What It’s Like: In A Tibetan Dance Club
December 20th, 2008 | Posted in China, Tibet, Video, What It's Like |If I were to say the word ‘Tibet’ to you, it would likely conjure, in your mind, images of temples, monks and mountains. It’s unlikely it would make you think of dance clubs. To assist you in such future visualization exercises, we bring you the next in the ongoing series of ‘What It’s Like’ videos, this one from Lhasa, Tibet. Breaking with normal form, in which I usually do not add much commentary to these videos, this one requires a bit of a setup.
After seven days of touring monasteries and temples, praying with monks and crisscrossing the Himalayan foot hills, we decided to try to get a glimpse of the contemporary life of young Tibetans and found ourselves chasing an invitation to one of Lhasa’s most popular dance clubs.
We arrived fashionably late and after the formalities at the door, we entered a cavernous room full of hundreds of rowdy, young Tibetans, mostly between the ages of 18 and 30—all crammed in circular booths drinking what else but cans of cheap, full strength American Budweiser Beer (Tibet is the country outside of America, where I’ve seen (and drank) the most of America’s favorite King of Beers).
We found a table on the upper floor, one of the last left in the place, despite it being only 8pm. Over the next six hours we’d be entertained with all types of amusement, including traditional Tibetan dances, karaoke, stage plays, pantomimes, drummers and singers (some of Tibet’s most famous), among other things. Every four or five acts, a Tibetan pop hit would explode from the speakers and the crowd would rise from there beer can covered tables to cram the stage for an all-out MTV Grind-style dance party, returning to their seats every single time after just one song. More amusing acts would follow, then once again a club-wide, single song dance party would ensue. I was actually quite impressed, as I realized a few hours into the evening, that they had not played a single American pop song, an experience you’d never have in Beijing, Bangkok, Buenos Aries, Pretoria, Paris or Perth. All the entertainment at this thumping Tibetan dance club was, surprisingly, Tibetan.
The menagerie of spectacle, the heavily pulsating lights, the cheesy re-creation of the Potallah Palace (the home of the exiled Dali Lama) on the stage backdrop under the clouds of cigarette smoke, left my head in a drunken state of confusion akin to a hallucinogenic trip on acid, on crack—or maybe it was just the Budweiser.
As our host would explain to us, the entertainment lineup would be the same night after night, the same songs, plays, performers and dances. Despite the fact that the audience could lip sync to all the songs, knew all the punch lines of the plays (and still laughed) and had done the same dances a hundred times over, it was all because everyone—all 400 people in that club—were in fact just waiting for one performance, and then its likely most people would leave for the night.
The promoters of the club were smart and put this one performer on stage about 3am. The anticipation of arrival grew as the hours passed on and the beer cans emptied. I knew we couldn’t leave until I figured out what had all these young Tibetans so damn excited, to come each night to put themselves through a show they’d seen a hundred times before and to drink beer that was about a half step up in flavor from the other ubiquitous Tibetan drink: butter tea. This performer, I figured, would have to be a show stopper.
I’m not going to tell you what happened at 3am, you’ll just have to watch the video and see who arrived for yourself.
Click here or the video player above to see the video.
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