KAREN L. ITO

“Internationalizing New Work in the Performing Arts” was a ten-year initiative funded by the Ford Foundation from 1993 to 2003. This initiative was established to promote international collaboration between performing artists from the United States and underrepresented areas of Africa, Asia (excluding Japan and Korea), the Caribbean, South America, and Mexico. Seven U.S. sites were chosen to nurture these collaborations and develop a knowledge base to assist other organizations in the development of similar work. Two sites were re-grant agencies: Arts International and Meet the Composer. The other five were diverse organizations that served as initiators and homes for site-created collaborations: 651 ARTS; Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center; Miami-Dade Community College, Cultural Affairs Department; Northwest Asian American Theatre; and the UCLA Center for Intercultural Performance. The following two excerpts were written as part of the final report of the initiative and will give the reader a sense of the initiative work as a whole, introducing both the dynamics of international collaboration and the core values of the participants.1 APPEX housed UCLA’s residency program and included two years of funding to support the addition of Rockefeller Writer Fellows in the program.

One of the unique aspects of the initiative was that an ethnographer was partnered with each of the sites to assist in documentation and feedback as the collaborations unfolded. Ethnographers were key in providing the data that established the basis for knowledge-building about international collaboration. They also met as a team to work on initiative-wide issues and to discuss individual field situations. As “participant observers” of the collaboration process from both administrative and artistic perspectives, ethnographers served as—in the team’s words—“the third eye.” This meant to stand at a slightly removed viewpoint to give a critical internal voice about this process to the sites.

Karen Ito “in the field”
PHOTO: EKO SUPRIYANTO

I served in two capacities for the initiative. First, as an administrator of the ethnographic team, I served as co-Director of the team with Douglas DeNatale and as the Director of Research. Second, I served as the site ethnographer for UCLA’s CIP/APPEX program because, philosophically and methodologically, I feel that to understand the subtleties and problems of data collection for any research team under my direction, it is important to also collect data myself. Working with APPEX gave me this opportunity. The ethnographers all felt it was a privilege to be associated with our sites and to see and feel the struggles and triumphs, failures and epiphanies that this remarkable initiative engendered. While each site was unique in how they developed collaborations and the levels at which they worked, all agreed that the opportunity to bring together such a diverse set of cultural and social collaborations was uniformly rewarding and that the mark of success was less in the final product than in the synergistic process of establishing and working in collaborative partnerships.

1 - For more information, see “A Report on the Ford Initiative ‘Internationalizing New Work in the Performing Arts’ Phase II: 1999-2003” and “Working Paper #4: Core Values: Essential Aspects of International Collaboration,” published by Arts International and available on their website: http://www.artsinternational.org/knowledge_base/resources_and_models/index.htm