Exclusive:Festival director: Roma culture needs to gain same status as Irish music in Scotland
The Ando Glaso Roma Fest wants to highlight Roma culture and music
Roma culture needs to gain the same status as Irish music to allow Scotland's Roma population to “collaborate” with society, the head of a cultural festival has said.
Janos Lang, director of the Ando Glaso Roma Fest, said Scotland needed to embrace Roma and gypsy music "as its own" as he said he aims to start a local production company to tour Scottish Roma bands and musicians.
The first UK symposium on Roma culture is to be held as part of the festival, which takes place in Glasgow next weekend.
Two stars of Roma “pop music” with Slovak and Czech roots - Bobby Blaze and Lucie Bikárová -are also to appear at the festival, at the city’s BaaD and Elim Church venues, as well as Scotland-based Roma music groups.
Mr Janos said he wanted to start a production company in Scotland, AG Productions, to showcase Roma music, while Roma cultural night Barvale has started touring around Scotland.
Earlier this year, the organisation was granted multi-year funding by Creative Scotland.
He said: “Thanks to our funding, we have the opportunity to do more things. We’re trying to take our Roma music around the country a bit more, to different places in Scotland to bring our music and culture to more people.
“We will always organise our own events, but we’re trying to build up more of a brand, a strategy around our work and establish a new strand of our work as a production company. We want to give [musicians] some real pathways and look into how can we build the brand and how can we build jobs within Roma culture in Scotland.”
He said he hoped that would help give Roma music a similar status as that afforded by Irish music.
“We want to be a producers of high quality material whether that is Roma pop, for that scene or how to run our own ten-piece Scottish Roma ensemble,” he said. “That’s a direction we are trying to take. It is very exciting.”
He said: “If you think about how Irish music has gone, this is what we should be doing. We have at least as strong a cultural heritage, but we don’t have the visibility and brand that Irish music has in the world.
“That’s why we desperately need something like that to showcase the best of it, to build up an appetite among the general public and for Scottish and UK audiences to see it as their own.”
The symposium will feature Roma organisations from across Europe and the rest of the UK, as well as panellists from Creative Scotland.
Mr Lang said: “Hopefully, we will have a very eye-opening, good, interesting and fruitful conversation about what is happening and hopefully it shines light, not only on our own needs of being included in the Scottish cultural scene, but why ethnic minorities generally benefit from such a thing and why we need more of that.”
He acknowledged a problem with stereotypes around the Roma community.
In 2012, as part of a UK-wide framework created for the EU on Roma integration, the Scottish Government acknowledged that the “Roma community is one of the most disenfranchised and discriminated against in Scotland”.
He said: ““We want to use our tangible culture and heritage to create collaboration within our own communities in Scotland. We need to look at the tools we have to change that [discrimination] and I can’t think of anything better to do that than arts and culture.”
Comments
Want to join the conversation? Please or to comment on this article.