DRAGON BOAT FESTIVAL - TANDAVA
Tony Montague
For Taiwan-born musician Lan Tung the Dragon Boat
Festival feels like home. It’s not just that, more
than any other fixture on the Vancouver calendar, the
three-day event brings together her cultural origins
and her present-day reality on the other side of the
Pacific. The world music group in which she and her
husband Jonathan Bernard play, Orchid Ensemble, was
created 10 years ago for the purpose of playing at the
DBF.
"Jonathan and I weren't together at that time,"
says Tung, who plays the erhu [a two-stringed violin],
interviewed in her East Vancouver home, "I got a call
to play on the World Beat Stage at the festival, so I
quickly put together a group with a couple of friends
of mine who performed Chinese folk and classical music
and wanted to reach out more to western audiences."
Tung has performed at the DBF several times since then
with the Juno-nominated ensemble. At this year's 17th
edition however, she and Bernard appear with Tandava,
a quartet that's starting to make waves on the North
American world music scene.
The idea for Tandava came from another member,
Prashant John," says Bernard, percussionist with the
Vancouver Island Symphony Orchestra, who plays marimba
with the band. "The music very much rooted in the
Carnatic [South Indian] and Bengali traditions. He
plays bamboo flute and guitar and brings the basic
compositional ideas to the group. We develop them in a
very organic way, bringing in our different
influences: Chinese classical music and folk from Lan,
north Indian rhythms from Stefan [Cihelka] our tabla-player,
and textural arrangements from me with my orchestral and
chamber music background."
Part of the festival's mandate has always been to
give a boost to multiculturalism. It’s provided a
great stimulus to many of the world music bands that
have sprung up in the city over the past two decades.
"The old truism that you need to make it somewhere
else before you're recognized in your own home holds
true in Vancouver, but not with the DBF," says
Bernard. "Almost all of the roots music bands in town
have played more than once, and a lot of emerging
ensembles had their first festival gig there."
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