Performances
Check the schedule for times. All performances will be at the festival location in Cass Park.
Amber Dance Troupe
Amber, formerly known as the Chinese Folk Dance Troupe, is a registered graduate student organization at Cornell University. The troupe was founded in 2003 by seven graduate students from China who were passionate about presenting the Chinese culture and tradition to the Cornell community through beautiful Chinese music and dance - both traditional and contemporary, as well as representing a variety of ethnic groups in China.
Shimtah
Shimtah is the Korean name of our poongmool group. Shim and Tah translate respectively into heart/ soul and beat/ sound. The mission of our group is bifold: to learn and share traditional Korean folk music, poongmool, with the Cornell and Ithaca community. In doing so, we hope to promote a better understanding of the Korean heritage,which will in turn contribute to the cultural, racial, and ethnic diversity of Cornell. The second is to provide a forum for Korean and Korean American students of different backgrounds to come together and discuss various issues that are pertinent to our community. Poongmool is an expression of our hearts, minds, and souls, just as Mozart's symphonies and Shakespeare's sonnets are for many of us here at Cornell.
Chinese Music Ensemble
The Cornell Chinese Music Ensemble (CCME) brings together lovers and musicians of Chinese traditional instruments, and promotes wider awareness and deeper understanding of Chinese culture. Traditional music in China is played on solo instruments or in small ensembles of plucked and bowed stringed instruments, flutes, and various cymbals, gongs, and drums.
Butoh Dance Group
Butoh is an avant garde performance art, that has its origins in Japan in the 1960's. After the second world war, Japan was a country in transition. It was a country still holding onto its old world traditional values while being forced into western democratic values by America's conquest. Butoh was born out of this chaos. Its founders were a young rebellious modern dancer named Tatsumi Hijikata (1928 -1986), and his partner Kazuo Ohno (b. 1906).
Hijikata wanted to find a form of expression that was purely Japanese, and one that allowed the body to "speak" for itself, through unconscious improvised movement. His butoh sought to tap the long dormant genetic forces that lay hidden in the shrinking consciousness of modern man.
Butoh loosely translated means stomp dance, or earth dance. Hijikata believed that by distorting the body, and by moving slowly on bent legs he could get away from the traditional idea of the beautiful body, and return to a more organic natural beauty. The beauty of an old woman bent against a sharp wind, as she struggles home with a basket of rice on her back. Or the beauty of a lone child splashing about in a mud puddle. He sought a truthful, ritualistic and primal earth dance. One that allowed the performer to make discoveries as she/he created/was created by the dance.