Tag Archives: colorado dragon boat festival

Montbello High School Drum Line to perform during CDBF 2013 Opening Ceremony

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montbellodrumline-vidcap

It was at Denver Mayor Michael B. Hancock’s suggestion that the nine members of the Montbello High School Drum Line got the chance of a lifetime — to take the second historic flight of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner on United Airline’s new direct flight between Denver and Tokyo.

The students raised money for the trip with the help of sponsors, and they performed their synchronized drumming at the U.S. Ambassador’s home in Tokyo, and several times in Takayama, Denver’s sister city. The news report below is a sample of a half-hour special that airs this Friday, July 19 at 9:30 on KDVR Fox31. These students were cultural ambassadors for Colorado in Japan.

So the Colorado Dragon Boat Festival is proud to introduce the Montbello High School Drum Line as one of the highlights of this year’s Opening Ceremony.

The Opening Ceremony, which begins at 10 am on Saturday, July 27, also includes a spiritual Eye-Dotting Ceremony with chanting Buddhist monks to awaken the spirit of the dragon boats; a dynamic Dragon Dance; and an Olympics-style Team Parade. The Drum Line will get the chance to perform in front of Mayor Hancock, who will speak during the ceremony.
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Why I love the Colorado Dragon Boat Festival

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Colorado Okinawa Kenjinkai at CDBF 2011It struck me towards the end of the first day of the Colorado Dragon Boat Festival that the clash of cultures I had just witnessed perfectly encapsulates why I’ve been a volunteer for this event since it was started in 2001.

(Full disclosure: Last year, my partner Erin Yoshimura took on the role as executive director of the festival, after volunteering from the beginning. I help out with media, the website and emceeing on the main stage.)

As the first day of the two-day event came to a close, the main stage lineup included a sampling of performers from the festival’s very popular Cultural Unity stage, a showcase of Colorado’s diverse hip-hop community.

The hip-hop sampler was fantastic – and showed why their stage is always so jammed that you can barely see through the crowds surrounding the tent, especially when the dancers are spinning on the ground.

The elevated main stage offered an eye-popping view for the audience, most of whom hadn’t gone by the Cultural Unity area before. The performance was a 20-minute introduction to the artistic principles and driving aesthetics of hip-hop culture, starting with naked rhythm from a conga drum, then showing the evolution of the rhythm into the DJ’s scratching with turntables and vinyl records.

Then the B-boys and B-girls assembled around the stage in a half-circle took turns strutting their stuff to the rhythmic riffing, spinning, flipping and contorting their bodies into unbelievably elastic poses and leaving the audience agog.

The set emphasized the multicultural appeal of hip-hop and pointed out how the performers on stage with him ran the ethnic gamut: Asian, Caucasian, African American, Latino.

Following the Cultural Unity sampler, which drew a huge crowd to the stage, most of the audience stayed for the Colorado Okinawa Kenjinkai, a group of women from Okinawa who preserve the traditional dances of Okinawa, a culture that’s distinct from Japan.
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Watch the 2011 Colorado Dragon Boat Festival TV spot

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Many thanks to FOX 31 weekend anchor Deborah Takahara and reporter Chris Jose, as well as the FOX 31 crew and Dragonboat Race Association of Colorado (DRACO) members who manned the dragon boat for this shoot on a hot summer day!

My wife Erin is the executive director for the Colorado Dragon Boat Festival. We volunteered for the first seven years of the event starting in 2001, and she was hired last year. I’ll be the lead emcee at the Main Performing Arts Stage, and I’ll be Tweeting and Facebooking like crazy throughout the weekend. If you’re in Denver, come see how cool and diverse the Asian and Asian American communities are in this region! Sat.-Sun. July 30-31, Sloan’s Lake Park,

Is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month a bad idea?

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A Japanese American festival in Seabrook, NJ where the community performs a traditional Japanese obon dance

It’s May. Happy Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. I wonder, though, if this celebration of our heritage is an idea whose time has passed. I’m glad that we have our month every year, but I’m worried that we’re emphasizing the wrong things year after year.

Erin and I are starting to feel that APA Heritage Month may be counter-productive. The Pacific Citizen published a well-written piece last week, “Time to Rethink Asian Pacific American Heritage Month?” and I agree, it’s time to re-think the tradition even though it’s only 31 years old.

Last year, I wrote about how a 10-year-old Denver event, an Asian community celebration held in downtown Denver every May, needed to evolve from just Asians performing for other Asians.

It was a useful educational display back when our many communities stayed cloistered and Japanese didn’t know much about Vietnamese, and Vietnamese didn’t know much about Filipinos, and Filipinos didn’t know much about Cambodians and Cambodians didn’t know much about Koreans… you get the idea. But today, with especially young people mixing a lot more outside their own communities, it seems like a closed celebration, like preaching to the choir about the richness of our heritage. If you attend the annual event, you’ve seen many of the same performers year after year.

Even if the audience was expanded outside the Asian community, though, to the wider non-Asian population, I wonder if that would be good or bad for Asian Americans.
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Phyllis Heitjan: A performer worth a listen

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phyllisheitjan.jpgOne of the most satisfying aspects of the Colorado Dragon Boat Festival, the annual Asian community event that I’ve been involved in since its debut in 2001, is the mix of traditional Asian and Pacific Islander culture on display along with the new, Asian American values and ideas. That mix is most evident not in the festival athletic competition or the marketplace, where 90+ vendors sell their wares, but on the Performing Arts Stage.

In recent years, some of my favorite performances have been by APIA artists playing contemporary music: Chinese-Filipino Wendy Woo, a popular Colorado singer-songwriter and guitarist, with her Woo Crew rock band; Dwight Mark, a Chinese American multi-instrumentalist mining everything from blues to bluegrass for his original music; and this year for the first time, Korean American singer-sonwgriter Phyllis Heitjan from Philadelphia. Continue reading →