With more than 300 ethnic arts groups in town, the world’s at our doorstep
By Lynnda Greene
Photographs courtesy of the St. Louis International Institute
Touring the city recently with a friend newly moved back home from the West Coast, I was struck by just how much those tired old myths about ourselves—that we’re socially fragmented, politically balkanized, doggedly parochial—have faded. That afternoon, driving aimlessly, we encountered Bosnian folk art at the history museum, Japanese kyogen at the botanical garden, Irish step dancing in a suburban farmers’ market, a Latino street fair in South City and West African drumming in Forest Park (we joked we should have brought our passports). Later that night, savoring Cajun zydeco, Caribbean reggae and Indian sitar, as well as the usual jazz and folk pickup bands, along South Grand and the Delmar Loop, my friend turned to me, wide-eyed. “I feel like I’m in New York,” she said. “What happened?”
Diversity (or “multiculturalism,” in modern urban parlance) has gained currency in recent years as corporations, cities and whole regions on the make seek this latest must-have commodity. Attract a multiplicity of peoples, goes the theory, tap their collective traditions and wait for prosperity to follow. But St. Louis, a magnet for immigrants over much of its 242-year history, seemed to have lost much sense of itself as what it is—a city of immense ethnic and cultural diversity—until fairly recently.
“I noticed a change in people’s interest once we started the Festival of Nations,” says Ann Rynearson, senior vice president for culture and community at the International Institute of St. Louis, which, seven years ago, staged the first outdoor multiethnic celebration, a smorgasbord of traditional dance and music, ethnic food, cultural and educational exhibits and folk-art demonstrations. “There’s something about actually seeing something like Indian classical dance up close,” she says, “that cuts across all cultural lines to communicate something universal.”
The last festival drew more than 20,000 to Tower Grove Park, where, over two days, 800 ethnic artists from 75 traditions participated in 125 performances of native art, crafts, dance, music and storytelling. Wandering this venerable Victorian walking park, throngs of us watched Spanish flamenco and Argentine tango, African mask and Vietnamese dragon dancing, Ivorian drums and Jewish klezmer and scores of other troupes—Korean, Turkish, Iranian, Vietnamese, Haitian, Afghan, Native American—perform music and dance nearly round the clock in full regalia on three stages. Between acts we browsed 25 booths of Macedonian needlework, Kiowa Indian leatherwork, Colombian mask-making, Chinese paper-cutting, Mexican flower-making, Senegalese tie-dyeing and East German bobbin lace–making, all while sampling ethnic munchies as challenging to pronounce (Bosnian baklava, Brazilian feijoada, Ethiopian injera and Filipino kebab) as they are delectable to eat.
St. Louisans can’t get enough “multi,” it seems. “We were getting so many calls from community, church, school, even business and professional organizations, wanting these international groups that we couldn’t keep up with them all,” says Rynearson. “We finally had to publish ‘Culture Links,’ a contact roster for 300 ethnic cultural groups, so people could make their own arrangements.” The performing groups joke that they perform more here than in their native countries.
That St. Louis doesn’t rank high on national assessments in terms of immigration is misleading, Rynearson says. Though the International Institute regularly serves between 8,000 and 10,000 foreign-born residents annually, it receives only about 500 new refugees every year—“and that’s good,” she says, “because we’re not overwhelmed. People aren’t hardened. There’s room enough to welcome, absorb—and embrace.”
And propagate and cross-pollinate, too. The 300 groups listed on “Culture Links” regularly network with FolkFire, a gutsy local consortium of native and foreign-born performers and presenters that promotes and fosters more than 90 groups dedicated to the preservation and performance of native folk, as well as ethnic music and dance forms. Judging by the sheer variety of ethnic dancing and music-making (German, Czech, Polish, Scandinavian, Russian, Israeli, Bavarian, Scottish, English, Irish, Indian, Spanish and a dozen varieties of South American) going on around the metro area any night of the week, we’re not only immensely curious about other cultures, we’re also searching for something—a taproot to an identity lost in assimilation generations ago. Perhaps we need to access these traditions no less than refugees, newly arrived and disoriented, need to share them. Their traditions are ours, after all; we’ve just been here too long to remember.
But the dividends of the multiplicity of international arts we enjoy here extend far beyond any quality-of-life assessments to something seminal in the way we understand each other—and ourselves. That St. Louisans, for all our fabled fractiousness, support and nurture hundreds of multicultural endeavors speaks to an inclusive new spirit, one fully worthy of our gateway heritage. In a world of expanding technology and diminishing intimacy, these ethnic arts—traditional and contemporary, enduring and fragile—represent a resource of far greater spiritual import than economic. When we recognize in any cultural expression not just a singular product to be consumed but also a communal birthright to be celebrated, “diversity” is no longer something we must strive to embrace. It’s who we are.
