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Shajila Patel performs a poem. Photo by Howard Myint.
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Buddhist Center Fundraiser Typical of Movement
By Titania Leung Inglis
Special to AsianWeek
At last weekend’s Buddha’s Delight festival, billed as a space for “inspired” art, the tone ranged from reverential to irreverent to nearly irrelevant as a colorful and seemingly random series of artists performed to raise funds for the San Francisco Buddhist Center (SFBC).
Halloween made an appropriate opening night for a festival that often seemed like a masquerade, and not just because of the costumes favored by performers and audience members alike. That first night, the Marsh — a San Francisco black box theater — was filled almost to capacity as SFBC chair Viveka took the stage in a dramatic black-and-white costume to open the festival with a Buddhist chant.
The bizarreness of the curating, which juxtaposed a variety of media and subject matter, was highlighted by the vagaries of the program. The line-up had clearly been changing up to the moment the performers took the stage, as the printed program differed greatly from the online version, and even some of the performers listed in the printed version failed to show. “Is Russell Gonzaga in the house?” queried poet Shailja Patel about the poet who was supposed to follow her provocative, hilarious and highly political set.
In fact, he wasn’t, and his set was skipped over without a word of explanation.
Like most of the performers, Patel didn’t address Buddhism onstage, but when the topic was breached, it was mostly as a joke — the religion became a punchline for a cute animated film by Nina Paley, and for a series of jokes by Wes Nisker, who has a solo show opening soon at the Marsh. The easy-going, and largely white audience unleashed gales of laughter for anything remotely comedic, including “Yellow Apparel,” a documentary film that presents a scathing critique of the commodification of Asian culture.
It wasn’t clear whether the audience members, many of them presumably practicing Buddhists, were laughing because they saw themselves in the guy with the geisha shirt or the couple that just spent $250 for two vases of “bamboo flowers,” or because they felt their religion placed them on the Asian Pacific American side of the issue. But the film certainly underscored the oddity of a Buddhist festival where about half the performers were APA, and the audience was overwhelmingly white.
In a quick interview before Saturday’s show, Viveka acknowledged that, like the audience, the Buddhist Center’s membership was mostly white. “In Buddhism in general, there aren’t very many people of color,” she noted without a trace of irony. The SFBC chair, who is APA herself, added that she had begun holding monthly meditation sessions for people of color. “There’s a kind of affirmative action movement going on at Buddhist centers.”
This was the third biennial festival; Viveka hoped that it would become annual after this year. Other festival performances included a typically bizarre butoh instruction/performance by the legendary Hiroko Tamano; an oddly comic folk music set, from The Hand Shakes, that culminated with him playing guitar atop a unicycle; and a sort of monologue by Akashapushpa, who narrated stories she had heard while crocheting the huge, multicolored rope that lay at her feet, as images of her crocheting were projected onto her voluminous white gown.
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