Elvis-inspired trainer fights Roma prejudice with music and coronary heart
Tudor Lakatos challenges Roma discrimination by means of Elvis Presley’s musical legacy.
Sporting a rhinestone shirt, outsized sun shades and a traditional Fifties quiff, Lakatos captivates audiences throughout Romania along with his distinctive renditions of songs like Blue Suede Sneakers.
Somewhat than being an impersonator, Lakatos harnesses Elvis’s common enchantment to dismantle stereotypes about Roma folks and encourage Roma youth.
“I by no means wished to get on stage, I didn’t give it some thought,” Lakatos, 58, stated after a current gig at a restaurant within the capital, Bucharest. “I solely wished one factor – to make pals with Romanians, to cease being referred to as a Gypsy,” he added, utilizing an typically derided time period for folks belonging to the Roma ethnic group.
The Roma, with South Asian origins, have endured centuries of persecution all through Jap Europe and proceed to face poverty, unemployment and prejudice. In Romania, they symbolize roughly seven p.c of the inhabitants, with one-fifth reporting discrimination experiences up to now 12 months, in accordance with European Union knowledge.
Lakatos started his mission within the early Nineteen Eighties as an artwork scholar throughout Nicolae Ceausescu’s communist regime. When anti-Roma sentiment was widespread, he found that Elvis’s music created connections with ethnic Romanian college students whereas concurrently symbolising resistance towards authorities oppression.
Now, 40 years later, his viewers has expanded. As a trainer for 25 years, Lakatos makes use of music to indicate his college students they will aspire past the restricted alternatives of their northwestern Romanian village.
“The adjective Gypsy is used in all places as an alternative to insult,” Lakatos stated. “We older folks have gotten used to it, we are able to swallow it, we grew up with it. I’ve stated many instances, ‘Name us what you need, dinosaur and brontosaurus, however at the very least be part of fingers with us to coach the subsequent era.’”
Regardless of his educating profession, Lakatos continues performing all through Romania at numerous venues.
The eclectic mixture of languages can typically result in surprises as a result of there’s not at all times a literal translation for Elvis’s Fifties American English.
For instance, “Don’t step on my blue suede footwear” doesn’t make sense to most of the youngsters he teaches as a result of they’re so poor, Lakatos stated.
In his model, the lyric Elvis made well-known turns into merely “Don’t step on my naked ft.”
It’s a message that Elvis – born in a two-room home in Tupelo, Mississippi, throughout the Nice Despair – in all probability would have understood.
