| Opening Ceremony: Kitaro w/Grand Master Tanaka & Dennis Banks |
 DAY: Friday June 11thSTAGE: Harmony Main Stage (5:00PM) Born in Japan, KITARO is a huge international star and true global music legend. Kitaro has been writing, recording and performing for over 30 years and has been nominated for numerous Grammy Awards. His pioneering fusion of electronic artistry, traditional Japanese forms, and pop-inflected Western idioms created a lush, harmonic, and poetic "New Age" sound that has earned Kitaro a huge international following. His albums have sold millions of copies worldwide, and in 2000, Kitaro's "Thinking Of You", earned this visionary his first Grammy for Best New Age Album. That same year, Kitaro also made his first concert tour of North America. Kitaro's music is both elegant and wondrously masterful and is firmly rooted in his profound message of global peace and spiritual freedom. Kitaro will be conducting this year's opening ceremony in a collaboration with Grand Master Tanaka and Dennis Banks. Grand Taiko Master Seiichi Tanaka spent his youth in Nagano prefecture and, like his father, grew into a skilled athlete, attending university on a baseball scholarship. He visited the United States in 1967 and it was during a visit to the Cherry Blossom Festival in San Francisco’s Japantown that he discovered his calling. In 1968 Grand Master Tanaka established San Francisco Taiko Dojo, the first such school in the United States. Over the past forty years he has taught Taiko to more than 10,000 men, women, and children from all walks of life, many of whom have gone on to begin the over 200 Taiko groups throughout the United States and Canada.
Grand Master Tanaka has been honored by Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs with its prestigious Foreign Ministers Commendation which recognizes his significant efforts in promoting the Japanese art of Taiko drumming. In 2001, he was named a National Heritage Fellow by the United States National Endowment for the Arts, widely recognized as one of America’s highest honors in folk and traditional arts.. Master Tanaka explains, “The essence of Taiko is not only skillful playing of percussive instruments, but also discipline of mind and body in the spirit of complete respect and unity among drummers.”
Ojibwa Native DENNIS J. BANKS is one of the founders of the American Indian Movement (AIM) and has spent much of his life protecting the traditional ways of Indian people and engaging in legal cases protecting treaty rights of Native Americans. At the age of nineteen, Banks joined the U.S. Air Force and served in Japan. Discharged in the late 1950s, he returned to Minnesota, where he faced the same problems as young Native American men today: alienation from his culture, unemployment, poverty, alcoholism, and crime. The next forty years took him from Stillwater State Pen to seizing Alcatraz Island along with 200 other activists, to caravanning to Washington DC in a protest rally dubbed the Trail of Broken Treaties to the riots protecting Sarah Bad Heart Bull in Custer then Wounded Knee, South Dakota, to finding sanctuary on the Onondaga Reservation in New York to surrendering in 1984 after nine years living as a fugitive.
In 1988, Banks organized and led a spiritual run called the Sacred Run from New York to San Francisco, and then across Japan from Hiroshima to Hokkaido. Also in 1988, his autobiography Sacred Soul was published in Japan, and won the 1988 Non-fiction Book of the Year Award. He had key roles in the films War Party, The Last of the Mohicans, and Thunderheart. He now travels the globe lecturing about and teaching Native American customs and sharing his experiences, and is writing a book on Native American philosophy which will be published in Japan. http://www.domo.com/kitaro/index.html |
