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By Bobby Panza
You don’t need a remote control, avatar, or player profile for this one. Come as you are. Under the direction of founder and conductor Johnathan Gibbs, Otaku Choir NYC has carved out a niche in New York City’s arts scene, blending choral performance with music inspired by video game franchises like “Digimon,” “Final Fantasy,” and “Halo,” while also incorporating Asian folk and pop music—traditions that have profoundly shaped gaming and anime culture worldwide.
The choir made its debut inside the Sanctuary Space of Rutgers Presbyterian Church in 2025 with a performance themed around “Pokémon: The First Movie.” On Tuesday, May 19 at 7 p.m., the group returns to celebrate Asian Pacific American Heritage Month with a new (free) production, “Pressed Flowers,” which Gibbs said draws inspiration from Filipino poet José Rizal’s work, “A las flores de Heidelberg” (1886), written in Germany, far from his homeland in the Philippines. In the poem, flowers are connected to memory, longing, and remembrance—powerful themes in both life and gaming. Gibbs shared that music, in many ways, functions similarly, with melodies carrying memory and preserving language, culture, and emotions ranging from grief to celebration and identity across generations and borders. Heightening the mood for the upcoming production, which will include numbers from “KPOP Demon Hunters,” the “Like a Dragon” series, SB19, and others, NYC jazz ensemble Catbus Collective, featuring Mỹ Tâm Huỳnh and OK KAI, will perform alongside the choir in this special event.
“Weirdly enough, this stuff is mainstream now,” Gibbs, 41, said during a recent interview. “When we were younger, anime and video games were seen as uncool. Now everybody is doing it.” For Gibbs, the choir, which is made up of volunteers, is about more than nostalgia. It is also about representation, collaboration, and creating community in a city where people increasingly struggle to connect offline. “People are yearning for that physical, together singing-ness,” he said. “Choir is very physical and real, and in real life.”
Born to a Filipino mother and a Black American father, Gibbs, who graduated from Rust College in Mississippi, a historically Black college, spent years creating online spaces at the forefront, before they became the well-known hubs they are today. He built communities where people could openly discuss identity and belonging. During the early days of YouTube and Facebook, he developed a following through videos anddiscussions centered on his experiences growing up Black and Filipino (“Blasians”).
“We didn’t know other Blasians,” Gibbs said. “I was trying to bring folks together.” Today, Gibbs studies Japanese, but in his formative years, his Filipino mother discouraged him from learning Tagalog, “because she wanted me to ‘fit in’ as an American.” This was a common sentiment among many Asian parents of millennial children in California, where Spanish is “very much a part of the community.”
That instinct for community-building evolved during Gibbs’ time living in Brooklyn. “For much of these 14 years that I’ve been in New York, I was part of the New York City Gay Men’s Chorus,” said Gibbs. When comedy legend Joan Rivers passed away, her estate asked the choir to perform at Temple Emanu-El in 2014. “Through that organization, I was able to learn so much and had so many opportunities,” he added. Gibbs’ résumé includes multiple performances at Carnegie Hall and Madison Square Garden, where he performed with Hugh Jackman.
Gibbs went on to perform in the ‘A New Beginning’ concert at Carnegie Hall in 2023, celebrating the resilient and tenacious stories of Asian and Pacific Islander (API) communities through song. It was at this concert that Gibbs sang a collection of Asian and Asian Pacific American music under the baton of Jace Saplan of Hawaii. “So Hawaiian music, Korean music, Japanese music, music in Tagalog, which is my mother’s language. After that, I realized—this was like summer 2023—I was like, wait, I’ve never sung anything in Japanese before this choir. I’ve never sung anything in Tagalog before this concert. There needs to be a choir in this city that does that.”
The end result is a volunteer choir that mixes anime and gaming music with Asian folk traditions, pop music, and contemporary choral arrangements, many of whose members have found Gibbs through his digital presence. “All of our volunteers are really gung ho,” said Gibbs of the team preparing for their upcoming show at Rutgers. “They’re super into this idea of the choir.” One recent performance from the choir, featuring music from “Love and Deepspace,” went viral online, as viewers debated whether the choir performing inside a church was even real, given how beautiful the music and setting were. In many ways, this blending of gaming and choral music is charting new waters in the arts world, captivating audiences both live and online.
But Gibbs said social media today feels dramatically different from the internet culture he remembers helping build years ago.“It’s not authentic anymore,” he said. “You don’t even know what’s real.”That shift has made live performance and connection even more meaningful to him.
In 2020, Gibbs founded the Black and Asian Alliance Network, an initiative created in response to heightened racial tensions between the two communities. Through dialogue, workshops, and media advocacy, the organization aimed to foster solidarity and mutual understanding.
“Singing is a communal effort that has been around for millennia,” Gibbs said. “You don’t have to be the most knowledgeable person. As long as you’re willing to try, we can do it together.”
Part of the choir’s appeal is the emotional evolution of gaming music itself. Back in the early Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) and Sega Genesis days, while still engaging in their own right, composers worked with limited technology and only a few sound channels. Today, many of those same melodies have evolved into fully orchestrated pieces performed by symphonies and choirs worldwide.
“The ideas were always there,” Gibbs said. “Once the technology caught up, they became these lush orchestrations with timeless melodies.”
For audiences who grew up alongside those games and shows, the performances can feel like a flashback—one that remains surprisingly moving in a new era. Gibbs, who says the gaming character he feels most connected to is Squall, the protagonist of “Final Fantasy VIII,” said conducting the choir has always felt enchanting.
“The things that you do with your beat pattern, with your eyes and your arms and your whole body can influence the sound,” he said. “That’s magic to me.”
Pressed Flowers: An AAPI Heritage Month Concert by Otaku Choir
Tuesday, May 19, 2026, at 7 p.m.
For free ticket reservations, click here.
Check out the Otaku Choir on Youtube here. This “Super Smash Bros.” main theme
performance from their first Rutgers visit is a great example of their range.
