“Culture as a Precursor to Augmented Trade Relations”: Indonesian Musics, Multicultural Festivals, and Vancouver’s Changing Transpacific Identity, 1984–1986

In the mid-1980s, Vancouver witnessed a sudden explosion in presentations of an Indonesian music tradition called gamelan. Brought to the city as part of an intentional programme of increasing economic connectivity with the wider Asia Pacific region, gamelan began appearing among other musics from the Pacific Rim on large stages at the 1985 Asia Pacific Festival and Expo 86. The emphasis on using arts and cultures to facilitate trade was explicitly expressed both within these festivals and by local, provincial, federal, and business interests, creating the appearance of a hegemonic programme leveraging arts and culture for economic ends, yet these developments also created the conditions wherein local artists could subvert the material and cultural resources and the ideologies bringing them to the city during this time. Throughout Expo 86, these artists recognized that, although their interests were not reflected in the utilitarian uses of Indonesian musical culture at the large festivals, there was an opportunity to channel these resources to their own ends. Examining the connections built between these artists, their larger community, the musicians present at the 1985 Asia Pacific Festival and Expo 86, and governments and institutions with transnational political and economic interests reveals that Vancouver’s changing transpacific political economy was a contested process that resulted in the creation of a long-standing community for the study and performance of Indonesian musics and arts in Vancouver.