Bryn Mawr Hosts ASA Culture Festival
Hannah Mueller, 12/04/2007
From the The Bi-College News

Lions, poetry, swords, a capella, hula—Bryn Mawr’s Asian Students Association Culture Festival had it all. “Night Market: The OccAsian of the Year,” held in Thomas Great Hall last Saturday, was well attended and a great success. The performance portion of the show was followed immediately by a Night Market, a beautifully decorated and eclectic “street fair” in the back of the Hall with food, games, and gifts.

Kelly Soudachanh ‘10 and Sandra Lee ‘10, Culture Festival co-heads and emcees, really had their act together, which made the show flow naturally and quickly. The first and last performances were by the Johns Hopkins University Lion Dance Troupe. Pounding drumbeats accompanied the five dancers, four of whom composed two huge, colorful lions with moving mouths, ears, and eyes. As part of the dance, the lion dancers pounced into the crowd, and later into the Night Market.

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Giles Li’s performance was the finale to the program portion of the festival. Li is a spoken word artist from Boston who has founded the Boston Progress Arts Collective and works as an Arts Coordinator at the Neighborhood Center in Boston’s Chinatown. Comfortable and friendly with the audience, Li performed lyrical spoken word poetry about America’s international situation in “Mathematics,” the hypocrisy of commercialized Christmas in “A Crappy Xmas Poem in Seven Parts,” and a deeply respectful and heartfelt tribute to the women in his life in “Woman.” Li interspersed his poetry with funny stories from other performance experiences, and with an acoustic version of “Umbrella” on the guitar, which was pretty funny. His last poem involved audience participation; in three sections, we yelled “Okay!,” “Yeah!,” and “What?” at his direction and were incorporated into an ardent appeal for peace.

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