Hastings was unseasonably cool this year. Actually, let’s be honest – it was BLIMMIN FREEZING.
The overall theme was “Great Things Grow Here” so we decided that floral hats and other accoutrements would be the order of the day. About half the band got dressed up in their best floral attire, which looked great. Continue reading
Wellington Batucada was honoured to be invited once again to play for guests at the Brazilian Embassy’s Brazil National Day celebrations – a celebration of the 193rd Anniversary of the Independence of Brazil. The event was held on 7 September 2015 at Te Whaea (NZ School of Dance), Wellington.
A group of drummers and dancers performed at the invite-only event, with Wellington Batucada featuring at the top of the bill. Guests including the Brazilian Ambassador danced enthusiastically (and skillfully) to our Brazilian beats. Continue reading
UPDATE 01/08/15: We’ve had a huge response from people wanting to attend this latest series of beginner’s classes, and we are now FULL. We will not be accepting any more registrations or expression of interest for the upcoming sessions.
However, if you’d like to put in an early registration for the next series (which will be sometime after March next year), please feel free to do so. Instructions and registration form on our Join page.
Wellington Batucada in the RWC 2011 All Blacks victory parade
Photo by NZ Sevens (click to enlarge)
We’ve been madly making our costumes, dressing our drums, building and painting the stage set and – of course – practicing our drumming and dancing for a couple of months now, and things are coming together nicely.
The donations we raised from our Boosted campaign have enabled us to bring a whole bunch of sambaistas to Wellington from across the country. We’re playing host to 37 drummers from AK Samba in Auckland, 40 drummers and dancers (including a brass section!) from Samba de Sol in Nelson, 30 drummers and dancers from Hamilton & Tauranga and 14 from Bay Batucada in Hawkes Bay. Together with the 55 drummers and 15 dancers from Wellington Batucada, we’re going to be bringing Carnival to Cuba Street in a big way this weekend.
We’ve trained up a whole bunch of new dancers, who will debut for you at the Wellington Batucada gig on Saturday night on the Swan Stage. Somewhere along the way we’ve also moved from Upper Cuba Street to Swan Lane, Glover Park and Te Aro Park, and our costume theme has morphed from Pushme-Pullyou into Amazonian rainforest and now “AmazoniAotearoa”.
With our costuming we have decided that you can basically never have too much bling, and so with that in mind we have cleaned Wellington out of green holographic paper and scoured the $2 shops for sparkles, diamante, glitter and other shiny things. We can neither confirm nor deny the rumour that we have also imported a rather large number of fairy lights from Hong Kong. Continue reading
You may recall a few months ago we hassled you incessantly to vote for us in the WOMAD Performer Competition. The prize was to perform at WOMAD 2015.
You may also recall that we won the competition (thank you SO MUCH for your votes!), and last Saturday we claimed our prize, and played for an hour on the Gables Stage at the WOMAD festival in New Plymouth.
Wow. What an amazing experience. When I got up that morning, all excited and full of anticipation, I told myself that this was very likely to be a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and a highlight of our drumming career – and that I should enjoy every single moment of it.
We love Newtown Fair. It’s one of our favourite gigs of the summer, because the crowds are so huge and the mass dancing so enthusiastic.
The weather was perfect (very hot!) the crowds were perfect (hotter!) and the samba was perfect too (even hotter!). Continue reading
Saturday – we were even more awesome than we had been on Friday (is that even possible?) – more people, more intricate costumes, more beautiful weather and fabulous drumming.
Could you wish for anything more? Continue reading
2015 marked the year we TOTALLY AND UTTERLY ROCKED IT with our Sevens waterfront parade costumes.
I don’t know what it is about Steampunk that fires people up to produce their best work costume-wise, but it sure as hell does.
We’ve never looked better. Continue reading
Gorgeous weather for the Sevens Parade this year – hooray!
We were right at the front of the parade again this year, which was nice. Huge crowds, lots of sunshine and a whole lot of happy people. We love the Sevens! Continue reading
We are running a new block of Brazilian samba dance workshops, in preparation for CubaDupa and beyond…
All are welcome – even if you’ve never danced before, we can teach you. Intermediate levels and above are also very welcome – we will tailor our workshops to your level.
Our two fabulous dance directors, Arawhetu Berdinner and Hillary Reid will be taking the workshops, with the aim (if you want to!) of getting you ready to perform with us at CubaDupa. Wellington Batucada will be performing at CubaDupa on March 28 and 29, together with all the other samba schools from around the country, and we’re looking to boost our dancer numbers to create a really spectacular show. It’s gonna be awesome! Continue reading