MARINA ROSEMAN

Standing beside a large, black piece of luggage with a yellow ribbon tied to its handle, Taiwanese-born dancer and performance artist Cheng-Chieh Yu told the gathered group of APPEX artists a “homeland story”:

This bag is made in Taiwan. This is the first bag that I brought with me the first time when I come to America in 1989. My mom bought this in the night-market really close to our home at that time. And after that, the first time I pick it up, I knew I am not going to return home for a while. And after I arrive in America, when I quickly learned that what “Made in Taiwan” means, it means “cheap stuff”.…So I never used it again. And it was forgotten for eleven years in the back of my closet. And I forget about it until this time I come to APPEX.… In the airport when I start to check it in, I pick it up, and I see this yellow ribbon, and [her voice breaks] it reminds me of my mom, that I’ve been forget with this bag with this yellow ribbon for 11 years, and that was in the airport, the first time when I left, my mom tied it on for me. And her intention was always that I wouldn’t mistake my luggage with other people, and other people won’t pick it up. So here I am with this luggage and the yellow ribbon.

Nuryanto Nuto Susanto in “Homeland”
PHOTO: LARRY LOEHER

Cheng-Chieh’s story of movement between times and places later took shape in a dance performed with her bag.1 And the visual image of luggage being carried from one place to another percolated through various Projects into final Performances, in “Journey”2 and “Interlude: The Arrival.”

Cheng-Chieh was one of 21 performing artists and five writers who arrived from their respective homelands in July 2000 to the UCLA campus to share their arts and create anew, collectively. We each came to the “here” of APPEX with particular gravitational points in our personal and artistic identities—our homelands—while simultaneously creating a new “home” together at the APPEX house and the Dance Building. Our mission together was fourfold: (1) to engage in the process of intercultural artistic collaboration; (2) to produce works, both performed and written; (3) to document the experience; and, hopefully, (4) to carry the reverberations of that experience into our continuing lives as artists in an increasingly globalized world.

Marina Roseman
PHOTO: EKO SUPRIYANTO

Artists and their audiences meet in a space of creation at the nexus between everyday life and staged performance. This sense of “in-betweenness” multiplies when performances evolve at cultural borderlines. I explore here the journey we took together at APPEX, creating on an intercultural stage, itself informed by the increasingly complex grounds upon which we live, betwixt and between cultures and identities, in the global ecumene. I draw upon recorded interviews; co-reflection with performers, writers, and staff; conversations and observations in informal daily contexts; participant-observation in collaborative processes resulting in several performance pieces; and analysis of videotaped program sessions. Nonetheless, there will remain, as our APPEX writers’ group noted during discussions and subaltern theorists remind us, “hidden voices” that will be submerged by our accounts, while other voices speak.3

APPEX puts artists from around the world in control, for a brief yet powerful moment, of the global flow of creative crosscurrents. Through documenting and interpreting that experience, as we do here, the APPEX project also offers guideposts to other artists who may embark upon the journey toward intercultural collaboration in the performing arts.

Shared themes, like the themes of childhood or homelands, evoke very different associations and experiences, bringing cultural differences into sharp relief. Individuals across different cultures nonetheless sense similarities in their experiences and reactions, providing potential for common ground. Both the shock of difference and the comfort of similarities can offer fertile ground for the content of performance pieces and also for collaborative techniques.

At APPEX, we were suspended between a seemingly conflictual set of goals: respecting difference, on the one hand, and forging common ground, on the other. This produced creative tensions that had the potential to be productive or destructive. How might we respect our differences, even as we built bridges across them? One useful collaborative strategy was thematic: our creative energies initially converged around a central theme that embodied issues of complex origins and exchanges. Another strategy involved facilitation, in the guise of both appointed and emergent moderators. These facilitators helped transform the friction of difference into sparks of creativity. A third strategy involved intuiting congruences in structural forms of artistic materials—tunings, characters, movements—while highlighting distinctions along other axes. Invoking such strategies, by design and by chance, we sought to maintain artistic and cultural integrity even as we reached toward one another across cultural and disciplinary borderlines.

Our APPEX 2000 group, the fifth in a series spanning seven years, was built upon experience and knowledge gleaned from previous years. The director of APPEX, Judy Mitoma, recalled:

It was in 1997, the second APPEX group. During our short introductory exercises, the group came up with an idea about childhood. Very innocent. When they went off to work on the piece, there were a Bangladeshi and a Vietnamese with two Americans. They decided to work on the six- to nine-year-old years of childhood. The Bangladeshi brought in the terrible war and struggle with independence. The Vietnamese recalled growing up during bombings. The two Americans remembered playing in their backyards with swing sets. Everyone had to be honest. We might think we’re a lot alike, and we might wish we were a lot alike. But as we get into these specific moments in our lives, we realize that we are not. What they came up with was riveting. They were so very clear in what they wanted to say, and it came out so clearly, so powerfully. A healthy respect started.

The group realized that powerful intercultural performance came from the honest recognition that a seemingly shared moment—childhood—could be experienced historically and culturally in such radically different ways. Participants from the next APPEX in 1999 felt their own experience was rather “abstract,” and suggested there be an organizing theme to guide future APPEX artists. Judy decided to try this, and chose the theme “homelands” for APPEX 2000.

Our collaborative process began, during the first few days, with short introductory, biographical presentations, and homeland stories presented by each individual artist and writer. Through these self-presentations, we began to complicate the notion of homeland, developing a more richly complex knowledge of each other. Stories were delivered in a multitude of performance styles, from narrative to sounds, songs, movement, and performance art. As artists told their stories, some common ground in their experiences emerged.

“Oseiku” Daniel Diaz
PHOTO: LARRY LOEHER

In a comic piece punctuated by the electronic beep of an alarm clock that had accompanied him through his travels, a Thai writer, Pattara Danutra (Teh), suddenly began weeping as he shared how his parents, after living forty years in Thailand, still have to obtain special papers to leave the country, because they are Chinese. Just as Teh has struggled with his Chinese heritage within Thai identity politics, so too, “Oseiku” Daniel Diaz, a multiracial percussionist from the United States, has tangled with identity politics in the U.S. He claimed: “I don’t buy into the philosophy of saying ‘I’m half this,’ and ‘I’m mixed.’ I’m not mixed, because I’m not mixed up, and I’m not half of anything. I am everything that my ancestors are. So I am Taino, and I am European, and I am African. No problem. If someone else wants to put me in a box, that’s their job. I’m cool.” The particular cultural and historical dynamics informing Teh and Oseiku’s lives differ, but their mutual experience of grappling with life “in-between” multiple identities offers common ground for their work as artists.

At the APPEX house, we cooked, talked, and did our laundry while homelands and borderlines continued to intersect and overlap informally. Like migrants traversing the globe, the homelands theme and its permutations—exile, journeys, nostalgia, encounters—split off, transformed, and coalesced once more. New, substantive themes emerged, as well. In one introductory presentation, Okinawan dancer Higa Norihiro danced his wife’s dream describing a return visit to her now-changed homeland. This presentation was transformed in the many developmental stages to follow—studio laboratories and sessions on Topics, Homelands, and Projects4—and was performed by artists from five performance traditions in the final APPEX performances.5 The dramatic narration expressed how homelands are illusory images that nonetheless maintain powerful effects upon our experience of lived reality: “Now I know that the homeland is in my memory, like a tapestry of images I carry inside.”

While creating together at the borderlines, we also struggled to maintain cultural and disciplinary integrity. Artists’ personal experiences with in-between identities aided us in this struggle. For example, Oseiku’s philosophy of conjoining not many halves, but rather many wholes, informs his practice of intercultural collaboration, as he later expressed: “I take traditional rhythms, I hear different rhythms, traditional rhythms, but I hear them come together, I hear similarities. So what I like to do sometimes is take people from different cultures and have them play together, without compromising. Without putting something on top and just having them play anything. I want them to play their rhythm.”6

Chinese Opera performer Peng Jingquan expressed this as the tension between “watering down” each artist’s contribution, versus maintaining the “watermark” that makes each artist’s contribution personally, culturally, or historically unique. Peng elaborates:

APPEX involves many different cultures, backgrounds, countries, artists. Each person has a foundation… each with their own particular talent, that’s the way they are chosen, then put together. We want to see, what is the specialness, what is the strong point from that culture that the artist stands for. And during the process of collaboration… I find, for me, if I’m a traditional Chinese Opera actor, to make me become a Javanese dancer, that’s very difficult for me, for me maybe I lose my own self, and for the Javanese dancing, maybe you ruin their art. You can learn that, the way they present their story or their special philosophical thinking on art, but you cannot become them. So when we embrace this standing point to try to connect, and only this way, we can still keep ourselves, and maybe we can connect with another style of theater or art or dancing. And this is what I think. Or otherwise maybe you make me to mimic another style of art, and he tries to weaken himself to become me, both of us are lost.

When he joined Ettumanoor Kannan Parameswaran (Kannan), a virtuoso of traditional Kathakali dance theater from Kerala, India, to create a piece based on the Oedipus story, Peng’s major collaborative strategy was to embrace that “strong point from that culture that the artist stands for.” Peng remains a consummate Chinese Opera actor enacting the role of King Laios, as exhibited in his powerful movements, exaggerated facial expressions, comic touches, and declamatory intonations during his character introduction, and during a fight scene when Oedipus forbids him to hunt a deer.7 The musicians imitate the sounds of Chinese gongs, cymbals, and drums during sections when King Laios dominates the action, and during fight scenes.

Kannan, too, embraces his own “standing point” as the place from which to connect with Peng’s theatrical style. Kannan’s skills as a Kathakali dancer blossom in the Oedipus piece, for example, in the use of his hands to create images when he introduces his Oedipus character, who travels through a land where there are “no bees” and “no flowers.” His Kathakali training erupts in his rhythmic use of his feet on the floor when he dances a celebratory dance after slaying King Laios the hunter.8

The piece was blended into a structural whole by the two virtuosos’ respect of each other’s artistry, their willingness to construct a common ground, and their shared mission within APPEX. Peng reflects further upon the process:

Kannan is Kathakali, very pure, very special. And I try to put Chinese traditional opera in a systematic way. In this movement, I cannot become Kathakali, and Kannan cannot become Chinese traditional actor, but both of us can keep our strong points, keep what we are, and we try to connect each other, or sometimes we can mix each other. But we cannot become each other.

The two artists also stretched their respective disciplinary orientations as they tried to “mix with each other.” Kannan speaks on stage, for example, during his character’s introduction; the homeland theme percolates momentarily in Oedipus’s declamation: “I am coming away from a prophet to my homeland. In my homeland, a sword is waiting for me to kill my father.” Kannan describes his efforts to stretch the usually non-verbal Kathakali dramatic technique to integrate verbal dialogue:

In our [Kathakali] style we are presenting the piece, but we never speak dialogue on stage.… A song will be sung from behind, and we interpret the meaning of the song using hand gesture language. But here in this production, because nobody is familiar with the hand gesture language, we have a plan to include dialogue. …For me even that is new, for putting our own gestures in this very foreign form it is very difficult. Even then I am trying my best and my friends are helping me giving feedback and suggestions.… I will use these Kathakali gestures and dialogue together after I go back to Kerala to present a different type of theater.

“Kannan, I think, is very open,” Peng observed, appreciating how this master in his own technique was willing to extend himself to learn new performance techniques. In Kathakali, performers never touch one another, whereas in Chinese opera, with its acrobatics and martial arts, they do. Kannan was willing to learn from Peng and choreograph contact between the two.

The fight between Oedipus (Kannan) and Laios (Peng) in “Oedipus”
PHOTO: LARRY LOEHER

With these two strong virtuosos from different traditions anchoring the production, the Oedipus group welcomed Cheng-Chieh when she expressed her desire to join the project. Peng observed that with her multiple bases in traditional Chinese and modern dance, and as a dancer who also had some training in Chinese Opera, she could function as what he termed “a mutual: she’s standing in the middle, she can draw two sides and put them together. But if you choose another person, maybe it’s too difficult for them.” Choreographically, she wove the sections of the stage together as she rolled from one side of the stage and set of instruments across to the other, or as she darted, spry as a deer, between King Laios the hunter and Oedipus her defender. As the character who is both King Laios’ wife, and Oedipus’ wife and mother, she also weaves as a woman between men. As the ghost of Oedipus’ mother and wife, Cheng-Chieh reaches across boundaries of morality, despite Destiny’s attempts to separate them, and soothes the grieving Oedipus.9

While the first section, through the death of Laios, came together fairly easily, the production ran into trouble developing the second section. Aware that the entire piece should be only 15 minutes, Peng wanted to compress and focus the narrative. From Chinese traditional Opera, he drew lessons on symbolism and on framing scenes:

One person play a table, one person eating make another person a table, and the table even speak: “Oh give me a cup of wine, I want to drink.” This is very strange! That means the actor can make his body as a thing. Still he keeps himself as an actor. And this actor can be within the story and he can at the same time be out of the story. Even he can say he can judge himself. He can say, “Oh this action has not finished very well, I will try another one.” When he plays, he says these words, the audience laughs, and he tries another one. So this gives a model for how we can be making our story going, and suddenly we can cut it off and make it change. This is the way I’ve learned from Chinese traditional Opera.

Situating his actors “within the story” and “at the same time… out of the story,” he wanted them to announce the action: “At last, he married his mother.” “And his mother feels shame, and hangs herself.” He would set Oedipus as a sculpture, symbolically manipulated by Teh and Tibetan artist Tashi Dhondup, the embodiment of History/Destiny, to move the plot forward through Oedipus’ blinding himself.

Tashi Dhondup and Cheng Chieh Yu in “Oedipus”
PHOTO: LARRY LOEHER

But Kathakali is a tradition of deliberate dramatic elaboration, where one image might be expanded upon, reiterated, as the audience delights in the subtle changes of the performer’s body movements and hand gestures. Kannan’s initial response to the Oedipus story was thus to envision extending and elaborating the dramatic narrative, treating each development of the plot literally, step by step, while developing symbolic pictures in their varied details. In the Oedipus production, however, he was being asked to disrupt this traditional narrative process. “But this time,” Peng suggests, “Kannan went away from his traditional Kathakali system. He tried to make theater. He tried to speak a story. That’s the weak point [in his system]. It tried to drag him back, that’s what I think. So just on this point we argued. Because this project is written by Kannan, not me. It’s Kannan’s project. So I find he’s so strong in his own understanding, I find it very difficult to continue.”

Kannan saw the problem more in terms of a breakdown in communication due to language:

I think that the reason of that argument was our lack of command on language. I and Peng has not so much command in English. We are using English as a medium for our communication. So I explain something, Peng understand different thing. And Peng explain something, I understand different thing.

Once again, Cheng-Chieh functioned as a “mutual,” or a facilitator. “For Cheng-Chieh is in the middle and hears what I feel and what Kannan feels, and tries to still keep us together,” Peng commented gratefully. “And at last, Kannan made room for me... So I try to finish it. When we got to show this piece to the audience we received good feedback and the audience welcomed it. So Kannan quieted about it, felt happy.” As Cheng-Chieh explained, the final product triumphed over altercation, as if the product itself had a voice of its own that was stronger than arguments.

Judy, in her role as APPEX director, also helped facilitate the project at one of its junctures. “When I put forth this idea, many other people didn’t understand what I was trying to say,” Kannan recollects. “But the approach from Judy was very helpful… she tried to analyze every person’s idea, sitting together, she was there and she asked everybody to speak, and putting forward these ideas together she made each person understand about others. Then this was a very fantastic wonderful process which worked later into this final production. Actually Judy was the force which made all the different opinions come together, and made it a successful project.” In her comments to the audience during the final performance, Judy emphasized the role of discussion in intercultural collaboration:

We discuss a lot in this program, we’re learning to find language, we’re learning to talk across language barriers, we’re trying to find a vocabulary that we can share as we discuss the world, as we discuss art. One thing I wanted to make really clear to all of you is that, in this program we are not actually trying to find a homogeneous world. What I hope you can see from what we do here is that we’re trying to find a way to understand each other, and we do that through working together. But none of us, not a single one of us, wants to make the other in our image. We try very hard to create an equitable environment where all people have the opportunity to contribute to the discussions. The Americans in this group are very aware of the privileges we have, so I believe we have made extra efforts to try to create a space where we are listening and we are learning.

How much must we simplify complexities in order to find common ground in intercultural collaborations? Do we have to find a “lowest common denominator” in order to meet and exchange? As musicians from Bali, Mindanao, Vietnam, Okinawa, and the Americas joined together in musical composition and improvisation, one artist, Vietnamese musician Nguyen Thu Thuy, fretted, “I have 36 strings, but I keep having to play the same five notes!”

Over the course of APPEX, various musical and choreographic techniques were explored to handle this tension. The “Ramayana” dance drama brought together dancers in the styles of Bali, Java, Okinawa, Cambodia, Thailand, and Tibet. As writer and dancer Garrett Kam noted in his comments to the audience at the final performance, “…we realized that there were many of us among the artists who could dance in their traditional styles…. So what we did was to put together something that showcases the contrasts and similarities that exist among the artists.” Several dancers had noticed, in particular, that their dance drama traditions—rife with interpretations of the Ramayana story that spread from India to Southeast Asia—each had well-developed traditions of portraying monkey characters. In the Ramayana, Hanuman’s army of monkeys helps return the abducted Sita to her beloved Rama.

How, then, to bring together, in one production, four monkeys: two in Javanese style, one Cambodian,10 and a Tibetan who had danced other animal characters, but not a monkey? In one sense, they were brought into communion by shared knowledge of the character Hanuman, who combines a soldier’s dignity, a devoted subject’s loyalty, and a monkey’s humorous antics. Yet, each tradition translates these character qualities into movement, and positions them in space, in different ways.

One choreographic technique, suggested in a workshop by Cheng-Chieh, proved useful: flocking. In this technique, the dancers move in diamond formation. As the dancers change direction, leadership of the movement shifts to the dancer on the front point. These “leaders” express their unique cultural or personal differences while the corps follows their momentary guidance. As leadership shifts to another point of the diamond, another participant’s style becomes salient, buoyed by the corps’ reduplication. The flocking strategy allowed monkey dancers to maintain indigenous complexities within a joint product. Later, performance artist Roko Kawai joined the group, tagging along in her own rambunctious, clowning style.11

When space between characters is reduced and they must act in tandem, adjustment issues can become more critical. Pradit Prasartthong (Tua), the Thai dancer who played Rama, recalls choreographing the moment when Rama tries to catch the butterfly, played at first by Balinese dancer, Ida Ayu Wimba Ruspawati (Dayu), and later, by Cambodian dancer Mao Tip Moni:

Each artist have their own way of catching.…For example, when I work with Dayu, she always changes at any time…. She always do something new all the time….Difficult for me to guess, what is going to be the next step? So I just try to observe the way she dance. And I wait until she’s satisfied, and I ask her, “Dayu, would you please choose one step that you prefer or you feel comfortable to do, and show it to me, and I can work on that one.” When we change the butterfly to become Moni, she also have her own strongly traditional way of catching that’s different from mine. Actually, my catching is also strong. Frankly, if I work in my own country, no compromise. But here, it’s different, something more like, “Okay forget what you have done before, forget what I have done before, we try something new, that both of us never do this catching, we create a new catching.”

Though artists are willing to compromise, there are limits to what they each feel can be changed. One of the greatest challenges was recognizing where these limits were, and finding a way to communicate this to each other. On catching the butterfly, Tua added a cautionary note:

But don’t go against your own thing. For example, I do this hand gesture [demonstrates], I will never do something like this [demonstrates] or something against my own traditional way. I still use this gesture, but maybe a different direction. That is a rule of collaboration in my mind.

The process of collaboration was complicated by different disciplinary orientations, from writers used to working solo to performers who work collectively.12 Some dancers were trained in traditional arts, with traditions of composed choreography or of improvising from a limited set repertoire of movements within traditional narrative constraints; others had modern dance or contemporary performance training, with its emphasis on choreographic discovery through improvisation and experimentation.

To help APPEX groups create across these differences, Tua suggested, “In each group, for me, we need a facilitator. A facilitator is not a director, not a dictator, not a teacher. Just facilitator. Everybody can listen to and not guide, not lead, but just provide some space or some exercise for us to find out together, to explore, some process that allows us to understand each other more deeply. And for me, I pay more attention on working process than art form, personally.” Such a facilitator might stay with a small working group throughout a project, moderating discussions and facilitating exploratory exercises that could bring group members into closer relationships of friendship, trust, and honesty.13

Though the Ramayana dance drama group did not have a full-time facilitator, they did benefit from several of Judy’s mediating visits, who came to the group as someone with no vested interest in any particular performance position. Her leadership philosophy elicits compassion from overbearing participants who may have lost their ability to empathize with others while encouraging those who may not have felt they had a voice to contribute. “A good leader helps others learn to lead,” she taught.

Each participant in the Ramayana dance drama faced their own individual challenges in joining together; that the piece was one of those chosen for the final performance is a tribute to their ability to do so.

Whether composing or improvising, rehearsing or performing, artists communicate with one another in verbal and non-verbal language. Cueing systems and interactive styles differ according to multiple parameters, from culture and discipline to genre, gender, performance role, and individual proclivities.

As the Ramayana dance drama developed, Danongan (Danny) Kalanduyan, from the island of Mindanao in the Philippines, joined the production as music director. For the first time in his experience, he was bringing the Magindanao gong chime kulintang into confluence with musicians and dancers from many cultures and disciplinary orientations.

Some Ramayana participants brought cultural and disciplinary expectations that dancers would follow musicians, others expected the musicians to follow the dancers. In Danny’s tradition, the kulintang played relatively set patterns and pieces that dancers then knew how to respond to. In the Ramayana group, however, several dancers were used to working with musicians who followed the dancers’ cues: a drummer might watch their feet, for example, and strike the drum in confluence with the dancers’ improvised movements.

Several anthropological definitions of “culture” point toward the expectations shared by members of a culture; so too, musical and dance cultures carry implicit expectations. The challenge, for APPEX participants, was to make such implicit sets of expectations explicit: to be able to express, for example, “This is how I’m used to working. This is what I find difficult.” But implicit expectations are not necessarily consciously recognized. Often, we only become conscious of them when they are thwarted.

Danny felt ill-used by the dancers, who seemed uncommonly aggressive to him. At one point, he nearly quit the production. When group members, particularly writers and ethnomusicologists playing supporting gong chime instruments, but also the dancers themselves, took time to analyze the situation, and talked with one another about it, we began to discover the unconscious assumptions driving our different compositional processes. We then began to try out strategies for alleviating the tension by alternating and sharing the directional flow of management between musicians and dancers.

One of the Ramayana dancers, Tua, made this observation and suggestion:

I feel uncomfortable a bit, just a little thing, about music and dance. Up to now we just respect the dancer: “Moni, what kind of music you prefer, what kind of instrument you prefer to hear to support your dance, and Dayu, what kind of drum….” What I want, just my point of view, the musicians themselves have their own right to create something in their own way. So why don’t we go like this: “This is the needs of the dancer, this is some creativity of the musician, and we meet at the middle way.” So, instead of, “I want flute, I want kulintang,” no. We just ask, “We need some romantic, romantic moment. And when the butterfly comes, we need something changed, but still beautiful, or joyful, or light.” And then let the musicians create their own way to support our needs. After that, we come back and present it to each other. “Satisfied? Oh, you have any comments?”

At one point, watching the dancers work with music he was supplying for the processional entrance of Lakshmana and the monkeys, Danny noticed the dancers were placing their downbeat step on what he felt was the upbeat. He spoke with Nuryanto Susanto, one of the Javanese dancers, and said: “This is where the downbeat goes and can you put your foot down here?” That moment, when Danny clarified the structural format of kulintang downbeats and upbeats and suggested how the dancers might step down and up in agreement with the musical structure, was a breakthrough moment in musician-dancer interaction.

During the second and third week of the APPEX 2000 sessions, artists and some writers presented 50-minute “Workshops.” In these, we were introduced to various cultural and disciplinary performance styles respective artists brought to one another. We were able to “try on” different movement and musical styles. I asked Tibetan dancer/musician Tashi to reflect upon his participation in Okinawan dancer Higa’s workshop:

Higa’s workshop, he has his own traditional way of moving, and different kind of hand movements. I’ve seen many kinds of Japanese dancers and it looks quite similar. I’ve seen Japanese dancing in Tibet, and while they’re dancing, it’s very respectful kind of dance. It’s also very slow movements, very gentle movements. It has lots of restraint. And they don’t move their heads or torsos. They don’t bend that much. From waist to head is kind of straight. If they move, they move the torso all together. This is quite different. They have lots of hand gestures. This was the first time I had felt what Japanese dance feels like. Tibetan dance is more active. You start from the first rhythm and it gets faster and faster. There’s lots of head and body and waist movements. And feet: each province has it’s own traditional type of shoes, and lots of step dances.

I would suggest we take time together during the workshop weeks to reflect upon and discuss the differences and similarities between the traditions we are encountering. How are different parts of the body being used? What is the role of narrative? How are vocalizations produced? What is the compositional process, and how do dancers and musicians interact? What is the orientation of this tradition toward innovation? What are the limits on innovation? By trying to make the underpinnings of our respective orientations explicit to one another, we might begin to anticipate the differences between our own and other artists’ implicit expectations.

Musicians working together interculturally faced their own challenges. As it did for many artists, the process of collaboration clarified, for Danny, the limits of his comfort when innovating:

We agreed to play our traditional rhythms. Because one thing I am not comfortable is to play something that doesn’t make any sense to me musically. If I play my own music, I have to feel that what I am playing is a traditional rhythm, or at least taken from a traditional rhythm. Because eventually, people who are familiar with my music will hear me playing this, and I don’t want to play something that they do not recognize, or something that is no longer the language of kulintang music. It doesn’t matter if I’m doing a collaboration, I will be sure that what I play is still something from the tradition. And then put it together with another tradition. That’s what I want. Not making up rhythms or sounds using instruments. I don’t do that. I asked everybody’s opinion and each said: “I feel comfortable with what I am doing.”

Danongan Kalanduyan playing kulintang
PHOTO: EKO SUPRIYANTO

Musicians trained in contemporary experimental music, like contemporary dancers, had different perspectives on the limits of innovation. Chilean-American musician Cristian Amigo, commenting upon the Ramayana collaborative process, understood Danny’s reservations, yet also hoped he would push the innovative envelope further:

I thought [Danny] was being asked to do things that he didn’t feel that comfortable with. And I was sensitive to that because I’ve been trying to make him feel comfortable, trying to take care of him. But maybe it’s good for him because he wants to... The point of it is to come here and collaborate. He’s a master and I respect that, but I could come here with my electric guitar and say, “You know what I play rock and roll guitar and that’s what I want to do, and if you can incorporate me, cool, and if not, you know, I can’t do it.” He wants to collaborate. So sometimes he’ll stop you, but he’s said it to me so many times, he’ll say, “I’m learning, and I want to try new things.”

Owan Kiyoyuki and I Nyoman Windha with Nguyen Thu Thy.
PHOTO: EKO SUPRIYANTO

The musical correlate to flocking was “staggering.” As musicians explored ways to play together while shifting musical leadership, one technique they found useful was to stagger the sequential entrance of melodic instruments. This occurs at the beginning of “Music Ensemble,” a piece presented at the final performance.14 First the Balinese gong chime reong gives a traditional “opening” solo, then the Vietnamese bamboo xylophone t’rung takes precedence. The next instrument to enter, the Tibetan plucked lute dranyen, is strummed lightly at first, linking it texturally with Thuy’s fluttering sticking on the t’rung. The dranyen was tuned, as those instruments that could change their tuning were, to a shared pentatonic scale. The dranyen then began to take over the melody beginning to emerge. Melodic precedence next “staggered” to Venezuelan cuatro in the version presented at Showing II. Finally the Japanese koto, then the Okinawan bamboo flute fue were woven into the piece.

Staggering the sequential entrance of the melodic instruments values their individual differences, while establishing a shared musical territory. For some musicians, however, “staggering” represented a mere first step in charting joint musical territory. As Cristian observed:

Here at UCLA via the Department of Ethnomusicology, I’ve seen a lot of concerts by world-renowned musicians who are really just amazing musicians, try to come together and make some music. And you’d rather see the people individually, because they haven’t worked out the commonalities enough to be empathetic with each other and to not just go, “here’s the jazz guitar, and now here’s the sitar.” And at the end of night you’re left thinking, “so what?”

Cristian Amigo and Tashi Dhondup performing during the “Music Ensemble”
PHOTO: LARRY LOEHER

As the Music Ensemble rehearsed and explored together, they began to develop new ways of bringing their instruments into conversation. These can be heard as the “Music Ensemble” piece itself develops through time. Balinese musician I Nyoman Windha starts a new melodic pattern on the reong. Danny answers on kulintang, a gong chime tuned to a different modal structure than the Balinese reong. Thuy, playing percussive sticks on the wood of her Vietnamese struck zither, and Ricardo Trimillos plucking on the Japanese koto, provide percussive glue as the Balinese reong and Filipino kulintang alternate in modal conversation.

We have moved, at this point in the piece, from “staggering” to “conversation.” “I thought that was a pretty sensitive moment for the ensemble when that came about,” Cristian recalls,

because there has been a reluctance on the part of the Asian artists to mix the Balinese gamelan and the Filipino kulintang. Whereas for some of the Western artists, they don’t mind hearing that discordance, or whatever you call it. The Westerners are used to hearing it all the time, so it’s not a conflict. But the conflict for the Asians is large. So that’s the way it had to be, they had to answer each other. It’s a modulation really, like a modal modulation. And I like to hear that kind of variety. That’s the stuff of development. If you could develop that and find out how to intertwine them, for me, that would be really interesting. So that’s a first step. Find what notes you have in common and find what notes you don’t have in common and try to work them.

Indeed, in the third section, the experiment develops further. The reong begins a chordal, rhythmic pattern, then Oseiku gains prominence on percussion. But very lightly, in the background, the kulintang is now playing its melody and rhythm, even while the reong continues to play. Balinese and Filipino gong chimes, in two different modes and patterns, are now polyphonically intertwined.

Simultaneously weighted and buoyed by our respective cultural and artistic experiences, like Cheng-Chieh carrying her Taiwanese luggage tied with her mother’s yellow ribbon, we came to APPEX to create together. Working initially with the focal “homelands” theme highlighted our multiplex positions in culturally “in-between” spaces, while providing us compositional and emotional points of convergence. But collisions deriving from our differences in training, technique, and experience, often led to ruptures during rehearsals. These threatened to suspend our ability to collaborate. Moderators often emerged spontaneously during such contentious moments, helping to re-establish bridges of understanding between factions. Such facilitators might in the future be designed into the collaborative strategies of APPEX.
Structural components in our artistic media—such as the two different tunings of Balinese and Filipino gongs played in polyphonic overlap during the “Music Ensemble” performance, or the monkey character Hanuman, reincarnated in four divergent diasporic forms and dancing together, yet distinctively, in choreographed “flocking” during the Ramayana performance—also offered means by which we might creatively converge while retaining the poignant tensions of difference. Yet, even as artists extended their techniques in new directions, they also discovered their personal limitations on innovation, like the Kathakali dancer who incorporated speech and compressed narrative into his performance, but maintained the fundamentally Kathakali forms of posture and gesture, that comprised his distinctive cultural and artistic “watermark.”
The collaborative process among artists is rife with creative potential and hidden land mines. Roko, interviewed by APPEX writer Mario Ontiveros, termed these plays of power the “collisions of collaboration,” and suggested, with that faith peculiar to artists and visionaries, that such collisions need not be negative, but can also provide productive energies. I offer these reflections upon artistic and social processes in the global era, gleaned from our creative collisions and collusions at APPEX 2000, as potential lessons for future intercultural experiments.

1 - APPEX 2000 DVD, Artist Portraits 1: Cheng-Chieh Yu
2 - APPEX 2000 DVD, APPEX Projects: Collaborative Process—Journey.
3 - As an APPEX 2000 Writing Fellow, I actively participated with performing artists in forums, movement-music-dramatic laboratories and workshops, topics and project sessions, rehearsals, and performances. Given the confines of a six-week program, in which my experience as participant-observer and Writing Fellow is necessarily partial and particularly sited, I must express my own recognition of my limits as I address the issues raised by our intercultural collaboration and performance. In some projects, I was a participant-observer, in others, I observed. I was able to interview some artists in greater depth; other insights emerged during informal conversations or group discussions. Our APPEX videotape and photographic archives, while extensive, are also necessarily selective. By virtue of time, inclination, and level of understanding, I saw some things, and not others; spoke with some people, not others; participated in some events, observed others.
4 - APPEX 2000 DVD, APPEX Projects: Collaborative Process—Dreams.
5 - APPEX 2000 DVD, APPEX Projects: Performances—Dreams.
6 - APPEX 2000 DVD, Artist Portraits 1: “Oseiku” Daniel Diaz.
7 - “Oedipus.” For an example of Peng’s Chinese Opera technique, see the fighting sequence on APPEX 2000 DVD, Artist Portraits 1: Peng.
8 - For an example of Kannan’s Kathakali technique on APPEX 2000 DVD, Artist Portraits 1: Ettumanoor Parameswaran Kannan, and Artist Performances: Kannan.
9 - APPEX 2000 DVD, APPEX Projects: Performances—Dreams.
10 - The Cambodian style is performed by Sophea on APPEX DVD 2000, Artist Performances: Moni and Sophea.
11 - APPEX 2000 DVD, APPEX Projects: Performances: Ramayana.
12 - APPEX 2000 DVD, APPEX Projects: Collaborative Process—Ramayana
13 - The growth of empathy and friendship among participants, though seemingly tangential to the collaborative process, is actually critical. Many of us dealt with family emergencies that brought the “there” of home into the “here” of APPEX in both subtle and dramatic ways. This forceful inclusion of our individual life struggles split our attention, often drawing us away psychically and physically. Yet, it also contributed to artistic process and production. For, as we forged bonds of friendship based in compassion and enduring human concerns, our APPEX community experience, and the artistic creations emerging from it, became fuller and stronger.
14 - A segment from the conclusion of “Music Ensemble” is included on APPEX DVD 2000, APPEX Projects: Performances—Music Ensemble. For more specific recordings and video of the segments discussed, see the hypertext version of this essay on the APPEX website at www.wac.ucla.edu/cip/appex.