Dear Reader, In my line of work you often meet people who either really want to talk to you or have no interest in talking at all. Both can be irksome, the former because they have an agenda, the latter because a conversation is like pulling nails. Yesterday, however I got to speak to someone who had no problem speaking her mind but was obviously completely mystified by the sudden attention she was receiving. Erika Schmaltz is the head of an all-female pensioners dance troupe who had just been given a crash course in the madness of the 21st century. She told me that she’d learned the word ‘woke’ for the first time the day before. A friend had explained what it means to her after she unwittingly found herself at the centre of a national media storm. Ms Schmaltz, from Mannheim in Baden-Württemberg, had been invited by the national garden show to perform with her dance troupe at the biennial event. The dancers, who sew their own costumes, planned to perform their newest piece called “dream cruise across the globe.” It involves dance skits with the ladies dressed in kimonos, saris, sombreros and in pharaonic garb. When the national garden show got wind of what they were going to perform, it got cold feet and told them that six of the costumes were unacceptable due to concerns about cultural appropriation. Mr Schmaltz, although completely unaware of the culture wars going on in the national media, dug her heels in nonetheless. “We’ll perform the whole show or nothing at all,” she told them. Before she knew it, every newspaper in the country was covering the story. The garden show quickly backpedalled, insisting it hadn’t tried to censor the pensioners, and invited them for crisis talks. What came out was a compromise in which the ladies agreed not to wear the sombreros (but keep their ponchos) and to take the gold and blue embellishments off the pharaonic clothes so that they would look “more like Arabic workers.” The garden show claimed to be happy with the compromise and the ladies were bumped up to the main stage in return. “It’s all ludicrous,” Schmaltz told me cheerily. But she is clearly politician at heart. “We had to make a compromise, so that no one would lose face.” But she had her read lines, too. “We agreed not to wear black wigs for Japan,” she said, “but we but we’re keeping the kimonos… they were expensive.” Did she have any sympathy for the notion that some audience members may be offended by the “cliched” depictions of their cultures, I asked. Not at all, she replied. Among the hundreds of emails of support she’d received were ones from Indian women who were delighted that her troupe were wearing saris. When they go back to the day job of performing in care homes the wigs and sombreros would be back, she assured me.
Would you mind un-paywalling this post, I'd like to share it on r/germany
And speaking of that have you considered joining reddit? Might be useful for marketing - speaking of that perhaps you should take a turn running I Am Germany
Would you mind un-paywalling this post, I'd like to share it on r/germany
And speaking of that have you considered joining reddit? Might be useful for marketing - speaking of that perhaps you should take a turn running I Am Germany
https://twitter.com/germany_iam?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor