Category Archives: Feature article

A feature report on a lecture, concert or cultural event, or on an art book or rare book in the Special Collections in Clapp Library

Bunad

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May 17th is Syttende Mai, or Constitution Day, in Norway. It’s the country’s biggest national holiday, a time when Norwegians celebrate their country and heritage. It’s the best day of the year! my friend Daniel had written to me when I confirmed that I would visit him after my final exams. Everyone will be all dressed up, so make sure to wear something nice. I stuffed a black dress, a pair of tights, and ballet flats in my backpack, hoping that that would suffice. Mostly, I was excited to visit my childhood friend, whom I hadn’t seen in quite a few years. I booked my tickets for May 16th to 18th—a short trip, but at least I would get to experience some true Norwegian national pride.

Daniel and I have been friends for most of our lives; we grew up in Italy together and both had Italian dads and foreign, English-speaking moms—his was Norwegian-American, mine was just American. Both of our mothers found comfort in speaking English to each other—a rare experience in a relatively small, not very tourist-centered Italian town. As kids, Daniel and I would always speak Italian with each other, but this changed when he moved to Norway in 10th grade. Now, we speak exclusively in English. During the trip, the only time I heard Daniel speak Italian was when he was talking to his sister’s boyfriend, who had just moved to Oslo from Tuscany and was still having a hard time mastering English and Norwegian.

I spent my first night in Oslo on the sofa in Daniel’s apartment—shocked to see the sun rising at 3 a.m. I put a pillow over my face to block out the light: I knew I would need plenty of rest to prepare for the next day’s celebrations. Indeed, we woke up at 7 a.m. to take the metro to Daniel’s mother’s house and pick up his traditional outfit. We skipped breakfast—he told me that after seeing his mother, we would be going to a champagne brunch at his friend’s house. This, he confirmed, is how all good Norwegians start their celebration of the best day of the year.

We took the metro to his mother’s neighborhood. On the train, there were people dressed in elegantly tailored dresses, suits, and overcoats—looking poised and chic. I was starting to feel underprepared for the day. I felt even more underdressed when I noticed that the majority of people on the train were dressed in colorful outfits with embroidered vests and puffy white shirts. The men wore cropped jackets, short pants and knee-length wool socks, while the women wore petticoats and beautiful, intricate dresses. Daniel explained that they were all wearing the bunad—the traditional outfit that he would be putting on at his mother’s house. His Norwegian grandparents had recently bought him a bunad and this would be the first Syttende Mai he would be celebrating wearing one. Since most of people on the metro were older than us, I asked Daniel if young people wore these outfits as well. He answered that those who didn’t really care about being patriotic or those who didn’t own a bunad didn’t wear one. I began to understand then how much he cared about being a patriotic Norwegian and how much he cared about showing off his traditional outfit.

After we got off the metro, Daniel and I walked up a hill to his mother’s house. Along the way, he pointed out the preschool where he worked, the streets he turned on to get to his friend’s houses, and various other neighborhood landmarks. I was having trouble paying attention to what he was saying, because the neighborhood and the general atmosphere made me feel like I was in a surreal fairytale setting; I half expected one of those trolls that you find in Norwegian tourist shops to pop out of nowhere. The sky was impossibly blue, the clouds were far too fluffy, and the houses, with their sloped roofs and dark wood paneling, all looked like ski lodges.

When we got to his mother’s house, Daniel went upstairs to try on his outfit and make some final adjustments. I sat in front of the TV with his mother, watching the tall, blonde Norwegian royal family exit the palace. From there, they would be taken to the center of Oslo, to greet the people as they did every Syttende Mai. Once in a while, the channel would show newscasters, some of them dressed in traditional clothes and some not, interviewing people all across Norway. Daniel’s mother would sometimes laugh because people from Bergen had very peculiar accents or she would point out the different details on the bunad that indicated which part of the country each person was from. I learned that the traditional outfits of each region had different colors, designs, and embroidered details: the women’s dresses are much more intricate than the men’s outfits, and are therefore a better indicator of origin. I learned that these outfits are typically passed down from generation to generation, and some Norwegians have bunads that are hundreds of years old. When Daniel walked downstairs, he looked incredibly happy: I knew he was proud to finally be able to wear a bunad on May 17th—something that was a true badge of his Norwegian-ness.

The Norwegian Royal Family

At brunch, two things struck me. First, the massive amount of champagne. (I counted the people sitting in the living room. Then I counted the bottles sitting on the counter: there were approximately two per person.) Second, I noted that I was the shortest person in the room by at least a foot—ten-year-olds included. I looked around the room and decided that I should make no attempt to outdrink these Scandinavians towering over me—which was definitely the right decision.

At brunch, I sat with a group of girls, eating fresh salmon and colorful berries. They each told me what part of Norway they were from, and what details on their bunad would indicate this origin. Since we were in Oslo and most of the people at the brunch were students who had come to the city for University, there was a huge variety of colors and designs in the room. I was startled to learn that some of these dresses were insured for $10,000 or more. I knew then why Daniel was so proud to finally own a bunad: although he maintained that his was “cheap,” it was something that confirmed him as a Norwegian, something that showed people around him how proud he was of his country. Now, he could celebrate one of the most Norwegian days of the year as a Norwegian, and be recognized as such, at least by strangers who knew nothing of his mixed background. He didn’t want to be seen as Italian and Norwegian—he wanted to be able to fully embrace his Norwegian identity, especially on such an important day.

It made sense to me then why he was working so hard to get his Norwegian citizenship, even though he might have to give up his Italian citizenship as a result. I was no longer confused as to why he refused to speak to me in Italian. I understood that the bunad would allow him to identify with the country that had become so central to his life. So, on that Syttende Mai, I attempted to join him in singing the Norwegian national anthem: “we love this country/as it rises forth/ rugged, weathered, above the water.”30dd3d38f63d4d4ff606fca9073bd9fb

The Customs of Going “Home”

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When my laoye, maternal grandfather, asked us to go to Chaozhou for two days, it caught us by surprise. Chaozhou, a city in China’s Guangdong Province, is known abroad as Canton. It is also my grandfather’s birth town and the ancestral home of my mother’s side of the family. My grandfather’s aunt had recently undergone surgery so he wanted to visit. I had never been, and since there was only one semester left of college, this was the only chance to go with him. It would be an opportunity to learn more about my heritage and the perfect excuse to go somewhere warmer before Winter Break ended and I had to embrace the Boston cold again. However, I forgot what an ordeal family visits could be.

We first gathered in Shenzhen, the second largest city in Guangdong, where my grandparents lived. Family members flew in from Shanghai and Tianjin. Then we took the long road trip. The majority of my grandfather’s siblings and relatives still lived in Chaozhou and, thus, our itinerary contained a series of house visits, a banquet, and a city tour. However, the hardest part was getting the relatives’ names right. Unlike in the US where relatives are just uncles and aunts, grandfathers and grandmothers, brothers, sisters, and cousins, there is a much more elaborate system in China.

My grandfather is the oldest of five children. We first met our erlaoye, literally Second Grandfather, otherwise known as Great Uncle in English. Erwaipo, Second Grandmother (Great Aunt), was present as well. We sat in their spacious and bright living room with the table already set for tea. Chaozhou is best known for its phoenix tea, which gets its name from nearby Phoenix Mountain. It’s customary to serve visitors tea and snacks, and accepting is the only polite response. Grandfather introduced us in the Chaozhou dialect and the conversation remained undecipherable. We later gave the visiting gifts and then went to his aunt’s place down the road. Erlaoye’s son led the way. I asked him what was the proper term to call him and he shrugged, just as clueless as I was. My great-grandaunt’s (is that even correct?) home was already filled with four generations under the same roof. From Great-grandaunt to her six-month-old great-grandchild to the child’s mother who married into the family, I gave up on figuring out the appropriate titles for all the family relations.

Great-grandaunt sat in her wheelchair and tried to get up multiple times, excited by all the visitors. When she took my hand, she grinned and patted it lightly. I knew this would be the first and last time we would meet so I held her hand for as long as possible. With all the people that needed to be greeted and welcomed, it was brief. Another tradition then hit us unaware. One of the relatives in the apartment came in with red envelopes. Chinese New Year was fast approaching and giving red money envelopes signifies bringing wealth into a new year.

Afterwards, we drove into Chaozhou’s Old Town to see the home Grandfather was born in. It was there I learnt our family business had been sausage making. Erlaoye’s son ran the business and converted the old house into the factory. Most rooms were full of machinery, but one room contained the family shrine and another, where my grandfather and his brothers once slept, had been converted into the work lounge.

Kowtowing at the Family Shrine
Kowtowing at the Family Shrine

A stick of incense burned as the first offering. We had more phoenix tea and then, Grandfather called us over. The shrine was just a wooden table with fruits, meat buns, a roast duck, and spirit money around an incense bowl that contained two candles for the great-grandfather and great-grandmother we were kowtowing to. Kowtowing may have imperialistic implications in the West, but historically, we kneel and touch the ground with our forehead in worship or submission. Many emperors, officials, and family heads have been kowtowed to, and it remains a traditional gesture symbolizing deep respect. When called over, we would kowtow three times before the table while Grandfather announced us to the spirits. After the difficulty of keeping up with relative titles earlier, this was grounding and reflective in comparison.

Burning spirit money for the dead
Burning spirit money

Caught in the moment, Grandfather began a long monologue about how far the family had come. My great-grandfather died young, buried in an unmarked grave by a forgotten roadside. Those were the early days of the Cultural Revolution and people marched across the country into exile. Great-grandmother raised five kids herself and died of illness in her early forties. My grandfather joined the military to support his siblings and became an officer. That eventually led to meeting our grandmother. After kowtowing, we burned stacks of spirit money, the currency of the afterlife, in a tin barrel. Since great-grandfather and grandmother’s lives were so difficult, we hoped that they made it to a kinder place.

 

We walked around the premises before continuing to explore Chaozhou’s Old Town. The trip through heritage and history hit me harder than I expected it to. It placed our success in the context of our humble beginnings. Since “visiting home,” as the eldest daughter of the eldest daughter of the eldest son, I realized I had a legacy to live up to. Many descendants of immigrants, like myself, feel the pressure to not waste their parents’ sacrifices and hard work. We learn to navigate freely between our identities and become a part of the adopted country despite instances of confusion like those I had recently experienced upon reentering the US at Border Control. My lack of a US permanent address while holding a US passport led to a short interrogation to make sure I was “American enough.” It’s a frustrating part of life we live with; however, we are not defined by our citizenship and paperwork. Chaozhou remains a physical home for my grandfather’s clan while it is something I now carry with me as well.

Maybe the idea of being rooted never made sense. We always move on. My parents did and I will likely do the same. I once joked that when I die, my ashes should be spread over the seas. If future generations want to “visit home,” they can make a shrine wherever they are and continue the tradition. If not, at least I’ll be everywhere and they can always find me.

The Coldest Time of the Year

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February 13, 2016 takes the record for the coldest day I’ve experienced at college.  Even as someone who generally prefers excessive cold to excessive heat, I’ve come to the conclusion that my tolerance for outdoor activity stops at anything below zero degrees Fahrenheit.  Any temperature that requires me to wrap a scarf around my face because the outside air stings my skin is simply too low.

At the end of that particularly frigid Saturday, I was relieved to find myself indoors.  I stood outside Tishman Commons, on the ground floor of the campus center, at the far end of a line that stretched down the hall and extended up the stairwell.  (I had arrived fifteen minutes early.)  At ten after the hour, the line began to move.  It wound around to the far end of Tishman through an adjacent common room.  The narrow hallway was bedecked with blue lanterns, paper snowflakes, fairy lights, and finally, the name of the event in large bubble letters:  Yuki Matsuri.

Yuki Matsuri is Japanese for “winter festival.”  I knew this already because Wellesley’s Japan Club had been advertising the event for weeks.  My decision to attend was more spur-of-the-moment than anything else.  For me, that Saturday was frigid in more ways than one.  While friends and classmates of mine were set to spend the long weekend off-campus or with significant others, I was dateless and had slated for Valentine’s Day a long stint in the library with my textbooks.  Like me, the crowd must have been drawn in by the cold.

Standing in line, longing for the pile of blankets in which I would bury myself later that night, I wasn’t sure how I felt about the idea of a winter festival.  Winter doesn’t generally have much appeal for me.  Beyond the novelty of the first snow—and, by extension, the first snow days—winter is something to be endured, something we have to survive in order to appreciate spring.  I wasn’t sure what to expect of Yuki Matsuri because I didn’t know what there was to celebrate.  Then again, who was I to make assumptions?  I can’t claim to have any strong understanding of Japanese culture, and I don’t have any real experience being part of a group on campus analogous to Japan Club.  I’ve consistently found myself more of a spectator, and less of an active participant, in my own cultural heritage.

I showed my student ID to the two organizers at the festival entrance and was ushered inside.  Immediately, I was struck by the scale of the event.  The accordion wall between Tishman and the common room had been folded out of the way, and the space was taken up by two long rows of tables arranged end-to-end, laden with buffet-style platters of food.  Of course.  Free food:  the easiest way to draw a crowd.  Volunteers in light blue T-shirts served bite-sized pieces of each dish:  one piece of sushi, one piece of mochi, a couple of pieces of edamame, a chunk of fried tofu.

Tishman itself was arranged so that most of the floor space was clear, except for a small stage and the booths lining the edges of the room.  I claimed a seat on the floor among the already-growing crowd, and marked it with my backpack.  Soon it would be difficult to walk back and forth to my spot without tiptoeing around other people.

While I waited for the festival’s performances to start, I wandered from booth to booth.  Food was available at over half of them—which more than made up for the tiny buffet servings.  I tried kakigori (shaved ice with syrup, condensed milk, and red bean paste), a frozen chocolate-covered banana (apparently this is actually a thing in Japan), and okonomiyaki, a savory pancake made with shredded cabbage and a strip of bacon.  While a quick Google search told me not all of these are necessarily winter festival foods—shaved ice seems to be more of a summertime thing—they were all delicious.  I also visited booths where volunteers were guiding visitors in making paper crafts.  I painted a phrase—admittedly in Chinese and not Japanese, one I’d recently learned in my Chinese class—on a piece of calligraphy paper.  I spent a pleasant ten minutes learning how to make an origami turtle.

At each booth I visited, I asked when planning had started for Yuki Matsuri.  I found out Japan Club had been recruiting people to work the festival since December.  This is one of the most striking aspects of the event:  it is largely volunteer-run.  Many different groups have to coordinate.  The performances alone featured music from Wellesley’s taiko drum ensemble, dances by Wellesley’s and Tufts’ Japan Clubs, and songs from a Japanese music choir, which—I later found out—was also entirely composed of volunteers.  And these were just the performances from the first part of the festival.  At the halfway mark, overwhelmed by the size of the crowd, I made my way back to my dorm.

If I’m being honest with myself, the particular significance of most of the aspects of Yuki Matsuri—the dances, the crafts, the food—were lost on me.  I did not come away with a greater cultural understanding.  To achieve that, I think it would have taken a lot more time and effort than it did to show up at the campus center on a cold Saturday night.  But I didn’t leave hungry.  And I brought some pieces of the festival home with me.  A tiny origami turtle now sits on my bookshelf.  The calligraphy page I painted—a symbol of my own accomplishments, if not of my understanding of Japan—hangs on the wall next to my desk.  I came away from the festival energized by the dances and inspired by the fierce taiko drumming.

Winter is a low-energy season, and February is a hard month.  It’s the coldest time of the year, the month when students drag themselves back from winter break to the stress of their academic lives.  And while Americans have customs that are particular to winter—drinking tea curled up indoors by a roaring fire, engaging in the odd snowball fight—we really don’t celebrate winter just for the sake of it.  At least, not on the same scale as Yuki Matsuri.  I can’t say I understand every aspect of the festival, but what I can say is that it takes one of the most difficult times of the year and gives everyone something fun to do, something energizing.  We need things like that.  More than we realize.

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Don’t Move, Just Sing

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In Moscow there are six different opera companies, but while I was visiting only one was performing Eugene Onegin. Wanting to see this quintessentially Russian opera, my friends and I ventured out one cold snowy night to the small (only 250-seat) Helikon theatre in the hip, artsy district of Арбат. Eugene Onegin is based on a poem by Russia’s most beloved poet, Alexander Pushkin, and the score is by the legendary Russian composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky. It is incredibly popular with Russian audiences, and is one of the most well-known Russian operas abroad. I had been to an opera once when I was ten years old, and slept peacefully through at least half of it. I was excited to see Eugene Onegin, because I was very familiar with Tchaikovsky’s symphonies and ballets, and I wanted to hear his work in an entirely different setting.

The theater was packed, even though it was a frigid Wednesday night in January. Families with kids, young couples on dates, older women with opera glasses, and businessmen in suits crowded into the narrow aisles. I scanned the program briefly as I sat down, and decided not to translate and decipher the long synopsis, which I was vaguely familiar with from discussions in my Russian literature class. I leaned forward in my seat eagerly as the lights went out and the orchestra began the overture.

During the first act, Tatyana, the heroine of the opera, falls madly in love with a friend of her sister’s fiancé, Eugene Onegin. Unable to sleep, she stays up all night, singing as she composes a passionate letter to him. During this scene, I began to cry, carried away by the surge of emotions captured by the melody of Tatyana’s aria. As I searched in my purse for a kleenex, I noticed that I was reacting to the production very differently from the rest of the audience. People were shifting in their seats, whispering, gesturing toward the stage, and shaking their heads. When the curtain fell after Act I, the applause was muted.

Confused, I turned to my friend Laura during intermission and asked what she thought of the production. Laura, who was studying to be a director, explained what she and the rest of the audience were seeing that I had missed entirely. “The staging is terrible. The set is all wrong for the size of the stage. The singers have to work around it, so the movement and blocking look strange.” Once Laura had enlightened me, I couldn’t unsee all the problems I had overlooked before. In the second act, when Onegin shot his friend in a duel, the shot was mistimed with the actor’s fall. The patterns in the mazurka in the ball scene brought the dancers so far downstage that they weren’t lit properly.

In the final dramatic scene Onegin returns several years after cruelly rejecting Tatyana, and begs her to forgive him. Tatyana, who is married at this point, tells Onegin that although she loves him, she will not be unfaithful to her husband. While performing the climactic duet, the two singers in this production dodged around the central piece of the set, obviously focused on carrying out their assigned movements.

The audience remained unimpressed for the greater part of the production, and was not afraid to show its displeasure. The whispering and gesturing continued and applause was rare. But in the third act, the singer playing Tatyana’s husband walked downstage with no elaborate gesturing or overly dramatic motions, and blew the audience away with his glorious bass voice. When he finished, the theatre exploded with enthusiasm. That one aria got more applause than the rest of the opera put together. When the cast bowed at the end of the production, Tatyana’s husband (a minor character) received a warmer response than either Tatyana or Onegin.

As we walked back to the metro through the snowy night, I mulled over how such an educated theatre-going public had developed in Russia. Laura and the other members of the audience (including quite a few small children) were somehow conditioned to pick out the flaws in the production. By the end of the show, I had begun to develop the same kind of awareness that Laura had learned through coursework and the Russians had learned through exposure.

In Russia, ballet, theatre, opera and music are very much part of the rhythm ordinary life for the middle and upper classes in large cities like Moscow. Parents bring their children. Those children grow up and purchase widely available student tickets, and then when they start families, they bring their own children. Going to the theatre is a special occasion, but a special occasion that happens on a regular basis, similar to going to the movies or to baseball games in America. Familiarity with the arts brings with it the ability to distinguish a mediocre production from a good one, and a good one from a great one.

Curious, I began looking up youtube videos of other productions of Eugene Onegin when I got back to my dormitory. By the time I went to sleep that night, I knew that I preferred Anna Netrebko to Renée Fleming in the role of Tatyana, and realized why the aria that had finally captured the audience was one of the most beautiful in the entire opera. Almost absentmindedly, I began to hum the melody of Tatyana’s letter scene as I got ready for bed.

 

The Green Dog at the Cat Circus

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I was looking forward to spending the afternoon with my cousin Oleg, whom I hadn’t seen in years. He was waiting on the snowy steps outside my dormitory. “We’re going to the circus.” Ada, his girlfriend, had gotten last-minute tickets to take her little sister to a show called “A Winter’s Tale” and on the spur of the moment, I couldn’t come up with a better plan. A trip to the circus was really not on my to-do list for two weeks in Moscow. In fact, surrounded by world-class theaters, museums, and food, listening to shrieking children and watching actors run around in clown noses and wigs was probably the last activity that I would have chosen. But I had no way out. At least I’d see bears trained to take vodka shots, I thought, or maybe a Russian-roaring tiger.

We were greeted in the lobby by a clown wearing felt boots under his galoshes, quilted pants, and a blue polka dot button-up, in all ways a stark contrast to the circus-goers. The dressing room next door was packed with little boys in slacks and girls in fancy dresses. The boys tied their ties while the girls changed from their bulky winter boots into glittery heels under the strict gaze of their parents and grandparents. “Do you remember how to untie your laces, Anya?” an elderly lady asked a smiling blonde girl in a purple velvet dress, while parting a boy’s hair with a wooden comb. “I do!” the boy responded. “How many times must I tell you not to raise your voice indoors?!” chided the grandmother. “You’re in a theater, for goodness’ sake!” Oleg told me how his parents bought him a new pair of slacks to go to the circus and took him to the circus cafe to make sure he could properly sip a Russian fruit drink called компот in public. For the grown-ups, any show is a welcome chance to teach their children manners.

Finally, the crowd of well-trained children and their trainers moved to take their seats. A wave of shushes swept through the room as the first chords sounded. The show plot was quite simple, as the recommended age for viewers was 0+. On a snowy winter day, a hunter comes to a forest. His repeated attempts at shooting are foiled by forest animals and their beautiful snow queen. He tries to shoot a bunny, played by a stocky man in a onesie, but the rifle flies out of the hunter’s hands and onto a little sled – a sled pulled by a bushy white cat running on its hind paws. Not a human in a costume, but an actual feline cat. As the hunter chases the sled, another cat jumps in the way and he trips.

A cat circus. For the love of God, I’m watching a cat circus in what little free time I have here in Moscow.

The audience boisterously laughs. The cat with the sled with the rifle disappears behind the curtains. After several failed attempts at hunting, the hunter sees the error of his ways and befriends the animals of the forest. And the cats.

The cats’ job was to help the snow queen save the forest animals, but even when their services were not required, they were present on stage for no apparent reason. While the hunter argued with the snow queen in the middle of the forest, there was a completely irrelevant cat just sitting on a shelf in the background. I mentioned it to Oleg during intermission. “That,” he said, “is an excellent example of the ‘green dog method.’” “It’s a tactic rumored to have been used by a clever Soviet theater painter to avoid any criticism of the content or import of his art.” The Soviet government exercised control over any form of expression and regularly sent inspectors to determine whether a work was pro-Soviet enough to be shown to the public. The painter would add a little green dog to all of his pieces so the art inspectors’ committee would get caught up “convincing” him to paint over the misplaced green dog. The painter would thus avoid any serious critique.

Not even a children’s circus show could avoid a review by the committee, so the “green dog method” was transformed into the “cat method.” If one dog served as a distraction, dozens of cats would be more than enough. When inspecting the cat circus, the committee could argue whether there were too many cats on stage, whether it’s acceptable to use the American Shorthair breed, and whether Murka was a name patriotic enough for the star cat. The cats were enough work for inspectors to get so lost in fluff that they would miss a detail or two of potentially less-than-patriotic humor. Working with cats thus provided not only an artistic niche, but also some freedom from scrutiny.

Our discussion was interrupted by bells signaling the end of intermission. The music slowly drowned out whispered conversations and the already-familiar cats began to jump between the trees and the hunter’s head, climb through obstacle courses with his encouragement, and even paw their way across parallel bars. Both children and adults ooh’d and ah’d watching as cats surrounded the hunter, dancing in a frenzy on their hind paws and creating a flurry of motion over the stage. Even the parents seemed too captivated to shush their children and pull them back to the seats. Glancing at Ada, I saw that her smile was just as wide as that of her little sister, who was so entranced that she had forgotten to squirm and squeal. But as soon as the show ended and the human actors with cats weaving between their feet took their bows, the adults were back on duty, nagging and scolding.

I left wondering what it was that made the cat circus so wildly successful with audiences of all ages. By allowing viewers to reimagine unremarkable animals, maybe it has always served as relief from grey, banal life. Ada told me afterwards that, as a child she left the show convinced that her house cat was actually a bewitched prince charming.

Certainly the method of misplaced cats provided both an outlet for the imagination and protection from the art inspectors. Today, there are no government art inspectors and the law backs freedom of expression. Yet the circus website still describes its children’s shows as promoting not only respect for elders but also “love and respect for the Fatherland, its people and culture.” Performance arts in Russia are largely government funded, so such a disclaimer can only benefit the circus. I didn’t notice any pro-”Fatherland” lessons incorporated into the show, so maybe the “cat method” is just as useful in the circus today as it was decades ago.

Those who came to the circus as kids grew up yearning to experience a sense of freedom and return as adults with kids of their own. For brief moments, protected by the green dog— or, as in this case, cats— government-trained adults with their parent-trained children can find release from their manners, constraints and responsibilities in the whirling blur of the trained cats.

I can’t believe I hadn’t wanted to see the cat circus.

The Magic Flute

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I’ve always wanted to see The Magic Flute (Die Zauberflöte) in person instead of just listening to it on disc, given that it premiered on my birthday two hundred and two years earlier. However, before being in Germany I had never gotten the chance to see a live performance. On Christmas Day the Berlin State Opera (Staatsoper Berlin), which has been performing in Charlottenburg’s Schiller Theater for several years while its permanent home on Unter den Linden undergoes extensive renovation, offers a matinee “family performance” of Mozart’s famous 1791 work. As one might expect from an event geared towards families with children, the tickets are relatively cheap. I was willing to exchange what I assumed would be a loud theater full of chattering kids for a reasonable price.

Before walking into the theater I worried about how The Magic Flute would be staged. A recent trend in contemporary opera is for directors and set designers to attempt to “update” the classics, placing them into spaces where they don’t really fit. It’s difficult to merge an 18th-century story with a WWII setting, and the soaring emotions of a 19th-century opera (say, Puccini’s La Bohème or a work by Wagner) don’t quite meld with minimalist, industrial sets. Is it too much to ask that operas be operatic?

In that sense the Staatsoper’s production certainly delivers. The sets are based on the designs for an 1816 production of the opera, only 15 years after it originally premiered in Vienna. They are simply fantastic. Each and every backdrop has been hand-painted to produce a dream world— the banks of the Nile River dotted with palm trees at moonlight, a looming temple complex in the distance, and the swampy endlessness of a mythical forest. The addition of modern electrical lighting allows the sets to be particularly stunning. We can even clearly see the bright sunlight streaming between columns into a dark interior or the hazy, misty effects of a riverside twilight. The most stunning of all is the so-called “Star Dome,” a backdrop of glowing stars, originally designed for the 1816 production. The Queen of the Night, standing on a crescent moon and resting behind a screen of painted clouds, sings of her lost daughter in front of it. The costumes also show the influence of the early 19th century. The women don’t wear the structured and fitted redingotes of the 18th century, but instead flowing Empire gowns. The hero Tamino wears trousers and an overcoat, not the breeches and powdered wig of an earlier generation. The animals that come to listen to the music of the eponymous magic flute are neither mechanical creations nor special effects. The crocodiles, rabbits, horses, and wolves are actors in costume. It’s something unexpected in an era of fantastical special effects but it adds to the atmosphere of the performance, as we get a better sense of what an early audience may have seen on stage.

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Not every element is positive, however; The Magic Flute was written in a very different time and place from the society we live in today. It can be a somewhat problematic work, and many viewers find it difficult to separate the beauty of the music from the more discomforting elements of the story. The opera is set in Egypt and features presumably African characters, one of whom, Monostatos, is a central villain. In fact he and Pamina, the white heroine of the story, are the only two characters whose races are specified. The libretto, which contains references to “wicked Moors” and portrays Monostatos as a traitor and attempted rapist, is often edited in the English-speaking world to reflect the differences between 18th– and 21st-century attitudes towards race.

There are of course also many more people of African descent in the United States and England than there are in Germany, and thus more sensitivity and acknowledgment of what may and may not be offensive. The Staatsoper performance was not edited, but perhaps it ought to have been. It may be faithful to original performances but it is difficult not to flinch and be uncomfortable when a man who is clearly of white German descent walks out onto the stage wearing blackface.

When I expressed my shock at seeing blackface in the 21st century people were quick to insist that a white person painting their skin black only has racist implications in former colonies. According to the logic of the people I spoke to, blackface is racist in America because of slavery. It simply can’t be racist if a German does it, as Germany had no slavery. This viewpoint is not at all valid. Involvement in the slave trade may not have been as common as it was in other countries such as Britain or Spain, but many Germans were indeed slave traders. The German economy has been reliant on shipping and international trade for hundreds of years. During the 18th and 19th centuries and the height of European colonialism slavery would have been part of that economy. Germany was also a colonial power in Africa, where colonists openly bought and sold slaves until their defeat in WWI – less than a century ago. Even when some Germans know the history and cultural implications of blackface, it doesn’t bother them. To a German, blackface may be “just makeup,” as some of the people I spoke to suggested. But how can that possibly outweigh what it represents to many other people in the world?

After The Magic Flute ended the children and their parents left the theater, chattering happily about their favorite parts of the performance. As I walked back towards the train station alongside these families I couldn’t help but wonder. If German children are taught that blackface is “no big deal,” how will it affect their views as adults? The history of racism and colonialism is without question a complicated one, and may be difficult for children to comprehend. I understand demands for authenticity in art, and I understand that the role of Monostatos is itself problematic. However, updates are not inherently bad. Electric lighting didn’t exist in 1791, but that doesn’t stop modern opera companies from using it to enhance productions. Perhaps we should apply the same principle to characters and costume.

A Picnic for Twelve Thousand

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“…And don’t forget to bring a semi-formal, white dress,” Marine said over Skype as I packed for my 7-week long trip.  I tried on the two white dresses I had at home.  One was a beach cover-up, too translucent for a night out, and the other was far too short, since I had accidentally put it in the dryer.  I decided I would just go shopping once I arrived in Paris. This should be fun, I thought.

…

Marine’s familiar face and warm embrace greeted me at the airport.  We plopped my large suitcase in the trunk and started driving to her home, in Le Vésinet, north of Paris. It was a beautiful day; no clouds in the sky and the sun warmed my right arm as I sat in the passenger seat.

I had never been to Marine’s house, however she had lived in mine for nine months. She initially lived with me for about six months while completing an internship for her master’s degree. That was when I was fifteen.  Since then she had come back for several month-long stays.  She bought a 1999 Mazda when she was living in Los Angeles, and after she left, it became my first car.  She helped me with my French and gave me plenty of advice about mundane high school drama. I still consider her my big sister. I would be spending that summer in Portugal for an internship, but the flights were cheaper if I went to France first, where I already had a place to stay.

Tall hedges fenced in the property, blocking the view of the house until I walked through the iron gate. Her home was stately and covered in ivy.  The two-story house was in an L-shape, which framed the garden.  The roof was square and outlined with an intricate tile design.  I asked, “Is this a historical building?” and she laughed, “No, it’s pretty old and worn, but it’s home.”  I felt like I was in a mini chateau, but in fact, it was just an old, large house.

As I enjoyed some espresso at the kitchen table and caught up with Marine and her mom, Waura, I finally asked, “So why do I need a white dress?” Marine smiled and answered, “Dîner en blanc! It is an event that is happening all across Paris on all of the famous bridges and plazas.  Everyone will be wearing white, and you cook a three course dinner for two, but it will be exchanged so that you eat food another  couple prepared! And of course you have to pack everything like a picnic, table cloth, centerpiece, silverware, and wine!” I tried to wrap my mind around this concept, and gave up, understanding only that I needed a nice, white dress. As I found out, it is just a group of friends randomly sitting down and having dinner on a prestigious and historic site. Dîner en blanc was a free event, other than the cost of transportation, coordinated by an independent group, without the permission of any city officials, and had been operating for over 25 years.

…

I walked down the Champs Elysées the day before our dinner in search of a white dress.  I had visited the Champs Elysées in my previous trips to Paris to see the Arc de Triomphe and enjoy a macaroon at Ladurée.  This time, however, I was walking past the same iconic tourist attractions on this street only focused on my mission to find a white dress. I laughed aloud; my third trip to Paris and I already took the Champs Elysées for granted.

Luckily for me, every store was selling white outfits.  Entire floors of clothing stores were dedicated to the color white; I was overwhelmed by my options.  After many trips to the dressing room, I finally found a white dress that was opaque enough to wear in daylight, modest in length, and chic enough to wear out in the fashion capital.  I headed back on the train to Marine’s house to plan the menu and prepare our dinner for two.

…

“We have to go!” Marine said to Alice, her sister, as she stuffed the last of her meal into a basket. “Chairs! Don’t forget the chairs!” Waura called down from upstairs. We stopped to take photos in the garden before departing.  We drove to a parking lot to meet the bus.  Everyone loaded their baskets and other necessities onto the bus and boarded –only fifteen minutes late.

We passed a park where crowds of people, all dressed in very sophisticated white, assembled their tables and spread their tablecloths.  Looking out the window, I slowly started to understand the magnitude of this dîner en blanc. We debarked on a bridge over the Seine and placed our tables of two together making a single table of twenty that ran perpendicular to the bridge itself.  There were a few hundred people on our bridge alone. In the course of an hour, the traffic of buses subsided and people took their places at the table.

Paris was transformed into a romantic, elegant dining room.  Men were dressed in white suits while many women wore white floppy hats, shading their faces from the sun low on the horizon.  The symphony of glasses clinking echoed across the bridge. We all started in with conversation and our first course, prepared by the people to our left. I thoroughly enjoyed my surprise meal, which started with prosciutto-wrapped melon.  Between the food and the conversation, we were unaware of the time passing until it was completely dark. Someone tapped me on the shoulder and handed me a sparkler.  Once given the signal, “Allez, allez!” everyone lit their sparklers and every bridge in sight on the Seine was full of light.  When the sparks went out we drank the only remaining item in our baskets, a bottle of champagne.

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La Vida en la Calle

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Romeria de San Isidro

Hurrying through the quiet streets of my host family’s neighborhood, I prayed that no one would be awake quite so early on a Saturday. After all, most everyone in the town had been celebrating late into the night before and I only had a few blocks to go. Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted my reflection in a shop window and smiled a little self-consciously at the sight, glad so few people were around to see. I had dressed that morning in the traditional Spanish fashion appropriate for religious holidays—though my borrowed clothes were a few years behind the latest trends. I had pulled my hair into a tight bun and bobby-pinned red and white carnations to it before donning a green and white polka-dot dress that flowed from my collarbone to my ankles. Despite clashing terribly with the classic Spanish style I hoped to achieve, I wore tennis shoes for the sake of comfort. Looking out of place on the city streets was the least of my concerns: I was on my way to a religious celebration and wanted to look the part, especially since I wasn’t a religious person. After turning a few more corners and avoiding all but a few pedestrians, who smiled knowingly at my dress, I arrived at the town’s central bus stop and joined a familiar group.

The crowd at the bus stop included a mix of students from my study-abroad program, members of students’ host families, and our program staff. As we stepped onto the bus, our program director Maribel inspected each of our outfits, fussing with the boys’ crooked cummerbunds and adding more red carnations to the girls’ hair. When we were all finally approved, our bus took off towards the Spanish countryside where we would be joining in a local romería, or pilgrimage.

In Spain, life is in the streets. Maribel had explained this simple fact during my first week in Spain. En España, la vida es en la calle. I had been told that the Spanish celebrate more than Americans, but it wasn’t until Semana Santa transformed into Cruces de Mayo followed by romería after romería, only to be topped off by Fería, that I understood what she had meant by life in the streets. I remember coming home late one night (at least, late for an American—about three in the morning) dead tired but struggling to fall asleep, thanks to the raucous music that poured through my bedroom window from the square below. After all, it was Cruces, and Spaniards were dancing outside of churches all across the city. Even toddlers twirled alongside their mothers into the wee hours of the morning.

Just a week after Cruces, I boarded that bus into the Andalusian countryside and stepped off at the small but buzzing village of Cañete de Las Torres. As I wandered through the crowd, my brightly colored dress no longer felt so out of place. Here, women in full-length, polka-dot dresses met men in chaps and formal black hats. The reds, yellows, and blues of the women’s gowns stood out against the dirt road; everyone had flowers in their hair. As the crowd grew, women compared dresses. The newer styles featured tight, mermaid-cut designs, unlike the loose style of my outdated dress. Men wrangled animals; ponies led carriages full of children and oxen pulled large floats.

As church bells rang out the hour, the congregation of townsfolk that I had joined began a romería in honor of Saint Isidro. Starting on the paved road in the town square, we leisurely wound our way out of the village. Though the townspeople rode on giant floats covered in flowers and adorned with images of Saint Isidro, we travelers and students went on foot, crossing fields of sunflowers and groves of olive trees. I felt like I was living something out of Don Quixote—men on horseback rode over the rolling hills and the blue sky stretched on for miles.

Though the processional could have easily been over in half an hour, the Spanish spirit of fiesta stretched the celebration into an all-day affair. Along the path of the pilgrimage, we stopped every half hour or so for food, drink, and merry-making. Pick-up trucks trailed alongside us and were stocked with water and wine, baskets of fruit, and sandwiches stuffed with Spanish ham, manchego cheese, and tomatoes. Most of the crowd was buzzed on white wine by noon, happily warmed up for a day of celebration. Unhappily, due to the policy of my study-abroad program, I was not among them.

As the heat of the sun pressed down on us and the shade of the olive trees began to wane, we picked up our pace through the last mile of the pilgrimage. Turning off the main road, we stepped onto a dirt path and the townspeople left their floats behind to take the last bit of the trail on foot. Though the dust stirred up by our eager feet coated the edges of the women’s colorful dresses and the men’s pressed pants, I couldn’t care less: we had reached the end of our journey. Climbing one last hill, I spotted the tents that awaited us in the olive grove beside the church of Saint Isidro.

While the procession might have ended, the romería had only just begun. As I headed towards our study-abroad program’s tent with the other students, the townspeople made their way to the old church. The afternoon had been mostly fiesta, but this was a religious occasion and Spaniards are quick to transition from merriment to piety. One single float made it along the dirt path to this clearing—the one in honor of Saint Isidro. Led by a team of oxen, the float arrived at the church, and the Spanish locals carried a statue of the saint into their service.

Though I myself did not attend, I can only imagine how solemn the service to Saint Isidro must have been. By that point in my semester abroad, I had visited the cathedral in my host town enough times to know how dignified Spanish Catholics can be. Yet, the townspeople returned to the festivities just as quickly as they had entered the church. Each family, cultural organization, or close group of friends had set up their own tent in advance of the pilgrimage. When they finished their worship they returned to the festivities.

In the US, I was afraid to enter Catholic churches due to youthful memories of being chastised for accidentally taking communion or saying the wrong prayers. But in Spain, I would return home from a night out to find my host mom smoking cigarettes with the local priest. (Were they flirting? He returned the next day for dinner.) While religion seemed so formal and strict in my mind, in Spain I found it a cause for celebration. All of the festivals during the month of May are tied to some religious tradition—in honor of Holy Week, local churches, and famous saints—and though they start as worshipful ceremonies, they end in dancing and drinking on the city streets. It’s merriment and devotion at once: antique crosses and red carnations in girls’ hair.

The Protest for All, but Not Me

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“The French are a people who protest. All you need for a French protest is people. Maybe you take some cobblestones from the streets to throw. Maybe you flip over cars and light them on fire.” I remembered these words of one of my former French teachers. They conjure up a very stereotypical image of protest, like the student uprisings of 1968. I thought today it would look different, but I could not guess how. I’d been living in Paris for weeks before I saw any semblance of a protest. Burning cars would have been exciting.

It was a Sunday. I was returning from Charles de Gaulle with my roommate when we emerged from the metro station, near our apartment in Paris’ 7th arrondissement, to the sound of rhythmic, almost militaristic chanting. I could not yet make out the words or understand what the crowd was saying. I was nervous and were it not for Katie, I probably would have gotten back on the metro and gone to one of my friends’ houses to figure out what was going on. Katie, more adventurous, pulled me onward and upward to the street.

“The government is threatening the future of France,” some shouted. “The family is at risk,” yelled others. Thousands of protesters were chanting. Pink banners, balloons and signs depicting an iconic family—a mother, father, daughter and son—spread like a sea across Boulevard des Invalides, reaching around the corner and as far down as the Seine. Our apartment was just two blocks from the Saint François-Xavier metro stop, but there were so many people that I could barely see one block ahead. Protesters of all ages were dressed in baby pinks and blues. I noticed that the banners, pickets, stickers and t-shirts all said La Manif Pour Tous. At least I now knew what the protest was. Or did I? I had so many questions: what did “manif” mean? Why was the family at risk? Did this have to do with some form of birth control I’d never heard of? I wanted answers, but Katie was intent on weaving through the crowd and participating, despite having no idea what it was that we were protesting for or against. Instead of making a beeline for home, we decided to try to blend in with the crowd.

I checked my phone to see if I could glean any information online, but there were so many people that my cell phone was too slow to connect to the internet or let me ask Siri. I shoved it back into my pocket and kept moving forward, so as not to get trampled. We joined the mass walking towards Les Invalides and the Seine beyond. Somewhere along the way we found ourselves holding bright pink signs with the same family logo. I quickly got rid of mine, still unsure what it meant. Nearly an hour later we had barely made it the half-mile from the metro to the Seine when we saw that the protest was rounding the corner and heading southeast towards the National Assembly. Katie and I agreed that was our cue to turn around. Easier said than done. We did not stand a chance swimming upstream in a crowd of that size; it really did feel like tout le monde was there. Instead, we drifted to the side and walked along the river until we had passed the sea of protesters and could make a left towards our apartment.

Once I got inside, a quick search told me two things. First, that La Manif Pour Tous or The Protest for All is a group that began contesting same-sex marriage laws when they were first proposed before the Senate and the National Assembly in 2012. The group’s name is an ironic reappropriation of the movement associated with that law; Le Mariage Pour Tous became La Manif (short for the French word for protest, manifestation, I was happy to learn) Pour Tous. Unlike the law to legalize same-sex marriage, this protest group was really not pour tous at all. La Manif Pour Tous lost its initial battle soon thereafter, in 2013, when the French government passed a law legalizing same-sex marriage. That did not dissuade them, though; since then, La Manif Pour Tous has refocused on “protecting” the family in response to legislation that would help same-sex or queer couples adopt children and form families of their own.

I also learned that La Manif Pour Tous is often compared to the Tea Party movement in the United States in that it too is considered an extremely conservative perspective on certain issues. What did I get myself into, I wondered. I read on. Those who support La Manif Pour Tous are less concerned with defending marriage as an institution exclusively between a man and a woman than they are about ensuring that queer couples not have children. As an extension of this, La Manif Pour Tous supports creating and maintaining barriers to prevent queer couples from adopting or finding surrogates. French adoption agencies often require couples to have been married or live together for at least two years, making it virtually impossible for single individuals to adopt. Further, surrogacy is illegal in France, so people are already forced to seek out other options abroad. These barriers date back to the Napoleonic civil code of France that considers adoption to be the right of a married couple. Some argue that La Manif Pour Tous is trying to ensure that every child has a mother and a father. Others argue that it is homophobic. This it certainly is.

I called Katie into my room to tell her what I’d just learned. We stared at each other for a few seconds, in shock at our ignorance, unable to find words. Even though we had participated in a protest neither of us believed in and never would have joined if we had known what the protesters stood for, we had a better understanding of the importance that the French assign to protest as a form of active citizenship and as a forum to voice their opinions. Katie shuddered at the thought of telling her friends at home what had happened. Even though she goes to school in conservative Virginia, the protest we had just participated in was on a wholly different level. Neither of us had expected to see this protest in France, especially not in Paris, a place we both idealized as liberal. Then we laughed because as we had just learned in class, in the mid-19th century under Napoleon III, the Prefect of Paris Georges-Eugène Haussmann redesigned the city, leveling the labyrinthine medieval streets in favor of wide boulevards. This design was in part to make it difficult for protesters and rioters to take control of parts of the city as they had done in the past. Clearly, this had not stopped the French from protesting. Rather, as I looked out at the sea of protesters from the window, it seemed that the boulevards only gave them more space to fill. Not a problem for the tous of this particular manif on that Sunday in Paris.

Photo courtesy of: http://www.huffingtonpost.fr/2013/04/25/manif-pour-tous-une-chanson-techno_n_3153093.html La Manif Pour Tous protest on the esplanade des Invalides
La Manif Pour Tous protest on the esplanade des Invalides  [http://www.huffingtonpost.fr/2013/04/25/manif-pour-tous-une-chanson-techno_n_3153093.html]
For more: http://www.lamanifpourtous.fr
For more: http://www.lamanifpourtous.fr