Advocacy

Manila Pages - Part 2

CATHY SCHLUND-VIALS

Amherst, Massachusettes

A Stage of One's Own: Women in Theater

I must admit that my introduction to theater came relatively late in life.  I was a junior in college - the University of Texas at Austin, to be more precise - and I was, as part of an English class, required to attend a production of Death of a Salesman.  Theater had, up to that point, not captured my interest, and I must admit that the production of Arthur Miller's now canonical work did little to change my alienation from the stage.  For me, theater wasn't accessible; it seemed more static than dynamic; and, most significant, it lacked a relevance to my life as a full time student who had to work full time. Though there were female characters in the work, the play did not strike me as one that attempted to advance a progressive feminist agenda.  I wasn't connected, I wasn't involved, and I felt that, upon leaving the large auditorium space, that I was the same person after the show as I was before it.

I made it my mission to avoid theater - I was more of a movie person anyway, accustomed to the quick shifts and diverse camera angles, hackneyed dialogue and lush cinematic panoramas.  It wasn't until 1998 - the year I began a graduate program in English - that I saw another theater piece.  The title of that show escapes me as I write, but I do remember that it involved a South Asian American female protagonist.  The story was one that I cannot speak clearly about, simply because it echoed so many elements from my own life that the two (imagined and real) become synonymous with one another in my mind. I guess what struck me most though, about the piece, was that I felt connected to it.  As the work progressed, I felt that I could fill in the silences with my own story of growing up a Cambodian American in Georgia and Texas, two places which, at the time of my childhood, were not known to be hot spots in the Asian diaspora.   This is not to say that all the experiences presented on stage mirrored my own. However, it was seeing this story on stage - the story of an Asian American woman - that allowed me to see the validity in my own story of existence.  I realized as the lights came up and the audience members got up from their chairs that I had been moved to a particular consciousness that I had forgotten.

It is this sense of consciousness and the possibilities that exist in theater as a realm of imagination and exploration that moved me to apply for a job at New WORLD Theater, a multicultural theater company in residence at the University of Massachusetts.  And, in complete honesty, the need for summer employment, coupled with the proximity of the campus to my home (a mere 4 miles away), made New WORLD Theater a more appealing employment site.

I have, in my almost four years at New WORLD Theater, served as a literary manager, reading scripts and reviewing work.  My title has changed to "Program Curator" and I have been, in recent times, more involved with programming ancillary events around our main stage productions.  However, I do still work closely with our interim Artistic Director Talvin Wilks, who has a keen artistic vision and has continued to foster work by emerging artists.  Because we lack a permanent theater space, it is difficult for New WORLD Theater to produce original work, though we do still offer developmental week-long residencies to several artists throughout the year.  What I have noticed, however, is that many of the works that are submitted are ones that need further development, and works by female playwrights of color constitute the largest number of submissions. Though heartened by the numbers of submissions, I am admittedly saddened by the lack of opportunities facing these playwrights - we, like other theater companies, are limited in our resources, and we simply do not have the means to answer the call put forth by such talented individuals.

It is this actuality that leads me to the title of this piece, which is based on Virginia Woolf's novel about space and the need to have a particular space.  I was able, through that South Asian American performance piece and in my work at New WORLD Theater, to find a space of my own in theater.  It is imperative that we, as a society and as a body, try to find spaces for these playwrights to continue to challenge and draw future audiences.  Through new coalitions, new strategies, and new visions, it is my hope that female playwrights of color will continue to push the theater canon and create provocative pieces that will reflect, mediate, and shift dominant ways of thinking. What I have left out, however, are the specifics.

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TERRY HONG

McLean, Virginia

Educators say that for students, the experience of not seeing themselves portrayed in textbooks and other materials is akin to looking into a mirror and seeing nothing.   Historically, Asian Americans, as well as other minorities, have peered into that looking glass and been confronted with predominantly negative, degrading images.  Think: silent servant, exotic geisha, evil warlord, prostitute with a heart of gold, sexless geek, corporate raider without a conscience, and so on and so forth.

In response, over the past four decades, growing numbers of Asian-American artists have reclaimed our images, creating positive reflections on stage and in other media.  In 1965, a group of noted Asian-American actors founded the country's first Asian-American theatre - East West Players in Los Angeles.  While East West thrives today, its legacy is also seen throughout the country, most notably-though not surprisingly-in New York City, one of the great theatre centers of the world.

On Oct. 7, 2002, nine prominent Big Apple theatre professionals gathered in the Kaplan Penthouse at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts for a symposium titled  "I Am Going to Like It Here: Asian Americans in New York Theatre," to discuss the current state of Asian-American theatre. Hosted by the Asian American Arts Alliance in partnership with the Lincoln Center Audience Development Initiative, the event marked an unprecedented gathering of leading Asian-American theatre figures.

The panelists were Ping Chong (founder and artistic director of Ping Chong & Company), David Henry Hwang (Tony-winning playwright of M. Butterfly and the new Flower Drum Song), Mia Katigbak (co-founding artistic/producing director of the National Asian American Theatre Company), Chiori Miyagawa (co-founder and co-artistic director of Crossing Jamaica Avenue), Jon Nakagawa (producer of contemporary programming at Lincoln Center and former managing director of Vineyard Theatre), Ron Nakahara (artistic associate at Pan Asian Repertory Theatre, standing in for Tisa Chang, Pan Asian Rep's founder and artistic/producing director), Diane Paulus (co-founder of Project 400 and creator of The Donkey Show), Ralph Peña (artistic director of Ma-Yi Theater Company) and Welly Yang (founder and artistic director of Second Generation).

The founding of Asian-American theatres has been pivotal to the arts community for two important reasons: Asian-Americans actors have had the opportunity to consistently play challenging roles, regardless of ethnicity; and for the first time in history, Asian-American writers have been able to tell their own stories, in their own voices, for their own audiences and beyond. More recently, these stories are being written by new voices who, rather than being defined specifically as Asian-American playwrights, could more aptly be described as playwrights whose Asian-American-ness is a part of their identity rather than an all-encompassing definition.

What defines Asian-American theatre today?  In fact, it is continuously evolving, changing and reinventing itself.  Today, the mirror's reflections are as diverse as our voices: no expectations, no limits, only the challenge of new discovery.  

Terry Hong

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SUSETTE MIN

Brooklyn, NY

i don't have time to write anything, but thought the attached would be good if you replace art with theater. feel that the vibe in theater corresponds to the trends in contemporary art.

In a cartoon featured in the November 2000 issue of New Art Examiner, Adam "Music for Airports" Green depicts a couple in a plane holding on for dear life during air 'turbulence.'  The woman says to the nervous man next to her "Brian Eno said, "In art you can crash the plane and walk away."   In bold capital letters above the cartoon, the artist writes "DURING TURBULENCE, YOU REALIZE THAT THERE WILL ALWAYS BE A SEPARATION BETWEEN ART AND LIFE."

Three time zones away from the epicenter of September 11, 2001, driving across LA's web of highways, passing cars along the fast lane, everything and everyone seemed to be in flight from itself, and we from ourselves, who watched all this happen from the sidelines.    Yet we could not fly or walk away, in fact, we were unable to move at all, as the event made immobile not only NYC traffic, but also the imagination in its attempt to visually or verbally grasp what had happened earlier that fateful morning.

The future of contemporary art has been more anticlimactic than anticipated.  Yet the events of September 11th raised the stakes and pushed forward the momentum for unforeseen possibilities of contemporary art.  The events in NYC reminded me of Michel de Certeau's essay entitled "Walking in the City" where he begins his essay from the 110th floor of the World Trade Center (WTC).    Describing the view from the WTC as a ".gigantic mass immobilized by the eyes.transformed into a texturology in which extremes coincide - extremes of ambition and degradation, brutal oppositions of races and styles, contrasts between yesterday's buildings, already transformed into trash cans..."  He goes on to remark that "unlike Rome, New York has never learned the art of growing old by playing on all its pasts.   Its present invents itself, from hour to hour, in the act of throwing away its previous accomplishments and challenging the future." [1]

New York City functions as the art world of late and hence will remain the art center of the world.  NYC is where the future of contemporary art will continue to unfold.  (Despite recent efforts to 'internationalize' the art world, to move its center west to Los Angeles, across the Atlantic to London or Berlin, in globalized terms, contemporary art = the NYC art world.  It is similar to the mantra of the U.S. nation-state that promotes E pluribus unum; when the U.S. speaks, the world listens.)  The events of September 11th were seen from the U.S. point of view as an attack on freedom.  The rhetoric of freedom foregrounds ART as the exemplary transgressing of procedures because art is in and of itself the work of freedom.

In the spirit of this 'freedom', the spontaneity of makeshift memorials all over the country and the gesture of galleries to invite and show artwork by both professional and amateur artists and photographers of their response to the events of September 11th evoked in me a nostalgia for the future and a desire:  

-to encounter a work of art by that provides a glimpse of the much philosophically-discussed sublime -- an overwhelming feeling that verges towards the limits of representation;

-to see the merging of art and literature that goes beyond thematic concerns and semiotic comparisons;

-to experience being part of a collaboration of artists, curators, designers, educators, and boards of trustees to create exhibitions that go beyond the dollar sign, the assumption of the public's poor accessibility and acuity of 'high' art, and the safe and manipulated presentation and choreography of the already-seen;

-to blur the boundaries between public and private spaces where art is seen and shown in ways that are currently forgotten and/or unforeseeable;

-and lastly, along the lines of political and social imperatives, to see the prolific and profound interpretation of works of art that would normally be framed racially because of the color of an artist's skin or the unfamiliar spelling of a name. That is, I would like to see the works of these un/marked artists be interrogated with the same rigor as other artists by paying attention to the nuances of form and content, pushing existing representational categories while opening up other spaces.

To romanticize such a future of contemporary art goes against my current sensibilities in light of what I already know of the contemporary art world, of politics, of a war that at this very moment seems never-ending and indiscriminate.  

What I see the future of contemporary art to be:

-The first casualty of this lost opportunity for an exciting and unforeseeable future will be the continuing racialization of contemporary art together ironically with the pervasive practice of exclusion;

-instead of the merging of art and literature, art and architecture, what I see for the future of contemporary art is the intensification and blurring of art and technology, art and Hollywood, art and advertising in which publicity-stunt events of technological innovations are veiled as art openings;

-the intensification of globalization will continue to enable the flow of privileged and entitled bodies across national borders as they gather to attend more over-determined biennials and symposiums now seen as celebrity-studded events;

-and lastly, the relationship between art and the commodity will continue to grow as art becomes more beholden to the market rather than a good review or essay from an art historian, curator, and/or critic.  

Theodore Adorno describes "Art's Utopia, "as" the counterfactual yet-to-come.a recollection of the possible with a critical edge against the real; it is a kind of imaginary restitution of that catastrophe, which is world history; it is a freedom which did not pass under the spell of necessity and which may well not come to pass ever at all." [2]

Rather than desiring art as utopic, perhaps we should look for the future of contemporary art in works by those artists who are already at the extreme and in the margins: artists who continue to produce work, despite the grind of the everyday and their invisibility, that gesture toward points of identification which are simultaneously suppressed and unconscious, playful and free.  

 [1] Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life , Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984, p.91.

 [2] Theodore Adorno, Aesthetic Theory , London: Routledge, p.196 quoted by Paul Gilroy in "Dialectics of Diaspora Identification" in ed. Les Back and John Solomos' Theories of Race and Racism: A Reader, London: Routledge, 2000, pp. 496-502.

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