It’s All Give and Take

On the stage of an airy studio at UCLA this warm July morning, there are about 20 people of various Asian and American ethnicities apparently trying to master the demeanor of a supermodel gone mad. Dressed in bits of Spandex and chiffon hastily chosen from a nearby costume rack, they stride, they mince and they prance, glancing haughtily at one another and pausing regularly to raise both arms in a stance of manic, preening triumph. It looks a little like a fleet of Mary Lou Rettons channeling anxious, pedigreed cats.

But, in fact, this is a fleet of dancers, actors, musicians and writers who have come from near and far to experiment in a kind of intercultural performance laboratory. It’s called APPEX--short for the Asia Pacific Performance Exchange--a six-week residency program of workshops, discussion groups and concerts. Many of the cavorting figures onstage are contemporary dancers familiar with free-form improvisation; but many others are more used to doing Chinese opera, or the classical theater forms of Tibet, Thailand and Indonesia.

This morning, however, they are all gamely improvising in one of the daily workshops led by individual APPEX participants. After all, they have come to learn from others, as well as to share what they know. In this third week of the residency, they have already played in a gamelan (an Indonesian orchestra), learned a Tibetan folk dance and done their best to look commanding while whacking away at a booming Japanese taiko drum.

Today’s catwalk session actually started in a more serious vein. Workshop leader Minh Tran, a contemporary dancer who is also trained in Vietnamese opera, gave a brief history of Vietnam, highlighting its many occupying forces; then he set everyone in motion for an exercise in understanding what it’s like to try to transform yourself to fit in.

“I had them first walk around, being aware of each other and saying, ‘You are pretty the way you are,’ ” Tran explains in the hallway afterward. “Then I asked them to walk around saying, ‘But I think I’m better than you.’ And finally I asked them to put on a costume and not use verbal communication, but to communicate those same two phrases--how do you transform your body to do that?

“I wanted them to experience, just a little, this Vietnamese ‘tradition’--always being told to change, adapt, to fit in, put on another coat of paint, without any preparation, just to survive.”

In the official feedback session after lunch, the performers laugh about the morning’s runway stars, especially the men who draped themselves in feminine gear; but they also acknowledge and discuss the deeper meaning of the exercise. At APPEX, acknowledging and discussing are the constant companions of performance.

Sitting on the floor in a large circle (there are 26 APPEX artists and six writers), Indian theater director and martial artist Tombisana Rajkumar says, “I’ve never been inside a woman’s dress. A change came over me, and I thought suddenly that I want to understand a woman.”

Kyaw Naing, a Burmese master drummer, also had a new experience. Speaking through an interpreter, he says that for the first time as a performer, he didn’t know what he was doing. From his laughter, and that of everyone around him, it’s easy to see that when you’re in APPEX, suddenly not knowing what you’re doing is considered an inevitable thing, even a good thing.

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If APPEX is a lab where art forms and practitioners provide the ingredients and experiments, the master scientist would have to be UCLA professor Judy Mitoma. The program owes its existence to her vision and--not to be underestimated--her grant-writing ability.

Before APPEX, Mitoma, a specialist in the music and dance of Indonesia and Japan, was already furthering the cause of intercultural scholarship in the UCLA department of world arts and cultures, which she chaired from its inception in 1982 until 1997. But she also felt that more in-depth research experiences for performing artists were needed.

For her, intensive exposure to an art form is “like getting involved with a religion, in a way--it has its own value system, its own aesthetic, mythology and cast of characters. I felt that those values needed to be reinvested in what we’re doing here at the university.”

At the same time, Mitoma saw that many Asian traditional artists were getting lost in the rush toward Westernized spectacle. “The world is changing so rapidly, and traditional artists are losing their audience, their support, their students. What could I do in the face of this? They were often outside the loop, and I became extremely aware that the privilege of information is one of the most important tools you can give a traditional artist. It’s not about making them something other than they are; it’s about what options they might have available to them.”

Mitoma envisioned an incubator where ideas could grow from interaction between Asian and American performers. Traditional artists could encounter the experimental foment of postmodernism at close range, while contemporary artists could benefit from understanding the discipline and historical resonance of more established forms. But how to pay for it all?

Mitoma looked to the funding models that are common in science and medicine. “Usually in the sciences, you apply for a grant, you get money and your job is to forward the research,” she says in an afternoon break at a UCLA coffee shop. “Even if you don’t prove the theorem or you don’t find the cure, you’re still moving forward. In the arts, we should have [this kind of] research agenda. And it requires greater resources.”

Those greater resources came in 1995, in the form of major grants from the Ford and Rockefeller foundations. Mitoma now operates APPEX, which had previous incarnations in 1996 and 1997, under the rubric of the UCLA Center for Intercultural Performance.

APPEX seeks early to mid-career performing artists or writers who have a track record that relates to intercultural issues. Each participant gets a small stipend, and has travel and living expenses paid (out-of-towners live on campus in a former sorority house). The goal is to have half the participants come from Asia and half from the United States.

The program’s weekly schedule is packed and always being revised, depending on who volunteers to teach a workshop, which ones participants vote to be repeated, and who needs studio time. Free-form discussions occupy the space between workshops and rehearsals for weekly collaborative projects, some of which turn into public performances.

Even in off-hours, APPEX togetherness continues--optional activities have ranged from trips to Venice Beach and the Getty Museum to ad hoc English classes, a salsa class and early-morning tai chi sessions--taught by an American to several Asians who were unfamiliar with the form.

Inevitably, the personal starts to merge with the theatrical, and at any given time, APPEX is a place where epiphanies abound.

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On another morning of workshops, the range of performance approaches at APPEX is particularly in evidence, as are a number of the “moments of discovery” that participants talk about taking home with them and incorporating into their work.

First up is Zhang Yijuan, who teaches the group ways of using their eyes effectively onstage--rigorous, detailed exercises that she uses with her Chinese opera students in Beijing. The uninitiated later talk about the refinement and discipline of a technique they knew little about--”When I think of the attention to detail, how extensive the training is,” says Los Angeles-based interdisciplinary artist Michelle Berne, “it really made me overwhelmed about the magnitude of the tradition.”

The group is also impressed by the depth of Zhang’s commitment to an art she’s studied since age 10. “I saw all of her life’s devotion as an artist,” says Tran. “She poured her soul out to help us, and what you could see shining through her eyes, that was just the love.”

The next workshop is led by Kop Thammapruska, a Thai actress and dancer who has learned theater games while studying in the United States. She directs a series of improvisations--take a gesture and make it bigger; relate your movements to the architecture in the room; go faster; slower. These exercises are familiar to any North American student of dance composition but are fresh and challenging to several traditional artists whose learning processes have been more sedate and controlled.

The level of invention is high in both groups. At one point, 10 volunteers make a living sculpture and end up facing the same direction, frozen in strained positions that make them look like a pack of elegant bloodhounds.

Later in the discussion session, Tashi Dhondup, a Tibetan performer who lives in Dharmasala, India, is thinking about what to take home: “My students only learn traditional things, they see no modern performance,” he says, “so we don’t think about improvisation for our art. But it wakes you up; it can teach us ideas.” Zhang says the exercises might help performers back home get at “their real selves” amid the elaborate decoration and conventions of Chinese opera.

The next workshop, led by Nami Yamamoto, a Japanese American puppeteer and modern dancer, features an exercise designed to heighten a performer’s awareness and understanding of other people. It involves taking turns gazing into the eyes of a partner, with the direction that “You are not looking out at someone, you’re taking them in. You’re looking at the whole package of the person, their history, their hopes.”

As people begin looking intently at one another, the room falls silent except for the occasional chortle from a circle of men who keep cracking one another up. “Smile, if that’s your response,” Yamamoto says, “but keep paying attention.”

In another group, unspoken emotions arise and are quietly acknowledged with brief embraces and tissues that are passed around.

Peng Jingquan, a traditional actor and playwright from Hunan, China, admits later that it was startling to see so many different faces close up--ones with blue eyes and yellow hair. “We were asked to show our emotions,” he says. “I try, but I am not used to that.”

In the discussions, sentences often start with “I really appreciated the way that . . .” or “I’d just like to thank you for. . . .” When the participants try to explain what they’re gaining from the sessions, they often fall back on the good vibrations of it all. Jingquan finishes his analysis of the face-to-face exercise: “I start to see people as human beings; I see that you should keep your mind active and full of feelings, to believe in people. It was a beautiful experience.”

Whatever else is going on, the bonding is intense. “It’s a very rare opportunity to get to know people, their habits and their processes,” says Eva Lee, a performer and choreographer from Hawaii. “It brings a freshness to one’s spirit and hopefully a few ways of thinking one hasn’t thought of before.”

As a returning APPEX fellow, one of seven this year, Kenny Endo already knows something about the program’s lasting effects. After he leaves here, he will meet with colleagues from China, Japan and Korea, with whom he has continued to work since he met them at APPEX ’97. They have several upcoming U.S. bookings for their “forgiveness project,” which involves music, dance and drama.

“The idea is to bring up some of the history and conflicts between these countries, to understand where everybody’s coming from in order to really talk about forgiveness,” Endo says.

Endo’s solo projects (he does jazz/fusion work with Japanese drums) also benefited from his last APPEX stint. “It was a life-changing experience for me,” he says. “It was so energizing. It gave me hope and inspiration and a lot of motivation. As a result, my music changed. It helped define what I’m doing a lot more clearly.”

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On yet another day comes the business of preparing for an upcoming concert. The group has decided to create a finale from bits and pieces of its now-shared repertory. Sitting on their heels in a long line, the dancers begin with a series of sways, hand claps and rhythmic arm patterns taken from their workshops on Philippine and Indonesian dance. Singing a Korean song, they pick up speed and break out into free-style individual solos, eventually coming together with the stamping and hops of a Tibetan folk dance.

The musicians, who have collectively composed a score, search for clarification about various moments--what mood should the taiko set at the start, when do the tabla drums come in, and could we all make the unison work here? Naing, so often quietly attentive as he keeps up with unfamiliar exercises, is now on solid ground playing the Burmese pat waing, a circle of 21 tuned drums. Leadership gets passed from contributor to contributor until the stitched-together global finale starts to look like whole cloth.

At this point, it’s hard to predict the impact of APPEX ‘99--on participants, art forms, audiences. The traditional performers and relatively rootless Westerners are all swimming in a pool of new strategies. Identities and artistic choices are being questioned every day.

“Am I an Asian dancer or an American dancer?” asks Cheng-Chieh Yu, who came from Taiwan to make a career in New York.

“Is what I do Korean dance?” asks Sen Hea Ha, who combines Korean and contemporary movement in ritual-like choreographies.

On one afternoon, the topic is how tourism affects traditional practices. It’s a double-edged sword is the consensus: Sometimes outsiders support the tradition more than locals; other times their demand for brief, colorful spectacle is destructive.

A few participants sip coffee from the nearby campus coffee shop as they ponder the options, unaware that the printed slogan on the side of their paper cups is “liquid culture.” The way ideas are flowing today at APPEX, it’s as good a metaphor as any.

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Informal performances of works developed during APPEX ’99 will be presented at the UCLA Dance Building, Theatre 200, Wednesday and Thursday, 7 p.m. Free; reservations required. (310) 206-1335.