Jan 08, 2020 at 07:58 am

#7 - Crowdfunding? How about Crowd-finding?

Update posted by Daniel Rolandi

Click here to return to our campaign overview and make a donation!
日本語でのご支援・ご協力はこちらのページをご覧下さい

Maria Traxler from Minnesota, USA, shares her story about her experience with yosakoi and with Kizuna International Team in 2019. This one is special because she actually found us through our crowdfunding campaign last year (and also invited her friend to come along)! What are the chances?


My first introduction to Yosakoi was at summer camp in Minnesota, USA. As a camper I learned Soran Yosakoi at Mori no Ike, part of the Concordia Language Villages (CLV). Many dances are taught at CLV, from many different languages, as a way to share culture and community between the 15 different language villages. Of course, Mori no Ike focuses on Japanese dances, but I also learned dances to songs in Portuguese, Hindi, Romanian, Spanish, and other languages. I loved learning the dances, so when the summer was over, I searched out as many of them as I could find on YouTube so I could keep practicing them on my own.

In 2015 I participated in the Yosakoi Festival in Kochi with the Shimanto-cho team Shimamuta, when I was a CIR there. I didn’t quite know the depth of what I was getting myself into--summer camp is a little different from the real deal--but I learned over our months of practice just how much a human being could sweat. And at every practice session I puzzled over choreography with or talked about the upcoming festival or commiserated about the humidity with someone new.


Even after returning to Minnesota I kept practicing the different dances I’d been taught. We don’t have a formal Yosakoi team here in the Twin Cities where I live, so I’d practice in my living room by myself. It helped me feel connected to the various communities I’d been a part of, even if I’d only been part of them for a few weeks (at camp) or they were thousands of miles away (in Shimanto-cho).

In early 2019 I suddenly hit a period of intense nostalgia for Kochi and Shimanto-cho, and on a lark I googled to see if there were any international Yosakoi teams that I could jump in with. It was half a joke, but the Kizuna International Team’s fundraiser popped up, and it turned out they were recruiting. My friend Jenn was also interested, even though she’d never danced Yosakoi before, and fortunately she convinced me to go for it with her. As before, it was a lot of hard work, but I met so many amazing new people, and I had a great time.


The team name, Kizuna, means “bonds”, and I really think dance is a way to build those bonds between people who might not otherwise interact. It’s definitely a lot of hard work, and it might be scary at first, but the end product is a sense of community we can be proud of and share with others. It reminds me of International Day, a festival we had at CLV, when the different villages would come together in one place and share aspects of our various cultures--including dance. Even if you’re not speaking the same language out loud, once you step and move and smile together with someone in the same way, you’re no longer strangers.

- Maria Traxler

Back to campaign page