Worldwide Eisa Festival to be held on October 15

Worldwide Eisa Festival to be held on October 15

In the afternoon of July 6, at the Prefecture Reporters Club, singer songwriter Kazufumi Miyazawa (center) talks about the Worldwide Eisa Festival.


July 7, 2011 Ryukyu Shimpo

The Worldwide Eisa Festival 2011, which aims to establish a new style of “participatory Eisa” as a world standard, is scheduled to be held at Onoyama Stadium in Naha City on October 15 and 16.
While the festival has been held under the name “the National Eisa Festival” until last year, it has changed its name in association with the 5th Worldwide Uchinanchu Festival scheduled to be held at the same time in October.

The Worldwide Eisa Festival 2011 includes a “Creative Eisa Contest,” which invites various groups from within the prefecture, other prefectures and overseas to compete to impress and energize the audience and deliver something creative, “Traditional Eisa,” in which 18 groups of junior troupes from the prefecture are scheduled to participate, and “Chimdon (get excited) Stage,” in which the groups that want to exhibit Eisa and drum performance strive to entertain the audience.

At a press conference held on July 6, Daiichi Hirata, a member of the Festival Executive Committee and the head of the Department of Culture, Tourism and Sports in the Okinawa Prefectural Government, said, “While we respect traditional Eisa and think that creative Eisa does allow young people to more easily participate, we want to create a new style of Eisa, one that is even more participatory and interactive, a style through which people will be able to start new friendships.”

Singer songwriter Kazufumi Miyazawa, who composed and sings Shinkanucha (Fellowship), a song for the “Creative Eisa Contest,” said, “There are many people like myself living in other prefectures and other countries of the world who love Okinawa and are concerned about its future. I wrote this song in the wish that those people’s hearts would be united.”

For further details and for applications, call the Worldwide Eisa Festival 2011 Executive Office at 098 (867) 2622.
For the official website for the festival, access http://www.eisa-okinawa.com/

(English Translation by T&CT, Mark Ealey)

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