Dancing from the Heart: Movement, Gender, and Sociality in the Cook Islands

Chapter Five Outing: Dancing after Dark

chapter five OUTING DANCING AFTER DARK Morning teatime at the Ministry of Cultural Development provided an opportunity for the staff to snack and chat. The most interesting morning tea was generally on Monday because people caught up on the news and gossip of the weekend, in particular what had occurred while “outing,” the term used to describe going to nightclubs, discos, and bars. One Monday morning early in my fieldwork, four younger staff members (all in their twenties) and I were sitting outside, eating bread and drinking tea under the building’s eaves. About thirty meters in front of us was the Tupapa Centre, the hall of the village of Tupapa. On Saturday nights the Tupapa Centre had a live band, and the five of us had gone there on the previous Saturday. The conversation turned to a casual evaluation of the evening—“The band was too good!” and “I was so drunk!” It had been a good night, according to the four of them—we’d had a good band to listen and sing along to, and we’d had fun dancing together and a good laugh. It was the first time I had been out with locals in the evening, and I was not sure of whether I had had a good night or not. I had been really looking forward to  8=6EI:G ;>K: the evening, as I thought it would provide an escape from the constancy of fieldwork , and a chance to relax in the manner I would at home. Far from allowing me to unwind, the evening ended up giving me the most severe sense of culture shock I had experienced since arriving on Rarotonga. I was conscious not only that I had been the lone papa‘ā at the Tupapa Centre but also that I was attempting to party in a way that was commensurable with activities of the other four. Although the ingredients were the same as those of nightclubs at home—beer, popular music, and friends—the style of consumption and interaction was highly unfamiliar. I was struck by a discomforting sensation that I didn’t know the rules of enjoyment: I had no idea how to dance, talk, or even drink my beer. A particular aspect of the conversation that Monday morning intrigued me. One of the girls turned to me and asked, “Do you cry when you are drunk?” I had to think about this, as I had not directly associated drinking with crying before. I finally said, “I don’t really know. Sometimes maybe.” Another girl interjected, “Oh, I do. Once, we had been drinking all night at the beach. I started crying and crying and walked off into the lagoon, just crying and crying. Shame!” Everyone laughed at this, and it led to other stories of drinking and crying. After I had been attending the local nightclubs for a year, this snippet of conversation kept returning and becoming increasingly significant to me. I saw many people cry when drunk and on a few occasions surprised myself by doing so. I also saw people do and say things they would not have done or said in broad daylight. These included practices such as risqué dance styles, loud singing, and, more generally , expressions of emotional intensity—crying, raucous laughter and joking, verbal arguments, and physical fights. While outing is overwhelmingly about having fun (tāmataora) and is associated with concentrated communal good feeling, it often leads to the reverse—conflict , tension, and sadness. Here George Simmel’s idea (1971, in Farrer 2000, 248) that sociability can be adversarial as well as pleasurable is instructive. On Rarotonga , individuals partake in a whole repertoire of outing behavior. At one end of the continuum are practices that are highly convivial—singing and dancing. At the other end are practices that are viewed as adversarial—talking and fighting. Both types of practice are expressive styles considered appropriate (though not necessarily ideal) when outing. Although outing contexts involve the display of behavior that differs starkly from that displayed in the daytime, hegemonic modes of social interaction continue to shape individuals’ experiences of outing. Young women are subject to moral evaluation of their behavior to a greater degree than men, and individual desires  96C8>CK: money to buy a carton of longneck bottles of Cooks Lager. When the person who went to buy the carton at the bar returned, I was again surprised that...