Estes Park Sings-really sings

Last night I attended a real piece of work-Estes Park Sings Around the World. I always find shows like this a little disturbing because they tend to overly essentialize and mock people from other countries but this my friends was the most terrible...

The performance begins in of course the small Mountain Town of Estes Park-the perfect place that it supposedly is. A straight white couple is sitting in "their living room" when they receive a phone call from their Dolly Parton-esque daughter who is going to be performing on a cruise ship going around the world. I honestly did not know that this was the premise for the show and I have been to some chorale performances etc that actually treat multiculturalism pretty well. They have to pay homage to the culture, sing along with their songs not appropriate them for their own use etc...

I knew this was not going to be pretty when the first "stop" on the tour was Jamaica. A whole bunch of white guys from the Rotary club (the sponsors of the show) dressed in shorts and their nerdy floral print shirts or t-shirts with Jamaica on them sporting Rasta hats with fake dread locks. They then proceeded to sing the song Day-O complete with Jamaica percussion in the background. Personally I do not see how this is much different from a white person painting black face and doing a "minstrel" show. I was mortified. When I said kind of loudly "Oh my goddess this is so racist. This is awful." My friend responded, "What did you expect?" I guess I didn't expect such a blatant form of racism to be pervading my consciousness right at that moment.

I recently read an article about schools' attempts to integrate multicultural education into the curriculum. The author recalled his own school's attempts as a child by having a multiplicity of dinners all themed from a different culture. He distinctly recalled "Taco Night" and how looking back on it was extremely problematic. This dinner was an attempt to learn about "Mexican culture" as though there is only one and that equates everything about it to "tacos." This is really problematic because (and I can't rememer how he phrased it) it essentialize all people of Latin/Spanish/Central American heritage down to Tacos-which, is an Americanized version of all of those cultures. It implies a whole bunch of people eat Tacos, when they probably don't and that this could stand in for their entire cultural being would be like saying some sort of food could stand in as a replacement for all the people in the U.S.A. Ridiculous yes-but people do it and this is exactly what was going on at the EPS concert. All the "Jamaican" people were whittled down to Dreadlocks, Rasta culture minus drugs, and a lazy attitude.

Besides the small town politics of "Oh this is a song this person knows so we need to incorporate it" all of the different or othered countries were extremely mocked. I mean every country and culture was mocked-Japan was whittled down to a bunch of quiet meek Geisha-like girls, Germany a large woman with long blonde braids under a helmet with horns drinking beer, and in Africa a whole bunch of again white guys dressed up in Safari like clothes singing "The Lion Sleeps Tonight." There was little respect paid to other cultures, no working with their traditional songs and doing them in a resprectful tone/way that honors them but instead it was all seeming to make fun. And this was my problem-using other cultures, especially "othered" cultures to get laughs is racist and colonialist and this is a problem. And this mockery besides being essentializing also further others these cultures by making them incredibly different from all of us. By portraying all people from Japan as meek little girls and dressing in traditional Kimonos seems to imply that this is what Japanese means. When most of the people currently in Japan dress like Americans and vice versa because of the globalized market economy we have going on. We are not that different looking or acting anymore and people from other countries (at least not all of them) don't walk around all day in their traditional dress. It would be like Americans being portrayed in their church best on stage. And this would imply everyone owns church best, goes to church at all, etc. They don't and as Americans we wouldn't want to be homogenized in this way so we shouldn't do it to others either.

But besides my obvious big critique being the racist/colonialist implications of such a concert and such performances are just so offensive is that not only do the performers think it is ok to put on such a performance but everyone in the audience (for the most part) laughs at them. They all think it is appropriate to laugh at white people pretending and mocking "blackness" and "brownness." But then when a Swedish performance of ABBA comes on stage no one laughs and no one gets it. It isn't funny to people because either they don't think it's funny to see a bunch of white people attempt to dance (at all) and especially dance and sing to ABBA, or they don't think it is that far fetched-at least far fetched enough from reality to be funny. Maybe it was so many of the people there's actual culture it just wasn't funny to them it was their 70's reality, or they just didn't get it because it was mocking whiteness and to them it wasn't funny. Other options here? I don't know what exactly the reason was behind not laughing at this-but meanwhile I am cracking up laughing at this whole mockery of white people. But this was the case with all the things that made fun of white people the audience (white upperclass hets) didn't get, whereas all the stuff making fun of brown or black people caused a huge roar/applause from the audience.

It was so problematic and I guarantee I would have felt this way despite taking my intercultural comm class but in light of all the reading about ethnicity, race, and culture it does give me some new ways to think about all of these things that I saw. New ways to theorize, new reasons to be upset.