The Ephemeral Tradition of Extravaganza

For decades, New Zealand student capping shows were a popular tradition in university centres around the country. However, they were an extremely high-context, localized, and ephemeral tradition. Little material from these shows persisted in tradition beyond the year they were composed. "Ephemeral tradition" sounds like an oxymoron; how can such a thing exist, and if so, how is it relevant to the concerns of folklorists? Using Victoria University's "Extravaganzas" as a case study, I will show how tradition operated in the folk process by which the shows were written, produced, and critiqued. Employing the process that Claude Lévi-Strauss termed bricolage, students combined hoary jokes and stock characters to create shows that were original but also conformed to local expectations. Rather than a fixed text, Extravs arose from a traditional local aesthetic that favoured originality and balanced competing demands to be both popular and critical of society and to appear professional while remaining the work of amateurs.