New Brisbane

Brisbane Buddha Birthday Festival 2006
South Bank Parklands
5 – 7 May 2006

I have a feeling I might be writing this a little too late… For those of you who didn’t go, or had NO IDEA it was on, take heed, put this grave mistake behind you and ensure you go next year!

Alice’s take :

The Brisbane Buddha Festival: Let’s start with a series of snapshots. An afternoon, hot enough to wet the underarms, yet fast cooling down. The memorable Southbank walkway framed by the succession of frond-like awnings unfurling above in static grace. Hundreds of bright red lanterns nestled among these balletic structures, glowing charmingly in the dusky evening sky.

Monkies effused in battery-powered light, smiling cheekily as they bounce on strings from children’s hands. The smell of fried batter, donation boxes picketing every corner, make a wish, hang it up, douse Buddha’s shoulder in YlangYlang-scented water, pledge good thoughts and do kind deeds. This is the Buddha Birthday Festival.

I arrived a little ahead of my friends and wandered aimlessly, smiling at stall owners, gazing at the lanterns hanging like ripe plums above the walkway. I dangled a finger across chimes, topped with intricate knots and gold trinkets, and paused briefly over the market-quality jewellery. I sifted my way through chokingly huge lumps of recycled clothing, shoving my hand into the centre of the mounds and blindly pulling out whatever i grabbed hold of… an Austen-Powers style dress with huge white buttons and thick white stripes in the kind of material that could start a blaze without a match. A vomitus yellow jumper with a harsh linted texture, pair after pair of narrow-hipped pants in white denim, nylon pink and pinstripe polyester - perfect for slim Asian figures, and perhaps an underdeveloped version of my teenage self.

So there were lots of interesting markets stalls, including the National Bank (silent question-mark here), crockery, mobilephone heebee-jeebee dooby wackers and Hello Kitty everywhere! But that’s just the side serving.

My friends and I really came for the food. I mean, honestly, festivals are really all about the food! I’m not going to Panyiri Festival (May 20 - 21) for the merry-go-round. I’m going to fast for days and then sample every food stall in sight. I’m going to have spanakopita oozing out my ears! But I digress. We made a satisfactory effort to look around, while containing our growling stomachs. We visited a few promotional stores, paid our respects to Buddha, knealing before the large golden statues and following the kindly ‘how-to-properly-say-happy-birthday’ instructions of the Buddhist nuns. Having done that we beelined for the Hare Krishna stall and gobbled down their kofta balls. Besides that we sampled the deep-fried tempura, the VEGIE fried chicken (could have fooled me!), the curry puffs, the samosas, even the steamed buns… each priced around $4 and under.

Dessert for our struggling stomachs were small rounded pancakes, poured into moulds the size of large Dolmio Sauce jar-tops, filled with red bean paste, chocolate, coconut and custard (*salivate salivate salivate*). This stall was so popular people were ordering ahead as sweat-sheened foodies diligently poured batter into the grill.

So a lot of the time you’ll find me down in the festival food garden, or admiring the local art and craft… which wasn’t as impressive as previous years… and you will never find me listening to the bor-ring speeches made by big wigs opening these events. However this time I did attend the opening ceremony…mostly I needed to sit down and digest. Surprisingly the speeches were minimal, but the performances that accompanied these…..WOW!

Not one adult was to be seen on stage, barely a highschooler could be seen. Most of these children were barely 15, according to my very basic age-analysis skills. They did some very colourful, and lengthy I might add, dragon dances, jumping around to the beat of the drums. The huge dragon heads bopping one way and another, their costumed legs (the only part of these little performers we could see) would kick up, sideways, out and in, feet flexed at a right angle to their perfectly straight legs. We watched entranced as they circled around one another, dipping and swerving in a ceaseless fluid motion.

But no sooner had this finished (and i’d snuck off for another round of vegetarian taste-testing) but the acrobats came out. Round after round appeared, some dressed in tight white (crotch-hugging) lycra bodysuits, others puffy satin shirts the colour of Barbie’s favourite pink handbag. They jumped over and around one another. On top of each other, flipping and flopping and coming to a rest upside on. I think the crowd was more exhausted than them! These kids were just amazing! For such a (seemingly) young age their agile little physiques carried out stunts of strength and balance that put Circus Oz to shame! Given, there were a few little mistakes here and there but that just added to the suspense!

Kids on unicycles threw bowls onto their heads where they balanced them and wheeled. Diablo-swinging troups practiced feats of throwing and catching, in near perfect sync in various formations. We watched a performer balance a pole on her feet which carried two girls, one sitting at either end. This performer then rotated the pole around on her feet and we watched the pole swing around on this girl’s tippy toes, while she nonchalantly rested her hands behind her head.

But the high point, the point of no return; the point at which I decided that nothing more could be done but to go home and get into bed, was the chair balancing. By my expert calculations I would age this child at 14. 14! He hops on a table and then proceeds to very carefully build himself a castle of chairs… Lets say 10 -12 chairs high. Each stack top to bottom, one atop the other. In the background blares a distractingly loud trance track… It distracted me..I don’t know how it didn’t distract him! This kid is now balancing well above us all, if he fell he’d go sailing into the blue yonder. The chair stack is trembling ever so slightly. The crowd is trembling in time with the chairs. The kid places his last chair diagonally across the stack and then proceeds to hoist himself up on one arm (my palms are sweaty just writing about it!) and balance high above us.. and no there were no trampolines below! He then performs a series of other acrobatic feats while we all sweat and gape in nervous wonder.

And then he proceeds to calmly climb down and chuck the chairs to his waiting team! Well that was it. The best free entertainment I’ve had since… Bar 55 in New York’s Greenwich Village when someone paid for my ticket to watch live jazz.

It was all over. I think I had mild indigestion and my eyes were so wide they were catching small insects. But that is enough to make me go again next year. And the year after that and the year after that. Mark my words! Change your ways and go!

Alborz’s take :

Personally, I have no big views on Buddha and Buddhism, I am not a very religious person, but as far as religions go, Buddhism isn’t the worst to pick. Nevertheless, the Buddha Festival had very little to actually do with Buddha as far as I could tell. I guess the main “attraction” was the lion dancing and the food, neigther of which really made my day. Apparently later on the night, there were some amazing acrobatic shows on (as alice mentioned), but I didn’t stay long enough to find out. The place was crowded with people wandering through the zillion little shops that were setup to sell the same thing. Lots of asian food, some excellent chocolate/coconut filled pancakes for $1 each but mostly lots of cheap shops selling fake merchandise. I never understood how shops can openly sell Fake merchandise ranging from Louise Vuitton handbangs to Diesel watches. This seems to be a growing trend everywhere you go now. Lots of fake merchandise being sold in public!

Nevertheless, for Southbank, it was one of the better events that has been on recently, the food was good (albeit expensive and with some wierd selections like Vegetarian Deep Friend Chicken? - vegetarian chicken? ), the people all generally seemed happy, and despite the fake merchandise, there were lots of little gimiky type gifts that you can only really ever find at these sorts of markets. The food wasn’t that great if you ask me, maybe I am just not the biggest fan of Asian food. What I really want to know, is what the heck the American Indians were doing singing at the festival? Maybe I need to refresh my knowledge of buddhism a little bit. The event seems to run yearly, but I am not that optimistic if I am going to bother next year.