Culture and entertainment from around the world
PLAINSBORO Five weeks from now, you’ll look back on a trip that broadened your cultural horizons.
You felt the rumble of Japanese drum music, encountered Chinese dance, experienced Native American tribal dancing, and took an excursion through Mexico’s dance and musical history before finishing with New Jersey’s Exit 9.
Guess what? You never even left Plainsboro.
The West Windsor Arts Council will hold its first and organizers are hoping annual Sunday Sampler Series, featuring five events on Sundays beginning this Sunday and continuing to March 25.
Each performance will take place twice, at 1 p.m. and 3 p.m., at the Millstone River School, 75 Grovers Mill Road. Tickets will be sold at the door for $7 each or $60 for a book of 10.
Percussion group Taikoza Japanese for "big drum" will start the festivities Sunday with what their name says, along with traditional costumes and a frenzy of movement.
The following week, March 4, Dance China New York will perform their traditional Chinese dance and Peking Opera styles.
Next, it’s back to the West with a March 11 performance by the Thunderbird Dancers, who will engage in regional dances including those from tribes such as the Cherokee, Winnebago, Choctaw and Hopi.
Then, on March 18, the celebration will move south of the border with Mexico Beyond Mariachi as its five performers’ trip through Mexico’s history of performing arts.
The Arts Council will bring it back home March 25 with Exit 9, a New Jersey-based percussion group which uses whatever it can find namely wooden stools and garbage cans to get the audience moving.
Calling the organization "an arts council without walls," board President Ruth Kusner Potts said the sampler series is new territory. "Our organization has never done an event like this. We’re excited about it," she said. "We’re hoping the community will be as well."
According to Ms. Potts, the diversity of the programming is no mistake. "The West Windsor and Plainsboro community has so many diverse cultures comprising it that we are glad to offer a program that reflects a lot of the diversity in our own community," she said.
Noting plans for future events to encompass even more cultures, Arts Council Executive Director Eduardo Garcia said the performances are intended to appeal to all age groups.
"To me, it’s not only a tour of cultures, but a tour of art forms as well," he said. "That’s both exciting to me and that’s a part of the design of the series to provide an event that you wouldn’t normally think of going to."
Mr. Garcia already has a response to any initial hesitation: "It’s right around the corner, it’s inexpensive, it’s on a Sunday afternoon. Let’s go."

