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magazine / jf06
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January/February 2006 issue |
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FEATURE
THE SURREY SOUND
Bhangra beat
Blending techno with tradition, musicians in suburban Surrey, B.C., are transforming the folk music of the Punjab to produce a sound all their own
Excerpt of story by Charles Foran
A propulsive, hard-on-the-beat song blasts from the speakers. Audience members, some clearly
friends and family, emerge from a stupor of inattention to welcome a group of dancers onstage.
It is midway through a showcase of South Asian dance at Vancouver’s Pacific National
Exhibition last August, and the UBC Girlz bhangra team, a dozen young women wearing blazing
smiles and dazzling costumes, launches into an energized and brash routine. More than eight
minutes long, the drill involves, by one count, nine tempo changes and nearly as many shifts
in style. The performance blends traditional bhangra — centuries- old dances from the
Punjab region of northern India — with the latest hip-hop moves and the rolls and throws
of American cheerleading. Handclapping to the beat, dancers line up in opposing camps and imitate
a courtship joust, complete with shrugging shoulders and wagging fingers. They also spin one
another and drop into squats. The team ends by constructing a pyramid and holding the pose,
chests heaving and free arms outstretched. "Hey-hey-hey!" someone in the audience
shouts, employing a Punjabi shout of appreciation.
In India, such a performance could well be misread as disrespectful — of both South
Asian culture in general and Punjabi customs in particular. For sure, the UBC Girlz, like
the dozens of university and private dance squads that have emerged across North America
in the past 15 years or so, don’t dance as their ancestors danced. How could they,
being second- and third-generation Canadians raised on hip hop and Janet Jackson videos?
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The ground of music
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Likewise, the medley of tunes to which the squads dance isn’t drawn only from the
northern Indian state where farmers once sang songs and evolved drum rhythms to accompany
their workdays. Again, why would young musicians of Punjabi descent, who are hearing everything
from rap to reggae to rock ’n’ roll, not toss these influences into their musical
mixes? Cultural art forms weaken and eventually expire when they cease to have meaning in
people’s lives. How young women attending the University of British Columbia (UBC)
decide to dance and the necessarily raucous music they choose are both indicators of the
vitality of the culture — not of the Punjab, transposed 11,500 kilometres away, but
of the new Canada, in one of its many singular and evolving manifestations.
With its large East and South Asian populations, Vancouver is the natural setting for cultural
evolution from within these groups. More than half of Canada’s 285,000 Punjabis call
the Lower Mainland home, making the region the logical epicentre. More exactly, it is to
the sprawling satellite city of Surrey that the majority of young Punjabi Canadians return
after rehearsal at UBC or Simon Fraser University. In the suburban basements and community
halls of Surrey, a new sound is coming together. And although the official cross is of traditional
bhangra and various Western beats, the real encounter is between inherited markers of creative
identity — those grounded, so to speak, in that fertile Punjabi soil — and notions
that belong to the cultural soil directly beneath our feet. If that makes bhangra hip hop
at once a product of tradition and innovation, past and future, East and West, so much the
better. Complex identities make for complex and interesting art. The challenge, as it often
is, is to reshape the tradition — labour done most easily and naturally in those basements
and community halls — and then somehow bring it out to the wider world, fresh and smart
and ready to command any dance floor in any Canadian town.
For the rest of this story, visit your local newsstand or go to our store to buy this issue.
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