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…”

On B(r)e(a)st Behavior

In a city like SF, where you can always count on the fog and never on the sun, on the rare occasions when the weather warms up for real, women and their faithful companions (…) sometimes are caught unprepared.

The below is my humble attempt at offering SF ladies some guidelines on how to react to such unusual circumstances. Disclaimer: the b(r)e(a)st practices were gleaned from observing actual San Franciscans in their own habitat, Discovery Channel-style.


So here’s what some owners might like to do with them on a warm weekend: 

The San Francisco War Memorial Opera

1.  Squeeze them into tight, deep-cut dresses and take them out to watch Faust on Friday night at the San Francisco War Memorial Opera. If they get bored, use your binoculars to find other cousins of theirs exposed to high culture in the rows below. Unless, of course, you’re in box seats, in which case you’ve paid so much money, you’d rather faint than admit you’re bored. Suck it up.
2.  Let them aerate in flimsy dresses, taking advantage of an extremely warm Saturday afternoon. Maybe take them to grab a bite at Elite Café and then walk down Fillmore Street, spying on the state of other globular objects.
3.  If it’s too warm (I know, fat chance) cool them off with a wine spritzer in the shade of the Kabuki Cinema. While you’re there,  take them to see SATC II, where they can gawk, together with you, at the girls’ outrageous and impossible ensembles, like high-heels in the middle of the desert, and shoulder pads adorned with life-sized poleaxes and other medieval weapons.

The Kabuki Sundance Cinema on Fillmore

1.  In the evening, fit them into a strappy top and try to keep them in it, as bartenders at Asia SF will diligently attempt to apply non-fat whipped cream in their general area. An impressive array of bras in all colors, shapes and sizes hangs above the Asia SF downstairs bar, reminding all visitors that this is a place of liberte, egalite, fraternite and, occasionally, toplessness-ite. Alternately, if owners are brides to be and engaged in bachelorette party activities (of which there were at least five on Saturday night two weeks ago), said items could end up spending a significant amount of quality time with rear ends of tranny divas, as part of obligatory pre-nup lap-dance rituals. Onstage.
2. If the warm weather persists (as a result of some cataclysmic climate changing-event), you have two options: go flower power or hop on yer bike. For the former, all you need is, yes, no bra and a tie-dye top that will accommodate fluid movement as you shake to the beats of the drum circle in Golden Gate Park. For the later, "support and cover" are the operative words -  if not for yourself, at least for the sake of drivers coming from the opposite direction. You don’t want to have them on your conscience

SF Drum Circle on a colder day 

Et voila! SF ladies - am I missing anything?

Stars of Burma; Password - Mango

I think it would be safe to say that any respectable San Franciscan who has a simile of social life has at least  heard of Burma Superstar and its sister, B Star Bar.

Both are restaurants on Clement Street, less than a block away from each other, under the same ownership and serving a similar menu of Burmese food. On Yelp, they both average four stars and get kudos for their fare, which is apparently a combination of Chinese, India and Thai cuisine over unique Burmese preparation techniques. Mango (in many shapes and preparations) seems to be the unifying element cutting across appetizers, salads and entrees, and thank God for that. I would’ve never thought of mango as a main ingredient in a pork dish, and it rocks!

Having visited both restaurants a total of 3 times in under 2 weeks, I feel compelled to commit to paper some notes on the cuisine, ambiance and service, before they fade away in the cloud of cheap take-out, salad bars and numerous Trader Joe’s dishes that make up most of my nourishment these days.

Burma Superstar is at its very best on weeknights. In fact, the difference is so great between weekdays and weeknights that they might as well call them Weekday Superstar and Weekend-Fussy-Diva-Past-Her-Prime.  Tuesday evening we waited about 45 minutes for a table of six and on a Saturday evening about 2.5 hours again for a tabletop of six. On Tuesday we got seated at the house’s only 8-top, with a turn table in the middle, which made is exquisitely easy to share dishes and impressions. On Sunday, drunk, cold and unnerved, we were hurried through courses not only by the waiter but also by the notion that another hungry, drunk an unnerved 6-top was breathing down our neck outside, checking on the progress of our meal through the window. “Are they done yet?” “They just got their appetizers”. Or maybe that was us, waiting for the people before. (Before you judge: it's hard NOT to get drunk when you walk all day and wait to get seated until 9:00 PM... ) 

At any rate, in terms of ambiance, I am strongly biased in favor of the Weekday Superstar. The food, however, in both instances, was delicious and refreshing. From the mango salad (pickled mango! who knew?) and samusas to the basil chicken and lamb curry, even the vegetarian dish, which featured ginko nuts that were surprisingly pleasant – everything was adventure and delight. So maybe the mango chicken and the basil chicken were almost indistinguishable and the wood ear mushrooms tasted, well, a bit wooden, but really, that’s it.

As to B Star: take Weekday Superstar, add the possibility of making reservations, replace experienced staff with younger, slightly clumsier, but more accommodating folks, compress the menu a bit, eliminating the more hard-core Burmese stuff but adding salmon ochazuke (mmm….) and polish the décor to a more asian-fusion look – and there you go. I can strongly recommend the fried trout on a bed of rice and (!) mango, the pan roasted sea bass and the aforementioned ochazuke which is a so-called “comfort food” dish, which in the Japanese mindset includes green tea, salmon  and poached eggs.

Let me know what you think of either restaurant next time you try them. I LOVE to compare notes.