Sound Check: Sulu DC Kicks Off Its 2013 Performing Arts Series

By Amanda Andrei

Azizah Amhad, host of the 2013 Sulu DC kick off performance Sound Check, holds up a clipboard and pen. “This is a community poem,” she explains to the packed house in the Black Fox Lounge on Connecticut Avenue in NorthWest D.C. “We’re going to pass it around the room and you can write a sentence and pass it to the next person. Keep it going!”

Brian Lozano, Filipino American activist and spoken word performer, opens the show with a love poem: “You are a city because you are so beautiful,” he recites. Jo Quiambao and Pia, women’s rights advocates, follow with a heart-breaking poetic duet about migrant women and their struggles. Vincent Lacsamana and band sing several original ballads: “Butterflies”, a hopeful song about first love and “Keep You Warm”, a romantic promise. Alex Cena and Christian Oh transition the show to a powerful spoken word performance about the APA identity – “I was the only southern Asian kid in Virginia,” Christian exclaims. “Stop, collaborate, and listen,” they chant.

Initiated in 2009, Sulu provides the Asian Pacific American community with a safe and empowering space to nurture artistic growth, foster community building, and raise awareness of issues relevant to APA communities at-large. Once a month, various performance artists—musicians, singers, poets, comedians, and dramatists—come together to give voice to the diverse threads of the community. As Jenny C. Lares, executive director of Sulu says, “What has consistently made me feel fulfilled, is the sense of home you feel, when the artists and everyone in the room laugh and cry and are angry together, and the knowledge that what you and your team produced carries great meaning for all involved.”

DISE, a Laotian singer and musician whose name stands for Disciple Impacting Souls Everywhere, plays the piano and serenades the crowd with the soulful original song, “Been to Paradise.” Anirudh, an Indian spoken word performer, moves the crowd with his story of connecting to his Indian heritage and the realization, “We are all immigrants moving from one time to the next.” Finally, Diana Bui, community organizer and artist, challenges the audience with the question, What does it mean to be a Vietnamese American woman?

The clipboard has made it back to Azizah’s hands. The community poem that has emerged—nonsensical yet deep, free-flowing yet structured, mostly in English and with a smattering of Asian phrases—delights and challenges the audience, eliciting loud laughter and contemplative murmurs. At the last line, the audience breaks into applause. Sound check, complete. 2013, here we go.

For information on upcoming Sulu performances, including a hip hop brunch, visit http://suludc.com or follow Sulu on Facebook and Twitter (@suludc).