Hot! Hothothothothot!

The last Newtown Fair to be organised by Anna Kemble Welch and Martin Hanley was also the biggest and best – it was huuuge. The festival stretched for miles in every direction (only a slight exaggeration) and the variety of food, stalls of every kind, buskers and roving street artists, a couple of hundred bands and other performers on 16 different stages doing their thing, and 80,000 super-happy festival-goers was quite a sight to behold.

This was also, I think, our biggest ever Newtown as a band – with well over 80 drummers and dancers taking part. Epic! It was also very hot. Super-hot in fact. As were we.

The dancers’ costumes looked fantastic – and entirely mad, and completely non-matching, and also at the same time forming an entirely unexpectedly coherent collection – and the drummers looked super-spiffy in our lovely costumes inspired by the Escadaria Selarón Mosaic Steps in Rio de Janeiro.
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Our earliest start – ever!

With the roads on every side of the 21km Round the Bays course closing for the duration of the race, it was an early start for the stalwarts of Wellington Batucada. Putting on my shoes and socks in the dim pre-dawn light, I imagined thousands of runners doing the same thing across the city, all of us getting ready for the marathon day ahead.

The organisers had very kindly sorted out a dedicated parking place for us, right near where we were to perform at Greta Point – but, yeah, the only caveat was “be there before 7:00am or you won’t get in”. For the early-arriver types, this meant getting up at around 4:30am – just a few hours after we had put our heads down to sleep following the previous night’s Diversity Festival performance. Crikey!
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Incredible audience participation

We did the Diversity Festival for the first time a year or so ago, and loved it. Loved the multicultural nature of it, the wonderful variety of performers, and the fabulously supportive and appreciative audience.

Various members of Batucada were also performing in other groups throughout the evening, and it was fantastic to have the opportunity to see our Batucada whānau demonstrating their skills in different cultural contexts.

The unique feature of this show is that the majority of the audience are also performing, which means you get this wonderful flow of people doing their bit on-stage and then coming back to watch everyone else. It also means that the majority of the audience is skilled in the performance arts, and presumably also loves being up on stage, a feature which will become apparent later on…
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Toitu te tiriti!

A few days before the gig, directors Darryn and Arawhetu announced that they would like us to begin our Waitangi Day performance by singing Ngā iwi E. This well-loved waiata was composed by Hirini Melbourne in 1984 for the Festival of Pacific Arts, which was to be held in New Caledonia. Ngā iwi E calls for unity among peoples of the Pacific and by extension, all peoples.

We felt it would be an appropriate waiata for Waitangi Day, particularly as the Festival itself featured a mixture of performances from groups representing the wide range of cultures that make up our beautiful bicultural and multicultural nation.
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