For Immediate Release

April 25, 2006

Contact:    Ken Tangvik, Director of Program Development, Hyde Square Task Force
                   617-905-7424, ktangvik@aol.com


Ritmo en Acción a Coming Up Taller Semifinalist!

The Hyde Square Task Force is pleased to announce that the Ritmo en Acción dance team has been selected as a Coming Up Taller Semifinalist by the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities. Selected from over 350 nominees as one of 50 semifinalists, this honor distinguished Ritmo en Acción as “one of the top arts- and humanities-based programs in the country serving youth beyond the school hours,” according to the Committee leadership.

The Coming Up Taller Awards is a national President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities initiative with the Institute of Museum and Library Services, National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities to showcase cultural excellence and enhance the availability of out-of-school arts and humanities programs to children, especially those that reach underserved children and youth.

In recognition of Ritmo en Acción’s success, Hyde Square Task Force will receive a Coming Up Taller Certificate of Excellence and be listed in national publications of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities. In June, the Committee will announce 15 finalists, each of whom receive a $10,000 award and attend a ceremony at the White House.

About Ritmo en Acción

Ritmo en Acción youth dance team was started in 2001 by the hard work and vision of a young woman who was a teen leader with the Hyde Square Task Force. In this program, a group of neighborhood teens practice 2-3 times each week with professional dance instruction and choreography from Boston’s top Latin dance troupe Hacha Y Machete. The teens regularly perform for the public, as well as teach dance to 80 elementary and middle school children in our after school programs. Funded in part by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Ritmo en Acción has gained considerable skills and confidence, as well as broad local and national recognition: the team has been invited to perform at the West Coast Salsa Congress and the Boston Salsa Congress, and also had the opportunity to perform in Paris, France through an international exchange sponsored by Boston’s Cloud Foundation. In recent months, Ritmo en Acción has been invited by a number of Boston area organizations (most recently, the Southern Jamaica Plain Health Center and YMCA East Boston) to conduct dance workshops with the children and youth they serve. As they gain valuable skills, participating youth act as cultural stewards, using dance to open the eyes and minds of both youth and adults to the richness of Latino cultures and to the positive energy of Boston teenagers.