Ethnic Dance Festival recap

It’s one of the many benefits of living in San Francisco that you get regaled with events like the Ethnic Dance Festival, four weeks of choreographic candy, with tens of troupes and individual artists performing at the Palace of Fine Arts. The palace itself is an architectural jewel, but more about that in another post, dedicated exclusively to urban planning. (I’m learning the subtle art of the teaser…)

Last Saturday night we watched the last performance of the season, with a lineup that started off with a Christian ceremony grafted on pagan roots from Nayarit, Mexico, and ending with Las Bomberas de la Bahia, a Puerto Rican group of women-only performers that sang and danced to the rhythm of drums made out of rum barrels (barilles the bomba).

As it usually happens, some of the performances spoke more to me than others and I’m sure my own cultural background filtered everything to match my own paradigm, which is a pretentious way of saying – I liked some dances better than others, but that’s not a judgment on their intrinsic value. That said, three performances really stood out for me: an ensemble from Zimbabwe, a Bolivian troupe and an Oakland-based hip-hop group.

In hindsight, it shouldn’t have surprised me that such very different performances would move me so deeply. I could even break them down according to Freud’s Id, Ego, Superego. The Zimbabwean dance carried with it a wildness and a purity of spirit that only cultures very close to the land still posses nowadays. From the toils of agricultural work as only means of subsistence to the abandon of celebration, the Zimbabwean dance reminded me of things our polished surroundings, sterile meeting rooms and buttoned-up social reunions have long ceased to offer: a genuine connection to one’s surroundings, expressed through movement. I’ll let you guess with which facet of my personality this performance resonated.

Bolivia Corazon de America was a feast for the eyes that catered to my inner child. Their dance, Magical Encounters in the Altiplano, told the story of a indiecita (indigenous woman) who runs into a gathering of surreal, humanized birds called suri. She’s fascinated by them – the dancers have huge feather headdresses that spin like ethereal flowers. Eventually, after hanging out with the birds for a while, she becomes a bird in her own right: a Cinderella story for the avian kingdom and a visual delight that transported me back to my days in junior high when I skipped school to read Quetzalcoatl in bed with a thermometer in my mouth, faking the flu.

Here you can see one of the enormous Bolivian headdresses 

 Last, but by no means least, A Rose that Grows from the Concrete. Where to begin? I’ll take it chronologically. First, about thirty or so kids of all sizes and ages burst onto the scene, dressed in shades of gray, black and red. I stared in disbelief at this motley assortment of inner-city kids, none of which looked like professional dancers or even particularly graceful. And then they started dancing! I was quickly ashamed of my intital judgmental reaction: these kids not only could dance, they could rock out to the tune of a poem recited by a rather unpoetic voice, combined with Motown and hip-hop tunes that created a dissonant effect. I can think of no better incarnation of the Rose from the Concrete metaphor. The effect was one of heart-breaking realism, the kind of art that holds a mirror in the face of life and thrives from its imperfections. And as it turns out, the lyrics were written by Tupac Shakur, himself an icon of the pitfalls of urban coexistence.

I’ll leave you with his hopeful, sad and incredibly urgent-feeling lyrics:

“Did you hear about the rose that grew

From a crack in the concrete?

Provin’ nature’s laws wrong it

Learned how to walk without having feet

Funny it seems, but keeping its dreams

It learned how to breathe FRESH air

Long live the rose that grew from the concrete

When no one else even cared…”

… And a Merry Vampire Weekend to You All!

On a cold and gloomy week day, my better half and I drove to Oakland’s Fox Theater to watch Vampire Weekend give the last performance of their US tour, hoping (for our sake) that they would go out with a *bang*. The Fox Theater on its own deserves another review, which I will hopefully manage to write after completing the required amount of billable hours some other day …

As to VW: We were not disappointed. Even seated (seated!) at the mezzanine, VW’s infectious energy caught up with us and, by the last song, they had us bouncing off our chairs. If you’re not familiar with Vampire Weekend, I strongly recommend listening to eponymous debut album before diving into their latest Contra. Vampire Weekend, the album, has a familiar storyline for anyone who lived on the East Coast, specifically in Boston and Cape Cod, anyone who went to college, popped their collar, took English lit, listened to Bob Marley, fancied themselves a philosopher, waited tables in Wellfleet and spent innumerable hours in Harvard Square/Foggy Bottom sipping coffee and mingling with Ivy-league folks. But really, I’m doing VW a disservice by limiting them to such a select crowd – their appeal is universal.

On their first album, Mansard Roof opens with lyrics that speak volumes to anyone who’s ever spent a summer in a hot city anywhere in the world, yearning for relief from dust and noise: “I see a salty message written in the eaves/ The ground beneath my feet/The hot garbage and concrete/And now the tops of buildings, I can see them too…” And reversely, the song Walcott, even though it takes shots at a summer hotspots for Bostonites (“Hyannis is ghetto”), it applies to any place where pale sweaty people serve tanned, rested people tall glasses of Arnold Palmer (ah, the irresistible pull of accelerated seasonal income): “Walcott, Don't you know/That it's insane?/Don't you want to/Get out of Cape Cod?/Out of Cape Cod tonight?”

On stage, their footwork is as playful as their strings, and they’re leggy and bouncy in the fashion of ‘80s synth-pop stars, minus the affected stances. They take obvious enjoyment in their music and use the surprise factor in their favor, keeping their songs curt like their lyrics, with abrupt endings that leave you wanting more. Their brand of music has been dubbed by others (more knowledgeable than me) as “preppy punky afro-pop,” but VW themselves profess to be "Upper West Side Soweto" (whatever that is).

Anyway, I love these preppy leggy punks and I think you would like them too. If you don’t already.

PS: Thank you, Tom, for introducing us to them.