DRJArticles

On the Value of Mistranslations and Contaminations:The Category of “Contemporary Choreography” in AsianDance

Ananya Chatterjea

Prelude

This essay has its inception in night-long transitory wanderings through Singapore’sChangi Airport, as I waited for a morning flight connection. I ambled through thepolished walkways, taking in the haute couture shops where the beautifully tailored,finely embroidered kebaya-sarongs are fitted on mannequins that look like young,

thin, white, blue-eyed models. These bodies bear little resemblance to those of the many womenI see slumped on the waiting room floor catching a bit of sleep—migrant workers all dressed inthe distinctive green shirts of their company. I walked through the duty-free cosmetic shops,where the current deal offers yet another free skin-whitening product with the purchase of $300in other cosmetics. It was also good to browse the bookstore where I glanced at The New AsianHemisphere (2008), the most recent book by renowned public policy thinker and academic,Kishore Mahbubani.1 Asia is the rising power, Mahbubani argues, and by 2050, China, Japan,and India will share the market with the United States as the world’s largest economies, despitethe latter’s petulant response and backlash against Asia’s rise.

These experiences dovetail quite neatly into each other, revealing their support of certain deep hier-archical structures. Fashion reminds me of the “white desire” that so dominates our understandingof beauty, and the growing trend among global communities of middle-class women to drasticallymodify their bodies to fit the stipulations of the beauty industry of the West. Indeed, draconianmeasures—for example, an increasing range of plastic surgeries—are not inconceivable; they aremarketed through the rhetoric of agency and access, where women can now do what they needto determine how they look. As to Mahbubani’s idea of rising Asian economic glory that will beachieved through learning and copying the seven principles of Western capitalism’s “best practice,”I can only shake my head in dismay. Jockeying for power is all well and good, Mr. Mahbubani, butwhat about the tremendous damage being done internally in this reiteration of colonial mimicry?What about the erasure of difference? And how do we begin to dismantle the stereotypical

Ananya Chatterjea is a choreographer and scholar who envisions her work in dance as a “call toaction,” with particular focus on women artists of color. She is artistic director of Ananya DanceTheatre, and professor in the Department of Theater Arts and Dance, University of Minnesota.Ananya was named “Best Choreographer” by City Pages (2007), and is the recipient of the “21Leaders for the 21st Century” award and the “Josie Johnson Social Justice and Human Rights”award for her work weaving together dance, social justice, and community-building. She is the reci-pient of a 2011 Guggenheim Artist Fellowship and a 2012 McKnight Fellowship, both in choreo-graphy. Her book, Butting Out! Reading Cultural Politics in the Work of Chandralekha and JawoleWilla Jo Zollar, was published by Wesleyan University Press in 2004. Other essays have been pub-lished in the anthologies Worlding Dance (2009), Critical Transnational Feminist Praxis (2010), andCelebrating India: Dance and Performance (2010).

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Copyright © 2013 Congress on Research in Dancedoi:10.1017/S0149767712000320

associations and the symbolic legacies that have accrued to bodies marked as “different” throughmodernity’s long expansion of capitalism? I am still mulling over these issues as I board mynext flight.

Choreographies That Translate

[T]hey create the kind of transformative effect we normally expect from the syn-chronised poetry of a great corps de ballet, such as the Mariinsky.

(Judith Mackrell, reviewing the Nrityagram Dance Company)2

In 2011, the Nrityagram Dance Ensemble was touring the United States with a new program,Sriyah/A Decade of Dance Making, comprising selections from works made by artistic directorSurupa Sen over the last ten years: a landmark accomplishment indeed. The direct translation ofthe name Nrityagram is “dance village.” Part dance institute, part professional company,Nrityagram was established by dancer Pratima Gauri Bedi in 1990 on the outskirts of Bangalore,in Karnataka, India. By now, the company has managed to establish for itself a strong reputationas the tour de force Indian dance company of the twenty-first century. The choreography is craftedby Odissi dancer Surupa Sen who, by her own assertion, has also familiarized herself with the con-ventions of Western modern and postmodern dance-making. Marked by the specificity of theOdissi movement aesthetic and traditionally classical themes, Sen’s choreography is yet able toreimagine the form and structural principles of this classical dance in a way that “translates”well for Western audiences: she incorporates jumps and dynamic level changes, and departsfrom the traditional solo format to include duets and ensemble pieces. The company, which reg-ularly performs to sold-out houses and rave reviews in the United States, from the Joyce Theaterin New York City to World on Stage in Stamford, Connecticut, definitely offers something unique.Like so many reviewers who have written powerfully about the company, Jennifer Dunning laudedthe spirituality that was the “heart” of the show in her New York Times review of the company’s2008 season. For Dunning, this spiritual core was clear despite the great “abstraction” of theOdissi form, which, she said, “makes it somewhat more adaptable to Western dance.”3 JoanAcocella’s response in her New Yorker Critic’s Notebook was somewhat similar: she remarkedthat Vibhakta, one of the pieces in their repertoire, is “. . . like a lot of Indian art . . . religiousand at the same time very sexy.”4

In my estimation, the company is perfectly professional: the dancing is excellent, and the choreo-graphy is always pleasing. However, I suggest that the dancing bodies have been cleverly organizedto fulfill the promise of the New York Times descriptor that is the opening quote on the company’shome page: “A Modern Devotion to a Sacred Indian Ritual.”5 And the dancers assure us that ritualspirituality is still compatible with a contemporary world. Perhaps they even convince us that aslong as such pristine piety is possible, we need not worry that, not so far from Nrityagram, people’slives, livelihoods, cultural practices, and ecosystems are being crushed by global corporationsencroaching on their villages and establishing factories in the government-designated SpecialEconomic Zones.6 We are all implicated in these silences of globalization, and certainly those ofus living in the global North.

Flashback: September 1998: Madonna opened the MTV awards show with a performance of Shanti/Ashtangi, inspired by her then–Indian fascination; the song was part of her new album, Ray of Light.Three Odissi dancers, sisters Laboni, Shibani, and Shalini Patnaik, from San Diego were featured inthis and other live performances of Madonna’s adaptation of this mispronounced Sanskrit prayeroffering salutation to a guru. The song was immaculately danced and produced, but the choreogra-phy, which did not seem to have any direct relationship to the lyrics or concepts, was much more inthe tradition of nritta or “pure dance,” except for one moment. The dancers run in to line up behindMadonna, so that they remain invisible. Their arms extend out from behind her back on either side,

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framing her body, moving frommudra tomudra—a typical choreographic convention in Indian con-cert stage practice for signaling a goddess. The dancers seem to function as conduits for Madonna’sspiritual search, lending their bodies to realize her divinity. No doubt she was in fact godly to thesedancers, who gained popularity from that gig, and, in turn, spawned greater familiarity for Odissi.

From the Patnaik sisters to the Nrityagram Dance Ensemble: There are a lot of differences betweenthese two performances, which appeared a decade apart from each other, even as they were madepossible by, and constitute, a “global” forum. Clearly the Nrityagram administration has been ableto assess the cultural market well, figure out the balance of tradition and translation, and extend theform to work with influences from Western compositional principles; it is now managed byPentacle, the famous artist management company in New York City. The artists of Nrityagramare clearly in charge of their own representation, making informed and smart choices, and are func-tioning with much more infrastructure (and in different ways) than what was available—or possible—for the Patnaik sisters in 1998.

But still, the opportunity to perform on such global fora and earn a place on the transnational tour-ing circuit continues to be complicated. Such fora are in fact predicated on contradictory impulses.Sociologist Anna Tsing reminds us that “universalism is implicated in both imperial schemes tocontrol the world and liberatory mobilizations for justice and empowerment. Universalism inspiresexpansion—for both the powerful and the powerless” (2005, 9). So, even as we celebrate the obviousdesegregation of the global stage to include “other” aesthetics and bodies, and begin to operate onthe basis of some kind of assurance that dance has universal appeal despite its cultural specificity, wehave to remain vigilant to the dangers of unwritten conditions that undergird and asymmetricize theexistence of such stages.

My questions around the global stage have, in fact, become more urgent over the past few years. Themany years of working with the materiality of dancing bodies—as dancer, choreographer, danceteacher, and, in a different way, as audience member—have made me deeply appreciative of dan-cing’s irreducible plurality in meaning-making, coinciding with its insistence on incredible speci-ficity. I remain fascinated with the intersection of the overwhelming evidence of the locality ofbodies with the multiplicity of possible interpretations invited by danced metaphors. And the abilityof movement and choreography to produce knowledge, and transform ideas makes me acutelyaware of dance’s power to signify on many levels. Simultaneously, I am mindful of how the locationof dancing at the intersection of particular and broader appeal has meant that dancing bodies areconstantly circulating within circuits of meaning-making and cultural power, and are quite oftendeployed to operate within these circuits to accomplish particular political goals.

Indeed, it is because of my efforts to understand the multiple forces that determine the migration ofdancing bodies and forms through the “new” and hybrid cultural fora that I am describing as the“global stage,” that my many questions arise: Do these phenomena rehearse another iteration ofolder projects of intercultural work? Do they, in fact, repeat the violences of racial, gendered, colo-nial, and other inequities that disfigured the projects of modernity? Alternatively, do they escalatesuch violences through their assumption of the kind of “flattening” offered by the circuits of glo-balization, and through the untheorized celebration of access? Are there in fact any spaces whereheterogeneous bodies, genres, and forms can encounter each other and engage in a productive dia-logue about “difference” that persists, and is perhaps magnified through the processes of global cor-porate networks? Specifically, as the phenomenon of “contemporary” choreography unravels andgathers momentum across Asia, is a new kind of cultural imperative taking hold?7 What of theother end, when dance artists from Asia are commandeered to stand in for “tradition,” withtheir bodies poised as carefully arranged simulacra to anchor the inevitable march of modernity?I am anxious that dance, in an unfortunate twist on the old commitment to beauty and the recentlyrevitalized agenda of entertainment, often comes to be used to gloss over the inequities that arerampant in the global march of capital.

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On the other end of the subtle translations and necessary conduitries that the dancer of “traditional”forms from Asia must negotiate, are the kind of choices that are available to choreographers who aredoing “contemporary choreography.” The two examples with which this essay begins are both fromchoreography within Odissi, not the performance of traditional repertoire. Only because such workremains with the classical ethos and aesthetic, it falls outside of what has come to be described as“contemporary choreography.” This seems to indicate, at least within the context of the Asias—broadly speaking—the articulation of some sort of personal voice and structure.

Losses in Translation

This essay was germinated by midnight meanderings through the Singapore airport in 2008. Acouple of years earlier, in 2006, I had passed through the same airport, and encountered similarexperiences, on my way to perform in the Indonesian Dance Festival in Jakarta. One particularcomment, by a student during a master class I taught at the festival, jumpstarted my sneaking sus-picions into a larger investigation. This student, a young woman from Jakarta who had workedhard during the class, remarked with surprise at the end, “Why is this so hard? It’s not even ballet!”The specter of ballet, which effortlessly relegated me, and others like me working with differentforms, aesthetics, and bodies, to a space of “less than,” morphed into the ghost of Western post-modern dance; it then followed me to Osaka, where I went next to perform in the Dance BoxFestival. During panel discussions following performances, I found myself confronted with onequestion repeatedly: How could I consider my work contemporary if I was still using footworkand hand gestures? (See Photos 1 and 2.) Every time, the suggestion lurking around the cornerwas that “contemporary” choreography had a particular look, and other imaginings of what mightbe described as contemporary had to translate into those terms in order to be recognized as such.

These are not isolated or merely anecdotal experiences, but rather suggest a larger trend at work.Indeed, as I have performed or taught master classes at “international” festivals at different sitesin Asia over the last decade, I have experienced a growing sense of isolation and dismay as Ihave interacted with some of my colleagues, choreographers, and dancers from Asia—talentedand amazing artists who are working in the field of “contemporary dance.” Repeatedly I havebemoaned the erasure of difference under the wonderfully unifying and legitimizing aesthetic cat-egory of “contemporary dance” (really meaning Euro-American modern/contemporary dance) thatseems to dominate much of what is seen of “Asian” choreography in these fora that currently rep-resent the global stage. Repeatedly, I find my choreographic work, created from a deconstruction ofthe classical dance form Odissi, the martial art form Chhau, yoga, and street theater modes fromIndia, being shoved into the category of “tradition,” which can no longer hold the attention ofyoung, talented dance-makers emerging from sites in Asia. Instead, there is incredibly virtuosic,highly kinetic work created by the emerging dance-makers—with the idiom and structure formost of these works almost inevitably drawn from Western modern/contemporary dance. I amreminded of Appadurai’s reflection on the contesting homogeneous/heterogeneous flows thatcharacterize cultural production in the era of globalization: “The central feature of global culturetoday is the politics of the mutual effort of sameness and difference to cannibalize one anotherand thus to proclaim their successful hijacking of the twin Enlightenment ideas of the triumphantlyuniversal and the resiliently particular” (1996, 27).

These contesting flows and tensions that Appadurai refers to are particularly evident within culturalcategories such as “contemporary choreography” and “world dance,” which seem to gesture towarda broad inclusivity, but in fact remain culturally specific in the ways in which they signify throughthe kind of work that is chosen to exemplify these categories. Asia-Pacific Dance Bridge, theConference of the World Dance Alliance, was held in June 2007 in Singapore. I was delighted topresent my own choreography at the conference, and arrived with great anticipation at this gather-ing of colleagues from around the world. However, the performance left me, once again, doubting

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the viability of fora presenting “world dance.” For instance, in the lineup for the Program A, theprestigious program performed for the opening reception of the Conference, and advertised as pre-senting “new voices in Asian choreography,” my short solo Pallavi, and a trio created by Indonesianchoreographer Ni Kadek Yulia Puspasari, Sang hara sang, were the only two pieces that clearlyemerged from culturally specific aesthetics. The other pieces, by choreographers from Vietnam,Singapore, and Taiwan, drew on Western modern/contemporary dance both in movement vocabu-lary and choreographic structure, as well as in terms of music and costuming choices. This patternwas repeated in the two other professional showcases that were featured at this forum, as well as theone showcase featuring local choreographers in the Singapore Arts Festival. Can the occasional cit-ing of a folded hand gesture, and the clearly visible difference of a body marked as Asian, overturn/balance the general vocabulary/choreographic structure that emerges from Western modern/con-temporary dance? Perhaps, if that is the intention and the piece is crafted as such. But of thiskind of contamination/bad/mis-translation, I have seen little recently. What seems to be increasinglypopular in the sphere of Asian “contemporary” dance is a kind of ventriloquism, where contempor-ary Asia finds its voice through the signifiers of the Euro-American modern/postmodern, the latterpassing once again as the neutral universal, which is able to contain all difference.

Thinking through this phenomenon is challenging, both because of how painfully I experience it,and because it is complicated. Clearly, I do not want to end up as some kind of champion of

Photo 1. Ananya Chatterjea (courtesy of Ananya Dance Theatre).

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encrusted categories of tradition, nor do I want to suggest that choreographers be denied their “aes-thetic choice.” But it is imperative to remember that choices are political, that bodies come withhistories and visual contracts, and that, as I often have to argue with my students at theUniversity of Minnesota, there is hardly any way to “be free and just dance.” It is also hard toargue about cultural/aesthetic specificities without postulating a putative purity—without essentia-lizing cultural formations. This difficulty is enhanced with regard to bodily acts that, after themoment of live and direct encounter, leave only trace and resonance to analyze. But perhapsbecause the live moment is so vivid, particularly in the ways that dancing bodies can give suchclear information about the particular way a movement was done, I find it urgent to constructthis argument with dancing—an argument against the flattening of specificity, which leads in theend to capitulation to a constructed norm.

More and more, it seems that the rhetoric and the practice of the global stage are deliberately con-tradictory to each other. While the idea of the “global” seems to offer the promise of a range ofaesthetics and a range of bodies from different contexts marking widely different understandingsof beauty and power, the reality of what materializes on stage seems to suggest that there aresome unspoken conditions for participation on the global stage that ensure some kinds of confor-mity. And this slow and steady erasure of difference in the name of globalization and equal accessmarks a departure from an earlier trend, which was marked in the endeavors of artists such asChandralekha and Sardono Kusumo (see Photo 3), for instance, whose search for a contemporaryvoice has always been located in an exploration of specific cultural practices, and in the trajectory ofchoreographers such as Lin Hwai Min, whose early emphasis on a modern dance vocabulary hasincreasingly been replaced by an inquiry into practices such as tai chi chuan.8

Of course, traditionally, across much of Asia there has been little taught by way of “choreography”as a manner of articulating individual voice. So, while the category of the contemporary expresslysignals the possibility of individual creativity, the “choreographic” work inside of traditional pieceshas often gone unmarked, or marked only as “traditional”—seemingly a category that defiesauthorship. Such traditional repertoire is often a result of collective voices—an amalgamation of

Photo 2. Ananya Chatterjea’s Moreechika (courtesy of Ananya Dance Theatre).

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past practices and gathered understandings. At any rate, the absence of a consciously marked andformalized practice named choreography meant that choreographers such as Chandralekha andSardono Kusumo, who began to think about contemporary articulations of Asian dance formssome decades ago, had to analyze practices and dance forms that were part of their cultural contextin order to arrive at understandings of structure and vocabulary.

But there is a distinct difference between that work and what currently populates the world of con-temporary choreography within Asian dance. The incidences I am referring to in my anecdotalexamples are much more part of a phenomenon that emerged in the late 1990’s. They are verymuch part of the current dance landscape—when globalization has regularized an immenseamount of traffic across the world, when dance educators and choreographers from the globalNorth are being invited to teach in countries all over Asia in great numbers, and a process of level-ing is under way—through classes in choreography, composition, and technique, through festivalsand performances. And the Naipaul fallacy, the idea that we are only good when we are as good asthe hierarchical standards, cycles around.9

The irony is that the kind of processes that make this possible are apparently very inclusive: alldifferent kinds of bodies can participate on this global stage, though they should speak a familiar

Photo 3. Sardono Kusumo’s Sunken Seas, Selasar Sunaryo Art Space at Bandung, Indonesia, 2006(courtesy of Sardono Kusomo).

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language if they want to be marked as “contemporary” work or, in fact, as “choreography” at all. It isurgent to celebrate the presence of so many different bodies on the same stage and the kinds of pos-sibilities that diversity opens up. But there is also a grave need for caution: sharing space requires aninterrogation of historic inequities and hostilities, and we need to be vigilant that these old violencesare not perpetuated under the guise of the “new” global ventures. For it seems to me that several ofthe problems that frustrated the failed Western projects of multiculturalism are continued throughmany of the current global spaces, particularly in how we note/fail to note the tensions and shiftingrelationships between the diasporic and the transnational, the intracultural, and the intercultural.

In the flattened plane of global circulation and unanchored migrant bodies, movements seem toconstitute their own category, referring to nothing beyond themselves—ahistorical and depoliti-cized. Here, bodies are technical, stuffed with a strangely unreflective kind of difference, onlyoccasionally heightened through technical details of where the hip is held in a battement or amomentary quoting of a hand gesture. And as the modern/contemporary reconstitutes itself as auniversal category on the global stage, which is capable of articulating the subjectivites andemotional articulations of artists across continents, I contend that the translations that are ableto circulate on the global stage are more often than not flawless, seldom suggesting irony or con-tamination of the “original.”

Here on the global stage, where we see such diversity of bodies, with some performing traditionalpieces and others performing contemporary works, the disjunctive flows that mark Appadurai’svision of global forces, creating crisscrossing lines of power, seem strangely tamed. Bodily and per-formed differences are choreographed in dances that make them their own end; the resonances ofkinetic and aesthetic difference are effectively snuffed out and evacuated of their political dimen-sions; all that remains is a domesticated diversity. Thus, for instance, we might celebrate the“diverse” and “multicultural” cast of a mainstream modern dance company without ever question-ing or dismantling the validating power of some forms over others, or without investigating theshifts that happen when “different” bodies embody certain forms, aesthetically and culturally. Isuggest that the severing of movement content from structure and context that plagued past multi-cultural endeavors continues through the staging of global and intercultural projects where all toooften forms and performers from Asia and Africa are mobilized only to ensure the ascendency ofEuro-American aesthetics.

Yet, even through this wrenching from context, bodies are deeply territorialized, clearly signalingtheir citizenship in program notes, but eerily signifying in their aesthetic the universality of cat-egories generated in the cultural production of the global North. And it seems clear that inorder for the global stage to work as such, national identities must be strenuously asserted andmarked as such through aesthetic and performative choices. There is a strange disjunction herebetween how, even as the technique, aesthetic, and structure deterritorializes these bodies—marks them as part of a shifting landscape that insists on being made over in approximations ofa viable “globality,” program notes and publicity efforts that emphasize where these bodies originatefrom reterritorialize them. It is this insertion of the national within the global that creates this cross-dynamic of fixity and mobility, causing what Saskia Sassen has described as the “unbundling of thenational” (2000, 227). Sassen suggests that national borders, instead of acting as barriers, in factfacilitate an international division of labor that is organized in terms of transnational power struc-tures and local hierarchies of class and gender. These global networks are managed by two entirelydifferent classes of laborers, both of which have a stake in the success of these systems, howeverinequitable they are. While Sassen’s concept emerges from her study of global cities, her theoriza-tion can provoke interesting questions about bodies, cultural forms, practices, and identities. Herwork is particularly useful also in thinking through the unraveling of racial and cultural specificitiesas certain “different” bodies are curated to travel through particular global circuits and as transna-tional alliances among decision-makers manage the flow of cultural workers. Is this Bhaba’sfetishized diversity, not difference? Indeed, Bhaba’s distinction between cultural diversity, which

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is the recognition of pre-identified cultural “contents,” and cultural difference, which destabilizesfixed structures of meaning-making and categorization, resonates strongly with my readingof the global stage (1996, 50). Is this the same failure of the multicultural project to instigate aprofound restructuring of the ways in which bodies produce knowledge, against which EllaShohat and Robert Stam called for a “polycentrist multiculturalism” where “no single communityor part of the world, whatever its economic or political power, should be epistemologically privi-leged” (1994, 46–8)? Some questions that Stuart Hall asked a while ago still seem particularlyrelevant as we think through the possibilities of global cultural fora:

Is globalization the cleverest story the West has ever told, or is it a more contradic-tory phenomenon? . . . Does the notion of “the local” refer merely to exceptionslocated on the margins, to what used to be called a blip in history? Is the local simplysomething that does not register anywhere, does not want to do anything, is not veryprofound? Is it just waiting to be incorporated, eaten up by the all-seeing eye of glo-bal capital as it advances across the terrain? Or is it also itself, in an extremely con-tradictory state? (1997, 186)

Contested Flows

The contemporary dance piece Pichet Klunchun and Myself toured the United States in winter 2007.Created by European contemporary choreographer Jérome Bel and Thai Khon dancer and choreo-grapher Pichet Klunchun, this 105-minute piece is much more a dramatized conversation thandance. Yet it is all about dance, the production of dance, how dancing bodies distill cultural differ-ence, and what Bel describes as “a kind of theatrical and choreographic documentary on our realsituation.” The piece was commissioned by well-known Singaporean curator and dance critic TangFu Kuen, and it premiered at the Bangkok Fringe Festival in December 2004.

This was an interesting curatorial choice by Fu Kuen, particularly in light of his more recent post onRaft, a moderated blog about contemporary art.10 Fu Kuen contends that the production, distri-bution, and consumption of “Asian” performances are ineluctably bound by two major poles:essentialism, which casts Asian heritage expressions as marked by signs and values that are inher-ently distinctive and authentic, and are oppositional to Western modernity and ideology; and con-structionism, which casts Asian identities as open and fluid, adept in code-switching, perfect globalcitizens. Ultimately some of Fu Kuen’s questions, which were fueled by the frustrating failure in“cross-cultural communication,” are “Can Asians be comfortable in their own skin, gestures,and conscience, and yet be ‘mobile,’ ‘readable,’ and ‘translatable’ in another milieu? . . . Whatwould it take to enable Western spectatorship to overcome its aporia?”11 My question to him,thinking specifically about this curatorial choice, is why do Asians care to be “readable” to theWest? By placing this burden of accessibility on Asian bodies, is not the global stage rehearsingyet again the legacy of colonialism? If the global is indeed about the realignment of power, is itnot time to undo “the disproportionate influence of the West as cultural forum, in all three sensesof that word: as place of public exhibition and discussion, as place of judgement, and as market-place,” which Homi Bhabha lamented over two decades ago (1996, 31)?

The piece Pichet Klunchun and Myself is intelligent and cleverly constructed. In the program notes,Bel says, “Some very problematic notions such as Euro-centrism, inter-culturalism, or cultural glo-balization, are issues defined all through the piece. These notions, which are so delicate to discusscan’t be left out. The historical moment doesn’t allow what is at stake here to be skipped over.”11

Indeed, the piece takes on several of these issues. The choreographers sit across from each other andbegin talking. The aesthetic is postmodern (in the historical context of modern and postmoderndance of the West) and stripped down: they are in rehearsal clothes, Klunchun’s water bottle sitson the floor beside him, Bel has his laptop beside him on the floor; the lighting is understated—just enough to mark the stage space as a performative one. Bel dominates the conversation in

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the first half, asking Klunchun about Khon, why he is so invested in the dance, how meaning isconstructed and conveyed. Klunchun performs patience: he shares, without expressing hugeemotion, that while Khon originally belonged to the court and the court performances had a steadyaudience, it now belongs to the tourists. However, the aesthetic remains the same: the body is atemple and the structure of the temple pagoda is reflected in details of the body, like the fingersthat curve upward like the roof (see photo 4).

Comparing the continuous and circular energy of Khon dance to Western modern dance,Klunchun asks Bel about what he sees as a tendency to “throw away your energy.” The exchangeproceeds through numerous misdirections and failures: Bel asks to see demonstrations andKlunchun complies, but when Bel tries to follow, he fails to pick up on the nuances. Thesefunny moments—funny because the audience is invited, through the dialogue, to join Bel in laugh-ing at himself—underscore a subtly made point. Klunchun is the master of a “tradition” with his-tory, but Bel is the dismantler of tradition and expectation in order to radically reimagine thepossibilities of performance (see photo 5).

Bel and Klunchun discuss representations of death and mourning; they disagree about nakednesson stage, audience expectations, and how they relate to each other’s dancing bodies. In a turningpoint in the second half of the piece, Bel admits he has been a “monster,” constantly asking

Photo 4. Pichet Klunchun and Jérôme Bel in Pichet Klunchun and Myself (photo © association R.B.).

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questions of Kunchun and requests that Klunchun to do the same to him. Indeed, in response to aquestion about his work, Bel matches the exquisite detail and nuance of Klunchun’s demonstrationswith an eloquent speech about the ontology of theater—his belief in the intimacy of theater and itsspecificity, how the “now” of performance is an encounter that he tries not to dominate with theperformance of virtuosity.

It would seem that the dialogue, particularly with Klunchun’s ending refusal to see Bel naked, dis-mantled Eurocentric privilege and allowed the two artists to meet on an even plane. But once again,I left disconcerted: Why did it seem that Bel, with his overt performances of irony and self-directedhumor, and dancing his own choreography, was performing a “self,” while Klunchun, with hiseven-keeled demeanor and performances of traditional Khon (not his contemporary choreographybased on it), was yet again performing some version of the inscrutable Asian? Bel’s questions wereoften ironic, repeating Klunchun’s words as if to point out his incomprehension of them, whileKlunchun’s questions were primarily factual. For Bel, there seemed to be space to emerge as anindividual, a choreographer making choices, while for Klunchun, there seemed to much morepressure to be in character, representing a “culture.” Despite the conceptual brilliance of thepiece and the deliberate politics that Bel’s statement in the program notes echoed, so muchremained to be dismantled.12

Audiences blogged furiously after witnessing this performance. While reception of the piece waspredictably uneven, most were enchanted by Klunchun and the beauty of his movement, eventhough there was little display of it. Some of the blog entries made me think of AmitavaGhosh’s essay Dancing in Cambodia, especially where he describes Rodin’s fascination with theyoung Cambodian dancers. Ghosh quotes Rodin’s words: “The friezes of Angkor were comingto life before my very eyes. I loved these Cambodian girls so much . . .” (1998, 38). The sketchesof Rodin, the poetry of Rilke—so much of Western modernity has been figured in relationshipto and against the difference of Asian and African aesthetics, and inevitably a hierarchical position-ing has come to be implicit in this. Yet Asian modernities, wrestling with the legacies of colonialism,displacement, Western/Northern dominance in several forms, and postcolonial jockeying forpower, have often refigured the models of modernity thrust upon them in unique ways.Juxtapositions that were postmodern for the West were a necessary part of this refiguring. But,as we reckon with the implications of the global, can we continue to insist on re-mappings inour own terms? Can we reimagine our encounters in ways that disaggregate the encrustations ofpower that have continuously dogged our meetings with the global North?

Photo 5. Pichet Klunchun and Jérôme Bel (photo © association R.B.).

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Friction/Seams/Bad Translations

Young dance-makers across Asia are making amazing work—work that provokes thought andreveals the global stage as being constructed over conditions such as forced mobility due to civilwar, colonialism, and the importation of labor by capitalist centers; voluntary exchanges throughtravel and alliances; migrations in search of better life conditions; and intercultural exchangesbetween First World and Third World countries in the name of “development.” But this is notnecessarily what gains the spotlight on large-scale global fora, which these artists need to survive.How can we remind key decision-makers—producers, curators, scholars, and choreographersthemselves—about the incredible possibility of dance to create an encounter with difference onmultiple levels, and to profoundly move audiences and alter their frames of reference? I recallAlfian Sa’at, Singaporean playwright and poet, who reflected after a workshop on translation in/of/as performance: “Bad and ineffective translation is a strategy with the potential to empowerthe audience member into examining cultural incompatibilities and political incongruities”(2006, 283). Like Bhaba’s “difference” and Shohat and Stam’s “polycentrist multiculturalism,”Sa’at’s “bad translation” urges us to look at the seams that do not come together—those momentswhen cultural processes and representations emerging from different contexts collide with eachother, cleave away, and refuse to fall into a neat and convenient pattern that might be part ofthe organizing networks that Sassen detects in the global cities.

To end, let me share a moment of effective non-translation. In 1993, Sardono Kusumo toured theUnited States with his epic piece Passage Through the Gong. When I saw it at the Brooklyn Academyof Music, I understood that audiences around me, as well as dance critics, loved the piece but wereconfused about the alchemy of tradition and choreographic intervention. Most audience membersthought, for instance, that the traditional dance from the Yogyakarta court, the Serimpi Sangupati,danced for Kusumo’s piece by women from the Solo royal family, was a contemporary piece: thewomen gently poured wine into their glasses during the dance, sipped it, and pulled their revolversout from the folds of their sarongs, and fired shots in the air, all the while dancing with the typicalcalm and detachment that typifies much of Javanese court performance. Developed in the 1800sduring Sultan Paku Buwaono IX’s reign, this Serimpi indeed incorporates surprising elements(like the wine glasses and gunshots), revealing the Javanese uneasiness in the political encounterwith the Dutch. And this does not quite fit with the popularized image of Javanese court danceas serene and spiritual. Jack Anderson, writing for The New York Times, loved the piece, butadmitted that “It was difficult for Western audiences to guess what aspects of ‘Passage Throughthe Gong’ derived from tradition and what were Mr. Kusumo’s inventions.”13 But despite hisappreciation of the piece, Anderson ultimately expresses his reading of the piece through a momentof translation, through language and categories that Western audiences can understand: “‘PassageThrough the Gong’ resembled a contemporary Surrealist fantasy. Mr. Kusumo invested Indonesiansteps with a modern-dance sensibility.” Yet Anderson is careful to qualify that, here, modern dancedoes not indicate a specific technique, but rather “a form that emphasizes individual points ofview.”

While “modern dance” often seems to function like the universal signifier that can contain so muchdifference while inherently retaining its Eurocentric orientation, Anderson’s need to negotiate aparticular understanding of what constitutes modernity in dance is important to note. His emphasison individuality as the core of modern dance offers hope that we might be able to invigorate abroader understanding of “contemporary” choreography as well, where genres are understood inrelationship to other cultural forms and practices in that context. At any rate, instances, such asthe confusion around the Serimpi Sangupati—a “traditional” section within a contemporarypiece that does not fit with our expectations of what “traditional” looks like in this context, thatdefy stereotypical expectations suggest moments of bad/mis-translation which create profoundencounters with difference for diverse audiences. They help us to rethink the particular possibilitiesfor complicated restaging of contesting forces on the global stage. Such heterogeneous dance

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practices that shift our understandings of the relationship between the local and global as theymobilize different contexts and relationships offer so much hope. Anna Tsing’s idea of “friction,”as that which creates possibilities for redirecting global flows, is particularly useful here: “Engageduniversals travel across difference and are charged and changed by their travels. Through friction,universals become practically effective. Yet they can never fulfill their promises of universality”(2005, 8). Translations may be inevitable given the economy of the global stage and the kind ofcurrency performing on the global touring network seems to hold. But the kind of non-alignment/mis-translation/contamination that I am yearning for will necessarily create productivefrictions and tensions, marking dance as a practice where bodies, moving through space andtime, repeatedly redefine spaces and complicate our notions of the global stage without needingto consolidate into any one particular understanding.

Notes

1. Kishore Mahbubani is currently dean and professor in the Practice of Public Policy at theLee Kuan Yew School, National University of Singapore. Widely recognized as an expert in the fieldof policy and world affairs, with particular reference to Asia, his bold assertions about the risingeconomic capital of Asia are significant in thinking about globalization. His 2008 book, The NewAsian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East, follows two others: CanAsians Think? Understanding the Divide Between East and West (Hanover, NH: Steerforth Press,2001) and Beyond the Age of Innocence: Rebuilding Trust Between America and the World(New York: Perseus Books Group, 2005).

2. Judith Mackrell, “Nrityagram Dance Ensemble Review,” The Guardian, August 29, 2011,http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture /2011/aug/29/nrityagram-dance-ensemble- edinburgh-review.

3. Jennifer Dunning, “Spirits That Fly High While Rooted in Tradition,” The New York Times,February 21, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02 /21/arts/dance/21danc.html.

4. Joan Acocella, “Tea for Two,” The New Yorker, February 25, 2008, http://www.newyorker.com/arts /critics/notebook/2008/02/25/080225gonb_GOAT_notebook_acocella.

5. Jennifer Dunning, “A Modern Devotion to a Sacred Indian Ritual,” The New York Times,January 11, 1999, http://www.nytimes.com/1999/01/11 /arts/dance-review-a- modern-devotion-to-a-sacred-indian-ritual.html.

6. The Indian Government adopted the Special Economic Zones (SEZs) Policy in April 2000for the express purposes of overcoming “the shortcomings experienced on account of the multi-plicity of controls and clearances; absence of world-class infrastructure, and an unstable fiscalregime and with a view to attract larger foreign investments in India.” I quote from the Website dedicated to SEZs created by the Ministry of Commerce and Industry (http://www.sezindia.nic.in/index.asp). Deregulation has resulted in disasters for indigenous communities who haveexperienced complete routing of the ecosystems they inhabited, and destruction of the environmentand local economies. Many of the SEZs have been set up forcibly against protests from localcommunities.

7. I do not want to suggest that cultural production across the Asias is generalizable; the workthat appears across this vast continent no doubt indicates a huge aesthetic variation, and that is whyI find the evenness among the work that I see on global fora as representing “Asia,” if you will, allthe more troubling. Moreover, there are artists working with forms that originate in Asia who liveand work in the diaspora. And there are artists who live and work in the Asias who work with formsfrom the global North. No doubt these categories demand particular conceptual frames and par-ticular kinds of analyses. Yet to mobilize difference in order to erase aesthetic specificities is danger-ous. It is my hope to constantly unsettle the conceptual lens through which we understand “Asiancontemporary choreography” so we are ever vigilant to differences that animate it, and can locateresonances that bring together different kinds of work.

8. Chandralekha (1928–2006) was a celebrated contemporary choreographer from Chennai,India, who worked from a deconstruction of Bharatanatyam and Kalaraippayattu to create

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evening-length works. Jakarta-based Indonesian choreographer Sardono Kusumo (1945–) was oneof the first to explore movement ideas and cultural forms indigenous to his context to create con-temporary works. Lin Hwai Min (1947–) is the artistic director and choreographer of Taiwan’sCloudgate Dance Company (http://www.cloudgate.org.tw/). All three choreographers are acclaimedas pioneers in the field of contemporary dance.

9. Cultural studies scholar Kwame Anthony Appiah (1984, 146) coined the term “Naipaul fal-lacy” to suggest a post-colonial inferiority complex, whereby one might seek to demonstrate thevalidity of African (in the case of this particular argument) literature because it is fundamentallythe same as, or can be explained in the terms of, European literature.

10. Tang Fu Kuen, February 27, 2008, “The Brand of Asianness,” entry on the blog Raft, http://www.raft.indanca.net/?p=23. I had referenced this blog throughout the process of writing this essay.Unfortunately, this blog seems to be currently unreachable and the Web site has been disabled.

11. I am referencing Program Notes written by Jerome Bel, June 1, 2005, for a performance ofthe piece in Seoul, South Korea. However, my analysis comes from a performance of the piece atthe Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis, in 2007.

12. Though in agreement at many points, my analysis differs somewhat from that of dancescholar Yvonne Hardt, whose essay “Staging the Ethnographic of Dance History: ContemporaryDance and Its Play with Tradition” was published in Dance Research Journal (2011). Hardt suggeststhat Pichet Klunchun and Myself in fact stages a “reflective appropriation” of ‘other’ dance forms,revealing complex possibilities for interpretation” (2011, 28). In Hardt’s reading, this piece, andanother like it, succeed in “integrating dance styles that are explicitly considered ‘local’ and by;othering’ Western contemporary dance as equally culturally, politically, and traditionally marked.By placing contemporary dance strategies in conversation with those dance styles usually excludedfrom contemporary dance performances, they ask us to reevaluate demarcations between traditionand modernity and encourage dance historians to venture into still unconventional dance fields”(2011, 28). While her point about opening up the field of dance scholarship is well taken, in myreading, the piece fails to accomplish some of the dismantlings she marks.

13. Jack Anderson, “Dance View: Embarking on a Grand Tour of International Dance,”The New York Times, December 12, 1993, http://www.nytimes.com /1993/12/12/arts/dance-view-embarking-on-a-grand-tour-of- international-dance.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm.

Works Cited

Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 1984. “Strictures on Structures: The Prospects for a Structuralist Poetics ofAfrican Fiction.” In Black Literature and Literary Theory, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr., 127–50.New York: Routledge.

Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.” InModernity at Large, 27–47. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Bhabha, Homi. 1996. “The Commitment to Theory.” In The Location of Culture, 19–39. London:Routledge.

Ghosh, Amitava. 1998. “Dancing in Cambodia” (In) Dancing in Cambodia, At Large in Burma,1–53. New Delhi: Orient Longman.

Hall, Stuart. 1997. “The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity.” In Dangerous Liaisons,edited by Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat, 173–87. Minneapolis, MN:University of Minnesota Press.

Hardt, Yvonne. 2011. “Staging the Ethnographic of Dance History: Contemporary Dance and ItsPlay with Tradition.” Dance Research Journal 43(1): 27–43.

Mahbubani, Kishore. 2008. The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to theEast. New York: Perseus Books Group.

Sa’at, Alfian. 2006. “Out of Synch: On Bad Performance as Translation.” In Between Tongues:Translation and/of/in Performance in Asia, edited by Jennifer Lindsay, 272–3. Singapore:Singapore University Press.

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Sassen, Saskia. 2000. “Spatialities and Temporalities of the Global: Elements for a Theorization.”Public Culture 12(1): 215–32.

Shohat, Ella, and Robert Stam. 1994. Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media.London: Routledge.

Tsing, Anna. 2005. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton, NJ: PrincetonUniversity Press.

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