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Connecticut Cultural Heritage Arts Program collection, 2015.196.235.12, Connecticut Historical ...
Auspicious Signs: Tibetan Arts in New England Exhibit Opening
Connecticut Cultural Heritage Arts Program collection, 2015.196.235.12, Connecticut Historical Society, Copyright Undetermined

Auspicious Signs: Tibetan Arts in New England Exhibit Opening

Subject (Tibetan, born 1962)
Subject (Tibetan)
Subject
Date1996
MediumPhotography
ClassificationsGraphics
Credit LineConnecticut Cultural Heritage Arts Program collections
CopyrightIn Copyright
Object number2015.196.235.1-.20
DescriptionPerformers and speakers participating in the "Auspicious Signs: Tibetan Arts in New England" exhibit opening festival at the Institute for Community Research in Hartford on October 11, 1996. Photographed by Lisa Gibso of the Institute for Community Research.

2015.196.235.1: Photo showing Cholsum Dance Group performing

2015.196.235.2: Photo showing Lakedhen Shingsur playing flute

2015.196.235.3: Photo of Trinity College professor Jan Willis, scholar of Tibetan Buddhism, speaking

2015.196.235.4: Photo of exhibit curator and then CCHAP Director Lynne Williamson speaking

2015.196.235.5: Photo of Cholsum Dance Group performing

2015.196.235.6: Photo of Cholsum Dance Group performing

2015.196.235.7: Photo of Trinity College professor Jan Willis, scholar of Tibetan Buddhism, speaking

2015.196.235.8: Photo of Dadon Dawadolma singing with her performing group

2015.196.235.9: Photo of Cholsum Dance Group performing

2015.196.235.10: Photo showing Lakedhen Shingsur playing flute

2015.196.235.11: Photo showing Thupten Tenzin and Lakedhen Shingsur playing instruments

2015.196.235.12: Photo showing Cholsum Dance Group performing

2015.196.235.13: Photo showing man playing instrument while woman sings

2015.196.235.14: Photo of Miranda Arana from Dadon's performing group

2015.196.235.15: Photo of Dadon Dawadolma singing with her performing group

2015.196.235.16-.20: Photos of Cholsum Dance Group performing with Lakedhen Shingsur and Thupten Tenzin
NotesSubject Note: "Auspicious Signs: Tibetan Arts in New England" was an exhibit project developed by the Connecticut Cultural Heritage Arts Program (CCHAP) at the Institute for Community Research in Hartford in 1996. The exhibit opening and a festival of Tibetan arts and music served as the major public events of an eighteen-month research and programming project conducted by CCHAP in partnership with the Tibetans. The project celebrated the Tibetan community's preservation and practice of their traditions in America.

Since the Tibetan Resettlement Project brought twenty-one Tibetans to live in Connecticut, the state has become home to one of the fastest growing Tibetan communities in the United States. Several Connecticut Tibetans are traditional artists of great skill who are deeply committed to expressing and passing on Tibetan culture. Members of the Tibetan community are also dedicated to educating others about the difficult history and circumstances of the Chinese occupation of Tibet.

The collaborative project team consisted of three Tibetan project assistants, exhibit designer Sarah Buie, the Tibetan Cultural Center of Connecticut, artist Sonam Lama who was at the time Vice President of the Massachusetts Tibetan Association, and curator/folklorist Lynne Williamson, then director of CCHAP. The interdisciplinary nature of the team served to broaden the project's outreach to regional Tibetan communities as well as to incorporate a rich variety of expertise and perspectives.

The project team produced an exhibit displaying Tibetan religious art as well as everyday traditional arts, a day-long festival featuring artists, performers, demonstrations, and discussions, and an illustrated catalogue. Artists Jampa Tsondue, Ngawang Choedar, and Tsering Yangzom were featured in a video documenting their artistic process.

Funders included the Lila Wallace Readers Digest Community Folklife Program administered by the Fund for Folk Culture and underwritten by the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund; the National Endowment for the Arts Folk and Traditional Arts Program, the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, the Connecticut Humanities Council and the Institute for Community Research.

To mark the exhibit opening, the Tibetan community held a festival attended by over three hundred people, including Tibetans from all over the region. Four music and dance groups performed outside, while in the exhibit gallery three Tibetan artists demonstrated weaving, woodcarving, and thangka painting. The event also featured a bazaar, a common Tibetan cultural activity. Many Tibetans are keen traders, maintaining links to Dharamsala, India, and Nepal through import of goods to the U.S. and sale through small shops here. Six Tibetan vendors from all over the region set up tables during the festival with a great variety of Tibetan books and crafts. Lakedhen and five other community members had risen at dawn to prepare food, which they sold during the day. Several speakers described the background of the project, the story of the Connecticut community, the current political situation in Tibet, and the history and character of Tibetan culture. Cholsum dance group from New York City and musicians Lakedhen and Thupten performed and accompanied the dancers. Singer DaDon and her group played for over an hour.


Biographical Note: Cholsum Dance Group, based in New York City, was formed in 1993 by Tibetans who came to the U.S. from India and Nepal shortly before through the lottery system. The group was inspired by the need to preserve music and dance from Tibet, and to serve and engage the community at events and festivals. Several of the early members of the group had been part of the organization Tibetan Institute for Performing Arts (TIPA) in India, and they were skilled musicians and dancers. This group performed at the Auspicious Signs: Tibetan Arts in New England exhibit opening in 1996, when the Tibetan community held a festival attended by over three hundred people, including Tibetans from all over the region. At this event four Tibetan music and dance groups performed outside, while in the exhibit gallery three Tibetan artists demonstrated weaving, woodcarving, and thangka painting. Cholsum Dance Group and musicians Lakedhen Shingsur and Thupten Tenzin performed and accompanied the dancers. Singer Dadon and her group played for over an hour. There is a current version of the group, called Cholsum Doegar, continuing with young members who perform around New York and New Jersey.


Biographical Note: Born in Gangtok, Sikkim in 1962, Lakedhen is a natural musician who taught himself to play flute while at the Indo-Tibet Buddhist Cultural Institute school in West Bengal. He became a versatile musician also able to accompany on damyen. He formed an amateur dance and drama club which still exists to present Tibetan song and dance, learning songs from Tibetan elders living in Sikkim. For ten years he was a member of the Sikkim National Performing Arts Troupe, touring in India, Canada, the Middle East, and visiting the U.S. for the Festival of India in 1982. He has lived in Old Saybrook and Clinton, Connecticut since arriving in 1992.

Lakedhen's primary instrument is the transverse flute. Usually made of bamboo with 6 finger holes, these are played throughout the Himalayan region. As a working musician Lakedhen's repertoire included modern Indian film scores as well as the folk music of Tibet, Sikkim, and Nepal. He learned many songs from the director and other members of the song and drama troupe, representing a number of ethnic groups from the region. Love songs, traditional welcomes for guests, Buddhist spiritual lessons, historical events, dance songs, and odes to the beauty of Sikkim are some common folk song subjects.

Lakedhen has led a folk music and dance group from the Tibetan community in southeastern Connecticut, teaching traditional Tibetan music and language in the community and performing at celebrations and festivals with his music group and students. He was featured in the CD "Sounds Like Home - Connecticut Traditional Musicians" which can be heard on the CHS YouTube channel.

"One of our songs is Dhana-Hain Roupaun: Sikkim the valley of rice, its smiling faces, its peace, prosperity and contentment, its imposing grandeur are all a part of its heritage. Another song is called Gha-To-Ki-To: An age old tradition of welcome. Guests are served chang, a millet brew, or soicha, butter tea, as a welcome in all Sikkimese homes."


Biographical Note: Thupten's parents fled from the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1959, traveling on foot for about ninety days over the Himalayan mountains when he was three years old. The family settled in Ladakh, India, near the border with Tibet. At age 19 Thupten went to the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts in Dharmsala, India to train as a music and dance teacher. He was sponsored by Tibetan Children's Village (TCV), an organization dedicated to educating the children of nearly 100,000 Tibetan refugees living in India. Prime Minister Nehru said that Tibetans could send their children to any of the schools in India, but Dalai Lama said we need special schools for us, so we can keep alive our culture for Tibetan children. After an intensive three-year special course in both music and dance, TCV sent him back to Ladakh to teach in one of the five new Tibetan schools. He later moved to the TCV school in Patli-khul, developing a program in music and dance from the three principal regions of Tibet, organizing a performing troupe, and teaching Tibetan language.

Thupten's teacher at the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts was an old master musician named Lhutse who had trained with a folk opera group in Lhasa. Because he was learning many different instruments, songs, and dances, Thupten's instruction and practice lasted from early morning until evening. He became proficient in five instruments important in secular Tibetan music: damyen, a six-stringed lute which is often depicted in Buddhist teachings and paintings as a symbol of the harmony of existence, also appearing as a magical instrument in folk tales; gyumang, a type of zither played with a small hammer; piwang, a two-stringed fiddle in both large and small sizes, and bamboo flute.

These instruments often provide solo or ensemble accompaniment for folk dances which differ from region to region in Tibet. Thupten's repertoire included a secular, quite rigorous classical music which he can also compose. After moving to Norwalk in 1993 he formed a folk dance group with other Connecticut Tibetans, performing around New England for two years. Thupten's two daughters joined him from India in 1996. He passed away in the late 1990s.


Biographical Note: Dadon Dawa Dolma has been a leading singer and composer of popular music in Tibet and later in the U.S. Sales of her six solo albums, sung in Tibetan, have reached millions in Tibet, China, India, Taiwan, Bhutan, and Japan as well as Europe since she began recording in 1989. Her music is modern and powerful, combining traditional and contemporary Tibetan melodies and instruments. The words of Dadon's songs are written by her and other Tibetans such as a monk working for the Dalai Lama in Dharmasala, India.

Like most Tibetans in exile, Dadon has been fervently committed to informing the world about Tibet's loss of freedom and culture under Chinese domination. Courageously using her popularity to express strong feelings about the liberation of Tibet became too dangerous, so in 1992, Dadon and her then-husband Phumba walked over the Himalayas to refuge in Nepal and later India. They immigrated to Connecticut in 1993, where their second son Tenzin Tashi was born, settling in Middletown.

Dadon learned traditional Tibetan songs from her mother, a renowned singer, later studying violin and piano at the Beijing University of Nationalities. She played in the Tibetan National Orchestra, then studied voice at the Chinese Musical College. Often in the West, Tibetan culture is thought to be homogeneous. In fact, Dadon's song style features elements from many kinds of Tibetan music and dance forms including secular traditional and modern, religious, and classical. Like musician Thupten Tenzin, she knows and loves all these styles, believing that Tibetan culture will survive and strengthen through both preservation and innovation. Also an actress in theatre and films, Dadon has performed at community events and at several large benefits for Tibet, including at Carnegie Hall. She formed a performing group with musicians based at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut in the 1990s, performing widely with this group and solo around the East Coast and for several large Tibet benefit concerts in New York City including the Tibetan Freedom Concert in 1997 along with Michael Stipe and other well-known stars. Dadon and her group performed at the Tibetan Festival at ICR during the Auspicious Signs exhibit in 1996. In addition to music, Dadon and her sons were part of a theatre project at Oddfellows Playhouse in Middletown in 1998.

"...I'm going to sing more for freedom, because in Tibet after the Chinese came they've broken lots of monasteries and they want Tibetan culture to disappear. They try to bring Tibetan kids to China to teach in the Chinese language and teach a very Chinese way. We worry about later when the Tibetan language will be gone. Tibetan young people and others like to listen to my music, so I want to use this road to tell them how important our culture is, how important independence is...they have been learning the wrong way! They don't even know the truth, their story, our story! If I can sing songs about our true culture and what's really happened for us, they will know."


Cataloging Note: This project was made possible in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services MA-245929-OMS-20.
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