The Hudson Review, Inc

Urban Anthropology
Author(s): Marcia B. Siegel
Source: The Hudson Review, Vol. 51, No. 1, 50th Anniversary Issue (Spring, 1998), pp. 217-
223
Published by: The Hudson Review, Inc
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 MARCIA B. SIEGEL

Urban Anthropology

To MOST PEOPLE, THE WORD FESTIVAL suggests a sort of expanded block

party that can combine ceremonial events with cultural forms of dance,
music, and crafts. But large-scale arts festivals today are more likely to be
invented occasions. This doesn't necessarily mean they're fake, only that
they have different intentions; they may not be the best place to see local
color.

The last big international dance festival I attended took place nearly
ten years ago in Los Angeles, where a dozen Pacific Rim countries
presented theatrical, ritual, and folk dances in a variety of spaces: parks,
plazas, courtyards, theaters, museums, and outdoor arenas, with the
public's participation invited as often as possible. Last summer's 12th
International Festival of Dance Academies in Hong Kong, with perform?
ances originating in eleven countries and choreographers from Asia,
Europe and the Americas, was neither as diverse nor as spontaneous, but
both events had been fabricated by the festival sponsors.
The City of Los Angeles offered "authenticity," traditional perform?
ances as defined by the participating groups. At that time?it seems long
ago now?critics were worrying about how to talk about this work, how
to identify it, describe it, evaluate it. Had it changed from some
paradigmatic essence conceived in the distant past and supposedly
preserved intact for all time? How much change was allowable before
the dance became a new creation? Did the unintentional shadings of
prolonged use and word-of-mouth transmission diminish a work's
traditional efficacy? Were modern interpolations in bad taste? Could a
tribal work be credibly done on a proscenium stage? At what point did
a planned performance cede its professional dignity to the disorderly
enthusiasm of a participatory audience?
Even then, we realized that hard-line authenticity was probably
unattainable in any culture. What was considered the most "classical" of
the events at the LA Festival, a version of the Javanese court dance
bedoyo, far from leading an unbroken existence for thousands of years,
had been newly reconstructed by a living choreographer in Yogyakarta
for the international touring events of 1990-91. Other groups offered
pan-ethnic confections devised to represent recently independent na?
tions; ritual or ritualistic performances adapted to foreign circum?
stances; and old dances with admittedly new elements. Not to mention
on-the-spot instructional sessions, devotions, and farandoles for the
audience.

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218 THE HUDSON REVIEW

Virtually all the performances at the LA Festival, though, aimed at

showing cultures as relatively unique and unpolluted by modern atti?
tudes, or at least as withstanding worldwide popular culture. The
audience realized that television and movies must have penetrated the
most remote villages, but we believed that when natives practiced their
dance and rituals, they left the jet-propelled world behind. That, in fact,
leaving this world behind was necessary for them to be Indian at all, or
Balinese or Micronesian.
In the Hong Kong of 1997, the message was that modern culture is a
synthesis, and that culture is inescapably modern. People mainly live in
cities, not villages, and they communicate by fax and cellphone, not
tom-toms. Prominently on view at the Festival was a massive demonstra?
tion of modernism. This was performance tailored for a world market,
dancers highly skilled in many techniques, and choreography produced
with theatrical savvy.
The Hong Kong Festival was started in 1985 by Carl Wolz, then head
of dance at the newly opened Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts
(APA). Wolz, a Juilliard-trained former Jose Limon dancer, established
a solid program in Hong Kong on the Western conservatory model, with
major concentrations in ballet, modern dance, and Chinese dance.
APA's graduates are being prepared for professional careers in dancing,
choreographing and teaching.
The festival brought together performing groups from four compa?
rable institutions, National Institute of the Arts in Taipei, Beijing Dance
Academy, London Contemporary Dance School, and Purchase (NY)
Dance Corps, for featured performances in the largest of the APA's
theaters. Smaller, less official groups and independent choreographers
were showcased in studio and small-stage performances. These were
"student" companies only in the broadest sense, encompassing officially
sponsored university groups and national ensembles, experimental
ventures comparable to New York's downtown dance companies, plus
teachers performing solos, historical reconstructions, children's recitals,
and performers from special-learning schools. A number of off-campus
events by local and visiting groups filled in the few cracks in the week's
schedule.
Since the beginning the Festival has also organized a research
conference, and hosted meetings of various regional organizations now
networked into the World Dance Alliance. After six years in Hong Kong,
the Festival began a migration to other Asian cities, but Wolz had always
intended for it to cycle back in the momentous year of the colony's
return to China.

Much of the dance in Hong Kong in '97 looked a lot like what I might
see on a mainstage in Boston or New York: tradition slickly packaged,
youthful rebellion draped in pop commodities, and all-purpose, anon?
ymous, plotless dancing for its own sake. When the lights went up on
one of the week's 80 or 90 pieces, you were as likely to see a skyscraper

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 MARCIA B. SIEGEL 219

city made of Coke cans as a bevy of maidens in brocaded pajamas doing

multiple pirouettes while kicking the back of their heads. In the best
works as well as some of the most mundane, tradition was very much an
issue.

During a panel discussion I moderated one morning among four

"hyphenated-Chinese" dancers (from Taiwan, Malaysia, the US, and
Hong Kong), someone made the startling remark that choreography is
a Western concept. To the Asian artist, dancing is a demonstration of
skills. Dance-drama and rituals may absorb these skills into specific
formats, but to shape dancing as an independent theatrical entity is a
relatively undeveloped practice. I think this notion explained a lot of
what looked to me like vast expanses of unmitigated virtuosity on the
stage.
Beijing Dance Academy offered several of these dances-for-their-own-
sake numbers. Sleeve and ribbon dances, with silken women gliding
swiftly on their heels in pleasantly evolving floor-patterns, are an
indispensable part of Chinese folkloric presentations. So are showy
acrobatics and martial arts lifted from Chinese Opera. All these genres
were easily folded into Beijing's concert repertory, modern arrange?
ments of traditional skills that emphasized precision, uniformity, and
visual design, and didn't demand anything of the choreographer
beyond moving the groups around and setting steps in order.
There's a certain charm for audiences about these clockwork drill-
displays, and it's not solely attributable to some lingering allure of
chinoiserie. Americans have always adored marching bands, swimming
and flying squads, and military parades. High school and college dance
teams, the newest performative amalgam, are everywhere. Instead of
swinging swords and fans, these groups punctuate their routines with
pep yells, gymnastics, tumbling, acrobatics, and here and there a swift
connecting ballet maneuver. ESPN announcers track the competitions
with a play-by-play. For the public that appreciates dance spectacle,
there isn't so very much difference between adolescent pep dancing and
the sophisticated Celtic chorus lines of Riverdance.
In addition to its sensual pleasures, precision movement gives the
audience a reflection of itself enhanced by a harmony that can never be
achieved in real life. The Soviet ballets of the 1960s and 1970s abstracted
and regularized the vocabulary of dance together with expressive
gesture, to represent the collectivized soul of the masses. Though those
ballets had stories, they were devoid of naturalism or even individual
character. Instead, the ensemble charged and flew in virtuosic battal?
ions. Discipline conquered. Solidarity made them strong. As a political
symbol, this dance affected audiences like the rallies of the Third Reich.
If there's anything big going on in mainstream dance, I think it's the
development of an International Style which gathers in all the physical
accomplishments dancers have acquired at home and from the teachers
roaming the world. Synchronized movement and uncomplicated
rhythms provide a structural framework for these skills. High-tech media

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220 THE HUDSON REVIEW

and marketing can both distribute the product and enrich its pool of
raw materials. In these spectacular but thematically simplistic forms,
dance is experiencing something similar to the boom in music that has
produced Afro-pop, Canto-pop, fusion jazz, and other popular hybrids.
Beijing Dance Academy and the Guangdong Modern Dance Com?
pany (seen at the theater in Hong Kong City Hall) retain some of this
conglomerate sensibility. They offer formalism and high-powered effects
minus the political sledgehammer. Ballet has a firm foothold in Asia,
established by the refugees from the Russian Revolution who fled
eastward, leaving their trail across China and Japan. Modern dance in
recent times has been exported on a big scale by the American Dance
Festival to Guangdong and other worldwide ports. Chinese opera
techniques and remnants of Soviet realism influence both Beijing and
Guangdong dance, as well as the other institutions serviced by these
training centers.
Beijing's use of traditional movements and their associated character
types romanticizes ancient images of male and female that would be
obsolete off the stage. Launched into the upper registers of technique
they become contemporary models of success. Guangdong's melange of
styles, sophisticated lighting, and streamlined costumes link the perform?
ance to modernity while asserting a sanitized national identity. Its
dances often allude to issues of gender, power, and community, but lack
a strong choreographic point of view that would give the action a
specific relevance. To a greater or lesser degree, much of what I saw in
Hong Kong shared this aesthetic of diffuse modernism. The works that
seemed more interesting and less formulaic looked at tradition as a
ground of troubled histories, a source of personal conflict, and a
pathway into movement experimentation.

Two strong but contrasting theatrical works demonstrated how tradi?

tional aesthetics are being reinterpreted. From Malaysia, Mew Chang
Tsing and Lee Swee Keong's Re: Lady White Snake adapted a Chinese
legend in terms of contemporary theatricality. Taiwanese choreogra?
pher Tao Fu-lann's Thefars created an atmosphere of reflective sensu?
ality that fused techniques of postmodern movement exploration and
Eastern meditation.
Mew Chang Tsing's RiverGrass Dance Company and the piece they
showed in Hong Kong represent a wide spectrum of training. Mew
herself, a graduate of the Hong Kong Academy, exemplifies the
intercultural Asian artist, not only choreographing but writing and
teaching with a consciously eclectic set of resources. In Mew and Lee's
reinterpretation the white snake who takes the form of a woman has a
double identity, Mew as the White Snake and Lee as the male Green
Snake.
I don't know the original myth, but the dance seemed to draw on
Jungian ideas about the divided psyche. Green and White Snake
encountered a Scholar and a Monk, perhaps representing the intellec-

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 MARCIA B. SIEGEL 221

tual and the spiritual sides of the male/female persona. After symbolic
seductions and struggles, the four seemed to reach an understanding
where they accepted each other on equal terms. The movement
included gestures, steps and body postures from Balinese, Indian,
Chinese and Western modern dance, but all the characters were allowed
a more naturalistic basic stance than any of the antecedent forms. The
Scholar, for instance, would beckon to the White Snake with codified
gestures from Bharata Natyam, released both rhythmically and spatially
from the prescribed formatting of the original context. White Snake
would angle and sidestep like a Hindu temple dancer but smile
flirtatiously, against the rules for the Thai, Burmese, Cambodian or
Balinese dancers she was evoking. So the dance as a whole, with music
that sounded like a New-Age movie score, looked moody and exotic
rather than severely didactic as traditional forms often do to the modern
audience. It didn't preach or instruct, but evoked themes known
throughout time.
Tao Fu-lann has studied American modern dance forms and Chinese
and Taiwanese performance. Thefars, choreographed in 1995, enjoyed
a successful touring career; I had already seen it in New York before its
showing at the Hong Kong Arts Center. Using the gorgeous and
multivalent scenic device of large, translucent urns with lights and water
inside them, Tao introduced a community of six women, each focussed
on one jar but all sharing the same movement behavior. Slowly they rose
and sank down behind the jars, tilted them to produce subtle changes in
light and sound, curled around them like decorative bas-reliefs. Some?
times they climbed on the rims and squatted there, sometimes they
scooped out water and scattered it with widespread arms.
Maintaining the strong visual image of the jars, the women's slowly
evolving and cryptic movement invited the audience to make its own
connections to Chinese culture and to the inner life of women. At one
point, as they bent over and plunged headfirst into the jars, they implied
mundane tasks like washing their hair, but the same action also hinted
at a narcissistic fascination with what they saw in the water, or it might
have signalled a ritual cleansing or anointing, even drowning. At the end
of the long piece, the women formed pairs and, with their skirts draped
around the jars, became four-armed, praying goddesses who reminded
me of some ancient Chinese religious paintings.
Spirituality is never far from cultural forms in Asia, no matter how
they seem to deal with contemporary secular life. In Sun Flowers, a
powerful work by Guo Jun-ming for the Taipei National Institute of the
Arts dancers, a group of women in street clothes stood to one side of the
stage, interrupting a recording of Thomas Tallis' Lamentations of Jeremiah
with loud yells and screams. One by one they placed flowers on a sort of
altar suggesting some female ancestor-deity. The piece had opened with
a circle of men and women singing and stamping in an adaptation of a
Taiwanese aboriginal dance. I had first thought that this piece referred
simply to the loss of a traditional culture, but later I was told it was a cry

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222 THE HUDSON REVIEW

against the contemporary practice of selling aboriginal girls into pros?

titution.

For several years the Taiwanese have been rediscovering the history of
their island and the tribes who inhabited it before the influx of Chinese
from the mainland in the twentieth century. Aboriginal music and
dances have been researched and restaged for folk dance companies
and student ensembles at NLA. Studying and celebrating these old
cultures is a way of reinforcing the sense of an independent nation on
Formosa, and of partially atoning for injustices done to them in the past.
Last summer I visited a series of restored aboriginal villages built around
the perimeter of a Disney-type amusement park. The student adapta?
tions of the aboriginal dances in Hong Kong struck me as more
persuasive than the show put on for the tourists by a group of aboriginal
performers.
What it means to be Chinese, or hyphenated Chinese, is a preoccu?
pation of many contemporary artists. In the year of the Hong Kong
changeover, these questions became more troubling than ever. Hong
Kong seemed to be accommodating to its reunification with the
mainland. Whatever new problems may be in store, people seemed
relieved to see the conversion from British rule finally accomplished.
But Taiwan's independence seemed more tenuous than ever, as the
Chinese intensified their pressure for its return. Most Taiwanese I met
last summer seemed determined to assert the island's autonomy, to
distinguish Taiwan from China, not only by its booming economy but its
food, its cultural history, its emerging dance style.
Set alongside these political tensions there was the multiculturalist
and universalist instinct to communicate across contested and shifting
national boundaries. The American choreographer Rosalind Newman,
based for several years now on the faculty at the Hong Kong Academy,
showed Scenes from a Mirage, in which mysterious figures appeared from
the shadows deep at the back of the stage to dance with a contemporary
young woman, then receded once again into a doorway that might have
represented the past. Although the music was Yiddish-flavored (by Guy
Klucevsek, the Klezmatics, and Muzikas), and the dance could have
taken place at a Jewish wedding, Newman and the large cast of Chinese
students managed at the same time to suggest memories of a Chinese
family.
Contributing to the nonsectarian look of a lot of dance is the
widespread influence of German Tanztheater. The theater-games tech?
niques and quasi-therapeutic gambits of Pina Bausch and her followers
have infiltrated as far as Beijing and Jakarta, providing a vehicle for
contemporary conflict that needn't be restrained by traditional rules.
Tanztheater's movement is built on what people do every day, not on
any rigid studio conventions. I think its bone-deep physicality allows
performers to express themselves in any cultural context, but it also can
supplant other dance idioms. The clash between the "real" and the

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 MARCIA B. SIEGEL 223

invented movement of a dance form often becomes the subject of

choreography.
In one corner of a large gallery during a loud, continuous, 1960s-type
people-dance event by the Hong Kong performance collective Zuni
Icosahedron, I noticed a sort of corral or cage about twenty feet square.
The structure was laced around and around with strips of white cloth,
almost completely curtained. Months later I saw a film of a Chinese
funeral, where the coffin was carried through the streets inside just such
a structure. In Hong Kong, peeping through the slits in the cloth, I saw
a man slowly circling a platform with the wide, low, pivoting steps of
Chinese martial arts. As he went, he dropped brocade ribbons on the
floor. After a long time, he mounted the platform, where a garment was
hanging on a coat rack. The man slowly spread out the garment to reveal
a splendid robe that might be worn by an emperor in a Beijing Opera
performance. I could hear voices drifting in and out that might have
come from the opera. The man put his arms into the sleeves of the
costume. He seemed to be embracing it, merging with it, making love to
it. He started pulling white strips of cloth from inside the costume,
disemboweling it. He got out of the costume, circled the platform again,
and finally left the enclosure.
The man was the choreographer, Yeung Chi Kuk, an accomplished
Beijing Opera actor who had recorded his own sound track. For me, this
performance piece about loving and letting go of tradition, about being
and not being Chinese, was the most moving event of the entire week.
The title was written in Chinese in the program, and when I asked,
someone translated it as No matter, it's 1997, we're still dancing.

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