Buddha's Day Multicultural Festival

Another year, another Buddha’s Day & Multicultural Festival! This year the BDMF event was done a little differently. In previous years, BDMF was always held at Federation Square - This year however it was held at the Golden Square Car Park which allowed for Covid Check-ins upon entry.

The venue may have changed, but the atmosphere was still very much the same. They had an incredible mural of a Bodhi Tree (Wisdom Tree) painted by Mike Makatron & Conrad Bizjak on a 5 story wall facing the car park. At night, this wall was lit up with beautiful projections of motion graphic art. Food stalls were also available serving delicious vegan and vegetarian meals and so many other activities and entertainment for kids and adults to enjoy. Of course as part of the entertainment there were live cultural performances, that’s where we came in.

We were invited by BDMF to perform on the final day of there 3 day event. We performed 2 dances, the first dance was Tari Merak from West Java and the second was Tari Jejer Jaran Dawuk from East Java. It’s been a very long time since we had performed these dances, as a matter of fact the last time Tari Jejer has ever been performed in Melbourne (maybe even Australia) was about 20-30 years ago when Mama Ning performed the dance in a simple black outfit as the costume was still hard to come by and bring to Australia back in those days. So it was a little bit of a special moment for Mama Ning to see this dance performed again so many years later.

Tari Merak was performed by Mira, Tika, Laura & Rani. The girls brightened up the stage with their colourful peacock costumes, Deena & Asti then followed with their performance of Tari Jejer. After our performances, we jumped into the audience to watch the Bollywood dancers perform and joined in on their fun dance workshop! To end the day on a high we finished off with ‘foto bersama’ (of course), a couple of TikToks and makan-makan at ‘Yoi’. Just another typical weekend with Sanggar Lestari Melbourne.

A big thank you to all our Lestari family and friends for coming to watch us perform at BDMF, your support means the world to us all!

Watch our performances here