Burmese let off steam with parties and pole-dancing

DANCE music thunders through a crowd of thousands, past pavilions where skinny women in impossibly high heels gyrate around metal poles and into the streets filled with taxis ferrying partygoers to the free, whisky-soaked concert in the park.

Myanmar is a country where owning a fax machine without a permit is illegal, where even spontaneous gatherings of more than five people are technically banned and where critics of the government are regularly locked away for decades in tiny prison cells.

Yet despite this repression, or perhaps partly because of it, young people are pushing the limits of what the military government considers acceptable art and entertainment.

Art exhibitions, some featuring risky hidden political messages, open nearly every week in Yangon, Myanmar's main city. Yangon has a festival of underground music, including punk bands, twice a year. Fans of the most popular genres, hip-hop and electronic dance music, wear low-slung baggy trousers to regularly held concerts.

U Thxa Soe, a popular artist who mixes traditional "spirit dances" with something resembling techno music, said he believed the government had tolerated wild concerts in recent years partly because it suited its strategy of control.

"You need to squeeze and release, squeeze and release," he said. "We live in fear. We live under a dictatorship. People need fresh air. They release their anger, their energy."

The success of artists like Thxa Soe undermines Myanmar's image as a place of no freedoms. The country, formerly known as Burma, is by many measures a brutally authoritarian place – human rights groups count 2,100 political prisoners.

But even if the generals willed it, many people believe the government would not be able to pull off North Korean-style totalitarianism. Society is too unruly, disorganised and corrupt, people are too creative, and the climate too hot for 24-hour repression.

The police are famously brutal, but they too suffer from tropical torpor. A common scene is a group of police officers napping in the back of a truck.

Over the past two years, entertainment options have rapidly expanded for residents of the country's largest cities.

The government has nurtured the creation of a football league after years without any organised matches. Football games are raucous, with fans spewing invective towards the opposing side, ignoring government exhortations to be "polite".

The number of FM radio stations in Yangon, formerly Rangoon, has gone from just one a few years ago to a handful that play both Burmese and western-style music. A private company recently started up the country's first television channel dedicated to music videos.

"The government is trying to distract people from politics," said a Western-educated Burmese businessman, who did not want to be identified for fear it could jeopardise his business. "There's not enough bread, but there's a lot of circuses."

A good example of Myanmar's contradictions came earlier this month, as the leader of the ruling junta, Senior General Than Shwe, observed Peasants Day with a message addressed to the "Esteemed Peasantry".

At a lakeside fairground in Yangon, security guards had trouble holding back the thousands of fans, who clambered over one another like peasants in revolt to watch a concert of pop and heavy metal music.

Thxa Soe said he had experienced both the government's hard-line rigidity and its quirky, laissez-faire side. He is one of the most harassed musicians in the country, constantly called in for reprimands by the censors, who banned nine of the 12 tracks on a recent album.

Yet in a telling sign of the complexities of Burmese society, his hard-driving music is popular with civil servants. He sometimes jokes with the military intelligence officers assigned to spy on his shows. They are also fans, he said. He was invited to inaugurate the zoo at the country's new capital, Naypyidaw, several years ago and has been invited back to perform three times.

"Some people in government like me, some people hate me," he said.

His songs include We Have No Money, a title that appears to have slipped past the censors. Poverty is a delicate topic in Myanmar, because many blame government mismanagement and corruption for the country's poor economic performance.

Artists say the censorship board's approval process often seems random and inconsistent.

For example, U Thu Myat Aung, 24, an artist who says he draws inspiration from the British street artist Banksy, hosted the country's first graffiti show this month, on the eve of Peasants Day.

"We've been wanting to do this since 2003, but we weren't allowed," he said.