BON ODORI DANCING

Let’s leap in to our season of music from East and Southeast Asia! Bon odori is a Japanese folk dance most often performed outside and danced in concentric circles around a raised wooden platform called a yagura, where taiko drummers may keep the beat. The dance developed several hundred years ago from a Buddhist chant to welcome the spirits of the ancestors, and has long been a staple of Obon, a Japanese summertime festival which is a period for Japanese to appreciate their ancestors by returning to their hometowns and “visiting with” the spirits of those who have passed. Obon is sometimes called the Lantern Festival; at its beginning Japanese light chochin lanterns to guide the ancestors’ spirits from their graves to the family home (a tradition called mukae-bon) and at the end, in okuri-bon, family members use lanterns to lead the spirits back.