Friday, February 4, 2011

LunarFest Riverside

TAIKOPROJECT was really busy this past weekend! While one group was in Chicago freezing their tails off in the snow, the rest of us were playing for Riverside's First Annual Lunar New Year Festival. Happily, I was in the latter group with Maz, Courtney, Darren, Emily, Yumi, and Candice performing outside in the nice Downtown Riverside weather.

Emily, Yumi, and I arrived early so we walked around for a bit and saw a few of the performances, including traditional dancing, martial artists, and Chinese lion dancers. They also had a ping pong tournament going on. I wanted to play, but didn't want to embarrass myself! Then Yumi's food radar went off and led her directly to the eggrolls...

Once everyone arrived, we prepped our equipment backstage for our 1:45pm performance. After unloading, Maz and Emily needed to re-park their cars, but unfortunately finding parking was quite difficult. While Emily was still looking for a place to park, the festival staff alerted us that we might need to go on early! Luckily she found parking just in time and we went out to perform for a great audience.

After our first set, we had some spare time so we relaxed at the Coffee Bean and ate some Portos courtesy of Darren (thanks D!). We also got a chance to hang out with UCR Senryu members. They had performances at the opening and closing of the event. We later saw this amazing performer who could change his face mask in the blink of an eye. He would either turn around or flash his cape in front of his face for a fraction of a second and presto blingo -- new face! I thought one of the masks looked like Pikachu, but I could be wrong...

Our second set was at 4pm and we made a few adjustments to make it an even better performance. Thank you to the festival volunteers that were very helpful and assisted us in getting on and off stage! After packing up our equipment, it looked like the sun was setting soon. We were tired, but had a lot of fun. Maz especially had a blast because he loves his festivities!

On our walk back to the car, we passed by a booth that had some rabbits in honor of the Year of the Rabbit. These weren't ordinary rabbits though... these were the biggest rabbits I've ever seen! Some would say ginormous! I'm pretty sure the rabbits would beat up my dog. Thank you to LunarFest Riverside for having us. Gung Hay Fat Choy!

Thursday, February 3, 2011

Celebrasia 2011: Year of the Rabbit

Before the sun has even started to peek over the horizon on Jan 29th, Bryan, Andrew, Tomomi, Jenny and Jen met at LAX to get on their flight to Chicago to perform at Northwestern University's Celebrasia. Celebrasia is an annual program that is hosted by Northwestern's own Taiwanese American Student's Club and the Chinese Student's Association to celebrate the lunar new year. This year, we were joined by other student performers and acts such as Chicago's Seven Stars Lion Dance, Youtube singer Jennifer Chung, the Shanghai Restoration Project and the Season 5 winners of America's Best Dance Crew -Poreotics.


After landing in Chicago, we drove straight to the Midwest Buddhist Temple to pick up some borrowed drums and also met up with Ryan who helped us out all day...thanks Ryan, you're awesome!! From the temple, we headed directly to Northwestern for our sound/tech rehearsal and then it was showtime! The crowd was jam packed and had great energy all night. We want to thank Tiffany Chang, TASC and CSA for bringing us out and to all the students for their hard work and great hospitality.


The next morning, we had some free time before out flight back to LA, so Andrew, Tomomi, Jenny and I decided to drive out to downtown Chicago to do some sightseeing. First we visited the Willis tower and took an elevator 103 floors up to their Skydeck. On the Skydeck, they have a glass box called the "Ledge" that extends about 4 feet out of the side of the building. We all took turns standing on the ledge and from 1,353 feet up in the sky, enjoyed the vast horizon and view of downtown Chicago. After Willis Tower, we walked around the streets of Chicago for a while then made a stop by Millennium Park to visit the Cloud Gate sculpture before heading back to the airport. I was told that it was fairly warm for Chicago weather while we were there (and it seemed that way as we saw students walking around in shorts and shirtless on campus), but thinking back to our frozen, shivering bodies while walking through the city, it was apparent to me that you can't get acclimated to colder weather like that in just 2 days =)


Thank you again to Northwestern's Taiwanese American Student's Club and the Chinese Student's Association for bringing us out and thank you to Chicago for a great time. Can't wait to visit again!