Celebr(ASIAN) good times, come on!
Mike Devine, 03/31/2008
From the The Northeastern News

Blackman Auditorium was a center for culture and choreography Saturday night when the Pan Asian American Council (PAAC) presented the second annual Celebr(ASIAN).

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Li followed the opening act, cracking a joke about an automated voiceover that served as the show’s announcer by calling it “one of the whitest voices” he had ever heard.

Li performed poems with subject matter including the statistics involved in US wars (”Mathematics”) and a call to focus on helping people in need during this election year (”Obama Mania”).

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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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Hip-hop performance to examine culture
Matt Collette, 11/05/2007
From the The Northeastern News

While considering hip-hop and spoken word performances, Asian American performers are rarely the first to come to mind, said organizers of tonight’s “Beats Rhymes and Rice” event.

Three Asian American hip-hop artists from across the country will perform in the West Addition of the Curry Student Center at 8 p.m. The performers seek to examine Asian American culture through a medium not usually associated with Asian culture.

“It’s a spoken word hip-hop event featuring three Asian American performers,” said Delia Cheung Hom, director of the Asian American Center.

The event, a collaboration between the Asian American Center, the Asian Student Union, the Korean-American Student Association and the Vietnamese Student Association, will showcase Asian American performers, a demographic not usually associated with hip-hop, Hom said.

Beats Rhymes and Rice is named after a line from Seattle-based hip-hop duo Blues Scholar song with the lyric: “Beats rhymes rice be the breakfast of champions.”

Both members of Blues Scholar are second-generation Americans whose parents worked hard to send them to college, according to their website.

The three performers are Giles Li, Bao Phi and Kiwi, each hailing from a different region of the country. According to promotional material for the Beats Rhymes and Rice tour, they deliver a unique combination of social commentary, self reflection and painful comedy, all to challenge established assumptions about the Asian American community.

Hom said few people are aware of Asian American hip-hop performers, but the three performers at Beats Rhymes and Rice have all made names of themselves in their local communities, as well as on a national level.

“You ask people, ‘have you ever heard of an Asian American hip-hop performer’ and they say no,” Hom said. (more…)

Artists express heritage
Lauren Paulauskas, 10/26/2007
From the Central Florida Future

Three talented spoken-word and hip-hop artists filled a packed Cape Florida Ballroom with words and music Wednesday.

The Beats, Rhymes and Rice Tour, starring Giles Li, Bao Phi and Kiwi Illafonte, breezed into UCF.

“They’re traveling from school to school,” said Cuong Le, chair of the Asian Awareness Council of the Multicultural Student Center at UCF. “This is the first school they’re stopping at.”

Members of the Asian Awareness Council, who put on the show, were really excited for their arrival and performances, he said.

“We asked one person, and they told us about this tour,” Le said, “so we jumped right on it.”

The three Asian men, all of different Asian heritages, emphasized their origins through their conversations with the audience and their descriptive pieces. They’ve known each other for a while and said their paths have crossed several times.

“We’re all community artists,” Phi said. “We’ve shared a lot of stages.”

The three men performed in a rotation because they said they didn’t want the audience to get bored. The audience’s response throughout the show proved that their plan worked. (more…)