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Thursday, October 23, 2003 Stage: Homogenization island
By Newt Briggs
Nobody--not even Gray Davis--has taken a bigger beating than Christopher Columbus of late. The recent student backlash against UNLV's Rebel Yell over an editorial titled "Christopher Columbus, We Salute You" is but one of a surfeit of indications that many Americans are no longer willing to envision Columbus as the heroic voyager and righteous conquistador of junior high history texts. Rather, they are beginning to realize the true horror of his "civilizing" quest--a mission that resulted in the most efficient genocide of a people perpetrated in the history of the modern world. Still, it's amazing how--despite this historical rethinking--Columbus' concept of nativism remains firmly entrenched in our cultural consciousness. In everything from King Solomon's Mines to Lilo and Stitch, native peoples are imagined as childlike innocents, huddling over homemade fires, wearing gaudy clothes, beseeching the gods and gorging themselves on juicy, juicy mangoes. Occasionally, they are credited with homespun wisdom or cast as "noble" savages, but their personas are more often than not limited to the bounds of a simple, superstitious primitivism. And nowhere is this homogenization more evident than in the musical Once on This Island. Once on This Island presents a familiar story: A peasant girl falls in love with a young colonist, and their forbidden affair threatens to undermine the ethnic stratification of the island (imagine West Side Story on a beach). It is billed as "family entertainment"--a goal realized by means of simple storytelling, charming choreography, elaborate costuming and exaggerated characterizations (Papa Ge, the god of death, looks like a headdress-sporting version of Johnny Depp's Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean). Unfortunately, this accessibility comes at the cost of authenticity--a fact revealed when the island's entire colonial history is swept under the rug by the song "The Sad Tale of the Beauxhommes." In the musical's liner notes, Signature Productions director Leslie Fotheringham writes, "Once on This Island is a story of the hope, faith and tolerance for a society that could one day live in harmony as a united people." But if that were really the goal, wouldn't it be better to choose a production that, as historian Alvin Josephy suggests, portrays native peoples as "real, living persons" rather than as the naive and fearful savages of history? Only then will we be able to candidly confront our past and fully purge ourselves of Columbus' bitter legacy. Summerlin Performing Arts Center Thu.-Sat., Oct. 23-25, 7:30 p.m. $12-20; 878-7529 |
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