UTTARA ASHA COORLAWALA

I embrace this opportunity to mark the generous and profound meetings, through the work of Asian artists as they negotiate policies of funding and marginalization, situated between opposing aesthetic criteria, between nationalism and globalism, between internalized whiteness and internalized otherness. This paper reviews dances produced by the dancers collaboratively at APPEX 1999 with a view to identifying possible patterns and issues.

The configurations of how artists worked together yielded three generic collaborative patterns, although in each situation, individual personalities, histories, cultural baggage, and immediate and preceding circumstances qualified the nature of the interaction. In the first four assigned collaborative projects, topics were nominated after brainstorming in small groups and presenting these ideas to the larger group. Individuals indicated their preferences, which provided the basis for assigning individuals to various groups. The last project involved self-selected collaborations with self-selected artists.

Uttara Asha Coorlawala on tanpura with Lenny Seidman on tabla.
PHOTO: LARRY LOEHER

Most collaboration seemed to follow the dynamics of the circle, where each participant would have a say in how they envisioned the event to be created. Then, participants would contribute possible methods of realizing the selected collective vision, which could transform as the techniques to realize it evolved through trial and error. The process tended to work cyclically in spiraling loops of insight, work, accomplishment, and clarification. Fan Variations, Family Portrait, and Imaginary Homelands were among the works generated this way.

The second collaborative process was linear, as evidenced by the collaboration between musicians for the Cal Plaza Musical jam, where each musician was spotlighted individually while the remaining musicians supported the soloist. Ancestors was created in this way.

The third configuration of the working process involved, more traditionally, a director whose vision would hopefully include the visions of the remaining participants. In this structure, the participants interpreted and elaborated upon the director’s single but responsive vision according to their abilities and penchants. An example of this conventional model of choreographing or directing a play has not been described here.

Fan Variations1 was developed out of a circular collaborative process with translation-transformation as an operative system for generating variations on the spatial and stylistic qualities of the fan techniques in Chinese Opera. The dance began with the three dancers, Zhang Yijuan (Mme. Zhang), Cheng-Chieh Yu, and Minh Tran, posed with open fans in a traditional tripartite formation. Separating, they moved on to manipulate the fans in sequential progression starting with Mme. Zhang and ending with Minh. Gradually, the small, aerial trace forms suggested by the scooping wrist movements of the closely held fans extended into larger, arm-length arcs, and these in turn extended into traveled pathways of looping figure eights. Cheng-Chieh generated her variations of Mme. Zhang’s movement even as Minh generated variations of Cheng-Chieh’s movement, transferring the spatial patterns of Chinese movement into postmodern movements so that one could discern a kind of morphing effect that still retained an overall sense of unity. To accompany the dancers, percussionist Lenny Seidman supported and highlighted the danced action on the tabla. He used traditional tabla-playing techniques and phrases, but not in accordance with the Hindusthani patterns of organizing rhythm cycles. Rather, the tabla and other percussive instruments were appropriated to provide a non-cyclic, open sonic environment.

In the words of Cheng-Chieh, this postmodern framing of Beijing Opera fan techniques hinged on “Teacher Zhang as movement source and foundation.”2 All participants departed from their source materials: the postmodern dancers studied fan manipulation and movement techniques of Peking Opera; the traditional Opera performer forsook the conventional choreography of her tradition. Lenny extended himself to accompany what he had first perceived as superficial and decorative.3 Moving with refined finesse and flow, the stylistic qualities of Cheng-Chieh and Minh (both small boned) harmonized with a Chinese opera “look.” Despite six weeks of living together and teasing “Teacher Zhang” as her students in China never could, Minh and Cheng-Chieh manifested a profound respect for her art. No doubt this contributed to the intermeshing of the spatial and movement dynamics of the dancers and to the seemingly effortless reflection of this state by the musicians.

The same circular process of collaboration resulted in very different consequences in Imaginary Homelands, a work recalling the colonial experience.4 It evolved, as Thomas Riccio said, out of the dynamics of his discomfort at the realization that, in this group, he was the only non-Asian. Twice inscribed with dominance by gender and race orientation, Thomas took on the role of a White American Male (WAM), a foil against which the Asian participants might vent their desires and frustrations. Participants proposed movement images, voiced objections, and suggested remedies to the objections. For example, during the rehearsal on August 4, Joan Pangilinan-Taylor reminded the group that the rice-planting activity at the opening of the work was to indicate a Pan-Asian commonality of experience. Ta Vu Thu suggested that each perform a different rice planting action. Thomas suggested that they also do this in different rhythms so that the collective statement could be nuanced and complex. Joan and Cheng-Chieh immediately began to improvise an interactive, rhythmic dance sequence.

Imaginary Homelands was planned as a narrative of colonialism, of individuality surrendering to the seduction of capitalistic carrots, and of individuals becoming stereotypes of themselves. The following description is based on my memory of rehearsals and the final showing of this work to other APPEX participants.5 Imaginary Homelands opens on the Asians planting rice. Enter the tourist-intruder, Thomas, whose height and voice greatly contrasts with that of the smaller Asians. Thomas plays up the savagery of the white man but also the lonely uncertainty of a stranger who remains to further mercantile interests but becomes the object of the collective Asian gaze.

While To Mai Hoang displayed her desire for the handsome outsider, Cheng-Chieh and Nami Yamamoto played on the ironies of intra-Asian difference as they improvised with naming and language. Cheng-Chieh’s Japanese name, for example, referenced dual colonial experiences, the Japanese invasion of China and Japanese appropriation of Chinese pictographic script.

In another scene, the Asians faced Thomas and the audience while Thomas stood with his back to the audience between the Asians and the audience. Thomas and the “Asians” communicated through a kind of “Simon Says” game of gestures reflected back and forth. This spatial configuration made concretely visible a double displacement of subjecthood: we could only know Thomas via Asian representations of his actions and we could only know the Asians as imitations of Thomas! At the same time, we in the audience enjoyed the privilege of gazing upon the Asians and sharing Thomas’s perspective of them. I find it interesting that even when this spatial orientation was reversed with Thomas facing the audience and the Asians, the hegemonic implications remained the same, though not as complex.

I was struck by the extent to which this Simon Says game corresponds with Homi Bhabha’s description of the colonial subject as one who is absent, whose identity as Other

can never find representation in the tradition of representation that conceives of identity as the satisfaction of a totalizing plenitudinous object of vision.…In the postcolonial text the problem of identity returns as a persistent questioning of the frame, the space of representation where the image—missing person, invisible, eye, Oriental stereotype—is confronted with its difference its Other.6

Imaginary Homelands in its earlier phases promised profound renderings of the colonial experience. As rehearsals continued the next day, these accomplished performers continued to demonstrate a precise and sensitive sense of timing and spatial awareness as they grouped and regrouped in visually striking formations and as their voices blended and separated, rose into crescendos and petered out. However, the Asian participants’ reproduction of agreed-upon activities seemed to loose vitality. While Thomas, as colonial outcast foreigner played with situational relationships, the remaining performers—Peng Jingquan, Ta Vu Thu, To Mai, Nami, Cheng-Chieh, and Mme. Zhang—dissolved from individuals to a quantitative Asian presence, a supportive background. Cheng-Chieh vigorously protested that something was very wrong with the process, but somehow no one could quite identify the problem. The well-worn stereotypical behaviors of Asian passivity and resignation, of white dominance and adventurousness, and of the nuanced individuality of the colonizer versus the collective anonymity of the colonized had become more than just a performance; it had seeped into the dynamics of participation! The represented relationship had become the working relationship.

In Ancestors,7 the collaborative process followed the linear model of creative participation, in which each participant directed a section on the theme of Ancestral Memory with suggestions from the non-directing participants. The sequence of parts and the overall shape of the final presentation was arrived at by consensus. The following description is based on a videotape of the showing on August 12,1999.

Jettisoned by unseen hands, rolls of white paper speed across the black space in intersecting diagonals. One by one, black and white figures enter, moving with an inner focus as though listening intently to each other and the crackling silence for invisible cues. From time to time, they all pause simultaneously, then one and another break into action. As the piece continues, I begin to appreciate that these pauses of silence mark sections of the dance.

Carol McDowell during the “Ancestors” performance.
PHOTO: NAM HAU DOAN

Each participant negotiates the paper pathways and begins to revolve, cocooning self in the crackling white paper. The women pair off, each with a male. Partners revolve, support or wrap around one another on different levels—at the shoulders, at the chest. The activity dissolves. Downstage right, Sen Hea Ha crumples a roll and offers it to an Unseen Presence, while the dancers seated in a cluster upstage left watch intently. Sporadically they utter words like “gateway,” “body,” “memory,” “truth,” “ayna,” invoking by free association the ancestral figures of their own mind/body-scapes. Sen Hea Ha, aligned with the diagonal direction of the group’s focus, intensified her shamanic offerings to a crescendo of utterances. Suddenly, the flurry decreases and a more formal steady chanting begins. The participants each gather up the Gehry-esque paper cocoons in their arms and exit slowly, as deliberately as they had entered. Their intense focus and the stark, intentless dreamscape of archetypal inevitability recalled for me the vision of Japanese intercultural artist Kei Takei.

Revisiting the silent pauses when the listening focus seemed to be clearest, I note that the dancers appear to be listening as if for a directive, from an unspecified space beyond their individual bodies-as-desire, bodies-as-material-objects. These pauses evoke for me the Japanese theatrical convention Ma, or “meaningful silence,” that “refers to the presence of an invisible being in the character ruling mythically over the stage.”8

Sen Hea Ha during the development of “Ancestors”
PHOTO: TRACY FLINT

Carol McDowell brought to my attention that “the other dynamic in the composition was our ongoing dialogue with our ‘outside eyes’: Marian [Pastor Roces], Phillip [Pzorer], and you.”9 While I am not sure how this interaction shaped the final performance, I do know that Marian, who had remained close to the process throughout, observed at the last APPEX circle that concepts of inherent body knowledge and ancestral memories are associated with a history of racism.10 For Carol, this comment brought to crisis her beliefs about creativity. In her workshop, she had spoken of how she sought to choreograph from trance and shared some of her exercises for approaching this psychosomatic state. The remaining participants, however, did not seem to have been so impacted by Marian’s observation—perhaps because shamanic communications with other worlds through body, music, and dance have been acknowledged in their cultures from time immemorial and continue to be so without the burden of associations with genocide and beliefs in a superior body/race. Within Buddhist, Tantric, and Hindu worldviews, behaviours like racism are supposed to be contained by the accountability structured into beliefs such as Karma and reincarnation. In this belief system, superior physical and mental characteristics (as exemplified by the diverse animal and human forms of the Bodhisatvas) are perceived to have been achieved through moral effort sustained over several lives. However, within Hitler’s amoral Darwinian utopia, the superior body bore the characteristics of only the Aryan and its existence served to justify genocide and Hitler’s will-to-power. Carol was, in fact, the only participant in this dance not of East Asian origins (of Scottish ancestry, she had grown up in Hawaii); the remaining participants in this ritual-dance were from East and South Asian geo-cultures where Buddhist and related Tantric belief systems prevail.11 Paulina Sahagun, a Chicana who had been assigned to this group, opted out at an early stage because she found the direction of exploration to be incompatible12 with her own beliefs and process.

I propose that this concept of ancestors as a socially-inscribed but transcultural imaginary offered the dancers13 a pretext to interrogate a collective imaginary, where 14“being” is polarized into binaries as matter-spirit, physical-conceptual, body-mind, subject-object, individual-institutional, rational-irrational, transcendence-religion, inheritance-appropriation, mythic-historic, dominant-subaltern, First World-Third World. Perhaps these performers needed to interrogate the paradigms that dominate their modernist education and aesthetic production? If so, then why is it that their recourse to rituals (chanting, free association, stylized movement improvisations) can so easily be read as mystifying exoticisms? Perhaps we could turn to Masakuni Kitazawa for an answer. Kitazawa observed that all intersubjective fundamental doubting of modernity is doomed as long as it takes place in an environment where the imaginary and the mundane, logos and ethnos, are seen as mutually exclusive. “But,” he concludes hopefully, “if we could restore the performative to society, we would regain the collective imaginary. This imaginary, the universal immanent, is realer than real. This universal immanent can be reached only by means of performance.”

Exile15 is an example of two separate, self-selected projects that combined so fortuitously that the participants could not explain their process. It just came together, they said. The first project, the dance, had been begun the previous summer at APPEX by returning participants Eko Supriyanto and Sen Hea Ha. The Tibetan song (performed Sonam Phuntsok and Tashi Dhondup with Kyaw-Kyaw Naing providing keyboard accompaniment) recalls the predicament of the youngest prisoner in exile, the Panchen Lama. The “work” in these kinds of situations was in staying alert with the process, constantly observing, re-aligning, following, and listening to both the senses and to emotional resonance.

In Exile,16 the lights come up on three musicians situated upstage left of an incomplete square taped precisely onto the marley. Within this white frame lie two bodies, side by side, their heads nearest to the audience and facing upstage. As the profoundly affective singing commences, one body rolls into the embrace of the adjacent one, then over this body and back again to lie still, cradled one within the other. Fingers and toes articulate esoteric hasta (hand gestures) as they reach upwards gently, waving, twining and untwining. It is difficult to establish who is where until the barebacked Eko rises, peeling himself out of Sen Hea’s embrace. His back to the audience, Eko’s broad muscular back and thighs, his long-haired, masculine, sensual presence contradicts the delicate sensitivity of his movements and precise, detailed gestures. Sen Hea’s monk-like interiority, shaved head, and elongated El Greco-esque body and arms evoked a set of ascetic associations. Her fragile appearance seemed incapable of accomplishing what she then proceeded to do. Throughout the ensuing part of this dance she carried Eko—on her shoulders, on her back, in her arms across the front of her torso. They twined and untwined as she bent over him. Cradling his torso, she encases his palms in hers, the four palms pressed together in praying gesture. The carrying seems to be about caressing. Each one reaches very softly over to touch the forehead of the other. With a passion quiet but consuming, one limb appears to grow out of another, peripheries encase and interlace, touching and not touching. Suddenly, Eko jumps up and runs, breaking the unbearable intimacy, only to return to his postmodern Pieta. She bears him out of the gap in the square to settle on the floor downstage right again in mutual embrace. The musicians rise and enter the square, and the lights dimmed to tumultuous applause.

“Exile” performers Eko Supriyanto and Sen Hea Ha
PHOTOS: NAM HAU DOAN

In this dance, the metaphor of the framed space propels the theme, Exile, towards its completion as the Tibetans move from “freedom” outside the taped square into the enclosed area, their subjugated homeland Tibet, while the Korean and the Javanese dancers move from within the enclosures of their inherited traditions outwards to “open” intercultural and international spaces.

In the presentation of this dance, the personal and the aesthetic are entangled deliberately by the performers, by the APPEX environment, and their reasons for performing. When introducing themselves, each of the Tibetans found it relevant to say “I am a Tibetan. I was born in Dharamsala, in north India.” Said Sen Hea, “You receive tonight a very emotional, difficult, but beautiful process that we have been going through.” Eko said thoughtfully, “I am from Solo, Central Java. THIS IS THE BEST EXPERIENCE IN MY LIFE. We have shared a deep level of knowledge, friendship, appreciation of our cultures, hearts, and art.” Despite traditional garb, photogenic physiognomies, and exotic instruments, the quiet, gentle countenances of the performers, their utterances of personal exile and personal commitment rendered it impossible to see them as performing bodies-as-art objects. The personal, the circumstantial, and the aesthetic had become symbiotically entangled so that it was difficult for myself, indeed for any observer, to maintain critical distance. Feminists might applaud this framing of a subject position, but in the fiercely invested battle to keep arts clear of politics, personalizing has been branded a strategy of victims.17 Many dance critics still hold that—regardless of culturally inscribed difference—if a dance needs to be explained, it cannot be “good.” Rarely is this same demand for transcendence imposed on dances produced within the same culture as the perceiver’s.

In their self-presentation, I recognize what I am tempted to call an “APPEX-UCLA style.” It marks a response to the pressure to participate in the low-context, transparent, functional aesthetic of Anglo-American avant-garde art when offering up highly contextual traditions as Korean dance, Javanese dance, and Tibetan opera to be accessed via the “unmediated encounter.18” But then, the group personalized their presentation by describing the process as a profound human experience and, in doing so, found a way to serve the advocatory mission of the Tibetan performers as well as frame the work as authentically non-western.

“Exile” musicians Sonam Phuntsok and Kyaw Kyaw Naing
PHOTO: LARRY LOEHER

While Korean and Javanese stylistic gesture codes flavored the dance with appropriate exoticism, difference was ameliorated by the use of abstracted “universalized” movement accessed phenomenologically. The androgynous appearance and behavior of the two dancers complicates the sexual implications of the work. Mother and son, male-female, asceticism and sensuality all dissolve into and emerge from each other in a mobius strip of ambiguous associations leaving space for many interpretations. To “appreciate” the dance, the politics of the song do not have to be understood, and if they are, they can be read either within the context of “victimhood” or as micropolitical interventions in dominant space. Exiles succeeds precisely because it fulfills Eurocentric expectations of intercultural otherness, without disturbing the status quo.

At APPEX 1999, dance projects involved improvisational techniques and problematized difference (gayness, colonial-colonized, identity). Spontaneity highlights the real-time aspect of performance and heightens focus and suspense. Improvisation allows entryways for new images. Improvisational techniques thus enabled diversely-trained individuals to select both familiar and unfamiliar movements and inflect the movements with their own stylistic qualities within an agreed-upon structure. That the visual impact of these improvised performances was so pleasing had to do with the consummate skill of the performers. However, improvisation skills can also seduce improvisers and observers into accepting surface and leaving crucial issues unprobed, unrecognized, especially when negotiating time constraints and the constant pace of group activities. This was most visible in projects where artists were assigned to groups, as in the Imaginary Homelands and the Peking Opera projects. When collaborative partners were self-selected, as in the Fan Dance and Exiles projects, then they were able to explore structures and content more extensively.

A work like Exiles fulfills Eurocentric expectation delightfully while works like Ancestors and Imaginary Homelands are extremely valuable in that they probe Asian and non-Asian frames of representation and of thought. At APPEX, performers steeped in traditional moulds of far flung geo-cultures quickly imbibed the significance of the improvisatory games and looked eagerly for suggestions regarding structure. This exchange aspect of APPEX would make their works more accessible to the postmodern-global market and therefore more valued in their home cultures as well. It would be simplistic to ignore the frame of “whiteness” which encircled and profoundly influenced the shape of activities at APPEX. Even as APPEX deliberately privileges Asian-ness and is run by Asians and women of color, still, it is funded by American institutions and located discursively and geographically at the University of California at Los Angeles, i.e. within whiteness.19 Despite attempts to conceive of Asian intercultural performance as having its own global market, a market with its own criteria, the individual and collective presentations were as much about Asianness as about negotiation between Asianness and Whiteness. Ultimately, for the individual artists at least, it seems that it is in strategies for negotiating the global market that empowerment lies. APPEX offered opportunities to exchange such strategies for six brief but cocooned weeks. I believe that it is significant and necessary to create a space for exploring such negotiations as took place at APPEX 1999.

1 - Fan Variations, as videotaped and performed August 11, 1999, by C. Jason Koontz, Carol Lyn McDowell, Minh Tran, Lenny Seidman, Cheng-Chieh Yu, and Yijuan Zhang.
2 - These words were spoken by Cheng-Chieh Yu in her introduction to the salon performance.
3 - Upon being induced to actually try out the fan techniques, Lenny realized that this was a highly developed skill as demanding as playing the tabla, and hence his participation.
4 - Imaginary Homelands was performed as an in-house showing only. Participating were Peng Jingquan, Nami Yamamoto, Thomas Riccio, Joan Taylor-Pangilinan, Ta Vu Thu, To Mai Hoang, Zhang Yijuan, and Cheng-Chieh Yu.
5 - Based on notes for August 4, 1999.
6 - Homi K. Bhabha, “Interrogating Identity,” The Location of Culture, ed. Homi K Bhabha, NY: Routledge 1994, 46.
7 - Ancestors: Sen Hea Ha, Pichet Klunchuen, Eva Lee, Carol Lyn McDowell, Rajkumar Tombisana Singh, and Eko Supriyanto.
8 - Masakuni Kitazawa, “Myth, Performance, and Politics,” in TDR/The Drama Review, 36, No 3 (T135), Fall 1992, 165.
9 - Email communication, November 25, 2000.
10 - Linda Tomko notes that attention to the materiality of the body in the early twentieth century owed much to concepts of social evolutionism and that modern dance explored this linkage of mind-body-knowledge. See Linda Tomko, Dancing Class, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999, p.188. Carol McDowell cites another version of this article.
11 - Rajkumar Tombisana Singh is from Manipur where Meitei beliefs strongly endorse a mind-body-earth connection. Eko Supriyanto comes from a tradition of Javanese dance where dance is meditation (rasa avastha). Pichet spent several months in a monastery learning meditation and spiritual discipline.
12 - Email communication.
13 - For Eko, it was “just a topic to make a dance.” Personal communication, July 2000.
14 - Masakuni Kitazawa, “Myth, Performance, and Politics,” in TDR/The Drama Review, 36, No 3 (T135), Fall 1992.
15 - The description is based on the videotape of the showing on August 11, 1999. Participants were Tashi Dhondup, Sen Hea Ha, Kyaw-Kyaw Naing, Sonam Phuntsok, and Eko Supriyanto.
16 - The description is based on two videotapes of the showing on August 11, 1999. Participants were Tashi Dhondup, Sen Hea Ha, Kyaw-Kyaw Naing, Sonam Phuntsok, and Eko Supriyanto. One videotape was filmed by the APEX crew: Marlene Millar, Phillip Pzorer, and Carmella Vassor. I am indebted to choreographer-participant Eva Lee for her sensitive close-up recording as well.
17 - See Arlene Croce, “Discussing the Undiscussable,” The New Yorker, Dec 26, 1994. This article was followed by a spate of responses in many publications. Here, Croce writes, “When a victim artist finds his or her public, a perfect, mutually manipulative union is formed which no critic may put asunder....”
18 - See Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, “Confusing Pleasures,” in Destination Culture, Berkeley: University of California Press 1998.
19 - See earlier version of this paper where I cited Raka Shome, “Whiteness and the Politics of Location,” in Whiteness: The Communication of Social Identity, eds. Thomas K. Nakaya and Judith N. Martin, London: Sage Publications 1999. Shome writes: “As a power-laden discursive formation that privileges, secures, and normalizes the cultural space of the white Western subject, whiteness ‘travels’ and has historically ‘traveled’ to ‘other worlds’—whether it was the physical travel of white imperial bodies colonizing ‘other worlds’ or today’s neocolonial travel of white cultural products—media, music, television products, academic texts, and Anglo fashions—to ‘other worlds.’”