Buddha's Day Festival
Buddha’s Day and Multicultural Festival is a major annual attraction held at Melbourne's Federation Square. This festival commemorates the Buddha’s Birthday and celebrates the City of Melbourne’s multicultural and multi-faith society. One reason we enjoy this festival is that it promotes inclusiveness, cultural awareness, cultural understanding and enhances community spirit and social harmony.
This 2-day festival celebrates the diversity of Melbourne's multicultural and multi-faith society through traditional Buddhist Ceremonies, arts, music, cultural performances, social and spiritual wellbeing lectures, world peace prayers, blessing ceremonies, children’s activities, vegetarian food and much more.
For the past 5 years, Sanggar Lestari has proudly performed at the 'Harmony Under One Sky' Multicultural Performance Stage. This stage set up at the festival showcases a diversity of music, dance and other cultural performances from a variety of multicultural groups throughout Melbourne.
Each year we perform dances from different regions of Indonesia. For this year's Buddha Festival, we performed two dances and even had time for a workshop at the end!
With a large team of 8 performers, it was an early morning for Lestari! We prepared our makeup, kondes and costumes in the comfort of Mama Ning's house before making our way to Federation Square in a large group!
Our first dance performance was 'Tari Patenung' from Sulawesi and after a quick costume change into bright pink kebayas, Sanggar Lestari performed 'Tari Roro Ngigel' from Java. We did warn the audience to warm - up as we would be pulling them out of the comfort of their bean bags and onto the stage to try Tari Roro Ngigel for themselves! Needless to say, there were a lot of beautiful hand, feet and head movements from our new friends from the audience!
We love the community feel of this festival and appreciated seeing some familiar faces in the audience including some family, Indonesian teacher friends, Indonesian Community members and friends of Sanggar Lestari!
Hopefully, we are blessed with a fun and sunny day for next year's Buddha Day Festival.
Peace Lestari x