Celebrating the Chinese Autumn Festival on the Full Moon
A great gig for the crew at the Ode to the Moon Multicultural show at Lower Hutt Town Hall. A fun and vibrant night was had by all.
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A great gig for the crew at the Ode to the Moon Multicultural show at Lower Hutt Town Hall. A fun and vibrant night was had by all.
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Lucy (former Batucada tamborim player) owns El Barrio Latino Bar and was keen for us to do a small gig in June to celebrate the Brazilian festival Festas Juninas – also known as Festas de São João.
Keeping the volume down is a challenge in a small space, so we decided a mini-gig would work best, with 10-12 drummers instead of our usual 20-30. Our dancers came along and danced with the crowd, as there wasn’t space to do a dance performance. So – a bit of an experiment all round.
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Pride is such a wonderful gig to be a part of. We’ve watched this fantastically inclusive event grow over the years to become quite epic, and it’s one of the band’s favourite parades – probably the craziest parade we do. The crowd and all our fellow paraders are so much fun.
We adore Newtown Fair. And this year, the weather was spectacular. As, of course, were we.
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Thank you from Island Bay Festival:
Hi everyone! Slightly belated, but still heartfelt thank you to you all and your groups for yet another fantastic parade!
Couldn’t do it without you all, and your enthusiastic participation, marching, singing, dancing, trike-riding, acrobat-ing, instrument playing and marshalling really makes it an awesome event. Please pass on my thanks to everyone from your groups who was involved. Til next year… Mel
We love performing at Te Rā o te Raukura Festival. It’s such a brilliant community event, and we really enjoy wandering round all the stalls and checking out the other acts, as well as doing our bit. It’s got such a friendly vibe.
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Normally when we are invited to parade on or around the field at a Wellington Phoenix game, they lose. OMG! The curse of the samba drummers!
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The last time we were on-stage at the Opera House was for the DANZdance20 gig back in 2013 – so it’s been a while.
25 drummers and 10 dancers from Batucada took to the stage for The Menagerie Variety Show – invited as the “intermission entertainment” – and a brilliant time was had by all.
It was a long day – beginning with a stage walk-through at 3pm. It’s always reassuring to be able to experience the stage and plan how you’re going to get on and off before you do a big gig like this one – and producer extraordinaire Rachel Rouge and her team made sure that every one of the multiple acts in this fabulous Variety Show were able to do just that.
The Opera House is such a beautiful old building – a perfectly grand and decorative old-fashioned theatre – with a veritable rabbit warren of dressing rooms on multiple levels behind the scenes. When you reach the bottom of the many flights of stairs from your dressing room you step through the door from the light-filled stairwell into a dimly-lit and cavernous backstage area. It’s another world.
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Once a year we run an 8-week block of beginners’ drumming classes. These are held on Sundays from 1pm to 3pm, before our regular band practice.
Our next Batucada beginners’ drumming course begins 10 June 2018.
This is an opportunity learn the basic techniques and patterns on a number of instruments and cover the rhythms of Brazil including samba, samba reggae and merengue. You will be guided by our directors Darryn Sigley and Tim Cooke into the wonderful world of samba, and we aim to have at least one experienced Batucada member supervising each section so that whatever instrument you’re playing, there’s someone there to help you.
We adore CubaDupa. In the four short years that it’s been running it has become one of the best festivals on Wellington’s annual calendar, and it’s one that we put a huge amount of effort into in terms of costuming and trying out new performance pieces.
This year we did two things we’ve never done before. We designed our own patterned fabric especially for CubaDupa and made our own costumes with it; and we introduced two fabulous singers into the mix – Alda Rezende and Nikkie Rich – who sang traditional Brazilian songs while we accompanied them on our drums.