A conversation between APPEX 2000 artists Denise Uyehara and Ettumanoor Parameswaran Kannan

DENISE UYEHARA

Denise: Tell me a story, something that happened to you.

Kannan: (smiles) A very suitable story is the story of the performance called “Voices,” how it formed.

Ettumanoor Parameswaran Kannan (South India) and Denise Uyehara (U.S.) met through the 2000 Asia Pacific Performance Exchange. During their residency, they collaborated with community theater artist Josefina Baez (U.S./Dominican Republic) on a piece entitled “Voices.” As with many APPEX projects, this was just the prelude to future artistic explorations together. The following conversation took place one week after APPEX concluded.

D: It’s interesting that Indian theater and dance have influenced Western contemporary theater, in particular directors such as Peter Brook, and that his work in turn informed a whole spectrum of performers, including myself, several generations later. Now here we are—you, me, Josefina—working together. We’ve come full circle. I am interested in the threads that connect our traditional and contemporary forms, our points of entry into the work, and how we managed to work together with such diverse artistic backgrounds.

You had mentioned that Kathakali was originally a renegade form much like performance art in the United States. It was at one time a contemporary form, but now it is considered an old form, a traditional form. Could you describe the Kathakali form for us, as it is seen today in India?

K: Kathakali is a theater art form of Kerala. It’s a traditional story-telling theater. [In Sanskrit] Katha means story, Kali means performance, so literally it means “performance of story.” The performance is on the basis of a literature form called Aattakkatha, which means the poem for performance. So in Aattakkatha, one poet takes a story and writes poems [dialogues and narration]. Actors, singers, and musicians accept this literature; the singers sing, the actors—using a type of hand-gesture language—perform different characters on stage, and the percussion musicians support the song and movement. Actually, Kathakali is not a dance form. Most Western scholars consider Kathakali as a dance-drama. It is not a dance-drama but a theater form, in which we use dance effectively. Dance is used to express emotion each time.

D: What led you to be interested in working with artists in other contemporary forms?

Kannan, performing Kathakali during an APPEX final showing
PHOTO: LARRY LOEHER

K: In Kathakali, we always have that dialogue, a conversation, in between the artist and the audience. Every day, the Kathakali artist has to find something new, and he has to present new [ideas] on stage, because it is the same story that we are presenting, some for 300 years. If I am performing one character that has been performed for 300 years, then I have to do something new, otherwise it cannot [survive]. If [the audience is] getting the same experience and feeling, then they won’t be excited. They should get something different. We are looking for how to make it different. That is why the Kathakali performance is always improvised on stage, it is not set, there are forms, but each character should be presented in a particular form, a structure.

D: Contemporary dancer Cheng-Chieh Yu (U.S./Taiwan)1 talked about how she uses structural improvisation in the development of her dance pieces.

K: Yes, it is like that. There’s a structure, but in that structure we have a lot of freedom to improvise. So, for me, this improvisation is not new. I happened to know about modern performers, that they do improvisation, but this is entirely different from Kathakali improvisation, and I wanted to know what this is. So at APPEX, I got a chance to watch your performance and Cheng-Chieh and choreographer/dancer Roko Kawai (U.S./Japan). They are entirely modern, exclusively modern, I felt they have no connection to traditional things. Roko had some background in traditional dance forms, and Cheng-Chieh did also, [but] in their performance, they purposely cut that traditional part. And so I wanted to work with all three of you, but the circumstances turned, and you and I alone began to do it. I wanted to know about your methods and exercises, your method of finding voice. So we went into a work room and began to do some exercises2. You gave some directions, and then Garrett Kam (Bali/U.S.), and Kazuko Yamazaki (U.S./Japan) and Ric Trimillos (U.S.) joined us. We began to write about our experiences, through which we found our own sound. And I appreciated that way of training: doing something, and then observing someone do the same thing.

D: You mean, the exercise when we had everyone doing the same gesture, waving or scratching their head, and notice how it is different?

K: Yes.

D: You seemed very at home in the “Voices” piece, even though you may have not done that particular process before. What was that process like, being a traditional performer, and then writing and creating a piece like this?

Josefina Baez
PHOTO: LARRY LOEHER

K: I am always looking for new forms in which this Kathakali training can be used, particularly modern performance pieces. For Kathakali, we learn the form first—external training. Then, through practice, life is filled in that form, and then it becomes alive. You and I did some similar practices, forms like scratching the head. Four of us did the same action, and a fifth observed. Or waving the hand. The form we repeat, but in different ways.

D: One of the things I wanted to examine in the exercise was how we performed each task in our own unique way. Because I wanted to lead us through exercises of personal story, I thought it would be good to first explore even how we move differently: sit differently, scratch our heads, wave goodbye.

Josefina Baez soon joined us. She brought her multidisciplinary and intercultural artistic work to our project, her training in the South East Indian form of Kuchipudi, and her contemporary performance work. We had a chance to see her perform part of one of her solo pieces, “Dominicanish,” during APPEX. You brought Kathakali, story-telling, a knowledge of other traditional plays, and form. I brought my interdisciplinary performance experience, mixing story with movement, song fragments, image, and juxtaposition of the real with the uncanny. We all brought our desire to jump in and work together: we understood how to generate new work, interweave themes and physical movement, and how to self-direct.

Josefina Baez
PHOTO: EKO SUPRIYANTO

So when the three of us collaborated on the final “Voices” incarnation, we were already very good at metaphorically stepping outside of ourselves and looking at what we were seeing. For example, Josefina brought in the airline flight attendant movements, the movements we see repeated over and over as the plane taxis down the runway. Each attendant performs these moves differently, as did we. Then we built the crux of the piece: interwoven stories. You used Kathakali to recount how you almost lost your voice and life in a car accident, Josefina described a revolutionary friend whose death caused the sky to change ‘from blue to bright orange,’ while I evoked my encounter with a dead body wrapped in white cloth laying on the beach. And we also interpreted Josefina’s English and Spanish, through Kathakali and American Sign Language (with ASL coaching from ethnomusicologist/musician Miriam Gerberg). Story and gesture provided a common point of entry, plus we each had a wealth of story-telling experience from which to work.

K: In all these exercises that led up to the “Voices” piece, you gave us a task which was done by each person, and showed the differences.

In Kathakali, there are three levels of creation. All three levels have the aim of telling a story. In the first level, a poet—who is not a performer, but who knows about theater and has insights about it—he writes a poem, through which he tells a complete story with dialogue and narration. He finishes his work. He told one story. Then the story goes to actor or director. An actor is always a director in Kathakali.

D: You’re self-directed.

K: Yeah, I self-direct. This is second level. He [the actor] takes the lines. He does not know what the poet actually thought in his mind, so he interprets the words of the poet and, using this new interpreted meaning, he creates a performance using gesture language, music, rhythm, dances, facial expressions, and many other things like costumes. Thus he creates his stage performance. This second level of creation is not at all realistic, but a highly stylized, abstract form. This stylized form is not complete. Each character is a type, they are not complete characters. But the audience who is watching it has to fill the gaps. There is no speech, but the audience has to use his imagination to understand that character is speaking with hand-gesture language. In realistic plays, the characters speak, so the audience does not have to use as much imagination, but because these characters don’t speak, the audience has to do a lot of brain work. That brain work is the third level of creation.

D: I like that, brain work.

K: In a Sanskrit text on theater written in 18th century, it is said, Bhaavanaanubhavathvam bharathathvam, which means, “Art is the expression of the experience of the imagination.” You did an exercise in your workshop. Do you remember the exercise in which you wanted us to lay down and imagine that we are in a beach?

D: I knew the group we were working with needed a warm up. It was early in the morning, and I wanted to do something that would allow people to be creative without them even knowing they were doing it, because some of the musicians and traditional artists were not comfortable improvising. So the only word I wrote on the board was “Imagination” and then I added the word “Imaginary,” and then “Giant Imaginary Animals.” I wanted people to go through a process imagining they were laying on the beach, throwing sand, and then moving into a Giant Imaginary Animal, a creature that they created. And when they had to work together, they didn’t feel they were being watched so much, and they used their imagination in a big way.

K: Without imagination, there is no art form, really.

D: We performers create and perform what we cannot see or touch. You can touch this table, touch these cups on the table, but what’s this space like between the cup and the table? Or what is the feeling of this coldness here, when I put my hand near this ice-filled cup? Those invisible things are interesting in theater. I think those are the things that are transferred to the audience in what you call the “third level.” And the audience does have to work. I live in Los Angeles where there’s a lot of television and movies all around me. But I don’t watch television anymore because it doesn’t encourage me to think. I want to do some brain work, and I want my audience to also.

I have another question for you. After APPEX, now you have all these new ideas. Are you interested in writing new Kathakali performances, generating your own stories?

Kannan demonstrates Kathakali technique during his APPEX workshop
PHOTO: EKO SUPRIYANTO

K: I don’t think that I will write new Kathakali performances, because Kathakali already has a good variety of plays. I don’t have to create new movement patterns because Kathakali has a well-established grammar of movement language, of that I think should not be changed. If it is changed, then the aesthetic concept behind Kathakali will be changed. So I don’t think I will have to create a new Kathakali. But I will use my experience with other classical art forms and modern performances to interpret the same characters [in Kathakali] that we already perform. We have freedom to change [within] each performance, so now I can use what I learned, to make it better and better. It is difficult to explain how, but if you observe the performances, you can see how we do it.

D: What do you think will be the response to these types of changes to traditional Kathakali, even without changing the grammar?

K: People like very slight changes, but they should not know that I am changing it. If it is a gradual development, people like it. If it is a leap forward, then people are afraid that perhaps I will destroy the traditional form. So it is the will of the society: the society wants to keep the form of Kathakali. That is why when I change the form people protest.

We are bound to keep this tradition. At the same time we have to find out new things. This is a challenge for real classical performers. This is what I am interested in facing.

Kathakali is a story-telling theater, and you are also telling stories. How did you find out this way of storytelling? Is there anybody you try to follow, or is this a way you found out yourself: using an overhead projector, or using small objects, speaking with some small gestures with sufficient gap between words….

D: I started as a writer. I’ve been writing since I was young. Around the early 80s and through the 90s, performance art in the U. S. became a contemporary vehicle to deliver stories. I shifted from writing to the performance form mostly out of necessity, because I knew that as a person of color, as an Asian woman in the United States, performance provided a means by which I could get my work out to the public and simultaneously relay images and complex ideas bursting out of my head, things that I couldn’t always describe on the page. And I was interested in seeing people like me reflected on the stage. There had been some Asian American performers since the 1960s, but not very many, and then, in the 80s, there was a big wave of solo performance artists of all races and walks of life. So I started working in that performance community with spaces like Highways Performance Space and the Asian Theater Workshop at the Mark Taper Forum. I learned from different types of renegade artists who telling their stories, creating art, pushing the political and artistic boundaries. I am self-educated in performance, but my real education has been from watching other performers and creating new work that interested me.

K: Did you learn anything from the classical performers in the APPEX program?

D: Yes, I’ve learned how to better read traditional dance and Kathakali story-telling. Before, it didn’t occur to me that a whole society understood what a specific dance piece was, for example the Ramayana. So, if an artist performed part of it, then the audience would know what they were seeing. In the U.S., most of the performers that I work with, we create new work, and the audience always wants to see a new piece. That’s why I think some of us contemporary artists at APPEX were wondering “Why do they want to do Oedipus? We want to do something new.” Now, many contemporary artists work from classical pieces, but it’s actually expected of us that we will always perform it in a new way. Or, generate new material. If I were to perform the same piece, my audience would be disappointed. “Why didn’t you create something new?!” And when will I find time to perfect this piece? I don’t know. So it was interesting to watch the traditional artists who had a community that really respected [the fact] that they were performing the same piece the audience had seen before; what was new was that they found different interpretations within it, and that the society had a strong reference for it, a collective memory. When we see the Ramayana here, we have to read our program notes very well to understand what’s happening: “OK, this is Sita, and this is Hanuman….” And I came to understand the importance of gesture in traditional forms. For example, the formal Kathakali gesture for the tiger is very specific, the interpretation of the tiger. And I also learned that in the traditional form, female and male actors and dancers could often play cross-gender. Men could play women, women could play men. In the U.S. we think we are so sexually liberal, and yet in some of our traditional forms, such as Western ballet, you never see a man playing a woman, unless it’s a statement. That would be a leap. For example, there’s a performance of “Swan Lake” performed by all men in tutus, and it’s a statement.

K: Do you think, when an audience is watching a form—for example, Kathakali—10 times, 11 times, 12 times, when they have watched it for the tenth time, and when they watch it for the eleventh time, are they watching the actual form, or actually the spirit inside the form?

D: I think you answered your own question! I definitely think so. I understood that better after being in APPEX. For example, you didn’t wear your full Kathakali traditional costume when you performed at a salon, because you knew that the American audience would just be watching the costume, not paying attention to your interpretation, the spirit. And also, one country’s traditional interpretation of Hanuman was very different than another’s. [It was great] to hear people comment on why they thought someone’s interpretation was very good and why. I understood that a particular culture has learned how to read their own traditions very well, because they’ve seen them on a more daily basis, it’s around you more. As a kid, I heard certain cultural references growing up, and I would think for you growing up, you heard certain references to Kathakali, and you could go see it maybe once a month. You start to become educated to what you are seeing. And then of course you would want to go deeper. It would be no challenge to just look at the costumes—it’s more about the sublime.

K: I’m asking this question to lead to a certain point: in modern theater, when you change the form, again and again, do you think an audience is capable enough to enter into the spirit through the form? Not in your performance: in your performance, you are not changing the form too much—you change the props which you use, but your form stays the same. But Cheng-Chieh and Roko always want to change their form, and in each piece, the form is changed. Do you think that an audience watching for the first time, do you think they would be capable of breaking the form and enter into the spirit, into the heart, through one performance?

D: That’s a good question. I think what contemporary performance artists focus on is just that: a good performer understands that a good performance is more than just the fabulous costumes, or the shock value of performing naked, or piercing part of your body, it’s about something invisible—the message, and discussion you have with the audience. I think that in our “Voices” piece we are on our way there, and that it happens so fast, seven minutes: we enter as an airplane, and layer it with movement, talking in different languages, gesture, stories—a lot going on. If they were able to see the piece expanded, or an extension of the piece, they would be able go even deeper. If we had more time to work on it, we’d make even deeper connections. That was one of Cheng-Chieh’s suggestions, was for us to have more connection on stage, that’s why I suggested you and I speak more to each other in gesture. So when Josefina tells a story, then asks us, “Do you understand?,” we look at each other, and you talk to me in Kathakali and I talk to you in ASL. That was communication to me, it shows a distinct connection between us, like these two cups [refers to the table again]. The audience will take that home with them, not just that there were three people on stage, but how we interacted.

Denise Uyehara and Ettumanoor Parameswaran Kannan in “Voices”
PHOTO: LARRY LOEHER

K: They cannot express their experiences in words.

D: I think we’re on our way with our piece “Voices,” but of course, I always think that we could go deeper.

K: It is interesting to hear that the experience the audience gets, they cannot explain it in words—it is pure experience. This is what the traditional audience expects from the most sublime Kathakali performance. The meaning they already know; what the actor is doing, the audience knows. Then can you think, what is the audience enjoying when they watch those plays again and again? They are enjoying the spirit, the energy, the force, the life, behind that performance. That cannot be expressed. The form of the performance can be expressed in the subtext. But the energy, the life behind it cannot be expressed through words. As Josefina says in our “Voices,” “you are here to feel.” The life in such performances can be known only by feeling them. If it is presented five times, materially, in their form they are the same; but there is a vibration of human life within the form and each time it is different.

D: You worked in different collaborations at APPEX. Did you find any collaborative forms that you would like to pursue in the future?

K: Yes. I did three pieces. “Oedipus,” “Time, Emit Time,” and “Voices.” I used dialogue in “Oedipus.” I want to do the same thing in the future, performance like this using dialogue and hand gesture. For the “Time” piece, which Cheng-Chieh directed, it gave me an outlook on how a modern dancer works.

D: And you looked like a modern dancer!

Kannan in the title role of “Oedipus” in the APPEX final performance
PHOTO: LARRY LOEHER

K: [Laughs] Oh, thank you. I told Cheng-Chieh that within five years I will direct one modern piece! I was just joking. And then the third piece, it was the most interesting piece for me, “Voices.” The process of its development, and its final form, it was very interesting for me, and I was really thrilled. The three of us were thrilled. And the others who watched it were thrilled. It was very small, short, and very powerful. We used dialogue, our own traditional movements, we used a special kind of relationship, where there is no relationship. We created relationship where there was no relationship.

D: And we walked on a line, which you had suggested. I liked that, since we three were very small on a very big stage, so the way we isolate ourselves worked. You had mentioned to me when I had done that line exercise [in which we walked on a line while we told our stories], you said, “We are all coming from the same idea of the time that we found our voice, so perhaps by walking on the same line, we travel through the same journey.”

K: Yes. There’s a lot of richness in this piece, I hope that we could continue it in the future. And the experience to live with the Western and other cultures, that helps me to work as an artist who can work with artists from other countries. This experience helps me for many successful collaborations.

D: I had a question. How do you think a piece like “Voices” would be received in Kerala?

K: That’s a very good question. If I present a piece like this in Kerala…. There’s a small group of people there who would be interested in modern drama, [but] even then, they don’t understand everything. They cannot enjoy it perfectly. They are interested in experiments, so they would watch. They would not be excited, but they would say, “Ah, this is very interesting.”

There was a communist leader in Kerala, he wanted to present a scene—a fight between the working class and the bourgeoisie—in Kathakali, but it was an utter failure. It was a piece which he created using Kathakali gestures, the costume of the servant as the working class, and of the bourgeoisie. Traditionally there was no meaning. The form of Kathakali, it is not possible to present things so literally, it should be imaginative, mythical.

D: Presenting a myth or legend to the audience allows them to comment on social issues that relate to their current condition. Contemporary issues have much in common with traditional stories.

I didn’t have much formalized opinion about Kathakali before I met you. What I learned is that you happen to be very aware about social conditions around you, and about human nature, and about the human condition. So just knowing you, and knowing that you chose this path in Kathakali, when you play a character, I feel I am seeing someone who is examining his character so that he can understand the world better. Like the Okinawan artists [Norihiro] Higa-san and [Kiyoyuki] Owan-san (Japan), do what they do for similar reasons. Higa-san will repeat the same dance movement with his hand, over and over, until he gets it perfectly, because it’s a study of the human condition and how beauty is created by repetition.

K: I agree with you. By examining yourself, you may understand the world better. That is what these classical art forms do.

D: In the U.S. for a long time, there was funding only for classical Western forms, like ballet, but that is changing, and there’s more awareness about the diversity of people who live here, their influences, and more financial support for art forms from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. This type of work makes Americans think. Hopefully, in the future there will be more financial support for Asian Americans, African Americans, Native Americans, and Latinos, to continue in our contemporary art forms, because we reflect our communities and push the boundaries of the aesthetic we find there.

1 - Other performers and writers who participated in APPEX are referenced to throughout this discussion. When applicable, the artists’ country of residence is followed by the country of origin.
2 - Denise’s exercise on “finding your voice” is inspired in part, by an exercise lead by performance artist Tim Miller.