Welcome! This is my own 365 project of creating at least one post per day about the stuff that I learnt, achieved, and found, the stuff that made me happy, or the new thing I did every single day.
The project was started on 21 February 2010. It has stopped for few times but I am determined to continue!
This project is dedicated to myself. I want to feel grateful for every single thing I have. I want to be thankful for my own life. I just want to feel that I have enough.
Not many people knew that I’d go back for good. Most of them found it out a week or even a few days before my departure. So I never expected to receive anything from them. I have too many stuff with me already. I didn’t want to bring anything more. But there was one special gift I got from our angklung team that really touched me and almost made me cry:
This frame is now put in my room in Jeddah. It’ll be brought to Malaysia next year, for sure! I’ll definitely miss playing angklung with them! 🙁
I’m so proud to be part of the family :). It’s been a great and an inspiring journey from the beginning. It started off as an ambitious dream with only 18 members and it has grown rapidly with a total of more than 40 members! Impressive!
Today was a celebration of our achievements (and apparently it coincided with the birthday of our director :)). It was also the day when the committee presented their visions and future plans on where this group would be headed. They even planned on recording in a studio!!! How awesome is that?! There were too many plans that they’ve laid out and it’s sad to say that I would not be here next year…
Not to mention: the foods were not to be missed, of course! After all, an Indonesian gathering without the foods were never complete!
I promised myself to completely take a break from all organization and angklung activities, but I CAN’T HELP IT!!! This event is our last big annual event before the end of our organizational term — before the new president is chosen. Of course I wouldn’t want to miss this chance! I want it to be a successful event tooo! 🙂 Can’t wait for Saturday!
I had a great day at Pasar Malam Asia last Sunday. We played a total of 9 Indonesian songs with angklung. The last song played was called "Poco-Poco" and for the fun of it, I took part in dancing poco-poco with other mostly middle-aged dancers and audience. Yes, you can see me with the red kebaya and red headscarf struggling to do the right steps there in the video LOL. It was fun though! 🙂
Poco-poco dance is a line dance which is very popular in Indonesia and other SE Asian countries. The dance is usually accompanied by the song of the same name, which was written by an Ambonese, Arie Sapulette, and was popularized by an Indonesian singer, Yopie Latul. There are much speculations of where the dance came from. Some say it was originated from Moluccas and some say it was from Northern Sulawesi.
The dance became even more popular when it was recently declared as haram (forbidden) by the mufti in Perak, Malaysia. What can I say? If you want to declare poco-poco dance as haram, then you should declare all sorts of dances as haram too. It’s so inconsistent. Anyway…
People here are crazy about poco-poco! I’ve seen them (read: Indo-Dutch people) dancing in every Pasar Malam (*) events in the country. They’d dance poco-poco no matter what sort of songs is currently played.
* Pasar Malam means night market (literally) and is directly associated with Asian or Indonesian event. The “night market” itself doesn’t necessarily open only at night. Most Pasar Malam(s) in the Netherlands have Asian food stalls and music performances. The event is organized in many cities in the Netherlands.
Glad it’s over! Phew. Finally I can take a rest a little bit. Our performance at the Festival Muziek op de Dommel was the biggest one so far, targeting the Dutch public audience, instead of Indonesians or students. We didn’t get to perform at the main stage, but hopefully next year we would be able to perform there!!
On that day, we all gathered in the chapel nearby the festival to do our last rehearsal before our performance. Then we walked from the chapel to the venue.
It was so hot on that day! We were all grumpy waiting for the performance at the main stage to finish. We were behind the schedule.
The cutest loyal angklung supporters who never failed to attend the rehearsals right from the beginning 🙂
Conclusion: it was a great performance! I really enjoyed it. The audience seemed to enjoy it too coz we got 2 offers to perform again. Yay!
Photos courtesy of Angga and Xuchen.
Here’s the video of one of our performances, playing Sleeping Beauty by Tchaikovsky.
Yay! Finally it’s here! The festival that we’ve all been waiting for is coming up very soon. I’m thrilled and super excited. I can’t wait to perform and promote our culture 🙂 I also can’t wait to watch the orchestra. It’s going to be awesome! I’ll post the videos when they’re available.
Since the theme of this year’s festival is Russian music, so we decided to play the following songs (I include the links of the past performances too): Kalinka, Rhapsody on a theme of Paganini v2, Swan Lake, and Sleeping Beauty.
Our recent performance at a charity event in a small city of Best, which is only few minutes by train from Eindhoven.
I think we did a great job playing this song! 🙂 Many of the notes need to be played longer though. But I hope we can play it perfectly next month! 2 more songs to practice, then we’re ready for the Festival Muziek op de Dommel! Can’t wait!
I’m so proud of our angklung team! We have recently got "accepted" to perform at Muziek Op Dommel!!! This is a free orchestra concert which has the stage located by the Dommel River. I watched last year’s concert and it was AWESOME! This will be our first performance at a festival where a number of nationally-acclaimed musical ensemble will take part!!! Woooow, such an achievement! I hope we’ll be able to perform at the main stage!!! 🙂
Meanwhile, here are our most recent performances, playing The Blue Danube (Johann Strauss) and Indonesian traditional songs (medley).
This was our performance in Delft, a small city near Den Haag. With only FOUR days of practice (two hour each), we played it really well, I must say. In this video, we performed a Sundanese traditional song called Pileuleuyan.
We’ve got a number of performances lining up for March and April! Excited 🙂
Yay! So happy to practice playing angklung again after so long :). It’s not confirmed yet, but we’re planning to perform again next week, this time in the city center! I hope it’s going to happen!!
