Reflections on the
Art-Making Process at APPEX

peter tokosfky

For six weeks during the summer of 1999, I found myself in a unique position as a participant-observer of the Asian Pacific Performance Exchange in Los Angeles. Unlike all of the other writer-scholars who joined the group that gathered on the UCLA campus in 1999 and 20001, I had never set foot in Asia beyond the banks of the Bosphorus, nor did I have anything more than a passing knowledge of Asian artistic practices. I brought very little training in music and movement of any sort to the sessions. My forays at participating in APPEX workshops amounted to little more than clumsy fun, which the skilled artists kindly tolerated, even encouraged.

The expertise I did bring to APPEX was as a folklorist and ethnographer concerned with how customs, celebrations, and traditional performances emerge from daily life in various communities. But the communities I have studied in Germany, Switzerland, and the United States exist by virtue of geography, ethnicity, and heritage; the APPEX community forms through a residency determined by application and invitation, with little reference to the particular setting in which the members gather. The performances I study, such as satirical carnival skits2, attain the label of “traditional” due to their anchoring and ongoing re-creation in a community of common citizens who are by no means professional performers. The arts practiced by many APPEX participants, in contrast, achieve the status of “traditional”3 due to their long histories of cultivation by a select group of highly-trained and skilled practitioners, often working outside of the ordinary flow of community life.

My only recourse as a scholar lacking the requisite background in the component arts of APPEX, attempting to understand the diverse interdisciplinary works produced in an environment so different from my familiar research terrain, has been to dissect the program by paying attention to the details of the collaborative process as it occurred. Throughout the workshops and other activities, I either sat quietly in the room with the tacit permission of the artists, or I participated to a limited extent in the ongoing processes of creation. Throughout these weeks of observations and during the months that followed, I have contemplated how the various APPEX activities might have contributed to completed works of art and whether this particular structure of activities best promotes the creation of intercultural and interdisciplinary works of art.

Peter Tokofsky sits with APPEX artists
PHOTO: NAM HAU DOAN

In order to begin dissecting the moment of artistic creation, one which involves diverse individuals from an array of cultural backgrounds who practice a variety of artistic disciplines, we must first look to the structure of the six-week APPEX program. Whereas many significant products of APPEX—life-long bonds between individuals, changes in world-view, altered political opinions, and new networks of collaboration and communication—emerged as by-products of the intensive program of workshops, performances, and communal living, the artworks themselves resulted directly from the program conceived by APPEX director Judy Mitoma. As the driving individual force behind APPEX, Mitoma consciously curated the six-week structure of activities—inside studios, on stage, and beyond—to stimulate artistic exploration and overcome the difficulties inherent in intercultural art-making. Over the course of several APPEX summer programs, Mitoma has developed a structure of communication, demonstration, and collaboration designed to spark creativity and inspire new intercultural works of art among a group of strangers within a short span of time.

Curating APPEX offered many challenges not typically encountered in the artist’s studio. Mitoma had to consider not only the particular personalities and talents of each of the participants, but also the variety of issues raised when such a diverse set of international performers comes together. Mitoma summarized:

When we bring people together from disparate cultures, we have to deal with many, many obstacles. Language is one of them, [so are] cultural differences, aesthetic differences, tuning systems. And yet what we have managed to do over the last six weeks is find common ground and the pleasures and rewards of working together.

Although keenly aware of the significance and impact many of these “pleasures and rewards” have away from the performance stage and beyond the duration of APPEX, Mitoma chose to focus her task—and that of APPEX—on artistic exploration. For us as observers, too, an examination of the sociology of APPEX House (the summer residence of the artists) would lead to an intrusive sort of psychology, possibly risk personal and political harm to certain participants whose behavior in Los Angeles might not correspond to the expectations of their families or governments, and ultimately into domains of human behavior that remain a mystery to even the most qualified analysts (for example: romance has been known to blossom during the six weeks). On the other hand, the strategies employed by Mitoma for cultivating a successful intercultural and interpersonal experience through a primary focus on artistic collaboration offer an appropriate and accessible terrain for scrutiny, particularly because the results of these strategies appear on stage in public performances.

The structure of the APPEX program can be broken down into three basic segments: personal introductions; workshops in which each artist introduces the group to his or her practice; and collaborative projects. Mitoma intervened as little as possible in the first two of these stages, telling participants little more than the day and time when they would hold their introduction and workshop. During collaborative projects, Mitoma’s role increased yet remained largely that of an “invisible hand.” Thus, the components of the APPEX schedule and their impact on the artists framed the creative interactions and collaborations more than active intervention by APPEX staff did. We must look, then, to the introductions and workshops if we are to scratch the surface of artistic invention which realizes itself in the subsequent collaborations.

Mitoma describes the decision to begin the six-week residency with introductions to the individuals and what they do artistically as “a no-brainer”: “I can’t think of any other way to get people to lay the groundwork for understanding who they’re working with.” Despite the matter-of-fact logic of this view, it is worth dissecting these components of APPEX, rather than skipping immediately to their end-products. If the introductions and workshops did indeed serve as the groundwork for subsequent collaborations, then an analysis of their dynamics and content should help us understand why certain artistic seeds germinated into later performances.

The “introduction” phase itself consisted of two parts: a group circle in which about 50 people (artists, writers, staff, and even some old friends of the APPEX program) introduced themselves; and a week of 15-minute presentations by each artist and writer participating in the program. The initial group circle consisted of a marathon meeting in which all participants gathered in the living room of APPEX House and said a few words about themselves and their feelings upon finally arriving at the start of the program that they had anticipated for months. After about six hours, all APPEX participants had formally met each other: we could match pronounceable names to recognizable faces, and associate those names and faces with countries of origin and artistic discipline.

The second part of the introductory phase occupied the remainder of the first week of APPEX. Each artist and writer was allocated 15 minutes for his or her “individual introduction,” but given no instruction beyond this. These 15-minute introductions offered an opportunity for participants to provide the group with a more in-depth view of themselves. In previous APPEX programs, a few artists enhanced this introduction with “video letters from home,” which they prepared in advance in order to show the group their families, aspects of their daily lives, the economic circumstances under which they live, their work environments, and so on. Although many participants valued the views offered by the videos, Mitoma reluctantly opted for 15-minute “live” presentations in consideration of time allocation.

Faced with a 15-minute slot in which to provide information about themselves, the artists and writers offered an eclectic mix of presentations covering many of the same aspects they might have depicted had they prepared “video letters from home,” but with less emphasis on elements of their personal and daily lives. The introductions ranged from discussions of national heritage and ethnic identity to explanations of academic approaches (for the writers), from demonstrations of artistic technique to expressions of how they felt that day. Several artists discussed their concerns about threatened cultures and traditions or about the treatment of minorities in their countries—subjects that, by their very nature, could not be documented in a video letter from home.

The workshop phase of APPEX even more directly concerns preparations for artistic collaboration. Over the second and third weeks of the program, each artist was allocated 45 minutes for participatory activities intended to engage the others in some aspect of his or her practice. As with the “introductions,” artists received few guidelines for their sessions. Mitoma positioned several returning APPEX participants at the start of the workshop phase so that they could rely on their familiarity with the format and demonstrate possibilities to new-comers through example. Scrutiny of the sequence suggests that she also intentionally arranged the workshops to ensure that on a given day participants would likely engage in a variety of activities, rather than several movement or music exercises in a row.

Mitoma describes the APPEX workshop approach as drawing on the familiar “master class” model for sharing technique:

In some ways, you can say that the notions of people teaching master classes is a vestige of the old models. Back in the ’60s and ’70s, an organization called the American Society for Eastern Arts—or there was the Center for World Music, which was down in San Diego—would have these intensive workshops with master teachers, and the whole workshop was [devoted] to study with the master teacher. So those are familiar models to us all. But the fact that [at APPEX] it’s all condensed into 30, 40 minutes, or an hour, that was very painful, but it seemed like it was necessary.

Sonam Phuntsok explaining Tibetan opera
PHOTO: TRACY FLINT

Over the two weeks of workshops/classes at APPEX, several variations on this model emerged, but I am reluctant to call them master classes. A master class is conventionally an opportunity for advanced artists within a certain discipline to work with a master in that form in order to hone and expand their already substantial expertise. An accomplished jazz musician, for instance, might acquire new skills, techniques, even vision by spending a few hours in an intense session with a jazz great. However, a master class would hardly be the place for a beginning student of jazz to learn chords.

The problem becomes more complicated when skilled artists from diverse disciplines and traditions come together. When their skills were in some way similar (Burmese and Indian drumming, or Tibetan and Chinese opera singing, for example), the APPEX artists stood to apply quantum gains to their individual practice after holding sessions with each other. On the other hand, while a Burmese instrumental musician and Tibetan opera singer might combine their skills to produce beautiful and evocative performances (as did Kyaw Kyaw Naing and Sonam Phuntsok in “Exile”), each would presumably add little to their own repertoire of technique when instructed in advanced practice by masters in the other’s art, not to mention how the instruction would be lost on unskilled interlopers such as myself.

The APPEX artists who work professionally in movement disciplines thrived in workshops led by their peers, and musicians easily took to those workshops conducted by other instrumentalists. The reverse was frequently not the case. To be sure, some disciplinary expertise of the artists enabled them to “cross over” in the workshops. For instance, the rhythms and stick-striking techniques of Taiko drumming served Kenny Endo (U.S.) well when he attempted a Filipino martial art; likewise, professional dancers have enough familiarity with musical patterns to make them more than novices in a workshop on tabla. But clearly, Jason Koontz (U.S.) could potentially gain more expertise from a workshop led by fellow tabla-player Lenny Seidman (U.S.) than could playwright Hoang To Mai (Vietnam); Manipuri martial artist Rajkumar Tombisana Singh (India), and theater director Thomas Riccio (U.S.) had very different experiences in a workshop on a martial art led by Joan Pangilinan-Taylor (U.S.). The handful of APPEX participants whose skills fell outside of the dominant strains of music and dance4, but who could nonetheless make important contributions to an intercultural Gesamtkunstwerk5, consequently had difficulties in the majority of instances. Under these circumstances, the workshop leader was confronted with the problem of addressing the lowest common denominator rather than seeking the highest pinnacle as is the case in a master class. When asked about their choices for workshop materials, several APPEX artists commented that they found it necessary to present rather elementary techniques or only a small portion of their arts due to the range of abilities of the others.

Despite these limitations, the APPEX artists constructed a variety of engaging and enjoyable workshops, which did ultimately lead to successful compositions and performances. Some of the artists offered master class-type sessions in which they taught the group elements of their technique. Others engaged the participatory audience in exercises that they use to prepare themselves for performance, rather than in aspects of the performance itself. Some APPEX artists chose to demonstrate their practice by offering a brief performance and then discussing it with the group. Various combinations of these possibilities also appeared.

The first type of workshop, which most closely resembles traditional master classes, was the most common. Almost all of the APPEX ’99 artists who had attended previous APPEX programs conducted this type of workshop. This suggests that after their first experience with APPEX, these artists came to concur with Mitoma’s view that this was the best way “to lay the groundwork” so that the others could understand who they were working with. In addition to the returning artists who conducted such classes, several first-time participants also followed this model. Dewa Putu Berata (Bali) and Endo both conducted 45 minute lessons in their respective arts. By the end of these workshops, those who were able to keep pace with the lessons had mastered a brief vocal syncopation and drumming sequence, respectively.

Kenny Endo demonstrates Taiko technique with drums made from tires covered with duct and packing tape.
PHOTO: NAM HAU DOAN

A number of artists who work primarily in dance and movement also followed the model of an introductory master class. Sen Hea Ha (Korea) guided us through several basic steps and gestures inspired by the movements of Korean shamans that inform Ha’s own performances. Yi Juan Zhang (“Teacher Zhang”; China) engaged the group in a series of eye exercises considered part of the training for performers in Chinese operatic tradition. In contrast to the other instructors, Zhang did not give participants a sense of mastery over even this small part of her practice by the end of the session. Instead, the workshop left most participants with impressions of the rigor and minutiae involved in the training of Chinese performers rather than with a repertoire of repeatable acts.

Another group of artists conducted a very different sort of workshop. These APPEX artists did not treat others in the group as experienced professionals ready to learn a specific, unfamiliar artistic practice. Rather, they took the group through various exercises intended to re-create the sort of preparations—from thoughtful reflection and meditative routines, to physical releases and romps—he or she might perform when beginning to conceive and create a work or performance. The distinction I am drawing here may be a subtle one, but I believe it merits fleshing out. Whereas the first type of workshop treated participants as beginning students, albeit ones accomplished in other, perhaps related forms of performing arts, the latter type of workshop treated participants as co-creators. While artists who led the first type repeatedly emphasized the necessity of limiting their instruction to a few, relatively simple techniques from their repertoires so as not to overwhelm participants, artists who led the latter type described their goals in very different terms.

Carol McDowell (U.S.) provides one such description of the workshop she designed for APPEX:

The intention of my workshop for APPEX was to introduce the overlay of techniques that comprise my personal movement research imparted from the lineage of modern dance. I began with a physical warm-up that draws from the practices of José Limón, Kei Takei, Alexander Technique, Masunaga’s Meridian Yoga, and Body Mind Centering. The second part of my workshop was Face Dance, an exploration in being seen through inviting the gaze of an other. The person who is being watched is encouraged to examine the ways that they embody and project into a movement impulse initiated in the face. The last part of my workshop was Fugue, my research of trance through dance improvisation. For three minutes, the mover energetically accumulates and repeats movements to fully engage the discursive or self-conscious mind. Then he stops and, in that stillness, the mover looks inward, locating and expressing body memories not formulated in words, dancing an “authentic/mythic” kinesthetic impulse/image/landscape that a watcher sings back to the mover.6

McDowell’s concluding thoughts about her workshop provide useful insights into the impact of the workshops on participants, as well as on the individual conducting the session:

Some artists were engaged with these practices, some were not. In presenting them I began to garner a lot of questions about underlying assumptions of authenticity, creativity, and tradition in my own movement research and in American modern dance.

Cheng-Chieh Yu (Taiwan/U.S.), Narumol “Kop” Thammaprusksa (Thailand), and Eva Lee (U.S.) also engaged the group in dramatic, reflective exercises. Yu instructed participants to close their eyes and then, without the benefit of sight, to line up by height against the wall. When everyone had reached a position in the line, she told us to open our eyes and look at what we had accomplished. We repeated the exercise several times, lining up according to various criteria such as skin color. Yu informed us that she shared these exercises with us because they encourage us to reflect on our perceptions of self and others, issues she deals with in her work. Thammaprusksa drew from the work of Anne Bogart to focus on perception, as well as on awareness and on effective gesture. Lee directed the group through several exercises and games. In one, the group broke into pairs; each pair held hands and gently began leaning backwards until the weight of each person balanced the other and only the counter-weight of the partner kept each person from falling. In “wild mind writing,” Lee gave us 30 seconds to write freely on a particular idea such as “laughter” or “journey.”

Thomas Riccio faced the challenge of developing a workshop which could not possibly begin to demonstrate either his artistic work or the preparations he typically undertakes to accomplish it. Outside of APPEX, Riccio creates indigenous theater performances with groups as diverse as the Zulu and the Sakha.7 Such projects require considerable research prior to and during the productions. Riccio typically spends several months learning about a culture, trying to “locate them in anthropological terms.” He attempts to understand their myths and legends, their music and rhythms. “I don’t try to make sense of it, I just try to absorb and visualize.…Essentially, my first two to three weeks with the groups is a research process. I’m basically researching what’s in their bodies, their minds, and their culture at this moment.” On such a project, Riccio might spend as much as a semester “to chitchat about what we want to do, and the scripts develop from this exploration.”8

Clearly, condensing this process into a 45-minute workshop was not merely challenging, it was impossible. Unfortunately, I was not able to witness the compromises Riccio devised. Reacting to the growing number of visitors and observers coming and going during the previous workshops, Riccio insisted that only participants enter the studio during his session. My interest in folktales and intercultural creativity beckoned me to participate. However, my primary role as ethnographer at APPEX, who would ultimately draw on all of my experiences and observations during the six weeks for this essay, told me that I should not participate and then be frustrated by my inability to use what I learned from the workshop.

This sampling of workshop strategies reveals that a clear correspondence between forms of artistic practice and formats of workshop emerged at APPEX. Artists who work with structured, traditional forms and techniques such as tabla and Taiko drumming, martial arts, or specific dance and theater vocabularies, led workshops introducing elements of these forms in the manner of a “master class.” Artists working in post-modern movement and theatrical forms, including performance art, led workshops encouraging participants to explore their consciousness. These “consciousness explorations” did involve the introduction of specific, structured techniques, but the workshops emphasized the end goals of awareness and creativity over the mastery of technique. Notably, APPEX musicians who have worked with both traditional and post-modern idioms chose to emphasize traditional techniques in their workshops. For example, Endo’s use of Taiko drums in jazz ensembles9 or Seidman’s tabla-playing in the cross-cultural drumming group Spoken Hand did not lead them to recreate these situations in the workshops. They did not equip participants with an array of instruments for a free-form jam in which everyone could explore their musical potential. Instead they focused on teaching elementary techniques for their primary instruments as they are used within traditional settings.

Performance and mixed-media artists also generally needed to isolate limited aspects of their diverse techniques to develop focused workshop sessions. As performers, both Dan Kwong (U.S.) and Paulina Sahagún (U.S.) create deeply personal shows exploring their identities as members of marginalized “minority” groups living in Los Angeles. At APPEX, each of these artists conducted workshops on a single theatrical technique related to processes of identity formation, but these workshop choices led to very different outcomes in terms of their contributions to later collaborative works. Kwong conducted a workshop in personal story-telling, and Sahagún led a session on masked performance influenced by her work with characters from commedia dell’arte. The APPEX group selected personal story-telling as the focus of a more advanced follow-up workshop, and Kwong’s narrative process informed “Family” and other performances during the final showings. Masking failed to become a substantial component of the intercultural collaborations, however. A couple of pieces, such as the intercultural puppet performance or Javanese dances performed by Eko Supriyanto (Java/U.S.), did involve masks, but each of these could be traced directly to other workshops, or were not the product of the APPEX collaborations at all.

Like Sahagún and Kwong, Peng Jinquan (China) needed to choose from among his many artistic activities for presentation in his workshop. In China, Peng directs an opera troupe but seldom performs. He also writes and directs for television and film.10 Peng correctly surmised that his work for the screen was not what earned him an invitation to APPEX, so he offered a workshop on Chinese opera. He offered us some history of selected forms as well as remarks on the current status of the traditional performing arts in China. In the remaining time, Peng and Teacher Zhang demonstrated stylized walks for a few opera figures and invited the group to practice with them.

Like the nuanced performance techniques demonstrated in Sahagún’s workshop, Peng’s teachings on Chinese opera did not figure recognizably in finished works. A group of APPEX participants, including me, attempted to work with Chinese opera to create an intercultural performance. However, some members of this collaboration took the position that only performers with extensive training in Asian movement should have the right to enter a dialogue with this venerable tradition. To me, this contradicted the entire premise of participatory workshops—if the training Peng offered me did not qualify me to participate, why bother with the training?—so along with one other participant, I excused myself from the group. The remaining members went on to explore some stylized operatic vignettes, which were performed in closed APPEX session but not included in the public salons. “Fan Variations,” a collaboration of Teacher Zhang, Yu, and Minh Tran (Vietnam)11 received far greater focus and stood out as a model of intercultural performance involving movements influenced by Chinese opera when presented on the final program. The general public did not view Peng in the roles associated with the traditions he presented during his workshop. Instead, Peng joined with his roommate, Riccio, and discovered physical comedy as a common ground they could explore on stage.12 When Peng returned to APPEX the following year, his workshop consisted entirely of acrobatic exercises, and he again collaborated in a physical comedy sketch for the final showings.

Two additional workshops further highlight the relationship between an individual’s artistic form and the nature of their workshop choices. Both tested the limits of the participatory model employed in all of the workshops described thus far. Sonam Phuntsok, an instructor at the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts (TIPA), is an accomplished artist in many disciplines. Tibetan opera is his primary expressive form. Unlike drumming or bodily movement, operatic singing—Tibetan or any other—is not an art over which novices, even skilled instrumental musicians, can achieve any mastery in 45 minutes. Phuntsok has trained since TIPA adopted him as a young boy. In his workshop he described his years of vocal exercises, which included standing beneath near-freezing Tibetan waterfalls. The pounding of the water on the back of the singer’s neck helped him produce the characteristic vibrato used in Tibetan arias. For his workshop, Phuntsok opted not to attempt compacting this rigorous process into under an hour by developing some sort of brief exercise. Instead he felt that his co-participants could gain insight into his technique by first offering them a brief lecture about the training of Tibetan opera singers and the place of TIPA in preserving exiled Tibetan arts. Phuntsok next introduced the group to selected texts and notations from the opera tradition. Finally, he donned his opera costume and emerged onto the studio stage to perform an excerpt. The workshop concluded with a question-and-answer session.

Probably no artist faced a more difficult challenge preparing a workshop than Hoang To Mai, a Vietnamese playwright and author of several short stories. Hoang initially planned on having several of the APPEX artists present a dramatic reading of her play, “I Don’t Like Roasted Corn,” which she had translated into English and brought with her to Los Angeles. Hoang arranged for evening rehearsals with the artists who agreed to perform for the workshop. The relatively simple dialogue in this play belies the complexity of the inner lives and shared personal histories of the characters. Thus, Hoang felt several rehearsals would be necessary to achieve the rendition she hoped to present. Unfortunately, during the days before the workshop several other activities occupied the artists. Hoang concluded that she could not successfully present the reading in the state she demanded, and thus developed an alternative workshop.

Of course, no matter what she decided to do in the workshop, Hoang would not have been able to allow the group to share her techniques for writing Vietnamese plays and short stories. Hoang’s workshop would, in any case, have been fundamentally different from most of the others: the workshop could involve neither hands-on experience of her techniques nor demonstrations of her work. In the end, Hoang selected a percussionist and two dancers for each of three improvisations. She asked the percussionist to provide a beat, and then asked one of the dancers to perform “modern” dance and the other “traditional” dance. She allowed each trio to perform for several minutes and, after each performance, asked the group whether they preferred traditional or modern dance in this context. Rather than experiencing Hoang’s own work in any form, the APPEX group instead received a glimpse of her reception of the ongoing APPEX process. Ironically, although Hoang’s workshop caused considerable discussion about its appropriateness because it failed to highlight her own work, the format she devised actually more closely resembled the process and product of APPEX arts than any of the other workshop formats. The dance-music improvisations conducted during this session foreshadowed such performances as “Exile” and “Fan Variations” that emerged in subsequent collaborations and were presented during the final APPEX salons.

The intent of the APPEX workshops differed from traditional master classes. Mitoma situated workshops at the heart of APPEX in order to lay the groundwork for the artists to understand who they are working with, not in order to improve the skills of participants. The performances produced at APPEX bore witness to the success of this goal. These works effectively combined the musical, dramatic, and choreographic techniques of the diverse participants. Performances such “Family” and the “Intercultural Puppet Company” revealed contributions easily traced to workshops conducted by participating artists.

Other performances presented us with compositional histories not as easily located in the workshops. The movement duet by Ha and Supriyanto in “Exile” was developed through intensive isolated collaboration, much of which predated APPEX ’99. The vocal and musical accompaniment by Phuntsok, Tashi Dhondup (Tibet), and Naing was then added and integrated after all of the artists involved became familiar with each other and their work at APPEX. The piece continued to grow, and even eight months after the performance at APPEX, Ha and Supriyanto could refer to “Exile” as a work in progress when presenting it, with recorded music, on a program of partner dances.
The “APPEX Music Ensemble” offered another study in the impact of the workshop model. Although the musicians were exposed to each other during the various individual workshops, throughout the period of collaborations leading to performances they insisted on substantial, uninterrupted studio time among themselves. When it came to the business of truly developing advanced intercultural musical collaborations, they recognized the limitations of interdisciplinary workshops. At several points the musicians did invite dancers to join their rehearsals, but inevitably the dancers who accepted this offer emerged from the studio disappointed that the musicians weren’t focused on producing music to accommodate their movement. For purely musical collaboration, it made more sense for the musicians to work among themselves and jump immediately to advanced intercultural exploration, rather than to experience each other presenting basic techniques to a mixed-discipline group.

However, APPEX musicians did not only form exclusively musical collaborations; they also performed in a variety of other formats. These pieces tended to have an additive formula (musical stylings added to “At the Table,” or music and song added to “Exile”), which would not necessarily require participatory workshops for their realization. Riccio and Peng did not need to play keyboards themselves to recognize that Naing could enhance their skit. The recognition by various performers that collaboration with their APPEX peers could enhance their works and form a “synthesis of vital impulses”14 demonstrates the success of the APPEX format, but still does not unequivocally argue on behalf of participatory workshops as the path leading to this end.

These examples, chosen from dozens of APPEX performances, reveal that the workshops did indeed lay the groundwork for substantial collaboration. The workshops seem to have transcended cultural differences to allow the artists to imagine how their various skills could contribute to new works. Yet, our survey also suggests that the format is less able to accommodate differences among the artistic disciplines and that the format simply is not effective for certain disciplines such as creative writing and musical composition. Still other arts, such as the masking work presented by Sahagún and the opera techniques presented by Peng, resisted integration into other pieces because of the depth of expertise they require and because, unlike music and dance, they could not easily be added to interdisciplinary works.15 In some instances, alternative schemes such as extended studio time for smaller collaborations or among artists in a single discipline apparently offered more effective mechanisms for the creation of intercultural Gesamtkunstwerk than the participatory workshop format, but these alternatives seem to have been most effective when they followed exposure to the others during the workshops.

Finally, we must return to our term Gesamtkunstwerk. If we define interdisciplinary work as that which is more than an aggregate of the various disciplines, and multicultural as something more than the happy co-existence of multiple cultures, then the measure of the successful “total intercultural work of art” will be the extent to which it transcends the component parts.16 Ironically, the very observation which permitted recognition of the success of workshops, namely the presence within collaborations of techniques introduced in the workshops, indicates that while the process of growing together at APPEX has demonstrated some remarkable achievements within the limited scope of the program, it also remains incomplete and ongoing.

1 - During APPEX 2000 I continued an informal participation in the program by attending several performances, workshops, and social gatherings.
2 - See, for instance, Peter Tokofsky, “Communal Creation Revisited: Authorship and Creativity in the Elzacher Fasnet,” Western Folklore 56 (1997), 215-232; and Peter Tokofsky, “A Tale of Two Carnivals: Exoteric and Esoteric Performance in the Fasnet of Elzach,” Journal of American Folklore 113 (2000), in press.
3 - On the key term “tradition,” particularly within folkloristics, see Henry Glassie, “Tradition,” Journal of American Folklore 108 (1995), 395 412.
4 - After the conclusion of APPEX, participants were asked to submit “exit letters” reflecting on their experiences. The APPEX staff then copied and distributed the letters received to all participants. In his letter, Minh Tran observed that “some of our APPEX siblings did not enjoy or perhaps did not fulfill their expectations at APPEX Program due to his or her capability in the field of ‘performing.’ A director, a playwright, costume designer, or set designer is an artist in his/her own right. However, because the nature of the program is to show or to perform the work to [an] audience, if a participant does not have the skill to perform or any previous performing experience, he or she cannot share the same experience that other participants cherished.”
Miriam Gerberg, who came to APPEX in the summer of 2000, was the only participant during 1999 or 2000 who identified musical composition (as opposed to performance) as her primary art. She agreed to leave the program before its conclusion due to conflicts she had with some of the musicians.
5 - I use Richard Wagner’s German term for the total work of art, “the fusion of all the arts in one work” [Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (London: Allen Lane, 1973), p. 124] to describe the diverse interdisciplinary creations found at APPEX in order to emphasize the importance of combining forms and experiences in these new intercultural works. See Richard Wagner, “The Art-Work of the Future” in Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, William Ashton Ellis, trans. (New York: Broude Brothers, 1966), pp. 69-213.
6 - Carol McDowell, personal communication.
7 - The Sakha (Yakut) are an indigenous group that live in central Siberia.
8 - Dale E. Seeds, “Trickster by Trade: Thomas Riccio on Indigenous Theatre,” The Drama Review 4:4 (1996), pp. 118-133; the remarks cited here appear on pp. 123-124.
9 - For a discussion of Endo’s work, see Kenny Endo, “Beat of a Different Drum: Japanese-American Drummer Seeks to Synthesize Eastern, Western Influences,” By the Way, Jan./Feb., 1995, pp. 43-49.
10 - Peng, in a typical display of his charming wit, pointed out to me that in contrast to many of his countrymen who leave China for the U.S. in order to earn more money, he earns money in China (through his work in television) so that he can travel to and within the United States. At times, this thought helps him endure some of his work on mass produced, serialized television programs.
11 - Yu and Tran had participated in the truncated Chinese opera group.
12 - Peng and Riccio credit Charles Tomlinson, costume and set designer for APPEX, for suggesting they work on a physical comedy sketch.
13 - “There’s part of me that knows it’s the process, process, process”—Judy Mitoma, discussing how workshops and collaborations lead to performances during an interview with the author on November 19, 1999.
14 - Laszlo Moholy-Nagy describes the Gesamtkunstwerk as “a synthesis of all the vital impulses spontaneously forming itself into the all-embracing Gesamtkunstwerk” Cited in Annette Michelson, “Where is Your Rupture?: Mass Culture and the Gesamtkunstwerk,” in Rosalind Krauss, et al., eds., October: The Second Decade, 1986-1996 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), p. 96.
15 - Wassily Kandinsky observes that combinations of forms in a Gesamtkunstwerk do not mirror the additive properties of mathematics. See “On Stage Composition” in Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, eds., The Blaue Reiter Almanac (New York: Da Capa Press, 1974), pp. 190-206.