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There’s a particular kind of courage it takes to transform trauma into generational strength. For Elaine Smith Holton, founder and artistic director of PHonk!Philly, that courage sounds like a surdo drum: deep, resonant, and impossible to ignore. Through the transformative power of carnival culture, she’s building community, honoring the African diaspora, and empowering Black women.
As part of the Leeway x NextFab Art + Technology Residency, Elaine is developing the skills to better serve her students. Teaching young people music comes with expenses, as instruments often break or wear out. During her time in the residency, she’s focusing on building instruments and accessories out of sustainable materials, as well as designing instrument carriers that make parade performances accessible to everyone.
Back in 2020, while living in West Philadelphia near 52nd and Chancellor, Elaine witnessed something that shook her deeply. Philadelphia police drove down the streets in armored vehicles, weapons drawn toward the residents. In the days following the protests for racial justice, she made a decision that would change the trajectory of her life and the lives of countless Philadelphia youth.
“The city of Philadelphia did not want us — Black and Brown people — out in the streets,” Elaine recalls. Her response was characteristically defiant and joyful: “You know what we’re going to do? I’m going to throw a festival where we’re just outside.”
That first festival, held at FDR Park and drawing multicultural bands from across Philadelphia and even Santiago, Chile, became the seed of something much larger. It revealed to Elaine just how hungry the city was for celebration, for connection, for the kind of joyful, communal expression that carnival culture has carried through centuries of the African diaspora.
“I love this city, and I love its people for how much they supported me during a very traumatic time in my life,” she recalls. “The next best thing I can do is really pour into this city, pour into its kids. The grant funding PHonk!Philly receives I pour back into its elders, youth, and communities.”
Elaine’s relationship with Brazilian music didn’t begin in Philadelphia. Growing up in Texas, she stumbled into a U.S. Samba school through their annual indoor carnival.
“The music is what gets you. It’s just that energy,” she says. “They call it the joy of Samba — Alegría de Samba.” A single mom at the time with a five-year-old daughter, she found in the Samba community an instant family, a sense of belonging that carried her through transition and uncertainty.
Over the following decades, she studied Brazilian percussion and dance, becoming a dance director, choreographer, and percussionist. She traveled to the Bahamas to study Junkanoo, Bomba in Loíza, Puerto Rico, and spent two weeks in New Orleans observing the Roots of Music School ahead of Mardi Gras and finding another Brazilian communities in Tamojunto NOLA and Bloco Sereira where she has spent the past three years drumming with their community Blocos during Mardi Gras festivities. This year, she will travel to Bahia, Brazil, to further her research on African Brazilian culture and traditions, tracing the connective tissue of African culture across the Americas, and learning how it could be woven into the fabric of a city like Philadelphia.
What she found was a model: the Samba school. In Brazil, a Samba school is so much more than parade training. It invites an entire community to learn instruments, sew costumes, write songs, and choreograph routines together. Its youth programs begin shaping children young, building pride and identity rooted in their neighborhood and heritage. The parade is the culmination of months of collective creation. “It asks of its community,” Elaine explains. “And it’s been going on for over one hundred years.”
“Its roots are in the diaspora. Samba actually traveled down south to Rio from North Brazil, from Bahia, from African Brazilian culture. That’s where its history lies.”
This distinction matters deeply to Elaine. She is intentional about centering African Brazilian culture. Specifically, the culture of North Brazil- Bahia, where the Black woman is honored and revered as a figure of knowledge and guidance.
“I’m not Brazilian,” she acknowledges, “but I do have so much respect for its culture and traditions. And as a Black woman, I want to represent an authentic experience of what that culture is.”
One of the through-lines of PHonk!Philly’s work is an explicit commitment to elevating Black women and melanated peoples in spaces where they are often pushed to the margins.
PHonk!Philly operates differently. “We welcome everyone,” Elaine says, “but we prioritize Black women, Black bodies.”
A key inspiration is Dee Hale, a Black woman who directs Vava United School of Samba in Washington, D.C., where Elaine deepened her percussion practice. Seeing that leadership modeled and feeling its impact convinced her that representation at the top changes everything downstream.
Now, at 51, Elaine is thinking about how to keep the tradition alive for generations to come. “I’m creating my succession plan,” she says. “I’ve gotten all these things in place. What is that next step where I start offloading this information?”
She seeks partnerships with youth organizations as a natural next chapter. These youth organizations can utilize PHonk!Philly is a training ground where young Black women step into roles as peer leaders and directors.
Elaine has accomplished a lot in a short time. Three years ago, PHonk!Philly shifted from producing one-off festivals to establishing sustainable programming rooted at the Hawthorne Cultural Center within Philadelphia Parks and Recreation. Everything they offer is free. Elaine also teaches percussion at the Jubilee School, working with children from pre-K through 6th grade. Together, they build rhythmic foundations that mature into full performances at winter and spring concerts. Her intergenerational community performance ensemble, Bloco Afro Oyá, shows up at events like the opening parade for Calder Gardens and the African American Museum of Philadelphia’s Everyday Heroes and annual Kwanzaa celebrations, functioning as a joyful house band for the city’s most meaningful moments.
But Elaine has a bigger dream, one that feels quintessentially Philadelphian. She envisions a Philly Carnival; not a Brazilian carnival transplanted wholesale, but something grown from the city’s own fierce neighborhood pride. Imagine each neighborhood, North Philly, West Philly, South Philly, SW Philly, Kensington, Germantown, Mount Airy, all developing its own arrangements, its own pageantry, its own colors. Then everyone parading together stepping onto our Philly Sambódromo, each community’s ensemble a distinct voice in a citywide chorus.
“What is your neighborhood sound? What does your neighborhood pageantry look like?” Elaine asks. She points to organizations like Spiral Q already doing this work in West Philadelphia, and wonders: who is doing it in the other neighborhoods, and could they all come together?
“I think Philadelphia could do a better job in its parade culture in representing all Philadelphians,” she says. “There are so many public spaces that don’t get utilized. If given enough encouragement and enough support, I think we could have a similar celebration.”
Which brings us to NextFab, and the residency that is helping Elaine quite literally build what she’s been envisioning. Running an arts organization while also being its primary grant writer, percussion teacher, and artistic director leaves little room to develop new skills. The NextFab residency gave her that space.
Her projects range from the practical to the poetic. She’s learning to make the mallets and straps that her students go through quickly. Kids break things, and buying replacements continuously isn’t sustainable. She’s printing drum head decals and making repairs to bells. She’s working in the woodshop, the metalwork shop, and the textile studio. She’s discovering that a makerspace, approached with intention, can function like a Samba school of its own: a place where community members bring different skills and create something together.
The centerpiece project, though, is something she calls a “musical contraption.” The contraption is a wheeled apparatus that can carry the heavy surdo bass drums (typically strapped to the body) and be pulled alongside a parade by a bike. The inspiration came from Mardi Gras, from festivals in Panama where elders play their congas on metal racks, from a simple question: How do we make sure everyone can parade with us?
“Part of sustainability is thinking about inclusion,” Elaine explains. “If there are mobility issues or physical challenges, how can we address that?”
She imagines the musical parade contraption as a first step toward a fully accessible Bloco Afro,
The NextFab community has met her warmly. She’s already connected with a drum maker whose wife is Brazilian; proof that music creates its own introductions. She’s found that her work sparks stories in others: DCI veterans, drummers’ partners, curious neighbors who have never seen a surdo up close but want to know more.
As part of the residency, Elaine is hosting a Parade Practice Workshop at NextFab on the last Saturday of each month from 4–6 PM. It’s open to the public there’s no experience necessary. Learn rhythms, meet the community, and walk (and play) together.
By the end of the residency, Elaine hopes to parade, contraption and all, in a proper procession. The drums rolling through the street, the community following behind, the city watching and wondering what, exactly, is happening, and whether they might want to join in.
That, really, has always been the plan.
To follow PHonk!Philly’s work, find them on Instagram. To learn more about the residency and upcoming workshops at NextFab, visit nextfab.com.
Elaine Smith is a Philadelphia-based percussionist, teaching artist, and cultural educator whose work centers on African diasporic carnival and street parade traditions. Through drumming, dance, and public performance, her practice explores how collective music-making activates public space, strengthens community relationships, and sustains cultural traditions.
Smith is the founder and artistic director of PHonk!Philly, a community arts initiative that brings these traditions into participatory performances, festivals, and classes across Philadelphia. She founded PHonk!Philly following the 2020 uprisings in West Philadelphia, producing early community festivals at FDR Park that brought together musicians, dancers, and neighborhood residents for day-long h celebrations of music, community, and culture.
She teaches Brazilian percussion at the Jubilee School in West Philadelphia and leads free Brazilian percussion and dance programs at Philadelphia Parks & Recreation’s Hawthorne Cultural Center in South Philadelphia. These programs support PHonk!Philly’s intergenerational community performance Bloco Afro Oyá, which appears at community and cultural gatherings, including the African American Museum in Philadelphia, Chaos and Kisses: A Grand Opening Parade for Calder Gardens, the Sojourner Truth Walk, Mamadêlê Foundation, Capital Pride, Fiesta DC, and Mardi Gras.
Smith collaborates with Sonia Pessoa, founder of Festival Afro-Bahia (Washington, DC); Dee Hale, Bateria Director of VaVa United School of Samba (Washington, DC); Tamojunto NOLA; and Bloco Afro Ayedun (North Carolina). In 2026, PHonk!Philly will host its first cultural exchange, Lavagem Philadelphia, welcoming Afro-Bahian master teachers in music and dance. Her study of African Brazilian percussion and dance includes mentorship with Luciano Xavier da Silva, Tamara Williams, Nildinha Fonseca, Vania Oliveira, Marcus Santos, Zé Ricardo, and Marcio Peeters.
Smith is a graduate of the Headlong Performance Institute Fellowship and the Bartol Foundation Trauma-Informed Teaching Artist Training. Her work has been supported by the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, Leeway Foundation, the City of Philadelphia, Bartol Foundation, and Justice Outside.
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Written in partnership with FORMATION. Media