“Gypsy Music” and Deejays Orientalism, Balkanism, and Romani Musicians Ioana Szeman Figure 1. Fanfare Cioca˘rlia, Queens and Kings tour concert, 7 December 2006, Bucharest, Sala Palatului. (Photo by Sonja Balcells, courtesy of Asphalt Tango Management) Romanian Romani bands such as Taraf de Haïdouks, Fanfare Cioca˘rlia, and Mahala Raï Banda have become popular in the West in the last decade, playing at prestigious venues in interna- tional festivals and featured in documentaries and Hollywood films. Taraf de Haïdouks, who hail from southern Romania, with their furious violin playing, flute, accordions, and cimbalom, count stars like Johnny Depp among their most famous fans. Fanfare, a group from northeastern Romania, play brass and percussion instruments and are known for their irresistible beat. Both Taraf and Fanfare won BBC Radio 3 World Music Awards in 2002 and 2006, respectively. Ioana Szeman is a Senior Lecturer in Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies at Roehampton University, London. She is currently completing a book project based on fieldwork carried out over a 10-year period called Stages of Erasure: Performing Romani Culture and Gypsiness in and out of Post-Communist Romania. TDR: The Drama Review 53:3 (T203) Fall 2009. ©2009 98 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2009.53.3.98 by guest on 28 September 2021 The popularity of “Gypsy music”1 performances in the West in the last decade has created not exactly a scene, but what the Guardian has identified as “something in the air, something that is hard to label, let alone define” that spreads from “world music” performances with “authentic” Gypsy musicians to electronic and dance music (Lynskey 2006:6). A wide range of “Gypsy music” events have flourished across continents, from large international festivals fea- turing Romani bands from the Balkans—including the three bands mentioned above—to “Gypsy nights” in clubs where audiences sport Gypsy costumes. Western deejays such as Shantel and Gypsy Sound System, and Western bands such as Beirut and Balkan Beat Box, feature or sample music from South East Europe, in what has become a fashionable, “not so underground any longer,” scene (6). Romani musicians from such bands as Taraf de Haïdouks, Fanfare Cioca˘rlia, and Mahala Raï Banda play a role in, but do not control, the export of “Gypsy music” from Romania to the West, while also negotiating the limited options available to them in both locations. After being “discovered” by their Western managers in remote villages in Romania, the Romanian Romani bands Taraf and Fanfare now perform almost exclusively in the West, are entirely Western- managed, and emulate the authentic Balkan Gypsy musician, made famous in Emir Kusturica’s filmsTime of the Gypsies (1988), Underground (1995), and Black Cat, White Cat (1997), and in Tony Gatlif’s Latcho Drom (Good Journey; 1993). While these groups perform mostly traditional music from Romania, Romani musicians in Romania primarily play manele (sing. manea), an ex- tremely popular and controversial genre with links to the Ottoman past and associations with Turkey and the Middle East. Hence Romani musicians find themselves at the crux of debates about identity, Europe and the “Orient,” modernity and tradition—epitomized in critiques or praise for manele. However, the record label behind Taraf de Haïdouks has produced a new band, Mahala Raï Banda, that performs manele, often alongside deejays. Shantel, also known as DJ Shantel, of Germany, has mixed albums for both Taraf and Mahala and won a BBC Radio 3 World Music Award in 2006. Mahala invites audience members to come up onstage and dance during their live performances, and Shantel has created a similar atmosphere with his Bucovina Club, initially based in Frankfurt, Ger- many, and now touring to international locations. Bucovina is the name of a Figure 2. DJ Shantel and the Bucovina Club Orchestra, Disko region situated in both Romania and Partizani tour concert, Koko, London, 20 February 2008. (Photo Ukraine where Shantel’s maternal family by Ioana Szeman) originated and with which he has been fascinated since he first visited in the late ’90s. HisDisko Partizani album (2007) and tour bring to his audience a new kind of pop focused on the urban music of the Balkans, including the manele, most famous and ubiquitous on the streets of Romania. Shantel’s music has the produc- tive potential for creating a Balkan cosmopolitanism, an alternative version of modernity, in tension with other forms of Western cosmopolitanism—what Donna A. Buchanan credits “Gypsy Music” “Gypsy 1. I follow Carol Silverman’s use of quotation marks for this term, which is used to market a variety of types of music from the Balkans and elsewhere (2007). 99 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2009.53.3.98 by guest on 28 September 2021 ethnopop for creating (2007:260). Shantel’s songs may offer the same kind of alternatives to diasporic audiences, but at the same time they orientalize the Balkans from within, erasing the Roma. Shantel’s album and tour feature a multinational group of musicians from the Balkans, Turkey, and Western Europe, including a couple of Romani musicians, such as Taraf’s newer member, clarinetist Filip Semionov, from Bulgaria. From Taraf’s and Mahala’s concerts to Shantel’s performances, Gypsies are a vehicle for entering the exotic Balkans. But while the role Gypsy stereotypes play in literature, musical performances, and Balkan films has received significant scholarly attention (see Trumpener 1992; van de Port 1998; Iordanova 2001), less discussed is how Romani musicians fulfill and embody these stereotypes, and their effects on Romani people, including musicians (see Lemon 2000; Beissinger 2001, 2007; Silverman 1996, 2003, 2007). Following the trajectory of Romani musicians in these bands, I trace the erasure of the Roma from the “authentic performances” of Taraf and Fanfare through to Mahala and the Disko Partizani tour concert, where the lyrics of one song, “T¸igan- izat¸ia” (Gypsification), literally suggest that by becoming Gypsy (t¸igan) one can reach the “exotic Orient” (here standing for Turkey). In a recent TDR article, Mike Sell argues that forgetting the Roma while mimicking them is an avantgarde gesture dating back to 19th-century bohemians and continuing in contemporary popular theatrical works such as Rent (1996): “By way of mimicking, appropriating, mythologiz- ing, and ultimately erasing the Roma […] the idea of challenging political authority through fashion, sex, drug use, cuisine, creative expression, etc., came into being” (2007:45). All of the stances Sell identifies recur in the recent plethora of “Gypsy music” performances, where musi- cians, managers, and deejays mimic, appropriate, and erase the Roma through their demonstra- tions of Orientalism and Balkanism. The marketing of the “authentic” Gypsies is based on Western managers’ discovery narra- tives that re-enact Balkanism, a specific discourse that historian Maria Todorova identifies as grounded in Western travelers’ discoveries of the exotic yet not so distant part of Europe known as the Balkans, beginning in the 18th century (1997). Todorova’s work on Balkanism provides a critical apparatus, inspired by, but different from, Edward W. Said’s Orientalism ([1978] 2001). Milica Bakic´-Hayden further developed and reconfigured Said’s work in her theory of “nesting orientalisms,” which she identified as the application of Orientalism to nationalities from former Yugoslavia (1995). In the Western performances of “Gypsy music,” “authentic” musicians, music from the Balkans, and even lyrics such as Shantel’s “T¸iganizat¸ia” index the same stereotypes of Gypsies as wild, passionate, and free. Ironically, however, the Roma become forgotten in plain sight, as in most cases they function as projective mechanisms and a way of reaching the wild, passionate, and unpredictable place that the Balkans are supposed to be. Buchanan (2007) notes that ethnopop genres like chalga (the equivalent of manele in Bulgaria) and Yugo-pop were not initially intended for Western consumption. However, the newest trends, such as Shantel’s and Mahala’s albums and concerts, have brought manele to the West. Diasporic and migrant Balkan audiences’ reception of this music, often advertised as “Gypsy music” in the West, and the musicians themselves, reveal that nesting Orientalisms, or the fractal recurrence of the East- West dichotomy, function to further Orientalize Balkan identities via the Gypsies. While the positive attributes of performance stereotypes about Roma present Gypsy musicians as passionate performers, the flipside, pervasive in the media, is that they are beggars and criminals.2 Since 1997, I have been involved in theatre projects and fieldwork with Romani communities from Romania, many of them impoverished, who often suffer the negative effects of these stereotypes (see Szeman-Ureche 2005; Szeman 2005). Because Roma rarely control media or entertainment institutions, non-Roma continue to shape public discourse on Roma, easily resorting to stereotypes both in the media and onstage. 2. Following Lemon (2000), I use Rom (noun, singular), Roma (noun, plural), and the adjective Romani to denote individuals or groups. I use “Gypsy” when discussing stereotypes and to translate the local term t¸igan. IoanaSzeman 100 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2009.53.3.98 by guest on 28 September 2021 Little is known about the suffering of Romani populations in the past, for example in the slavery and concentration camps dur- ing WWII. The perfor- mance paradigms that romanticize the Roma place them in the present through the denial of their past, as they become ves- sels for the majority’s ideals and aspirations. Katie Trumpener argues that: Gypsies continue to appear as stereotypical figures of magic and menace; what is involved here is not only igno- rance, and a failure to Figure 3.