Happy happy joy joy

We arrived at the school playground in the middle of the outdoor disco. The DJ was playing Pharrell’s song “Happy”, which always makes me happy, and I knew it was going to be a lovely gig.

Mt Cook is an inner city, multicultural primary school with an energetic, inclusive vibe. Kate and Gurdip both have kids at the school, which I guess is one of the reasons why we were invited to play at their fundraising gala today.

Dazzer and Tim G did the directing honours, and both worked hard to get the audience involved. It was lovely to watch the kids gradually realise that Dazzer was directing them to turn around with us every forth bar in Six-Eight, and very cool to see them all following our choreography and having a great time. Continue reading

Drumming and dancing the Newtown Wave

We love the Newtown Fair. Oh how we love it! It’s one of the parade highlights of our year.

There’s something about Newtown – the multicultural buzz, the happy happy up-for-it crowd of 70,000 good-humoured peeps, the Friends of Wellington Batucada whom we can guarantee will be there to dance with us – it all adds up to an hour and a half of pure Samba ecstasy, as we make our way slowly along the Newtown parade route, led by at least a hundred dancers – mainly festival-goers who love to groove on down with us every year.

Our dancers teach them the moves – and 100 happy people repeat those moves in choreographed harmony. It’s awesome to see – and wonderful to be making the music that inspires them all to strut their stuff. There’s even an official dance move that our dancers do nowhere else but here, called the Newtown Wave. How cool is that? Continue reading

On playing in the rain, a duet with Niko Ne Zna – and dancing with Elmos!

Yup, 2014 is definitely going down as one of the wetter Sevens weekends we’ve been involved in. But hey, the show must go on, and so it did.

Lisa and Nige abandoned their beautiful handmade wood-and-goatskin surdos in favour of having a shake on the chocalho for the day (they’d checked the weather forecast in advance), and the rest of us prepared in whatever way we could for a gig that was probably going to end up with us playing in horizontal rain… Continue reading

Posing as pirates in the torrential rain

Darn it! I knew I shouldn’t have mentioned how well the weather turned out in my previous post.

So – this year’s Sevens will go down in the annals of history for a) really crappy weather and b) really awesome costumes by Wellington Batucada.

And really, when you look as fabulous as this, who cares about a bit of rain? At least on Day 1 it started out OK and only became torrential at the very end… Continue reading

Fun in the sun (and wind!)

Having not had the chance to do the Johnsonville Christmas Parade this year (it was cancelled due to high winds and inclement weather), we were all looking forward to our last parading opportunity of the year.

Dear old Wellington put on a sunny day (hooray!) with a serious side-order of wind (well it wouldn’t be Wellington without a stiff breeze, would it?) and we came out in force to drum, march and dance our way through Wellington’s city streets. Carin and Tim G shared directing duties, and both did a sterling job of keeping us in-time and on-course. Continue reading

Batucada laydeez kicking ass again!

Last year, for the first time, we were invited to play at the MIA Latin Festival. As it’s organised by a women’s group, we thought it might be nice to send an all-female version of the band in recognition of this. Last year we didn’t have a female #1 surdo player, so Nigel became Nigella for the day and helped us out.

This year, Anny switched codes for the day and became our official #1 surdo, with Lisa holding the fort on the #2. It was Marion’s first-ever gig, having been called on by Kate about 40 minutes before we were due to go on, so that our only other repinique player would have some company. Carin did the honours as director, and she did a brilliant job – both in directing us, and in getting the crowd going as well. Our dance director Hillary was Principal Dancer, and she was just wonderful. Continue reading