Scorched Silk
A Record Crowd Defies the Heat for the Opening of the Folklife Festival

Only the Monkey Man seemed to be hip to the appropriate dress for camping out on the Mall yesterday in 95-plus-degree heat: Which is to say, practically naked. Shorts. Oversize sunglasses, of the Jackie O sort. Perhaps you'd want to skip the tail and fur mask. But only if you're not trying to draw a crowd.

This being the kickoff day of the highly publicized 36th annual Smithsonian Folklife Festival, dubbed "The Silk Road: Connecting Cultures, Creating Trust," there were hundreds of entertainers and artisans competing for attention. This is, after all, the Smithsonian's most ambitious festival to date, one that showcases the food, music and culture of the many nations that made up the ancient Silk Road, a storied group of trade routes that connected Asia and Europe for centuries.

So with all these cultures and countries, from Italy to Afghanistan to China, competing for attention, you've got to well, grab it. And so the Monkey Man, aka Kishan of India, was quite naturally trying to get as many people as possible to notice him. And so he, and his crew, the Indian Mela performers, a traveling band of magicians and jugglers and, um, monkey impersonators, kicked up a ruckus.

They shouted. They ate large metal balls and then spit them out, after rubbing their tummies and making great, grunting sounds.

They were loud. They were obnoxious. They were a rollicking good time.

And they were appropriately dressed for the weather. Of course, being from India probably had something to do with this, because from what we hear, India is nothing if not hot. We tried asking for a weather comparison -- which is hotter? D.C. or Delhi? -- but apparently something got lost in the translation, because they started talking about the heat in Delhi. Heat as in the cops, that is, and how the police hate street performers and this is why they are thanking the Smithsonian because now they get to work.

But we digress.

Heat -- and cultural understanding -- were the recurring themes yesterday at the Mall. And when the temperature starts to crank, and lots of officials -- such as Secretary of State Colin Powell and Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) -- show up to officiate, all kinds of interesting things start to happen. Yo-Yo Ma, the musical icon behind the Silk Road project, loses his cello, right before he's supposed to go onstage. (He found it.) Everyone starts to crack weather jokes. Endless heat jokes. ("Mongolian throat-singing cools the body." Ha-ha!) And when the jackets come off, you notice that senators sweat, too, in great, gushing amounts that form creative patterns on their dress shirts. But apparently, Cabinet secretaries do so only in tastefully restrained doses.

You also note that this cultural-understanding thing is serious business.

Despite the heat, Sufi singers and dancers from Turkey wore their suffocating layer upon layer of heavy beaded tunics. Tibetan monks wore their maroon robes that dragged about in the dust. And the minstrels and bards from Kazakhstan kept on their fur hats.

Just the sight of them was enough to send us running to the nearest yurt for cover, where it was surprisingly cool and dark -- for a structure covered in boiled wool. Yurts, in case you didn't know, are portable houses that take three hours to assemble and, when disassembled, can fit on the back of a camel. But we're betting that the "bilingual" camels shuffling around in a pen across from the Museum of Natural History won't be too happy later when they're loaded down with a disassembled yurt.

There has never been such a gathering of cultures in one place on the Mall. Getting all of them in one place was a major logistical coup. Yesterday an estimated 56,000 to 60,000 attended the festival, the biggest opening-day crowd in its history. Taking part were some 375 traditional artists -- musicians, dancers, cooks, storytellers and others -- from the United States and more than 20 other countries. The Silk Road takes over the Mall through Sunday, and July 3 through 7. Gates open at 11 a.m. each day, and special events, such as concerts, will be held during the evening. All events are free.

"In the part of the world I come from, boundaries are not as porous as they were in the Silk Road," observed Rajiv Sethi, the Indian artist who designed the festival's sculptures, referring to the troubled state of affairs in much of the Silk Road territory. "You couldn't bring a painted truck from Karachi into New Delhi and paint it with the sky of Bombay."

You can, however, bring the painted truck from Karachi into the District of Columbia and park it near the corner of 12th Street and Jefferson Drive SW. Trucks like these -- painted from fore to aft with the kind of elaborately swirling art you'd expect to find in a museum -- pack the Pakistani streets of Islamabad, Karachi and Lahore. And at night, they travel alone, creating an eerie tableau that lights up the empty streets.

Jamil Uddin, 38, designed the paneled body of the work. "I've been doing this for 25 years. My father did it before me," Uddin said.

Amid the cacophony of sound, there was a sense of tradition and continuity that permeated the Mall, the pride associated with displaying crafts and entertainment found when fathers and grandfathers and mothers and grandmothers pass on the family business, whether that was yurt-building or building Tibetan mandalas or levitating à la Aziz, the Indian yogi/musician ("I am flying here Air India").

There was the throat-singer from Mongolia, spitting out a deep guttural drone that the audience tried to mimic, to much less resonant results.

Cracked Powell: "I haven't heard throat-singing like that since my last congressional appearance."

Pause.

"That would be the Senate, not the House."

And with that, he took off, clapping his hands and dancing along with the Asian Mask Dance Theater from Japan.

Some things you just have to see.

And hear.

In the Aitys tent, so named for the Inner Asian tournaments of nomadic poets and musicians, there was the musician from Kazakhstan playing a small lute called a dumbra. "This is music for deep, deep thoughts," the announcer intoned. "Deep philosophical thoughts."

And so the musician from Kazakhstan commenced to playing deep thoughts, his fingers fluttering up and down the strings with the precision of a neurosurgeon. His fingers moved so quickly that it caused us to wonder how he'd have time to think deep thoughts and play that fast.

Two Tibetan monks wandered the Mall, stopping to take pictures with a curious tourist.

They've been traveling around the States since 2001, and they've learned a few things along the way.

D.C. is nice, but it's Colorado that makes their hearts sing.

"Because it's like Tibet," Dakpa said.

"Mountains. High altitude. And cold weather."