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Even as We Keep Trying: An Ethics of Interculturalism in Jérôme Bel's Pichet Klunchun and Myself

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 April 2014

SanSan Kwan
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Extract

In 2004, Singaporean presenter Tang Fu Kuen commissioned French avant-garde choreographer Jérôme Bel to create a work in collaboration with classical Thai dancer-choreographer Pichet Klunchun. The resulting piece is unlike most intercultural collaborations. In the world of concert dance, East–West interculturalism takes place in a variety of ways: in costuming or set design, in theme or subject matter, in choreographic structure, in stylings of the body, in energetic impetus, in spatial composition, in philosophical attitude toward art making. Bel's work, titled Pichet Klunchun and Myself, does not combine aesthetics in any of these ways. In fact, the piece may more accurately be described not as a dance but as two verbal interviews (first by Bel of Klunchun and then vice versa) performed for an audience and separated by an intermission. There is no actual intermingling of forms—Thai classical dance with European contemporary choreography—in this performance. The intercultural “choreography” here comprises a staged conversation between the artists and some isolated physical demonstrations by each.

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Articles
Information
Theatre Survey , Volume 55 , Issue 2 , May 2014 , pp. 185 - 201
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Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 2014 

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References

Endnotes

1. Jérôme Bel, “pichet klunchun and myself (2005),” rb jerome bel Web site, http://www.jeromebel.fr/performances/presentation?performance=Pichet%20Klunchun%20and%20myself, accessed 17 January 2014.

2. I recognize, even as I ask the question, that most of Bel's work deliberately resists conventional notions of choreography, but in this case I am interested in what this particular refusal might say about orientalism.

3. Banes, Sally, Dancing Women: Female Bodies Onstage (New York: Routledge, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Desmond, Jane, “Dancing Out the Difference: Cultural Imperialism and Ruth St. Denis's Radha of 1906,” Signs 17.1 (1991): 28–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Shelton, Suzanne, Ruth St. Denis: A Biography of the Divine Dancer (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1981)Google Scholar; Srinivasan, Priya, “The Bodies beneath the Smoke or What's behind the Cigarette Poster: Unearthing Kinesthetic Connections in American Modern Dance,” Discourses in Dance 4.1 (2007): 7–47Google Scholar; Wong, Yutian, Choreographing Asian America (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2010)Google Scholar.

4. Srinivasan, Priya, “The Nautch Women Dancers of the 1880s: Corporeality, U.S. Orientalism, and Anti-Immigration Laws,” Women & Performance 19.1 (2009): 3–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wong, 41–54.

5. Of course, the kinesthetic legacy of these Asian forms exists in the choreography itself, and it remains the work of another project to tease out and trace these influences. Priya Srinivasan has successfully begun this work with the choreography of Ruth St. Denis. See Srinivasan, Bodies beneath the Smoke.

6. While the term “intercultural” could certainly include non-Western artists who assimilate forms from outside their native culture, I am focused here on the long tradition of Western artists drawing from Asian forms. The debates of the 1980s and 1990s over interculturalism sometimes included discussions of non-Western productions, but they were mostly concerned with the work of Western artists borrowing from (most often) the East.

7. See, for example, The Intercultural Performance Reader, ed. Pavis, Patrice (New York and London: Routledge, 1996)Google Scholar; Interculturalism and Performance: Writings from PAJ, ed. Marranca, Bonnie and Dasgupta, Gautam (New York: PAJ Publications, 1991)Google Scholar; Peter Brook and the Mahabharata: Critical Perspectives, ed. Williams, David (New York and London: Routledge, 1991)Google Scholar; Lo, Jacqueline and Gilbert, Helen, “Toward a Topography of Cross-Cultural Theatre Praxis,” TDR: The Drama Review 46.3 (2002): 31–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8. Richard Schechner, “Interculturalism and the Culture of Choice: Richard Schechner Interviewed by Patrice Pavis,” in Intercultural Performance Reader, 41–50; Schechner, Richard, “Intercultural Performance: An Introduction,” TDR: The Drama Review 26.2 (1982): 3–4Google Scholar; Schechner, Richard, “Performance as a ‘Formation of Power and Knowledge,’” TDR: The Drama Review 44.4 (2000): 5–7Google Scholar; Patrice Pavis, “Introduction: Towards a Theory of Interculturalism in Theatre?” in Intercultural Performance Reader, 1–26; Latrell, Craig, “After Appropriation,” TDR: The Drama Review 44.4 (2000): 44–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9. Schechner, “Intercultural Performance: An Introduction,” 4.

10. Ibid.

11. Bharucha, Rustom, Theatre and the World: Performance and the Politics of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rustom Bharucha, “Somebody's Other: Disorientations in the Cultural Politics of Our Times,” in Intercultural Performance Reader, 196–212; Bharaucha, Rustom, The Politics of Cultural Practice: Thinking through Theatre in an Age of Globalization (Hanover, NH: UPNE for Wesleyan University Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Bharucha, Rustom, “Foreign Asia/Foreign Shakespeare: Dissenting Notes on New Asian Interculturality, Postcoloniality, and Recolonization,” Theatre Journal 56.1 (2004): 1–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brown, John Russell, “Theatrical Pillage in Asia: Redirecting the Intercultural Traffic,” New Theatre Quarterly 14.53 (1998): 9–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Biodun Jeyifo, “The Reinvention of Theatrical Tradition: Critical Discourses on Interculturalism in the African Theatre,” in Intercultural Performance Reader, 149–61.

12. Bharucha, Theatre and the World; Bharucha, “Somebody's Other”; Bharucha, Politics of Cultural Practice; Bharucha, Rustom, “Consumed in Singapore: The Intercultural Spectacle of Lear,” Theater 31.1 (2001): 107–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bharucha, “Foreign Asia/Foreign Shakespeare.”

13. Bharucha, “Consumed in Singapore.”

14. Schechner, “Interculturalism and the Culture of Choice,” 49.

15. Schechner, “‘Formation of Power and Knowledge,’” 7.

16. Pavis, Patrice, “Intercultural Theatre Today (2010),” Forum Modernes Theater 25.1 (2010): 5–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 13.

17. Patrice Pavis, Introduction (79–80) to Marvin Carlson, “Brook and Mnouchkine: Passages to India?” in Intercultural Performance Reader, 79–92, at 79.

18. In her blog I note several instances of Western prejudice and a lens on China colored by overused Western representations of the nation as creatively challenged and politically naive. Jenkins measures Chinese censorship levels, decries the GMDC company manager's reticence to discuss domestic politics with her, laments a lack of political critique in Chinese dance work, infantilizes and genericizes this same company manager as “the metaphor of a culture at once bursting to grow and shift and encompass,” and is awed by what she imagines is an audience seeing modern dance for the first time. She also retains a persistent optimism about the possibilities of intercultural work: “[The dancers] were completely and deeply focused on one another, knowing that although there are always surprises during performance, they were creating a world of their own, one to share with one another and with the audience, a world that could only come from their time together over the years it took to complete this work.” At the same time that she imagines a new world being created by her collaboration with the Chinese dancers, she continues to depict China as an “other sun” that she was enlightening with the bright rays of Western creativity and individualism: “It was so touching to hear the Chinese dancers talk about how their lives have been changed, how they learned to pay attention, to be present, to trust, and how this was as close to learning to fly as they thought they might get.” See “Excerpts from Margaret Jenkins' Personal Journal during the MJDC's Asia Tour of Other Suns with the Guangdong Modern Dance Company (GMDC), December 25, 2010–January 9, 2011,” www.mjdc.org/blog2011.html.

19. Foster, Susan Leigh, ed., Worlding Dance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20. Lena Hammergren, “The Power of Classification,” in Worlding Dance, 14–31, esp. 15–18.

21. Marta Elena Savigliano, “Worldling Dance and Dancing out There in the World,” in Worlding Dance, 163–90, at 165, 184.

22. The following depiction of the piece is based on my three experiences of it: a recording of the work performed at Novell Hall in Taipei, Taiwan, in June 2006; a live performance at Dance Theater Workshop in New York City in November 2007; and another live performance at REDCAT in Los Angeles in February 2009.

23. Note that the dialogue is staged as if it were spontaneous, but in fact it is scripted, and they have performed it numerous times. The artists, who are both nonnative speakers of English, retain the syntax and language usage that presumably would be present in an unscripted conversation.

24. Toward the end of Bel's interview of Klunchun, Klunchun discusses his efforts to make khon relevant to contemporary audiences in Thailand. For example, after premiering Pichet Klunchun and Myself, Klunchun created a hybridized work called Black and White (2011) using khon within a contemporary choreographic structure. In Pichet Klunchun and Myself, however, Bel's skeptical response belies his lack of faith in khon's accessibility: “Good luck.”

25. Debord, Guy, Society of the Spectacle [1967], trans. Nicholson-Smith, David, 5th ed. (New York: Zone Books, 1995)Google Scholar.

26. In 2011, Thailand's per capita GDP was 9,700 USD while France's was 35,000 USD. See The World Factbook at https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/index.html.

27. “The most dominant form of intercultural theatre today, which I term ‘hegemonic intercultural theatre’ (HIT), is a specific artistic genre and state of mind that combines First World capital and brainpower with Third World raw material and labor, and Western classical texts with Eastern performance traditions”; Lei, Daphne, “Interruption, Intervention, Interculturalism: Robert Wilson's HIT Productions in Taiwan,” Theatre Journal 63.4 (2011): 571–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 571.

28. See Bel.

29. According to Keith Hennessey, who spoke with Bel, the piece is not rigidly scripted, but the dialogue has settled over time. Bel and Klunchun are each welcome to improvise according to what they feel is appropriate for a particular time and audience. See Keith Hennessey, “Pichet Klunchun & Myself (Jerome Bêl),” circo zero/performance Web site, 19 April 2009, zeroperformance.blogspot.com/2009/04/pichet-klunchun-myself-jerome-bel.html (accessed 17 January 2013).

30. The piece premiered in Bangkok in December 2004, and Bel and Klunchun agreed to perform it for the last time in Bangkok in February 2012. See Pawit Mahasarinand, “And So the Curtain Closes,” The Nation (Thailand), 23 December 2011.

31. Pavis, “Introduction: Towards a Theory?,” 15.

32. Ibid.

33. In a special issue on theatre and globalization in Contemporary Theatre Review, Michael Welton likewise argues for a consideration of embodied experiences of different cultural practices as an alternative to what he views as the dominance of representational or spectatorial modes of intercultural theatre. See Welton, Michael, “Just for Kicks? In Search of the Performative ‘Something Else’ in a South Indian Martial Art,” Contemporary Theatre Review 16.1 (2006): 153–8Google Scholar. As a Western practitioner of the Indian form kalarippayattu, he is hopeful that his practical understanding of this martial art might help “resist division into the dualistic categories of self and other which dog so much (inter)cultural enquiry” (156). What is somewhat confusing in his formulation, however, is the way he seems to link his learning of an Indian cultural form to a transformation of self that somehow comes to understand the lived experience of the other. I am skeptical of such a link.

34. There is one instance when Bel learns a khon phrase from Klunchun and one moment when Klunchun imitates ballet.

35. Bhabha, Homi K., The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994)Google Scholar, esp. 53–6.

36. Bhabha's primary aim is to critique the kind of postcolonial nationalisms that work to conceal hybridity in favor of unified narrations of seemingly singular cultural identities.

37. Bhabha, 53.

38. Ibid., 36.

39. Ibid., 54.

40. Derrida, Jacques, Of Grammatology [1967], trans. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976)Google Scholar.

41. Levinas, Emmanuel, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority [1961], trans. Lingis, Alphonso (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969)Google Scholar.

42. Levinas, Emmanuel, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence [1974], 2d ed. [1978], trans. Lingis, Alphonso (The Hague: Martinis Nijhoff, 1981)Google Scholar.

43. Ibid., 5.

44. Ibid., 7.

45. A writer for Thailand's The Nation views the piece as an “informative study” of khon and “modern conceptual dance.” See Jasmine Baker, “Every Single Dance in One Hour,” The Nation (Thailand), 16 March 2012. More than one reviewer, including Roslyn Sulcas, describes it (perhaps to Bel's chagrin) as “entertaining.” See Roslyn Sulcas, “Thai Spars with French in a Cultural Exchange,” New York Times, 9 September 2007; Jane Howard, “Audience Quite Beside Itself,” Sunday Herald Sun (Australia), 29 October 2006; and Christine Madden, “Reviews,” Irish Times, 28 April 2006. On the other hand, a critic for The Australian describes it as “a brilliantly lucid deconstruction of two approaches to dance”; see Lee Christofis, “Cultural Exchange on the Hop,” The Australian, 30 October 2006. Jennifer Dunning sees the work as a “series of cultural collisions” and describes the end (where Bel begins to unbuckle his pants and Klunchun stops him) as a “gentle cataclysm.” See Jennifer Dunning, “Hear Them Talk and See Them Dance, Then Watch Their Cultures Clash,” New York Times, November 9, 2007. The Sunday Times of London describes the first half as “like having a Thai-dancing guidebook come to life” and the second half as a place where Bel discusses “his own western philosophy of movement” and makes provocative statements about religion and marriage. See Christie Taylor, “Joy is in the Air,” Sunday Times (London), 7 May 2006. One Australian critic uses food metaphors to describe the artistic “fusion”: “In short: funny French with Thai spice”; see Howard. Most of the reviews depict Pichet Klunchun and Myself as a mix of educational cross-cultural demonstration, personal interview, and amusing dialogue. None of them mentions the disparity between khon as a form and Bel's work as an individual choreographer, or the economic disparity that affects the production and reception of these two forms. None of them seems to take issue with the way the piece reproduces an orientalist relationship. One writer from the Irish Times does wonder whether the piece provokes thought or is merely narcissistic: “Is it egocentric intellectual self-pleasuring on stage? Is it a wickedly clever, insightful and entertaining exploration of communication, contemporary art and society? Maybe both”; see Madden.

Keith Hennessey, the aforementioned interlocutor after I presented my own dialogue with the piece, whose comments prompted me to research these reviews, writes in a blog: “Pichet Klunchun & Myself is an excellent failure. It paradoxically embodies all that it attempts to critique, in terms of spectacle, a democratic exchange, virtuosity, and the role of the European in global culture. Its contradictions are inspirational, evocative, encouraging, and generative.” He then goes on to discuss other discourses on the piece and how they reveal things he missed, and to discuss a second viewing and more subtleties that he noted. See Hennessey.

Yvonne Hardt has written about Pichet Klunchun and Myself as a form of ethnography through performance; see Hardt, Yvonne, “Staging the Ethnographic of Dance History: Contemporary Dance and Its Play with Tradition,” Dance Research Journal 43.1 (2011): 27–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar. She argues that the piece operates as a study of two dance forms, working on the assumption that both contain representational codes and staging conventions that are culturally specific (rather than relying on a Eurocentric notion of Western dance as universal). Hardt wants to demonstrate how the piece challenges our Eurocentrism because it approaches both Klunchun's and Bel's work equally as ethnographic sites. But I argue, again, that the key difference is that Klunchun discusses khon as an entire tradition whereas Bel is asked to be informant for only his own work. In another article about the piece, dance scholar Susan Foster advances a feminist critique, interspersing her argument with a fictional dialogue involving Bel. See Foster, Susan Leigh, “Jerome Bel and Myself: Gender and Intercultural Collaboration,” in Emerging Bodies: The Performance of Worldmaking in Dance and Choreography, ed. Klein, Gabriele and Noeth, Sandra (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Transaction Publishers, 2011), 73–82Google Scholar.

46. Natasha Rogai finds this piece entertaining, but says that it “does not develop into a profound dialogue on eastern and western dance”; see Natasha Rogai, “About Khon,” South China Morning Post, 25 November 2008.

47. Foster, Susan Leigh, Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance (New York: Routledge, 2011), 197Google Scholar. I have not personally found any direct evidence of such contradictory responses across Asia and the West; but the previous two notes do suggest a difference in reception of Bel and Plunchun between Rogai of Hong Kong's South China Morning Post, who is critical, and Christofis of The Australian, who is laudatory.

48. See “Globalisation and Theatre,” special issue of Contemporary Theatre Review 16.1 (2006)Google Scholar; “Other Transnationals: Asian Diaspora in Performance,” special issue of Modern Drama: World Drama from 1850 to the Present 48.2 (2005)Google Scholar; and “Theorizing Globalization through Theatre,” special issue of Theatre Journal 57.3 (2005)Google Scholar.

49. Yan, Haiping, “Other Transnationals: An Introductory Essay,” Modern Drama: World Drama from 1850 to the Present 48.2 (2005): 225–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 227 and 242.

50. Reinelt, Janelle, “Three Thoughts toward a Global Poetics,” Contemporary Theatre Review 16.1 (2006): 151–3Google Scholar, at 152.

51. Levinas, Emmanuel, “Substitution,” in The Levinas Reader, ed. Hand, Seán, trans. Lingis, Alphonso (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 88–125Google Scholar, at 98.

52. Ibid., 99.

53. Ibid., 102.

54. See Critchley, Simon, “Introduction,” in The Cambridge Companion to Levinas, ed. Critchley, Simon and Bernasconi, Robert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

55. Ibid., 18.