June 29, 2002	Saturday	Rabi-us-Sani 17, 1423

WASHINGTON: On a blistering hot day in the US capital this week, the Smithsonian Institution’s Richard Kurin sought refuge in the cool shade of a nomadic felt tent. Usually, the yurt from the steppes of Central Asia, and the camel standing next to it, may have looked strangely out of place on the museum-lined National Mall.

But not when the national museum is putting on its biggest-ever folklife festival and the theme is “The Silk Road: Connecting Cultures, Creating Trust”.

Artists and craftsmen from 25 nations have come to the museum- lined stretch of park in the US capital for two weeks to celebrate the cultures along the ancient network of trade routes that stretched from Italy to Japan and for millennia helped spread products and ideas between Europe and Asia.

“You can almost see Marco Polo trekking eastward toward lands unknown to Europeans, or hear the sounds of a merchant caravan heading west with its cargo of silks and spices,” marvelled Secretary of State Colin Powell at Wednesday’s opening ceremony.

The exhibition — which runs until Sunday, and again from July 3 to 7 — features Venetian glass-blowers and Chinese calligraphers, Turkish Dervishes and Korean martial artists, all of them performing amid replicas of Silk Road landmarks such as Istanbul’s Agia Sofia church-mosque and China’s Xian Gate.

The logistics were indeed mind-boggling, said one frazzled planner. “A simple message like ‘the bus will be late’ had to be translated into 25 languages,” she said. Organizers faced other challenges, such as ensuring that the yurt is wheelchair-accessible and has a fire exit. They also had to battle bureaucracy to bring in another eye-catcher, a technicolour-painted Pakistani truck.

Other performers found Washington less restrictive than their home cities, including a troupe of Indian street performers who were entertaining children and their parents with a traditional magic show.

A more martial performance art was staged a few tents down, where a beefy Mongolian wrestler was slamming his pink-faced opponent into the dust, dangerously close to a row of children.

More avantgarde fashion was presented by Japanese design team “20471120”, whose members “remix” second-hand clothes to make oddly elegant items such shirt with baseball-cap pockets.

It’s the cultural exchange that also motivated Dakpa, a Tibetan monk from northern India who was working on a mandala sand-painting, which takes 24 hours to make before the sands are scattered.

“We love talking with people from different cultures, different religions,” he said.—dpa