A Minute With: John Caird melds Ugandan dance, Japanese drums, U.S. chorus

By Elaine Lies TOKYO (Reuters) – Samurai, Ugandan dance, a U.S. chorus and the thunder of traditional Japanese taiko drums mix and meld in a cross-cultural charity collaboration to raise money for orphans around the world. “At Home in the World”, performed by Ugandan youth whose parents died from HIV/AIDS and Japanese young people who lost loved ones in the 2011 tsunami, as well as a chorus from Vassar College in the United States, is directed by award-winning Briton John Caird and was playing in Tokyo on Thursday. A: The difficult thing was teaching Ugandan children to sing in Western tonality because they do tribal shout singing, which doesn’t actually land on any key… But I suppose a bigger challenge was getting the Vassar students to behave like samurai. At first, the Vassar students were walking across the stage like big bags of dough.