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Shifting Musical Imaginaries at the Polynesian Cultural Center
Abstract
The Polynesian Cultural Center (PCC) is a cultural tourism site run by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) as a money-making enterprise to support students and programs at Brigham Young University-Hawai’i (BYU-H). Polynesian music and dance performances are the definitive centerpiece of the PCC experience, and visitors are treated to live entertainment repeatedly throughout the park. These presentations can be read as performative texts and are here subjected to semiotic and discursive analysis. The immersive and repetitive nature of the elements of these performances (e.g., costumes, musical styles, kinesics, narrative descriptions) are designed to create easily understood musical identities for tourists to associate with each Polynesian culture encountered. The identities presented engage in well-worn cultural stereotypes derived from existing colonial and tourist imaginaries to produce an experience that is marketed to tourists as an opportunity to get to know Polynesia in one day. In this article, we analyze the significant changes recently made to their long-standing and highly popular canoe-based musical show through a comparative analysis of the musical imaginaries embodied in each version. The deliberate changes in cultural identity messaging documented are considered in the context of on-going shifts in Polynesian diasporic ethnic identity formation, as well as the history of the LDS in the Pacific. We argue that, ultimately, the revised canoe pageant can be understood as a musical narrative that packages the LDS’ colonial-missionizing relationship to Polynesians into a musical imaginary not just for consumption by tourists, but also by the performers (indigenous LDS members) themselves.
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