What a joyful event we had at our MI Bon Summer Festival 2022 — thank you to all who supported us in preparation, promotion and presentation of our music and art, to our guests who showed up to celebrate with us, and to our host and sponsors who enabled us to drum and dance together in community! #MIBON2022
We welcome all to reply here with reflections about your experience with MI Bon Festival 2022!We also invite any of you who are interested to join the MI Bon Summer 2023 Festival Planning Team on our #MIBON2023 Project page ("Contribute" as a Planning Team Volunteer)!
In the news! Here's an article* about our #MIBON2022 event, written and translated by Kyoko Johnson for the Michigan Japan News Club: Hello from the Great Lakes Taiko Center! We held our 2nd Annual MI Bon Festival on September 24th 2022.
Readers might have read in the September edition of Japan News Club that the MI Bon Festival was supposed to be held in August. However, we were forced to postpone the event due to the bad weather. On the morning of 9/24, it was raining again! Even though the weather forecast said it would become clear that afternoon, we were so worried because taiko should never be exposed to water.
GLTC's three different performance groups – Raion Taiko, Godaiko Drummers, and T3-Tanoshii Taiko Tai – presented group and collective taiko performances, and we had two bon dance sessions with a lot of the audience joining the bon dancing. After a dance tutorial before each song, we danced Tokyo Ondo, Tanko Bushi, Michigan Ondo, and Ei Ja Nai Ka. Introduced for the first time at the last MI Bon Festival, "Michigan Ondo" is an original bon dance song, created by Kyoko Johnson and Noriko Maidens, with dance movements and lyrics depicting Michigan's beautiful nature and unique features of our four seasons. "Ei Ja Nai Ka" was composed in 1994 to 1996 by PJ Hirabayashi, a Sansei (third generation) Japanese American and pioneering Taiko artist in San Jose, California. Later in 2001, beautiful lyrics were added by Yoko Fujimoto, one of the founding members of Kodo – a prominent professional taiko group in Japan. (See PJ's TaikoPeace webpage: https://taikopeace.love/ejnk)
The first MI Bon Festival was a small event with a limited number of audience members (mainly Great Lakes Taiko Center members, their families and their close friends) due to the COVID pandemic. For the second MI Bon event, we created a MI Bon Committee in January 2022 and had monthly planning meetings. With help from the Novi Public Library our event was more organized and successful, and an original MI Bon logo was created by local artist Deanne Bednar. The Ikebana International Detroit Chapter 85 brought their beautiful artwork for an exhibition of ikebana, Japanese flower arrangement. We appreciate our communities including all organizations and our audience who supported us to make this happen. We are hoping this MI Bon event will continue growing. We also hope that our activity will help introduce and foster understanding of Japanese culture and customs through taiko performance and bon dance.
Eileen S. Ho
Posted on October 12, 2022