Is this Costume Racist?

Sergeant Pepper's uniform in construction
Photo by Ben Richards © 2022

The Aladdin Controversy: An explanation

Most panto Aladdins are, as the traditional folk story, set in the town of Peking. (If you thought it was set in Arabia, blame Disney.)

Forty years ago if you went to see Aladdin the panto, you may well have been treated(?!) to white men in yellow make-up and fake teeth wearing lampshades on their heads and doing a "Chinese language test" in a "fahnnee voyss".  Thankfully you're much less likely to see those kind of shennanigans on stage nowadays - I have a feeling most modern audiences might be more inclined to complain than applaud if confronted with that kind of otherisation.

• Aladdin Pantomime Poster from 1886
  Public Domain, from the British Library's collections, 2013

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However, Aladdin has (up till now) managed to trundle on.  It's a popular story: the kids know the Disney film and making a panto is so ruinously expensive, producers are keen to realise the value of their investments in costumes, sets and flying carpets.

Recently however, the panto title of Aladdin has been subject of no little disquiet.  Some people have called for greater ethnic diversity in casting. Some people argue that productions would be best cast only with actors from the global majority.  Some people are of the mind that having a show set in China is, in and of itself, so problematic that the best thing to do is ditch it entirely.  Indeed, so vociferous is the criticism from some quarters that some companies are doing just that.  Crossroads, the UK's largest pantomime producer stopped producing Aladdin last year, and I hear on the grapevine one of the other biggies is on the cusp of following suit.

Although I personally don't share these positions, I must confess I find it all extremely interesting.  So interesting, in fact, that I started to study a PhD in it.

So lively is the debate some may be cautious to express counterposing opinions.  One could almost imagine there may have been some very big meeting (presumably in London), only somehow somebody misplaced your invite, and now it's too late: everything's already been decided.

A couple questions which I have been asked during my research:

Question 1: On Panto Day (a lovely bit of fun that brings the industry together) did the admins of the official Twitter account retweet all the fun messages sent by the casts, except those performing Aladdin?

Question 2: Have I noticed the scarcity of nominations for actors in Aladdins amongst this year's UKPA nominations?  Is there a blanket ban on white actors being nominated for acting in Aladdin?

I must confess, when these questions have been put to me, I haven't had an immediate answer.  The fact that they are being asked is, in an of itself, of note, and certainly prompts thought.

Speaking for myself, I do think that if the grandees have decided that Aladdin must die, I wish they'd send a round robin email so at least we all knew what was happening.  It may even facilitate some debate!   By contrast, stage-managing a surreptitious slide into obsolescence surely stifles constructive debate.  Death by a thousand cuts is the cruellest murder of all!

The Aladdin Controversy: A Dissenting Opinion

When we decided to stage Aladdin, I never had a doubt that I would set it in Peking. My husband takes the lead on the set design, but I remember the thrill of making the mood boards, all the lovely reds and golds, dragon curves and gongs and pointy roofs.  

Hong Kong where my dad grew up
Photo by Skyseeker under Creative Commons Licence Attribution 2.0

I like China. My dad grew up in Hong Kong and my mother was down the coast in Singapore. I like Chinese style, I cook Chinese food, I have Chinese friends.  I particularly love the aesthetics from the mid to late Ming dynasty (roughly equivalent to the late medieval period in Europe) - the art, the fashion, the architecture: it really is rather quite splendid.  We drew upon it a lot as inspiration for our set design.  We researched, synthesised, imagined; we made a model box to make sure it was just how we liked it.  Then we bought and cut the wood to make the flats, we build the portals, stuck on glitter, we painted the cloths, we sewed the costumes and when we had finished, everything just the way we imagined it.  Wonderful, magical, Chinese.  An idealised pastiche of China, for sure - but our ideal, for our show, that we made. 

Some may say they don't like the style, but that’s OK by me. There are those who like Aladdin set in London (Lyric Hammersmith, 2021) or a haunted funfair in Manchester (Oldham Coliseum, 2021), and when they build their pantomime, they build the style they like. It’s a big wide world, and there’s more than enough room for a few different styles of Aladdin then people can take their pick. 

 In the words of the bard: 

"What if my house be troubled with a rat, 

And I be pleased to give ten thousand ducats To have it baned? 

What, are you answered yet? 

Some men there are love not a gaping pig, 

Some that are mad if they behold a cat, 

And others when the bagpipe sings i’th’ nose 

Cannot contain their urine; for affection, 

Mistress of passion, sways it to the mood 

Of what it likes or loathes"

 - Merchant of Venice, Act 4.  © Billyboi S-Peare (Olden times) 

I’ve butted heads with some who argue that the use of Chinese styles is at best misplaced chinoiserie, or worse, base Orientalism. I’ve heard it argued that it poor behooves a show to reduce the complex heritage of an ancient and diverse civilisation to hackneyed representations of Eastern iconography caricatured in broad and brassy brushstrokes.  But to me, this argument holds little water. 

Of course it’s pastiche, we’re making a panto. Broad brushstrokes is a key convention of the genre. If anyone’s making a panto that doesn’t look like a brassy caricature, they need to buy a broader brush. Yes, I know China’s not really a magical glittery kingdom. It’s not a realistic art form. Mother Goose is set on a farm, nobody complains that the stage isn’t covered in animal dung. (In actuality, I gave my Aladdin script a socialist bent and we ended up staging 60% or the scenes in a modern favela).

Shylock confronts Bassanio on the Rialto
William Shakespeare, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

The Power of Costume

“Symbols and representations are important in the production of identities. This is how we signal our identities to others and how we know which people we identify with and those who are distinguished as being different. How we speak, the clothes we wear, badges, scarves, uniforms or flags all offer symbols of identity.”

- p12. Questioning Identity: Gender, Class, Nation. Woodward, K (2004) p12.

Costume has power.  We harness it in our daily lives: a suit for work projects seriousness of purpose, a hard hat implies you’re a safe pair of hands. An expensive long white bridal dress symbolises purity, virginity, and a willingness to get into credit card debt to look good for the photos. Costumes are symbols, they have meanings: emergent properties, borne from the shared cultural values of the wearer and the viewer, made manifest through the act of wearing. 

For example: in my former life as a master of a boarding school, I Bunburied about Hertfordshire wearing a traditional academic gown... the kind Mr Chips would use to dust the chalk off the board. Many of the senior staff wore them - swooshing up and down the corridors. It gave authority, presence. It said: "here is a man (for it was just the men) with degrees and experience; listen to him; he’s clever; he must have something worth saying."  I didn’t. Not often. Nor did the gown make me any more clever than I had been without it. But it allowed me to claim these ethereal benefits. The ownership of the gown was merely incidental. It was the wearing of the gown that allowed me ownership of an elevated status. 

By this simple example we can see how semiotics (signs and symbols) allow the wearer of a costume to claim the qualities and characteristics with which it is associated. And herein lies the rub: the question of who owns the costume is just a matter of receipt. The question of who owns the meaning is often times contested.

Who owns Meaning?

"Meaning is an emergent, not intrinsic, property."

                        -  Me © Right now

What do I mean by that?  Let's try a thought experiment.  Imagine being in a crowd at the Louvre looking at the Mona Lisa.  Everybody's cooing and jostling: taking a photo - isn't she beautiful?  Do you think she's beautiful?  What is the source of her beauty?   Is it inside her, the model?  Or in the brush of the artist?  Or is it perhaps in the way you perceive her?

Mona Lisa Lolcat
by Planetrussell is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Now, imagine walking up and snatching that painting right off the wall.  Imagine how it feels in your hands.  How much does it weigh? Guess.  Did you guess 2.4 kg?  You might be right.  I don't know.  I didn't bother to look it up, I'm just banking on you not being bothered to either.  Whatever it weighs, the point is it weighs.. something. 

Imagine getting a bread knife and scraping off all of the paint, dismantle the frame, screw up the canvas into a ball and pop all the pieces into a blender.  Lift it up.  Heavy isn't it?  That's because the property of weight is intrinsic to the object.  You cannot separate it out.  It's in it.  It is it.  

But pour out all the bits and try and find the meaning.  It's gone.  It's not there.  The meaning is not in the painting, it is emergent.  It's a byproduct of interaction: between Da Vinci and the paint, between the model and the artist, between the tourists and the museum.  It's very real.  Meaning is (like beauty, monetary value, love) a miraculous by-product of thinking minds experiencing their own perception of the universe.

So, now that we understand this: Who owns meaning?  How do we decide that?  What does it even mean to own an emergent, intangible commodity - one that we value so highly? 

These aren't churlish questions.  People constantly make all kinds of claims on ownership of meaning.

In this blog, I've made a claim to ownership over the meaning of my production on the basis that I made it.  Actors may claim to own the understanding of their characters.  Likewise audience members have told me with pride "This is our panto.  We come every year!".  We stake claims to ownership through the act of identification.

The Scot who berates an Englishman for wearing a kilt because he identifies both the kilt and himself as Scottish. An administrator may not retweet a Panto Day video because they identify the cast as European but the story as Chinese.

Claims of cultural appropriation are really claims to ownership, staked through identification.  They are claims that although you may own the costume, somebody else owns the meaning.  

I have sympathy for this argument.  It's irksome to get rubbed up the wrong way, particularly by someone who's glib and uncaring, more-so on topics to which you feel deeply attached, and if you experience similar things on a regular basis, it can be truly excruciating.  Identification can be a useful defence.

The sociologist Kath Haywood puts it very well:

"In this sense, although as individuals we have to take up identities actively, those identities are necessarily the product of the society in which we live and our relationship with others... It is a socially recognized position, recognized by others, not just by me."

                                                     - Questioning Identity: Gender, Class, Nation. Woodward, K (2004)

When people make claims to ownership it's important to pay attention.  A willingness to listen and imagine another's perspective are key resources, not just in theatre, but in life.

However, meaning is emergent.  There is no meaning in the costume itself.  Meaning is generated in the act of perception.  

Different people may make competing claims to ownership for different reasons, and they may both be justified.  To claim exclusive ownership over meaning is to privilege your own interpretation over that of others.

I'm proud of our shows, of the scripts that I write, of the team we've built, of the costumes we've sewn, of the sets that we've made, of the audiences we've grown.  I identify as the producer of my work, and I would like to stake my own claim to its meaning.  

In the same breath: I'm delighted that others also want to make claims to ownership over the meaning of the work I create.  The ownership of lived experience which I do not have.  A multiplicity of voices can add understanding and depth to art: surely they should inform debate, not close it down.  

Unfortunately, in these days of echo-chamber media, the fragmentation of public discourse is such that, in some cases, the voices that are amplified are the ones shutting down debate rather than opening it up.  To that, I say: the antidote to conflict is conversation, not censorship.

At Last... The Costumes: You be the Judge!

I wanted to reference the beautiful designs of Hanfu (traditional Chinese fashion) - Hopefully while steering clear of cultural appropriation.  I took out some books form the library and used them to pattern a wide sleeved jerkin with a closed front and a Nehru collar so that (hopefully) it's shape was reminiscent of a Tang jacket.

Policemen Costumes.  Hanfu-style cut.
Worn expertly by the hilarious duo Sarah-Lou Young and Tessa Vale
Photo by Ellie Geurin Ⓒ 2022

I steered away from shot silks, which although they are very traditional in look, don't really fit in with our house style of bright and unfussy primary colours.  Instead, I went for a Chinese-British mash-up, combining the Hanfu cut with the traditional check and blue cord of an old fashioned bobby.  We did embroider Chinese lion badges which we emblazoned on anything Royal (the Empress, the palace, the policeman) which I think just jollied everything up a bit, as well as foreshadowing a climactic moment of peril.

Hanfu-Style Suits in Complementary Patchwork
From left: Wishee Washee (Will Cousins), Aladdin (Michael Pellman)
Widow Twankey (Dom McChesney), Abanazar (David Herzog)
Photo by Howard Barlow © The Big Tiny 2022

I used a similar same shape for Wishee Washee and Aladdin (I'm not going to broach the subject of the character names yet - but I'm very aware there's a range of opinions).   We drew inspiration from the laundry scene and came up with the idea for the purple and patchwork design.  Gosh, there's a lot of sewing in that patchwork suit!  I love the way they turned out.  They all look quite different, but still like a set.

The Empress's Dress
Look Closely... that's not Tessa's wig.  It belongs to our Dom the Dame who's standing behind!
Photo by Ellie Geurin © 2022

The Empress costume was hellish to make.  There are layers on layers of padding and linings and all kinds of different materials that all want to go different ways when you sew them.  Cripes, we did a lot of swearing the week we made that dress.  The bold colours make for an eye catching entrance, and it's still very 'ancient Chinese' in style.  In fact, the pattern is based on illustrations of actual Chinese Empresses.  The worst part was actually finishing and then having to make it again for the walk down!

The Finale Set
Just when we thought we were finished: 'We'll have to make it again then won't we?  Whoops"
Audience Snap

We worked really hard on the build for Aladdin, and I'm really proud of what we achieved.  We made it with love, (I'd be mortified if I thought that I'd made a panto that upset someone) and a lot of forethought and yes - I set it in China... and as it stands, I feel comfortable with the decisions I made.  In fact, I think it was smashing.