Tudor Lakatos challenges Roma discrimination by way of Elvis Presley’s musical legacy.
Sporting a rhinestone shirt, outsized sun shades and a basic Nineteen Fifties quiff, Lakatos captivates audiences throughout Romania along with his distinctive renditions of songs like Blue Suede Sneakers.
Moderately than being an impersonator, Lakatos harnesses Elvis’s common enchantment to dismantle stereotypes about Roma individuals and encourage Roma youth.
“I by no means wished to get on stage, I didn’t give it some thought,” Lakatos, 58, mentioned after a latest gig at a restaurant within the capital, Bucharest. “I solely wished one factor – to make buddies with Romanians, to cease being referred to as a Gypsy,” he added, utilizing an typically derided time period for individuals 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 % of the inhabitants, with one-fifth reporting discrimination experiences previously yr, in keeping with European Union knowledge.
Lakatos started his mission within the early 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 instructor for 25 years, Lakatos makes use of music to point out his college students they’ll aspire past the restricted alternatives of their northwestern Romanian village.
“The adjective Gypsy is used in every single place as an alternative choice to insult,” Lakatos mentioned. “We older individuals have gotten used to it, we will swallow it, we grew up with it. I’ve mentioned many instances, ‘Name us what you need, dinosaur and brontosaurus, however no less than be part of palms with us to teach the following era.’”
Regardless of his instructing profession, Lakatos continues performing all through Romania at numerous venues.
The eclectic mixture of languages can generally result in surprises as a result of there may be not at all times a literal translation for Elvis’s Nineteen Fifties American English.
For instance, “Don’t step on my blue suede footwear” doesn’t make sense to lots of the kids he teaches as a result of they’re so poor, Lakatos mentioned.
In his model, the lyric Elvis made well-known turns into merely “Don’t step on my naked toes.”
It’s a message that Elvis – born in a two-room home in Tupelo, Mississippi, in the course of the Nice Melancholy – in all probability would have understood.