Tuesday, December 09, 2008

BEMAC 21st Anniversary Gala Concert

On Tuesday 15th November I played with my new jazz-world fusion group Jaadu at the BEMAC 21st Anniversary Gala Concert. BEMAC stands for BrisbanE Multicultural Arts Centre, and they have been doing fantastic work in supporting multicultural arts in Brisbane since long before I started playing tabla. Unfortunately BEMAC has lost the support of Arts Queensland operational funding, and are struggling to redefine themselves as an independent body. I'm told that the state government prefers to "put all it's multicultural eggs in one basket" and has been funding the annual Qld Multicultural Festival in preference to other smaller projects.

Anyway, BEMAC Gala Concert was pretty successful with a whole host of performers playing for free in a massive 13 act variety show. Please give support to BEMAC and let's hope they can come through this crisis.

Fiesta Tropicale, who have been performing at BEMAC functions since the very beginning

Afusionistics - example of current BEMAC-sponsored arts, bringing together traditional African percussion with rap and traditional and contemporary dance

The Ghost - Ceri McCoy, Sebastian Flynn, Martin Reese

Rahim Zullah with Ravikesh Singh (tabla) and Francis Gilfedder (yidaki)

Saman Indonesian Dancers

Colombian Dance Group Qld

Dharmaka Bollywood Dancers

Zhiva Voda - Bulgarian vocal

Jaadu - acoustic jazz-world fusion

Jaadu: L to R - Asim Gorashi (Sudan - oud, vocal, whistling), Shen Flindell (tabla), Ravi Welsh (guitar), Robert Welsh (piano)

South African Carnivale

No comments: