CI Dancing

You know when you see something on Facebook that makes you regret logging in altogether?

That was me last week.

On my news feed there was a video of a Cook Island girl doing a traditional Cook Island dance, I watched it out of appreciation and awe because frankly despite Cook Island dance lessons as a kid I still can’t seem to crack it and look like a washing machine on steroids. Anyway, I realised the video had actually been posted on a page dedicated to the glorious 21^st century art form of twerking.

If that wasn’t enough, a lot of the comments were incredibly rude but either went along the lines of being smitten or claiming how disrespectful or innapropriate this is.

Perhaps this ignorance partially stems from the reinforced stereotype of the ‘hula girl’ – graceful, slow moving and delicate. While this isn’t an entirely negative stereotype, it ignores all the different kinds of island dancing just because their cultural costumes may be the same or similar. Ultimately this flattens many cultures into one image that is perpetuated over and over again.

As well as cultural flattening, the comments on this video make it clear there is an under representation of the Pacific Island community in dominant culture or forms of media which are accessible to dominant culture. So, when they are seen (like in this video) they may are forced to represent the entire communities. However this can be problematic when the community is not known because they can be overlooked and associated only with what is known to the audience. This is why twerking was quickly associated with this video, it is the closest association the dominant audience had and they simply hadn’t seen anything like it before.

The comments on this video also took me back to when the Royals came to visit New Zealand in 2014 and were welcomed to the Government House in Wellington with a Powhiri. Coverage from CNN’s Jeanna Moos saw the event reduced to a “royal bummer” as Moos described the haka as “a routine of slapping and thrusting… a cross between a Chippendales lap dance and the mating dance of an emu…”. Although Moos apologized for her sense of humour, she – like the uploader and commentors of the Cook island dancing video, fail to recognize the significance behind what can seem to be on the surface just a dance.

Cook Island dancing, and dancing in general, is a spectacle, but it is not ONLY a spectacle. It is especially not a purely sexually evoking dance to be simply gawked over. As Tali has mentioned in a previous blog post (Footlose), dancing tells stories, expresses emotion and works as an outlet.

All in all, we can’t expect everyone to know everything about every single culture around the world, however there is a certain level of respect that we need to show towards new experiences.