Aestheticizing Performance and Performing Art

I am interested in the modernist aestheticization of the Burmese pwe in Orwell’s Burmese Days. As “a kind of Burmese play; a cross between a historical drama and a revue” (101), the pwe embodies “nativeness”. We are told that the skirts of the pwe’s best dancer “curved outwards above her hips . . . according to the ancient Burmese fashion” (103); the significance being that the pwe is a form of homage to Burmese heritage and tradition. Although the pwe is a material embodiment of “Burmese-ness,” it is presented as a modernist aesthetic. If the subjugation of Blacks is aestheticized – in that while in service to the Whites, they are dressed in stylistic clothes – in the music box that Jean Genet saw, then the subjugation of the Burmese “natives” can similarly be said to be aestheticized. This aestheticization takes place not only because the dancer is reduced to inanimate objects, but more importantly, because her movements are compared to aesthetic commodities: she has the movement like “one of those jointed wooded figures on an old-fashioned roundabout. The way her neck and elbows rotated was precisely like a jointed doll” (104, italics mine). Burmese subjugation, in other words, is stylicized and incorporated into literary texts in a manner that we do not question, precisely because it has been naturalized.

After establishing how Burmese subservience is aestheticized in the text, it is necessary to discuss the reaction towards this ‘aesthetification’. The European reaction to the pwe is that of both attraction and revolt: Flory tells us that it is “grotesque, it’s even ugly . . . yet when you look closely, what art, what centuries of culture you can see behind it!” (105). In this respect, the conflicted response to the pwe is similar to the European response towards U Po Kyin right from the start of the novel: he was a man “shapely and even beautiful in his grossness” (1). The response to both the pwe and U Po Kyin remind us of the narrator’s response towards the dead “native” in Orwell’s Shooting an Elephant; in the latter case, likewise, the narrator is both fascinated and repulsed by the dead Indian coolie.