Fintan O’Toole can write cultural criticism about anything, even Riverdance. (If you don’t know what Riverdance is, then I’m slightly amazed, but Wikipedia summarises it as follows: “a theatrical show consisting of traditional Irish stepdancing, notable for its rapid leg movements while body and arms are kept largely stationary. It originated as an interval performance during the 1994 Eurovision Song Contest, a moment that is still considered a significant watershed in Irish culture.[1] Riverdance is, in essence, the story of the Irish culture and of the Irish immigration to America.”) In one sense, it’s up there with leprechauns as something we know is an iconic representation of Ireland but we’re quite embarrassed about, as you can see from the headline chosen above (at least Riverdance exists, though, in multiple performances around the world - leprechauns seem to exist solely in the minds of actual or potential tourists). Perhaps the best way to describe modern Ireland is that what you - mostly Americans - think of as ‘our’ culture is actually your culture (via tourist imagery and marketing), and ‘your’ culture is our culture (via globalisation and the media hegemony of the US and/or the UK, here at least).
That’s not to say Riverdance isn’t good entertainment - it’s excellent. I roughly still remember its arrival in ‘94 (but also that Brazil won the World Cup that year), and I recently caught a glimpse of it at the variety show for the visit of the Queen (another important cultural dignitary and embodiment of a historical legacy of oppression, this time actually including us), and it is exhilaratingly impressive. But I doubt most of us think of it any longer, if we ever did, as culturally very meaningful - which is the first part of why O’Toole’s re-interpretation is so interesting:
“… Chinese people seem to find Riverdance not just spectacular but genuinely moving. In 2001, when an excerpt from the show was performed for the first time for a high-level Chinese delegation to Ireland, the minister of culture Sun Jiazheng was so overcome that, as he wrote to the producers, “a poem flowed out from the deep of his heart”.
Sun’s poem (in a translation that may or may not do it justice) includes the lines “Tinkling like the gentle spring, / Roaring like the fierce thunderstorm, / The vehemence comes with heavy grief, / But never caught in despair and petty gloom.”
The idea of grief is striking. To an Irish viewer it seems obvious that Riverdance (as any commercial blockbuster must) skates very lightly over the grief at the heart of the Irish experience of mass migration. It is an evident product of the boom years, when involuntary emigration could be framed as a happily concluded story. In the narrative of the show, indeed, emigration is fully embraced as the energy through which Irish culture (and by extension Ireland itself) is enriched and renewed. Whatever pain is endured along the way is battered away by those pounding feet.
But the Chinese seem to read that grief back into Riverdance. I suspect that one of the reasons the show means so much to them is that it enacts an epic sense of history. It unfolds over what French historians call the longue durée, the time scale not of individual events but of slowly evolving cultures. Maoism proposed to deliver a short, sharp shock, a once-and-for-all transformation that would redefine everything in a matter of decades. But the Chinese are all too aware that things don’t happen like that.”
It’s impressive that he manages to write that without using Zhou Enlai’s supposed quote about the outcome of the French Revolution being “too early to tell”; certainly the implication and the lesson here is that Ireland’s boom and bust are similarly less-than-scrutable - on the one hand, the hubris and the unsustainability of the economic miracle has left bitter psychological wounds, while on the other, the infrastructural and wealth legacy of the Celtic Tiger is still largely extant, leaving the future course of Ireland (to be navigated through the increasingly surreal political economy of Euro-austerity) still up for grabs. And there are wider questions of comparability and cultural interactions:
“Oddly, given the unfathomable disparity of scale, the Chinese identify with Ireland in a way that might seem utterly implausible to us. Given that the population of the island as a whole would hardly constitute a single respectable Chinese city, it seems incomprehensible that Riverdance evokes what Sun, in that same poem, calls “the striving soul of a great nation”.
But the Chinese, even while they know themselves to be at the centre of the universe, also think of themselves as in some sense a small nation – one that has been bullied and humiliated by more powerful countries. They see in Riverdance a moral tale of an oppressed “great nation” enduring long enough to come into its own – a message with obvious resonance.
The other great attraction of the show is its upbeat take on tradition and globalisation. Chinese traditional culture was devastated by the Cultural Revolution. (One of the most moving things I saw in China was a concert by musicians in their 80s who had come out of prison camps and reclaimed the old musical instruments they had hidden before they were arrested.) It has been rehabilitated only to face the new challenge of the influx of western culture. Riverdance, with its narrative of the survival of a tradition across the millennia, applies a soothing balm to this anxiety about the fragility of Chinese traditions.”
As he then points out in his conclusion, there is an irony in this with China’s treatment of Tibet and the general lack of cultural and political freedoms within China. Yet without forgetting that, there’s a lot more we can learn about Chinese perspectives and motivations than can be found in kneejerk anti-Orientalism (or, of course, in naive pro-Orientalism). It’s not just in America that China is seen as an evil dictatorship posing an existential threat to the West, part of an economic Cold War with similar levels of political understanding. Two recent opinion pieces in the Irish Times illustrated the contrast between the good and bad approaches. On the latter, John Waters opened another of his all-encompassing screeds by describing China as “the most genocidal tyranny that ever blighted the face of Planet Earth”. On the former, Timothy Garton Ash, syndicated from the Guardian, wrote about how Mandarin-speaking Kevin Rudd inserted his vision between those of John McCain and his Chinese counter-part:
“In response to the Zhang-McCain exchange, Rudd calmly sketched the huge growth in individual freedom and prosperity in China over the past 30 years and the distance still to go before China can be described as a well-governed country under the rule of law. Implicitly rejecting the positions taken by McCain and Zhang, he said “we need to shape global values together”.
That seems to me exactly right. The US and China must be prepared to get into a conversation about the terms of international order in the 21st Century. Each must remain true to its values, but work to see where there is common ground – and where compromise or simply agreeing to disagree are viable.”
Perhaps Riverdance could provide a shared moment of bonding (over globalised imagined-nation values), and sure wouldn’t that be a grand thing?
