The performers of Children of the Khmer rehearse in Cambodia for their British tour
Theater&Performing Arts
The St George's West world music experience is admirably contextualised - which is more than can be said of many Edinburgh shows
August 12, 2008
One of the most consistently enjoyable runs you can have on this year's Fringe is at the World Festival at St George's West. Start at 2pm with the Tanzanian rhythms of the Zawose Family, follow it up with the gentle delicacy of Cambodian temple dancing in Children of the Khmer, raise your pulse with the high-energy sexuality of the Capoeira Knights and round it all off with the sultry Cuban swing of Hemingway's Havana. For the most part, it's feelgood, family-friendly fun, a celebration of great musicianship and a glimpse of a range of world cultures.
Seeing international acts on the Fringe is hardly a novelty, but there's something that distinguishes these shows from the crowd. In various ways, all four of them take the time to put the different cultures in context. It happens most radically in the Zawose show, which begins with a 40-minute documentary film telling the story of the life and death of Hukwe Zawose and of the remarkable family of musicians he left behind. Only after we've watched this does the band take to the stage.
There's a shorter film towards the end of Children of the Khmer, giving us a sudden insight into the trying social conditions from which these elegant young performers have emerged. Throughout Capoeira Knights, a narrator figure takes to the stage to explain the slave-trade origins of the martial art and to give a flavour of the favela background from which the performers have come. Finally, Hemingway's Havana is a curious hybrid, somewhere between chat show and gig, in which Valerie Hemingway recalls the final months in the life of the Cuba-loving Ernest Hemingway, the man who posthumously became her father-in-law.
What's important about these interventions is that they stop the performances from being merely exotic. Ever since 1947, the Edinburgh festival and fringe have introduced British audiences to foreign cultures. This is a tremendous privilege, but it raises the possibility of a kind of armchair colonialism, allowing a well-fed western audience to dabble in the colours and rhythms of faraway places without the obligation to understand or engage with what they're seeing.
The danger of this kind of voyeurism does not only apply to foreign shows. After seeing Deep Cut, a friend of mine came out infuriated by what she regarded as a self-satisfied audience getting a vicarious kick from someone else's sad story. They were not politicised, she argued, merely titillated and made to feel important.
Personally, I disagree with her in this case, but I recognise that in some circumstances there can be an imbalance between audience and actor that affects the meaning of what's on stage. A few years ago I was a lot more comfortable seeing Gregory Burke's Gagarin Way when it toured to Kirkcaldy, the play's natural home crowd, than when the middle-class Traverse audience had lapped up the working-class antics in a way that struck me as patronising. There were those, too, who suggested Burke's Black Watch was "soldier porn for liberals" who were looking for a bit of theatrical rough.
Some of these criticisms come from people who are too mixed up about their own class allegiances to find uncomplicated pleasure in entertaining and important work. It would be a crazy if the alternative was to ban plays about soldiers and miscarriages of justice. But as soon as something moves from one context to another, whether it be the temple dancers of Cambodia or the story of Des and Doreen James, then the meaning, too, starts to move. It's up to artists and, I think, audiences to ensure that shift is not exploitative.
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