Just back from Washington
While the Welsh participants of the Smithsonian Folklife Festival have crossed the Atlantic to return home following the two-week festival, I simply headed back up to New York to where I live on Sunday night. My colleagues who had come over to Washington DC from Wales included a slate-splitter, seven Welsh poets, experts on sustainable living and technology, a Male Voice Choir and world-renowned harpist, and many other performers, artists and crafts-people. They wowed more than one million people who attended the festival – the largest of its kind in America.
Highlights during the second week of the festival included a captivating performance by Catrin Finch with Columbian band Cimarron. Cimarron told us that they had already worked with Catrin in Wales during their two month-long visits, but this was the first time I had seen her perform on stage. The combination of Welsh harp melodies with Latin rhythms was stunning, and Catrin’s solo with her electric harp was amazing.
Equally as impressive was the new hour-long set from Only Men Aloud! This is our contemporary take on a Welsh Male Voice Choir, and the lads performed several times at the festival as well as at the Kennedy Center. They performed some Welsh hymns and even an operatic piece before launching into a more modern repertoire which included Bond tune Gold Finger, Angels, Macarthur Park and Don’t Rain on my Parade as well as a lively Tom Jones medley.
Wales has more than 300 Male Voice Choirs throughout the country, but it’s Only Men Aloud! who won BBC Television’s national contest “Last Choir Standing” and have a studio-recorded album in the charts. This video clip gives just a flavor of their performance, and you can see more performances from the festival on the Smithsonian website in their recorded webcasts:
www.festival.si.edu/2009/webcast.aspx
Back to the Mall in Washington DC, the festival included Welsh cookery demonstrations by chef Angela Gray and her team which proved really popular. Last Wednesday, Wales celebrated Christmas on the Mall and the team was cooking up Christmas Pudding!
But my favorite moment of Wales’ showcase in Washington was at a true local hang-out – Busboys and Poets. This café-bar holds poetry slams, readings and Open Mic nights year-round featuring DC poets and performers. But last Tuesday night, our seven Welsh poets joined the locals on stage. At first I wondered how our Welsh poetry would compare, given that the DC performers were reciting edgy, urban stuff, but I needn’t have worried! First up of the Welsh contingent was Mab Jones who had time to read three very cool, and quite controversial, poems before confessing to us that she loved being at Busboys and Poets as “on the Mall I have to do family-friendly stuff!” Check out Mab’s blog at http://mabjones.blogspot.com/
Mab was followed by six more of our poets including Aneirin Karadog who did an impressive rap in Welsh; Gwyneth Glyn who sang; and finally Gillian Clarke who read her poem about Barack Obama with the last line of the poem “Ie. gallwn ni” translating to, of course, “yes we can.” You can read that poem on the BBC website here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wales/7829348.stm
Meanwhile, our disapproval of UPS continued as they came up with excuse after excuse for failing to deliver 7,000 of our brochures in time for the festival. At one time they were saved from a fire at their Washington DC depot, and then they were locked in a trailer which no-one could access. They finally arrived on the Mall yesterday, a day after the event was over! Nice one guys – we’ll definitely choose FedEx next time!
While the Smithsonian Folklife Festival is a wrap, those of us Wales fans in America, still have two festivals to look forward to with the Left Coast Eisteddfod in Portland and the Festival of Wales in Pittsburgh.