In 2015, Hear Be Dragons conducted its first exchange project with youth groups from the El Puente Arts Academy in New York City and Nyanga Yethu, an arts and youth development outreach program in the township of Nyanga, Cape Town. These young people had the opportunity to explore sound within their own local urban environments and shared that experience with their trans-continental peers. Hear Be Dragons awakened these young people’s auditory senses and gave them the tools and language to capture and document this unexplored territory through a series of workshops in each city.

 “I don't classify myself as a race, I classify myself as a human—when we get to exchange, we get to share our humanity because we are sharing what we have to go through everyday.” - Mzukisi 'Parradox' Ndabeni

Together these groups, and the team of producers from Cape Town and New York created a series of uniqe sound pieces, using everyday technology like smart phones, they collected found sound from the respective neighborhoods and collaborated with one another to write lyrics and stories specific to those neighborhoods.

"It definitely makes you see the world differently, bringing two different sounds from two different places to one place ...it's amazing. It makes you fee connected and I think that's what the world needs to be about – it just needs to be a bridge, it all needs to be together and then everything will be a whole lot better.” - Timothy Muniz

Participants:

Nyanga

Williamsburg