A South African Audience

Tonight I went out to a talent show hosted on campus. It was interesting, let me tell you. For one, it was about three hours long, which is a bit too long if you ask me. They also had a real mix of talent, and some of the singers just could not keep their pitch up. Which made me uncomfortable, I hate people not being on pitch. Anyways, I'm a music geek. Those aspects of the show however didn't make it any different from other similar shows I've been to in the US. The distinctly South African difference for this show was the audience. I don't know if I can quite explain the difference in a comprehensive way. Let's just say that American audiences, for the most part, are quite passive and unemotionally involved comparatively. Audiences here (true I have been to all of two shows, so this is a vast blanket statement, but I feel like it would hold true in other circumstances) are so participatory. I don't think the audience was silent once. And everyone around me was so expressive in terms of whether or not they thought the act was good, if they thought the performer was hot, if they thought the act was going on too long. People were quick to boo performers they thought were bad, which made me want to go up and smack all 200 (overestimation) of them. Thought that wouldn't be practical though. I'm of course not saying I've never heard anyone be booed before, but never to that extent. Someone argued with me afterwards that if they are of the age to be in university, they are old enough to hear that they are no good. I tried to argue that the stakes were not high enough at a silly university talent show to warrant that kind of criticism, but he wasn't buying it. Thoughts? Opinions?

To show their appreciate for good acts (though honestly, the acts didn't have to be that wonderful. They just had to be better than average) people were quick to stand and scream and get fairly riled up when they thought something was good. That's rare in the States right? A single person standing in the middle of an act totally engrossed in the performance? It's not like it was like a rock concert or anything. And it wasn't just one person, lots of individuals would do it. Not at the end or the performance either, though it would happen at the end too of course, right in the middle of like a dance number or something. The other weird reaction from the audience was at the very beginning of the show there was a request for everyone to turn off their cell phone (normal right?) and there was this outcry unlike any I would have ever expected. It's standard procedure to switch of cell phones when you're going to see a performance right? More people have cell phones here than in the States (I think) because the payment method is different. You buy airtime rather than a cell phone 'plan.' That means that you can pay as much as you want for a set amount of minutes and once you run out of those you go and buy more. That way people who maybe don't have a lot of money for an extraneous cost of a cell phone can just buy a few airtime minutes and only use it for emergencies or something. So, according to Duduetsang people are very attached to their phones here. She said people would die for their phones, which I'm banking on being a joke.

Anyways, after the talent show I got a text from a friend that they were going laser tagging, which of course got me really excited. I ran out from the talent show a little early (ten minutes before it hit the 3 hr mark. they were deciding the ultimate winners, which I didn't have very high personal stakes in) and hopped in the car knowing next to nothing about the plans besides the fact that they involved laser tag. Unfortunately once we got there we found out that it was closed for the night (at 10:30 on a Friday, it was super lame). It wasn't too huge a loss. The mall was an outdoor one and Sarah (the other American Sarah) and I danced to ABBA next to rainbow fountains, which was a good time. And then we got hamburgers and drove around. It was really fun actually, even though we didn't really do a lot of concrete things. All in all, I mark it off as an interesting and ultimately successful Friday night. And maybe I'll actually get work done tomorrow. I know I didn't do any last night. Instead I had a marathon with those who could manage it (four of us in total who made it through the entire thing) of all three Bourne movies. It was pretty intense. I really didn't think we'd make it through all three, but by the time we got through two we figured that we had made it that far and had to commit to the last one. Totally worth it, even if my bed started getting pretty uncomfortable to sit on by the end of the night.