Mudra Dance Studio debuts this year’s spectacular, ILLhaam

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Mudra Dance Studio

Mudra Dance Studio has been celebrating the dynamic traditions of classical Indian dance, and putting a contemporary spin on it, since long before Bollywood films became a popular genre here in the US with non-Indians. Namita Khanna Nariani, a brilliant, energetic dynamo of a teacher and choreographer, founded the troupe 17 years ago and turned it into a non-profit organization eight years ago — all while raising a family and maintaining a career as an architect.

We first met Namita in the second year of the Colorado Dragon Boat Festival (the photo above is from this summer’s festival), and she’s been a regular every year since, closing out the festival with a one-two punch of her Mudras followed by the very popular Denver Taiko Japanese drummers. Starting the third year, at Erin’s suggestion, the Mudras started collaborating with Denver Taiko and now that’s become a regular cross-cultural highlight of the event.

The powerful Japanese drums have come to fit so well in Namita’s South Asian vision of cultural fusion, in fact, that Mudra Dance Studio now incorporates a taiko drummer, Thomas Knight, as a regular part of its exciting annual performances.

ILLhamThis year’s performance, ILLham, opens this Sunday at 2 pm, and then repeats Saturday, Nov. 20 at 5 pm and Sunday, Nov 21 at 2 pm, at the Lakewood Cultural Center. Tickets are available online at the Mudra website.

Each of the annual Mudra shows are carefully structured to be showcases not only of fabulous dance, music and multimedia, but also of an innate spirituality that is a part of the Mudra lifestyle. All its members seem imbued with this spirituality, because it flows down from Nariani herself. She explains the idea of ILLhaam, which is about cycles:
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API Extravaganza was a cool evening of hot Asian American talent

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Here are some videos from Sunday night’s API Extravanganza, an under-promoted concert that featured a bunch of great local Asian American talent, plus Chicago’s hilarious Asian American sketch comedy troupe, Stir-Friday Night.

The local lineup included singer-songwriter )and killer guitarist) Jack Hadley, Shaolin Hung Mei Kung Fu, Hype 303 hip-hop dance crew (shown above), sand painter Shaina Vo, covers by the Pacific Jam Band, award-winning singer-songwriter Wendy Woo and headliners Denver Taiko. The concert was sponsored and produced by Isle Casino Blackhawk, which, through Peggy Moore in ist marketing staff, supports a ton of Asian community events in this area. (Full disclosure: Erin was the emcee for the evening, and Isle Casino made a small donation in exchange to the Colorado Dragon Boat Festival, for which Erin is the executive director. Most of these acts have performed at the festival.)

One of the coolest things about the lineup of artists was that most of the acts were Asian American, not the ol’ kimono-and-traditional-dance routines. Sure, the kung fu was old school, and taiko drumming is traditional too. But they’re cool, right?

Here are the other videos:
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On blogging: Nikkei View, and my other stuff on Posterous and Tumblr

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I’ve been using Posterous and Tumblr as blogging outlets for posting about topics that don’t fit Nikkei View, and I’m especially loving Posterous. I use my Posterous blog for pop culture stuff (Asian or non-Asian related) and Tumblr for new media and journalism stuff. Take a look:

http://gilasakawa.posterous.com

http://gilasakawa.tumblr.com

The best thing about it is the ease of posting: I just send an email with photos attached or video embedded, and it appears within a minute or two online. And it posts the headline onto Twitter which then posts the update to Facebook.

Tumblr is more popular with media companies but it’s a little more work to post. They can do emails too but the email address is harder to remember, and the formatting gets all jacked if you submit via email.

Both platforms are great for short, snippy comments and observations, stuff that I don’t want to write long essays about. Or, I can write something longer too, if I want.

If you’re a blogger or just considering blogging, I highly recommend them. It remains to be seen if these inspire me to write more on this Nikkei View blog, or if I abandon longform blogging altogether… (not likely!)

Next up on visualizAsian: Meet Jeff Yang, editor of “Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology” & Bernard Chang, “Superman” artist

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Jeff Yang visualizAsian is back for November with a killer fun live conversation, an hour with Jeff Yang and Bernard Chang on the role of superheroes and comics, and why there aren’t many Asian American superheroes.

The chat will be Tuesday, Nov. 16 at 7 pm PT, 10 pm ET, and if you haven’t registered for a visualizAsian call before, you can sign up in a jiffy.

These two guys are eminently qualified to speak about Asian Americans as well as comic books and superheroes:
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Race in the 2010 political races

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This ad from Citizens Against Government Waste, called “Chinese Professor,” hit the fan just a few weeks ago as the campaign season was hitting its fever pitch, and it fanned the flames of outrage among Asian Americans across the country. It’s not subtle: The commercial obviously perpetuates an ugly, evil vision of Chinese as grim, committed enemies of America, gloating over a fantasy collapse of US world power and the rise of a gray-tinted China… with a gigantic visage of Chairman Mao glaring over an auditorium where a professor gloats to his students.

Here’s Angry Asian Man on the ad, and the original post on The Atlantic that analyzes the spot.

Angry Asian Man also tracked down a couple of extras who were hired for the commercial, and they explain that they knew the commercial was conservative, but they had no idea their stint sitting in an audience and laughing on command would be put in such a grim, stereotypical context.

There’s not much more to say about this ad, except it turns my stomach — and it aired tonight while we were watching election returns.
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