Korean Night 2016

Macleans College hosted another successful Korean festival ‘Korean Night’ on Friday 12 August to help foster better understanding and celebrate the student-culture of South Korea – where a major highlight of high school life involves an annual school festival – as well as to inform people about both traditional and modern cultures (hallyu, 한류*) of Korea to the wider school community.

This year, the event involved a collaboration of three schools in the East Auckland region: Sancta Maria College, Botany Downs Secondary College and Macleans College. The organization was led by two students, Sung Min Cho (Hillary House) from Macleans College and Ella Lee from Sancta Maria College.

Throughout five months of preparation for the Korean Night, the student organisers united nearly eighty students with a common love and appreciation of South Korea’s multifaceted cultural wave. Many of the students involved in the event spent months as a co-curricular group in the school to practice a Korean cultural activity.

Performances included: the Korean Traditional Dance team performing the Floral Coronet dance, which is recognized as an ‘Intangible Cultural Property’ No. 4 of Hwanghae Province in South Korea; and the popular ‘Samul nori’ (Korean Traditional percussion) performed using four traditional Korean instruments involving gongs and drums. Chris Lee (Snell), 3rd place winner of this year’s school-wide talent quest, performed an improvised version of Arirang, a Korean folk song. Taekwondo demonstrations were led by Jonathan Liang (Hillary). Contemporary culture was presented to the audience by Elly Kang (Mansfield) and Hyunse Lee (Te Kanawa) singing K-Pop tunes; as well as Heetae Kim (Upham) and Taehyun Park (Upham) rapping to lyrics they re-wrote. Tanisha Madhavan (Batten) led and choreographed a group of female students to perform synchronized dance routines to popular K-Pop songs.

A big round of applause and congratulations goes out to all participants in the production.