Sa Bai Dee! Lao Traditional Culture


You're invited to a behind-the-scenes tour of a traditional Lao Boon (festival). Enjoy authentic music, traditional stories, a special good luck ceremony, traditional craft demonstrations, textile display, and more. Storyteller Khampheng Manirath, an ESL teacher at Callanan Middle School and the event coordinator, will introduce this fascinating two-hour program.

Availability: weekday evenings, weekend days and evenings

Fees to Artists (plus travel): $1,200

Participants: 6

 

Bios of Key Participants:
Khampheng Manirath of Des Moines, Iowa is a traditional storyteller originally from Laos. Manirath is also an elected officer of the Wat Lao Buddhavas (Lao Buddhist Temple) in Des Moines. An ESL tutor and teacher for the Des Moines Public Schools since 1975, he is a graduate of Grandview College with an ESL endorsement from the University of Iowa. Manirath learned his stories from his grandparents and his mother. His grandfather would gather everyone by the fire in the evenings and tell ghost stories, French contes (fairy tales), Chinese folk tales (his father’s side), and Lao folk tales.

Manirath uses animal figures, miniature houses, and other objects, as well as his own hand-drawn book, to illustrate his stories, showing non-Asians some of the ways people live in Laos—and reminding Asian American students of their heritage. Encouraged by a fellow teacher, he began to illustrate the stories, putting together two bilingual books. The recipient of the 2000 Teacher of the Year Award from the Iowa Language & Cultural Concerns Conference, Khampheng Manirath has performed at the Iowa Folklife Institute’s Culture Café in 2000, at the 25th Anniversary of Freedom for the Peoples of Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam that same year, at the 2001 Festival of Iowa Folklife in Waterloo.

Inpanh Thavonekham plays with the Natasinh musicians who accompany the Natasinh dance troupe and also makes a variety of traditional Lao wooden instruments. Born in Atapeu in southern Laos, Inpanh moved to Vientiane, the capital, at the age of ten. He and his family fled Laos in 1979 for a refugee camp in Thailand, and, on April 17, 1980, Inpanh came to Des Moines, Iowa.

Inpanh was 11 when his teachers Langsy and Khamman, taught him the basics for playing his first and favorite instrument, the khene, a mouth accordion made of a double row of bamboo reeds fitted into a hardwood sound box. The khene is the favorite instrument for traditional Lao social dancing, for which couples dance facing each other in one or more circles. Inpanh also learned to play the khouy or flute as well as the phin, a three-string “lute” instrument that is plucked with an animal horn pick. As well, Inpanh plays ching (small, metal cup-shaped cymbals), the xor-doung and the xor-ou (small and large two-stringed “violins” with long carved necks, coconut shell or wooden resonators, and snakeskin sound boards), the khongvong, and the lanath. Inpanh learned to play all his instruments by ear—by watching others, experimenting, and performing.

Besides being a talented musician, Inpanh is also involved in carving and making instruments. A student at the Lao National Art Institute from 1975 to 1979, he studied painting and wood carving. Besides intricate relief carving of Buddhist visages, Inpanh has painted secular subjects. His splendid sculptures stand in from of the Lao Temple in Des Moines and include dragons, birds, and the Earth Mother God. He has also made his own phin, carving the long neck into an elaborate dragon head. Inpanh has also made the housing for a lanath; the tuned wooden keys are ordered from Laos.