2008-11-30
By: Don Hughes
Posted in:
This is a GREAT/WONDERFUL effort...but why not join forces with the Welsh National Gymanfa Ganu Association and the WELSH FESTIVAL held every Labor Day Weekend for the last 76 years? These two belong together?Don Hughes, Sarasota, Florida donwy@aol.com
Hi DonSorry I have taken my time to respond to your excellent blogpost. I entirely agree that there should be a dialogue and to that end I am emailing our phone number so that we can talk in person should you so desire. There is no sense in which we regard ourselves and NAFOW to be in competition. Indeed we are pledged to do whatever we can to assist with the success of the Pittsburgh and Portland events. We do, however, have a slightly different focus and I would be happy to talk about that anytime.
I attended NAFOW's Chicago Gymanfa Ganu and can attest that it does include an Eisteddfod. The Eisteddfod's adjudicators were very professional but insisted on precise, correct pronunciation of Welsh which not altogether bad but somewhat ironic considering the different dialects in North and South Wales. I also agree that the youth choir from Cardiff was phenomenal! Their name is COR AELWYD CF-1 and were directed by Eilir Owen Griffiths.
well...by way of explanation a major part of the event is in fact an Eisteddfodd...yes I guess it is mostly tradional Welsh music..perhaps that could be a combination too BUT this year was an AMAZING difference.! Not one of the performers was over 35! And in fact the AMAZING YOUTH CHOIR (I'm sorry I can't remember their full name right now) from Cardiff overwhelmed all of us. Your Group and the NWAGG/Welsh Festival certainly share the same goals and agreeably are not/should not be competitors. Perhaps at the Pittsburgh meeting we could get together and talk about our parallel efforts as well as exploring new ground unless some of us can get out to your event.While I think many of us do tend to see WALES in our grandparents eyes and while that has a great value..so does modernization! How do we keep a dialogue on these developments? I guess part of that is here.
Hello, Don!Thanks! I don't agree they belong together at all, they'll be two totally separate events, for totally separate publics. They will complement each other but are so distinct in their purposes as to be neither compatible nor competitive.I'm new to the concept of NAFOW, I've never been to one yet and had never heard of it at all until someone posted the event for this last year's in Chicago on the calendar here. Since then, I've discovered that NAFOW has indeed been held successfully every year for many decades. I'm very much looking forward to going to the 2010 NAFOW which will be held here in Portland and taking my children, too. I intend to buy bilingual song books so we can learn to sing songs in Welsh and participate with everyone else and I hope it will be a lot of fun. Ceri and I joined the Welsh Society of Portland at their last Gymanfa at Bryn Seion church this year and were asked if we would help promote the 2010 NAFOW here. We are excited to get to participate in this and intend to also contribute to publicizing the 2009 Pittsburgh event.My understanding is that the NAFOW event is a Gymanfa Ganu and showcases only traditional Welsh music forms, it is not an eisteddfod and would never feature a rock band. Our events have different purposes and different publics and I don't believe that the NAFOW would want to alter their successful event format to include ours. There is certainly room for more than one Welsh event, don't you think? In fact, I believe that it is absolutely necessary to have more than one event, if the general public is going to be made aware that we exist and of all the wonderful things Wales and modern Welsh culture have to offer them. My personal opinion and intention is that this event will be more of a fun "circus" type thing that will raise people's awareness and bring people who would otherwise never hear of the Welsh societies and NAFOW to those groups.The event that we want to put on is an eisteddfod and its focus will be mainly modern performing arts of many genres/styles. We hope to have some performers and competitors who will perform classic or traditional Welsh music but that probably won't be the majority of performance styles. We're looking at several rock bands and mostly modern music right now, as well as some folk. We haven't completely settled on all the arts that we'll have competition in but it will include musical performance, spoken word poetry, dance, theater and fiction prose. We would like to have basically a big party and invite all of "us" (Welsh-Americans) and mostly TONS of the general public who have never heard or us or don't know much about us and make this fun and interesting and exciting to them, especially Welsh-Americans who don't know they're Welsh or anything about Wales. I want to use this event to raise awareness of Wales and living Welsh culture, Welsh-American history and cultures and to hopefully introduce and create artistic, personal and commercial opportunities for Welsh and Welsh-American artists, musicians, craftsmen and businesses. We want to sell modern Wales to the American public and help it sell itself.Also, I've day dreamed about having an eisteddfod in Portland since I was about 13. I think it is a perfect fit for my city as we have a very large population of artists of all kinds, a long-standing appreciation of "Celtic" music and art and, I believe, many people of Welsh and other British descent. I think that once members of the varying art communities here discover this, they will embrace it and make it their own.These two events are not competitors, indeed they complement each other perfectly. We strongly urge you to support both, as we will be doing.