KAREN SHIMAKAWA

Two fans, held open against each other, form a screen. Invited by a sinuous percussion intro, the fans slowly, seductively part to reveal [predictably] the faces of two Asian [oriental?] women smiling faintly [coyly? invitingly? mysteriously?], their postures slightly [subserviently?] bowed, their actions mirroring each other, interchangeable markers of exotic, lotus-blossom beauty and grace...

C. Jason Koontz
PHOTO: LARRY LOEHER

“Fan Variations,” first workshopped as part of the “Group Projects” component of APPEX 1999 by choreographers/dancers YiJuan Zhang and Cheng-Chieh Yu (joined in the subsequent public showing by Minh Tran) and musicians Lenny Seidman and Jason Koontz, raises some of the crucial issues for intercultural performance and Asian diasporic identity. Initially structured as a dialogue between Beijing Opera-trained Zhang and Taiwanese-American modern dancer Yu (who has some training in classical Chinese movement forms), the piece begins with a series of demonstrations of fan work in classical Chinese opera by Madame Zhang—a nationally-recognized master of the form—whose movements are mimicked, interpreted, and eventually transformed by Yu, while U.S.-based percussionists Seidman (an accomplished tabla player/jazz percussionist) and Koontz (an ethnomusicologist who has studied both tabla and African percussion) in turn improvise a percussion score in dialogue with each other and with the dancers. Similarly, in the later public performance, Tran (whose training is primarily U.S.-based modern) patterns his movements initially to follow both Zhang’s and Yu’s, a second-degree reiteration of Zhang’s initial demonstration. Yu’s movements, which at the beginning closely mirror (and at times are in unison with) Zhang’s, grow steadily less faithful in their reiteration, eventually serving as a counterpoint, rather than a reflection, of Zhang’s actions. Like Yu’s movements, Tran’s become progressively less accurate in their imitation of Zhang, and more like modern-dance commentaries on Zhang’s and Yu’s preceding statements. The percussion becomes similarly more layered and complex (utilizing multiple instruments and accelerated rhythms). As the piece develops, Teacher Zhang sings short segments of a Peking Opera (“The Drunken Concubine,” based on the figure Yang Guei-Fei, considered to be one of the four most beautiful women in Chinese history). As the piece nears its end the pace slows and instrumentation scales back, and the dancers’ movements once again begin to reference, and then mirror, one another. The piece closes with the faces of the dancers again disappearing behind the screen of fans.

L to R: Minh Tran, YiJuan Zhang, and Cheng-Chieh Yu
PHOTO: VIET AN

As an Asian Americanist performance scholar, I am struck when confronted by a piece like this by its potential pandering to orientalist tropes: smiling, silent, and seductive (pan-)Asian women (and man) gracefully hiding behind their fans, dancing to the strains of exotic accompaniment; the epigraph that opens this essay is drawn from my notes taken while watching the workshop of “Fan Variations.” Yet as it evolved throughout the process, this piece came to exemplify precisely how intercultural performance can intervene in those orientalizing discourses by directly engaging with, and commenting on, that process. Through the interaction of the performers, “Fan Variations” invokes discourses of racialization, gender/sex, and diaspora; what is most intriguing and most powerful about this piece is that it does not provide a “pat” answer, a simple resolution of every conflict thereby implied, or homogenization of the multiple instanciations of identity which the piece offers. While putting these various discourses into play, the piece invites active, interpretative participation of observers, effectively engaging us in that conversation along with the performers.

In a moment when... academics and scientists, as well artists and politicians, are struggling to understand the cultural differences between bodies, dance can provide a critical example of the dialectical relationship between cultures and the bodies that inhabit them.2

As an APPEX “writer” I approached this program from the perspective of literary/performance/cultural studies, and heretofore my research focus has been Asian Pacific American performance (as) texts. I cannot hope to fully explicate this work or translate its “meaning” into text; I can, however, suggest some of the ways it sets discourses in motion—figuratively and literally.3 While, as I discuss in the remainder of this section, “Fan Variations” flirts (pun intended) with racist, sexist stereotypes and threatens to elide issues of national/cultural difference, it successfully problematizes those representations—in part as a result of the process through which it was created—in order to present a more ambivalent, complex, and nuanced meditation on intercultural performance of/and Asian diasporic identities.

Anne Cooper Albright argues that dance can comment upon constructed socially-constructed identities (racial, sexual, able-bodied/disabled) by mining the tension between the body as object/text and body as subject/author. But as others have observed, dance—like other performance forms—can also reiterate racist stereotypes by un-self-reflexively re-presenting culturally- and racially-marked gestures and images, on the one hand, or on the other hand, by erasing their cultural/racial specificities. Brenda Dixon-Gottschild’s Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance, for example, elucidates the ubiquity of African aesthetics in “American” dance, identifying the “invisibilized” “African-European paradigm [that] is the bottom line of American culture.”4 Dixon-Gottschild makes a compelling case for the foundational (but unacknowledged) impact of African cultures on “American” aesthetics and challenges racist-elitist assumptions about the perceived primacy of Anglo-European genealogy 56in “American” cultural forms. Conversely, Marta Savigliano’s study of tango and the racialization, exoticization, and commodification of “passion” points out the ways in which difference (conceived racially, culturally, and affectively) can be concretized as a dance form and exploited within a capitalist system. Jane Desmond’s reading of Ruth St. Denis’ yellowface performance of “Radha” similarly suggests that gestures may be racialized in quite spectacular ways, specifically calculated to invoke racial and sexual others phantasmatically.

However, Desmond argues that in such acts of racial/racist mimicry, “the middle-class white woman’s body is central to the production of pleasure in the relationship of these three markers of [race, gender and cultural] otherness” (47). James Moy makes a similar point in his study of “the touristic siting of Chinese America” when he observes that some of the earliest theatrical representations (circa 1796) of Chineseness on U.S. stages were performed by non-Asian performers.7 I would suggest, though, that there is another kind of (orientalist) pleasure achieved through the “appropriate” embodiments of otherness—in other words, there is a potentially problematic pleasure to be had (by a U.S.-based observer) in watching Asian bodies enact fantasies of Asianness. In spectacularly reiterating tropes of “Chineseness” and “(ef)femininity,” “Fan Variations” foregrounds the process of racialization through specific gestures and affect. Mme. Zhang’s movements, a culturally- and historically-specific, stylized distillation and codification of feminine grace and dexterity, are re-performed by Yu and then Tran who, in different ways, represent (in the context of this U.S. performance8) similarly “appropriate others”—the oriental woman and (feminized and/or gay) oriental man who “naturally” follow the patterns set by the “authentic” or “pure” version of the oriental (feminine) essence/ideal.

This perception of racial “appropriateness,” of course, elides differences in nationality as well as citizenship/immigration status: Yu is a Taiwanese native (and ethnically mixed Chinese and Taiwanese), and Tran is ethnically Chinese, but born and raised in Vietnam; both Yu and Tran live and work in the U.S.; and both identify themselves as “Asian American” (a pan-ethnic identification specifically tied to U.S. post-Civil Rights identity politics). The visual suggestion that Yu and Tran simply re-present “Chineseness” potentially erases these cultural, geographical, and political distinctions between them, however, and threatens to re-confirm the racist perception that Asians are “all alike” and interchangeable.

Moreover, as I’ve been arguing implicitly thus far, the suggestion that Tran simply re-presents Chinese femininity potentially invokes heteromasculinist-racist stereotypes of Asian men as effeminate and/or inadequately (hetero)masculine. As an Asian American male who joined “Fan Variations” because he “wanted to learn from Teacher Zhang,” Tran seemingly reiterates (and thereby validates) the trope so vigorously rejected by cultural nationalist Asian Americanists such as Frank Chin and James Moy, who are critical of what they see as an auto-orientalizing/-feminizing tendency in representations of/by Asian American men.9 Positioning Tran as an inheritor/ imitator of Zhang’s Chinese concubine raises similar concerns and could potentially reiterate racist stereotypes of Asian maleness as (in Moy’s terms) “marginalized, desexed, and made faceless” (125).

Further, read in a particular way, “Fan Variations” could be viewed as a dance version of the “One China” policy often debated in U.S. international policy.10 What does it mean for a Taiwanese American dancer to follow the lead of a representative of Chinese “official” culture? Watching Yu studiously re-perform Zhang’s gestures, one might be reminded of Homi Bhabha’s dictum that “mimicry emerges as one of the most elusive and effective strategies of colonial power and knowledge.”11 Adding Tran to the performance arguably does not “cure” the mimicry problem, if the effect of the piece is to position Chinese culture and aesthetics as the center from which “Asianness” emanates.12 A work that is premised on a demonstration-imitation pattern (as is “Fan Variations”) could visually validate certain geo-political patterns of dominance and submission, (economic) center and periphery.

Finally, what are the implications of Asian/Asian American collaborations such as this, which could be seen as privileging “Asianness” (or, in this case, “Chineseness”) as the defining, central, or essential basis for Asian Americanness—the authentic/Real of which Asian Americanness is a corrupted/diluted/pale imitation? A too-close identification between Asian Americans and “Asia”—the casting of Asian Americans (in popular media, politics, etc.) as “perpetual foreigners—has long troubled Asian American scholars and activists (despite the roots of Asian American activism in Third World/postcolonial, as well as domestic Civil Rights, political organizing). The historical associations of Asian American Studies with primarily domestic concerns are documented (and problematized) in Sau-ling Cynthia Wong’s essay, “Denationalization Reconsidered: Asian American Cultural Criticism at a Theoretical Crossroads”13:

The Asian American cultural nationalist project... was characterized by a cluster of domestic emphases, and the subsequent development of this project did involve a certain ossification of identity politics... In fact, it seems anything that threatens to undermine the demonstration of the “indigenization” (the “becoming American”) of Asian Americans must be scrupulously avoided. (3-4, fn. omitted)

From its beginnings in the 1968-69 student protests leading to the establishment of Asian American Studies programs at San Francisco State University and the University of California at Berkeley, the “Asian American Movement” has taken 14various forms, including a critique of dominant-culture (racist) performances of Asian Americanness, as well as the development of Asian American theatre companies and the attendant emergence of Asian American playwrights, performers, and other theatre artists. Performance per se (i.e., theatrical performance) has played an integral role in the performative creation of an Asian American political identity/community/consciousness/movement; from an Asian American perspective, then, the political stakes of representation are of central concern. The first Asian American theatre companies, after all, were founded precisely for the purpose of honoring and continuing those struggles by creating spaces for Asian Americans to perform Asian Americanness, rather than the stereotypically foreign/alien, F.O.B. (“fresh off the boat”) or inassimilable oriental roles to which they were limited elsewhere in U.S. American culture. The political history of Asian American performance, consequently, has been dominated by representations of Asian Americans’ Americanness, the ways in which they/we are distinct (if not discontinuous) from Asianness (understood as synonymous with “foreignness”), legitimate inheritors of (symbolic) citizenship, and the cultural capital and material benefits which flow from that status. Viewed from this perspective, a performance featuring two Asian American performers attempting to mimic an Asian art form could serve to undermine that indigenizing agenda by erasing the legal, political, and historical distinctions between “Asianness” and “Americanness”—and the struggles of those who fought for those distinctions.

But recent developments have called the continued viability of the “indigenization” agenda into question. Asian American Studies scholars and theatre practitioners are beginning to recognize the limitations of a U.S.-based focus, largely due to the fact that the U.S. and “Asia” are rapidly changing. Post-1965 immigration,15 neo- and post-colonization, and recent advances in the flow of technology and global capital have all contributed to the radically shifting demographics of populations identified as “Asian American.” Arif Dirlik reminds us that “the problems of Asian American history are also problems in the history of an Asia-Pacific regional formation.”16 In his recent study of “Asian/America,” David Palumbo-Liu suggests similarly that those transnational tensions and affiliations have always (though differently over time) been foundational to the apprehension of Asian Americanness: “The defining mythos of America, its ‘manifest destiny,’” he argues, “was, after all, to form a bridge westward from the Old World, not just to the western coast of the North American continent, but from there to the trans-Pacific regions of Asia.”17

What are the implications of this focal shift for performances such as “Fan Variations”? Among other things, it means that we can (and should) look at this piece in ways more complicated than merely dismissing it out of hand for citing stereotypes of Oriental/Chinese femininity. Indeed, though I have been raising a number of potential difficulties posed by a work such as this, I have (I hope) been careful to phrase those concerns hypothetically or provisionally, because in turning to the work itself—and, perhaps more importantly, the process by which it was created—I would like to consider how the “Fan Variations” project engages the discourses of racism, heteromasculinity, nationalism, and sub-imperialisms and, in so doing, creates a richly intercultural, politically-engaged (but not didactic) performance statement about Asian diasporic identity and the stakes of representation.

In my mind, I started with reacting to, and learning, Teacher Zhang’s version [of the Fan Dance], then translating [it] into a modern movement practice that I am doing now. The repetitious structure of constantly going back to the source—Teacher Zhang—[felt] at times as if I was referring back to my own “past.” — Cheng-Chieh Yu18

We kept [Cheng-Chieh’s] and Mme. Zhang’s original intent, which was “how far one can take the Fan Dance from China, bringing it closer to the ‘West.’” — Minh Tran19

The (political) stakes of representation in the terrain of (especially East-West) intercultural performance, have been elaborately and publicly debated.20 In many ways, the critiques of intercultural performance as cultural appropriation mirror the arguments I’ve outlined above: in each case, there is a concern with dis/respect for cultural difference and cultural specificity, with “getting it right” or falling into stereotypical discourse, and with the ability of the subject being represented (the cultural other, the colonized, the feminized, etc.) to present her-/himself or be re-presented as a (failed) imitation of something else. “Fan Variations” thus offers itself as a useful text through which to tease out the complexities of the intercultural debate by tracing its discursive tensions.

Developing “Fan Variations”
PHOTO: NAM HAU DOAN

It is instructive to include in our consideration of this piece the performers’ comments, which preceded the performance proper.21 Each performer identified her/himself by way of stating where they were “from.” Significantly, Yu did not mention Taiwan (though that information was available in the program) but rather identified herself as “from New York”—thus marking a national/cultural differentiation from Zhang, one that might not be readily apparent to observers who might otherwise simply see them as two “Chinese” women. Tran said simply, “I was born in Saigon, Vietnam, and I now live in Portland, Oregon.” Given the potential for a racist-monolithic, pan-Asian reading of this work, Tran’s specific self-identification in terms of geography—especially for those who (at best) might recognize him as ethnically Chinese, or (at worst) seem him as ethnically- and nationally- undifferentiated as “Asian”—as an important reminder that there are complicated personal and political geographies of “Asiannesses” being mapped in this project. (The two non-Asian performers, Seidman and Koontz, also identified themselves by their current place of residence, and not by citizenship or ethnic/national origins.)

Some of the performers then spoke briefly about their process of creating this piece. Yu explained that “Fan Variations” began with Zhang’s workshop on the Fan Dance, and that she and Tran pursued this project because they wanted to “go deeper,” using Zhang as “a movement source and foundation.” These comments might lead one to see the subsequent piece in the kind of center-periphery, authenticity-reiteration pattern discussed above as potentially problematic; however, Tran’s follow-up characterization of the process as “almost like our conversations of where we come from and what our training is” (my emphasis) complicates that top-down vision of source-transmission.

Also of note is Seidman’s comment that he was “fascinated by what I discovered to be the incredible power...of the fan.” As part of the creative exploration of this piece, Seidman handled the fan, learning some preliminary gestures from Zhang before entering into a (musical) dialogue with the dancers. This tactile experience, he later noted, was fundamental to his understanding of the project, and guided his participation in the collaboration. That Seidman gained this awareness through (if only at an elementary level) embodying the position of the [Chinese woman], rather than remaining at the level of (objectifying) observer of Chinese femaleness as cultural “text,” is crucial.22 Thus, from its inception, “Fan Variations” was structured as an intercultural dialogue not only between a Chinese opera performer and Chinese-Taiwanese dancer with some training in Chinese opera, but between a Chinese opera performer and a U.S.-based tabla player—suggesting more of an element of radical juxtaposition and dialogue, rather than a mere lesson in ethnic essentialism.23

The dance itself began, as noted above, with the faces of the dancers hidden behind the open fans. The dis-covering of the (Asian) faces behind the fans evokes fantasies of oriental feminine allure, and the dancers’ come-hither smiles seemed to validate such associations. And as if to suggest spatially the primacy of the “authentic” Chinese subject, Zhang occupied the apex of the triangle formed by the three figures as she stood over the crouched figures of Yu and Tran. Moving downstage, she executed a series of short demonstrations of fan technique, which were then reproduced more or less accurately—in colonial-mimetic fashion—by Yu and Tran in unison. But Bhabha notes that in the colonial context, while “[m]imicry is... a complex strategy of reform, regulation and discipline,” it is simultaneously “the sign of the inappropriate...a difference or recalcitrance which coheres the dominant strategic function of colonial power, intensifies surveillance, and poses an immanent threat to both ‘normalized’ knowledges and disciplinary powers” (86). By (partially) re-producing the original, in other words, the colonized subject calls into question the primacy and permanence of the colonizer as “source.” Moreover, in the inevitable (and, here, intended) variation from the original source-text, lies the potential un-doing of the master-subject relation: “The ambivalence of mimicry—almost but not quite—suggests that the fetishized colonial culture is potentially and strategically an insurgent counter-appeal” (91). I am not suggesting that Yu or Tran varied their imitations as an insurgency against a hegemonic threat posed by Zhang’s Chineseness, or that Zhang’s demonstrations carry the force of (or are analogous to) colonial repression; I would, however, argue that the representation of a demonstration of “authentic” Chineseness, followed by increasingly distant imitations that quickly developed into responses or counter-demonstrations created a visual (and aural) complication of what began as a fairly straightforward representation of “national” identity. After several demonstrations, each concluding in an iconic pose (in the first phase of the performance), Yu’s and Tran’s responses became more fluid, less angular, visibly recognizable (even to an untrained eye) as a fusion of modern dance and Zhang’s Peking Opera-styled gestures.

In her discussion of “[a]ppropriation/transmission/migration of dance styles,” Jane Desmond writes that it may be instructive to consider both the “pathway of that transmission” for what it tells us about “the continuing social construction and negotiation of race, gender, class, and nationality, and their hierarchical arrangements,” as well as “an analysis at the level of the body of what changes in the transmission.”24 The epigraphs to this section provide useful insights into Yu’s and Tran’s approaches to the project of transmission. While both acknowledged Zhang as a “movement source,” each took that source material for the purpose of creating something else from it. “When Minh joined us,” Yu recalled, “I thought it would be interesting to show a third generation of translation” (emphasis added). The structuring principle of (the movement element of) the piece, then was to complicate, multiply, move toward and away from the source text of Zhang’s movements. Before Tran joined the group, “[Cheng-Chieh had] already taken it one step away. When I was added onto the project, I stretched it further apart from the Chinese fan dance,” Tran recalls.

What is perhaps most striking in this regard is that as the icon of “authenticity,” Zhang did not remain the “essential” or stable referent which a center-periphery model would require. As rehearsals progressed, in response to Yu’s and Tran’s variations, Tran recalled, “Mme. Zhang began to ‘bend’ the rule, as she saw the physical response from me [as] sort of ‘another way to update her technique,’ to make it more suitable to the piece.” That is, one of the bases for a reading of “Fan Variations” as problematic—that it imposes an essentialized image of “authentic” Chinese femininity—is undermined by Zhang’s dialogic response to her collaborators.

By the fifth or sixth “demonstration,” Yu’s and Tran’s responses evolved into recognizably modern-dance commentaries on Zhang’s statements. At that point, Yu and Tran broke from the didactic structure altogether, pairing off downstage left to improvise in earnest, while Zhang moved upstage. As she began to sing and dance an excerpt from “The Drunken Concubine,” crossing downstage right, the percussion score all but dropped out and Yu and Tran slowed to a near-freeze, thus bracketing the Peking Opera source-text.25 When Zhang finished the excerpt, the music re-introduced itself more forcefully, the pace quickening, and Yu and Tran resume their improvisation—this time in a larger, more athletic mode, moving toward center stage. During this interval, Zhang improvised with the fan while moving upstage along stage right. This exchange repeated twice: musicians and other dancers pausing or pulling back while Zhang performed an excerpt, cutting a diagonal path across center stage and then receding while the musicians, Yu, and Tran engaged in a faster-paced interaction, inflected with elements of (post)modern and contact improvisation. Thus, the piece spatially re-worked the center-periphery dynamic, bracketing the originally-privileged Peking Opera text to situate it in a more even exchange with the other movement/performance styles in play on stage.

Cheng-Chieh Yu and Minh Tran interweave their movements. Lenny Seidman plays tabla in the background.
PHOTO: VIET AN

Following this series of exchanges, Yu and Zhang paired off. In this exchange, both women performed what was clearly recognizable as a fusion of styles, with Zhang appearing to follow Yu as much as the reverse. Tran broke away, encircling the women with a series of leaps, then cutting sharp diagonals between Yu and Zhang as they began to move more or less in unison. Tran’s departure from groupings with the women was striking, and his airborne movement was a notable departure from the more grounded movements inspired by Zhang. In this way, Tran marked out a space (literally and figuratively) for Asian (or Asian American) male identity that did not conform to racist stereotypes of feminization and subordination. His movements, while not necessarily aping stereotypes of (hetero) masculinity, nonetheless provided a basis for seeing the Asian American male presence on stage as something other than a pale imitation of (stereotypical) Asian femininity.

Finally, the rhythm slowed as the dancers assumed the positions with which the piece opened: the fans once again close together, the smiling Asian faces again concealed. However, this re-creation of the opening image was unfaithful in an important respect: Tran now occupied the apex of the triangle, Zhang and Yu forming a mirroring pair below him. While this arrangement, of course, activates other problematic associations (a patriarchal male presiding over a group—harem?—of smiling, crouching Asian women), I believe the dis-placing of “proper” Chineseness from the privileged position served a productive function. By the end of the piece the fan dance was re-contextualized to be just that—a dance, culturally embedded, racialized and gendered to be sure—but it is, if only for the space of this performance, a text to be performed (rather than identity to be inhabited)—by a Vietnamese-Chinese American man, by a Taiwanese-Chinese American woman, and by a mainland Chinese woman, as well as two white U.S.-born men. I would not go so far as to suggest these individuals appropriate this text in equal or identical ways; they do, nonetheless, appropriate the text in ways that foreground both similarities and dissimilarities. Chineseness is no longer a hegemonic formation which structures all three dancers; it is one possible location in a larger constellation of Asian diasporic identities.

This is, in fact, what APPEX allows its participants, audiences, and area/ethnic studies performance scholars to explore: complex inter-cultural histories as they are embedded or encoded in (racialized, gendered, nationalized) bodies. The relationship between cultures and bodies/movements/gestures is an area of consideration often overlooked in analyses of “cross”-cultural history, in part because it seems to “short-circuit” more discursive approaches to understanding that history. In its selection process (geographic as well as stylistic diversity) and its collaborative, process-oriented structure (allowing its artists to determine how their respective traditions/training are to be incorporated), APPEX and “Fan Variations” demonstrates that rather than transcending or short-circuiting history, it sometimes precisely (and most effectively) through these bodily interactions that such histories can be told and re-imagined.

1 - Humble and heartfelt thanks to the many people who provided the occasion for this meditation (and for their generous assistance in reconstructing the process and performance retrospectively): YiJuan Zhang, Cheng-Chieh Yu, Minh Tran, Lenny Seidman, Jason Koontz, Ric Trimillos, Judy Mitoma, Sue Fan, and the CIP staff. Thanks as well to those who provided invaluable assistance in the research, writing and editing of this essay: Yutian Wong, Sophie Volpp, Barbara Sellers-Young, and (again) Ric Trimillos.
2 - Anne Cooper Albright, Choreographing Difference: The Body and Identity in Contemporary Dance (Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press, 1997) 3.
3 - Moreover, since my training in performance studies has been primarily with theatrical or other text-based forms, I cannot claim to understand this work from the perspective of a dance scholar. While I do gesture toward what appear to me as some of the relevant conversations taking place in that field, I do so only preliminarily, as a way of “sign-posting” other possible ways of engaging with “Fan Variations,” for those better versed in dance scholarship than I.
4 - Brenda Dixon-Gottschild, Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts (Westport: Praeger Publishers, 1996) 2, 4.
5 - Marta E. Savigliano, Tango and the Political Economy of Passion (Boulder, San Francisco, and Oxford: Westview Press, 1995).
6 - Jane Desmond, “Dancing out the Difference: Cultural Imperialism and Ruth St. Denis’ ‘Radha’ of 1906,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 17:1 (Autumn 1991), 28-49.
7 - James S. Moy, Marginal Sights: Staging the Chinese in America (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1993), 10.
8 - Except where noted, I refer to the version of “Fan Variations” presented at the public showing on August 11, 1999.
9 - See, for instance, Frank Chin, “Come All Ye Asian American Writers of the Real and the Fake,” in Jeffery Paul Chan, Frank Chin, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Wong, eds., The Big Aiiieeeee! (New York: Penguin, 1991), 1-94.
10 - Interestingly, just prior to the weeks in which “Fan Variations” developed, a (minor) crisis in China-Taiwan relations erupted. On July 9, 1999, Taiwanese President Lee Teng-hui made comments that were initially construed as a rejection of a “One China” policy, suggesting “state-to-state” relations between the two entities were more appropriate. The Chinese newspaper People’s Daily responded with a front-page commentary declaring, “‘Taiwanese independence’ will fail.” By July 14, Lee had clarified his position in such a way as to reassure the Chinese and U.S. governments, and tensions eased. (http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/asiapcf/9907/14/china.taiwan)
11 - Homi K. Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” in The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 85-92, 85.
12 - Moreover, if, as Chen Kuan-Hsing argues, Taiwan’s policy of “advancing toward the South, West, and East” and the establishment of “the ‘Taiwan industrial area’ in Vietnam . . . signif[ies] the expansion capital and state” and the implementation of a “subempire,” what other kinds of neo-colonial relations might this performance invoke? (Chen Kuan-Hsing, citation)
13 - Amerasia Journal 21:1 & 2 (1995), 1-28.
14 - Certainly, from the beginning, many of these companies (East West Players, Northwest Asian American Theatre Company, Asian American Theatre Company, Pan Asian Repertory) have showed an interest in Asian theatre as well; and Asian American Studies’ links with a broader “Third World Coalition” during the 1970s did focus on social and political crises in Asia as well as in the U.S. I would argue, however, that these conditions existed simultaneously with, and were (until more recently) eclipsed by, a cultural nationalist agenda which sought aggressively to “claim” American identity and de-emphasize continuities with Asian contemporary cultures.
15 - The 1965 Reform Act to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization code significantly altered the quotas (and the means by which those totals were counted, as well as the exceptions to the totals), with the net result of dramatically increasing the total number of immigrants from Asia entering the U.S.
16 - Arif Dirlik, “The Asia-Pacific in Asian-American Perspective,” in What is in a Rim? Critical Perspectives on the Pacific Region Idea (2d Ed.), ed. Arif Dirlik (Lanham, Boulder, New York and Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), 283.
17 - David Palumbo-Liu, Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 2.
18 - E-mail correspondence, 28 May 2000. All subsequent quotations are from this correspondence.
19 - E-mail correspondence, 5 June 2000. All subsequent quotations are from this correspondence.
20 - See, for example, By Means of Performance: Intercultural Studies of Theatre and Ritual, ed. Richard Schechner and Willa Appel (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Interculturalism and Performance, eds. Bonnie Marranca and Gautam Dasgupta (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1991; Theatre and the World: Performance and the Politics of Culture, Rustom Bharucha. (London and New York: Routledge, 1993); The Intercultural Performance Reader, ed. Patrice Pavis (London and New York: Routledge, 1996); Theatre Research International (special issue on “Theatre and Interculturalism”), ed. Brian Singleton, 22:2 (Summer 1997).
21 - I am not suggesting these comments were scripted for the purpose of conveying the meanings I ascribe to them here; rather, I would argue that, regardless of the intent (or lack thereof) of the speaker, these comments informed audiences’ understandings/experiences of the piece that ensued.
22 - In fact, Seidman was invited into the collaboration by Zhang. According to Yu, “It was her instinct that the combination would work well.” Although there were many musicians participating in APPEX 1999—many from different parts of Asia and trained more narrowly in (especially East and Southeast) Asian musical forms, Zhang’s choice of the U.S.-based Seidman (who brought not only an expertise in tabla but also a range of percussion traditions) necessarily shifted the lens through which an audience might view the performance as “oriental” or even “Asian”—an attribution of cultural authenticity she wanted to avoid.
23 - The addition of Koontz (whose research has focused extensively in West African percussion) widened the cultural spectrum of instrumentation even further, thus heightening this alienation effect. In performance, Koontz played a (sonically and culturally) wide range of percussion instruments, rather than tabla. Seidman appears to have taken more of a leadership role (with respect to the musical element of the performance) in the dialogue between dancers and musicians, and Koontz’s performance, like those of Yu and Tran, at times functioned loosely in a statement-variation relation to Seidman’s; however, more often Koontz’ interplay with Seidman’s tabla was not in the form of imitation/variation, but rather as counterpoint. Because their interplay did not follow a theme-variation pattern with the same degree of explicitness, I do not see it as a direct musical counterpart to, or restatement of, the relationship established between Zhang, Yu, and Tran; rather, because of their more complex (and two-way) interplay, Koontz and Seidman establish an aural relationship which neither situates the performance as “Asian” nor creates a origin/authentic-to-reproduction/imitation dynamic.
24 - Jane C. Desmond, “Embodying Difference: Issues in Dance and Cultural Studies,” first published in Cultural Critique 26 (1993-4), reprinted in The Routledge Dance Studies Reader, ed. Alexandra Carter (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 154-163, 158, 159.
25 - It is also instructive to take note of the text from which Zhang takes the excerpts. “The reason that Teacher Zhang chose [“The Drunken Concubine”],” recalls Yu, “was mainly because it was the most representative repertory for the Fan technique.…The heroine was narcissistically reflecting on herself as being beautiful and lonely as the moon.” As the other Asian woman in the group, Yu was self-reflexive about the choice. “I was actually aware of Yang’s character, a loaded image of a beautiful but ill-fated woman. At the same time I was also aware of how Chinese Opera Movement represents a flirtatious female style.” Yu’s own choreographic work frequently focuses on the socially-repressive construction of Asian femininity, and she often self-referentially uses herself as body-text for these explorations. In this piece, then, Yu is deliberately taking on what could be seen as an exemplary version of the Asian-woman-as-sexually-available/exploitable stereotype, and her movement dialogue with Zhang and the text are explicitly informed by her own identitarian politics.