Love Dances: Loss and Mourning in Intercultural Collaboration 0197514553, 9780197514559

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Love in the Shape of Loss
1. Talking: Pichet Klunchun and Myself
2. Mourning: Flash and Simulacrum
3. Loving: Spiel and Talking Duet
Epilogue: The Wages of Dying Is Love
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Love Dances

Love Dances Loss and Mourning in Intercultural Collaboration S A N S A N K WA N

1

3 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2021 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Control Number: 2021940146 ISBN 978–​0–​19–​751456–​6 (pbk.) ISBN 978–​0–​19–​751455–​9 (hbk.) DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197514559.001.0001 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Paperback printed by Marquis, Canada Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America

Contents Acknowledgments 

Introduction: Love in the Shape of Loss 

vii

1

1. Talking: Pichet Klunchun and Myself 

32

2. Mourning: Flash and Simulacrum 

50

3. Loving: Spiel and Talking Duet 

78

Epilogue: The Wages of Dying Is Love 

108

Notes  Bibliography  Index 

111 117 125

Acknowledgments This book is about love, and I have loved writing it. The seeds of it were planted before my husband’s sudden death in 2013, but since then my journey through grief has given my ideas greater depth. For that, I am full of gratitude. If there is anything that mourning has taught me it is appreciation. This book is also about collaboration, and, appropriately, it is itself a collaboration. I am so thankful to the many generous partners who have been willing to dance with me here. My thanks go first to the artists I write about in these pages. Their bravery in putting their work out in the world and their patience in talking with me about it make this book possible. Jay O’Shea, Rebecca Rossen, and Karen Shimakawa provided a thorough read of the manuscript at exactly the right moment. They offered deeply engaged, insightful feedback. This would not have been a publishable book without the thinking they inspired. Their work was supported through a manuscript workshop grant from the Institute of International Studies (IIS) at the University of California, Berkeley. Natalia Duong assisted with furiously fast and scrupulous note-​taking during the daylong workshop. IIS also awarded me an earlier grant that allowed me to begin my initial thinking on this project. Other UC Berkeley units whose funds allowed me to research and write include the Center for Chinese Studies and the Division of Arts and Humanities. I am grateful to all of my gracious interlocutors throughout the various stages of writing this book. Esther Kim Lee, as well as anonymous reviewers, helped me to publish the Theatre Survey article that eventually became ­chapter 1, and Charlotte McIvor and Daphne Lei edited a piece that eventually evolved into ­chapter 3. I thank the anonymous readers at Oxford University Press, who provided profoundly consequential comments to enhance this book and strengthen its relevance. Of course, Executive Editor Norman Hirschy’s professionalism and always bright encouragement made the process easy. Weihong Bao, Sima Belmar, Brandi Catanese, Catherine Choy, Catherine Cole, Robin Davidson, Abigail De Kosnik, Katie Faulkner, Julia Fawcett, Peter Glazer, Joe Goode, Philip Gotanda, James Graham, Mark

viii Acknowledgments Griffith, Shannon Jackson, Jenefer Johnson, Anthea Kraut, Angela Marino, Katherine Mezur, J’aime Morrison, Dahlia Nayar, Laura Nelson, Shannon Steen, Amara Tabor-​Smith, Latanya Tigner, and Lisa Wymore have been shrewd readers and delightful colleagues. I am indebted to Heather Rastovac Akbarzdadeh and Paige Johnson for early research assistance. Jeniffer Tamayo and, especially, Miyoko Conley performed meticulous copyediting and citation formatting. Crystal Song did the painstaking indexing work. Lastly, I am continually stimulated by my creative collaborators at Lenora Lee Dance, especially Lenora Lee. I am sustained in life and work by my family, both on the Speirs and the Kwan/​Ning side. Mark McDermott is an astonishingly skillful dance partner and I could not be more thankful. My children, Kai and Bo, deepen what it means to love every day. Finally, of course, this book is dedicated to Kenneth James Speirs, who is its inspiration.

Introduction Love in the Shape of Loss

Duets When we were first given the task of making a duet together we had just met—​that day, that rehearsal. I remember thinking that he seemed very young, with a fresh, open face, and a receptive presence. We introduced ourselves and, without much preamble, we started to make a dance together. We fell into a rhythm where one person would initiate a movement, then the other would respond, a movement, a response, back and forth. The result was interesting, but fairly mechanical, a simple, somewhat affectless chain of movement and reaction. We were just getting to know each other, somewhat awkwardly. The artistic director asked us to set the phrase,1 and we did. Later, after many months of creating the larger piece in which this duet exists, however, our dance evolved. By this time Hien and I had spent hundreds of hours together in dance studios, in meetings, over meals, and in cars and on ferries to and from the historical site where we would perform. In fact, by the time we last danced this duet in 2019 we had spent years together, performed in another dance piece, and then again in a restaging of this one. We had long ago let go of the phrase we set on that first day, with its action-​reaction structure, and the odd lift at the end. Now we just met eyes at the right time and went from there. It was different and yet the same with each iteration, an improvisation with some expected landmarks. All the ways in which we knew and respected each other infused our duet. We trusted each other and we moved together from that trust. Our brief duet is part of a piece called Within These Walls. Hien Huynh is my partner and Lenora Lee is the artistic director of the piece, which is an immersive, site-​specific dance work set at the Angel Island Immigration Center in the San Francisco Bay. The work documents the lives of Chinese immigrant detainees at the Center in the early twentieth century. Hien is over twenty years my junior, a Vietnamese American man born in Da Nang

​

​

2  Love Dances and raised in Sacramento. I am a Chinese American woman born in 1970 and raised in Los Angeles. I love performing this sweet little duet with Hien. Hien is a magnetic dancer, full of sensitivity and care; his kinesthetic responsiveness is not merely corporeal but comes from his heart. Like me, he has experienced traumatic loss in his life, and there is a shared pathos that we bring to our connection. At the same time, because of our differences as people, and in keeping with the roles we enact in the piece (I play an older missionary at the detention center; he is a young detainee), there is a respectful distance in our duet, a space between. This is a book about duets. Like my duet with Hien, this book is about all the ways that duets generate awkwardness and inspire care, the ways that they require vulnerability, the ways that they highlight power, difference, and incommensurability, the ways that they can foster connection over shared pain and, most importantly, the ways that they necessitate and also engender love. This book is also itself a duet; it is a duet between the dances I study and me, between the thinkers I rely on and me, and between you, the reader, and me. The particular kinds of duets I study in these pages are intercultural collaborations. When I began the writing—​in the late 2010s, under the Trump presidency and in the shadow of the Brexit referendum—​the United States and Europe were experiencing shockingly aggressive forms of xenophobia: a refugee crisis and right-​wing populism on the rise in Europe, abominable mistreatment toward migrants at the southern borders of the United States, and continuing tensions with the Middle East. This alarming period compelled a desire to explore the ways we might resist fear and hatred and encourage understanding across difference. Of course, xenophobia is a reaction to the fact that cross-​cultural2 encounter and global interdependence are unavoidable givens. Interculturalism is a contemporary facet of life for most of the world. How, then, should we choose to interact? Love Dances explores global relationality within the realm of intercultural collaboration in concert dance. I contend that the practice and performance of dance serves as a revelatory model for working across cultures. Body-​ to-​body interaction on the stage carries the potential to model everyday encounters across difference in the world. Looking specifically at “East-​ West”3 duets, I am interested in how dance artists from different cultural and movement backgrounds—​from Asia,4 the Asian diaspora, Europe, South America, and the United States; trained in contemporary dance, hip-​hop, flamenco, Thai classical dance, kabuki, and butoh—​find ways to co-​create.

Love in the Shape of Loss  3 Of course, it is crucial to acknowledge the politics of collaboration. There are significant differentiations in power that structure cross-​cultural engagement. Given our histories of colonialism and Orientalism and resulting hierarchical taxonomies of dance (ballet and modern versus “world” dance), what presumptions and prejudices are at play when a French choreographer partners with a Thai dancer? Or when an Asian American butoh artist works with an African American popper? Or when a queer Argentinian man takes up Japanese kabuki to tell the story of a Japanese flamenco star? Power disparities and gender, racial, and cultural differences inevitably occasion misunderstandings, gaps in translation, failures to relate, and sometimes the threat of violence. Otherness can never be fully assimilated. As the full title of this book suggests, interculturalism is always bound up with loss and thus, I will argue, with mourning. By loss, I mean the losses across translation, the failures and disappointments, and sometimes the refusals, that define intercultural contact. These losses, I argue, are not reasons to bemoan the impossibility of intercultural understanding, however. Instead they remind us of the necessarily fragile nature of encounter. The effort to connect always, necessarily, gives rise to grief. In addition to these necessary questions of power and prejudice and the grief they engender, however, is an equally urgent question about the ethics of collaboration. Given the politics of global encounter, how do we nevertheless engage across difference with tolerance and compassion? The forces of xenophobia compel a humane and ethical counter-​response. Looking at duets, Love Dances insists on understanding interculturalism at the register of the intimate and the loving—​even in the face of otherness and miscomprehension. So this book explores intercultural duets as practices of love and of loss. It is inspired by my personal experiences with each. My husband died on December 11, 2013. It was sudden and completely unexpected. He was forty-​nine. Love Dances is inspired by all the things I learned in loving Kenny and all the things I have learned in the years since his death. Kenny was a white, US American, cisgender man, and I am a Chinese American, cisgender woman. There were many ways in which we misunderstood and felt alien to each other because of our racial and cultural differences. I could not understand his sunny optimism and persistent sense that the rules did not always apply, nor his love of Bob Dylan and Herman Melville. He had to come around to my view that almost everything had something to do with race and that my parents were always, at some level,

4  Love Dances going to have a say over me. Despite these and other intractables, there was also a foundation of love that drove us, not to overcome those differences, but to persist in spite of them. Through him I learned how intercultural collaboration both requires and can also inspire love. After Kenny died, I joined a grief group. We talked a lot about the integration that was supposed to come after losing someone you love. Still, for a long time, I did not understand what “integration” meant. How does one integrate? What do we integrate? Our loved ones? Our grief? After several years, I think I understand better now what loss integration means. It means that as you move out of acute grieving—​the painful, debilitating experience of early mourning, when you are wrenched from your very self—​the grief slowly starts to become a part of you, or you become a part of it. I have this image in my mind’s eye of a stone statue overgrown with moss (figure I.1). The shape is intact, but its contours are softened, its textures muffled. Or perhaps you have seen the photo of a child’s bicycle overtaken by a growing tree trunk (figure I.2). The bicycle has been preserved, integrated as the tree continues to grow around it, lifting it up as the trunk ascends. Loss does not go away; we carry

Figure I.1  One of 1200 statues at Otagi Nenbutsu-​ji Temple in Kyoto, Japan. Photo by SanSan Kwan.

Love in the Shape of Loss  5

Figure I.2  Bicycle grown into a tree on Vashon Island, Washington, USA. Photo by Christine Plihal.

it along with us even as we move forward into our new becoming. If loving Kenny taught me how to be in difference with another person and how to accept the gaps that come with that difference, his dying taught me how to integrate loss. This book argues for love in the face of otherness. It acknowledges the inevitability of loss that love entails, but also the obstinate, continual growth, not in spite of loss but in the shape of it.

Histories of Interculturalism in Western Dance and Theater A little history to begin. I write that interculturalism is a contemporary fact. Of course, intercultural exchange happens across all sorts of cultures. At the same time, Orientalist interculturalism has a particular legacy in Western

6  Love Dances theater and dance. From Bertolt Brecht and Antonin Artaud to Robert Wilson and Julie Taymor, from Ruth St. Denis and Martha Graham to Merce Cunningham and Deborah Hay, Western artists have borrowed from, imagined, and incorporated Eastern aesthetics in their work. For many of these influential artists, encounters with Asia have, in fact, inspired key turning points in the development of their art. I focus on East-​West pairings in this book because of this specific legacy and as a way to delimit my project to what I can responsibly cover. I draw upon my personal background both as a Chinese American dancer with experience performing in contemporary dance work that incorporates Asian themes and forms, and as a dance scholar with knowledge of both contemporary Asian and contemporary Western dance.5 Scholars such as Jane Desmond (1991), Priya Srinivasan (2007), Yutian Wong (2010), and others have done important historical work to uncover the ways that Asian aesthetics have been appropriated in Euro-​American concert dance (Banes 1998; Shelton 1981). Ruth St. Denis, one of the foremothers of modern dance in the United States, drew much of her inspiration and her choreography from South Asian dance (Desmond 1991; Shelton 1981; Srinivasan 2007). Likewise, Martha Graham was influenced by a range of East, Southeast, and South Asian aesthetics (Rosenberg 1995). These Orientalist imaginings lent the choreography of these pioneers of American modern dance an air of the novel, the exotic, the sensual. Later, leaders in postmodern dance similarly looked East: for example, Merce Cunningham drew on Chinese philosophy, and Steve Paxton incorporated Asian martial arts to generate dance material (Wong 2010). In all of these cases—​and this is just a selection of examples—​the choreographers, widely viewed as major innovators in the history of US American dance, did not credit any of the people who might have been the sources of their inspiration (Srinivasan 2009; Wong 2010). Their appropriation of Asian aesthetics became historicized as the unique creations of individual artists who single-​handedly renewed US American dance.6 As Wong (2010) and Srinivasan (2009) each argue, if these key figures in the history of US American modern and postmodern dance based their choreographic style on fantasies of Asia, then we must account for the ways that Orientalism is a constitutive part of the legacy of Euro-​American dance. Interculturalism also has a long history in theater. One of the most prolific periods in this history is the 1980s and 1990s, a time when a number

Love in the Shape of Loss  7 of European and American artists engaged in large-​scale projects that assimilated Western and Eastern forms, performers, staging conventions, epic stories, mise en scènes, or texts. Daphne Lei has termed the monumental projects of that period HIT, or “hegemonic intercultural theatre” (2011, 571), a form of production that largely followed a colonialist model of appropriation and exploitation by prominent Western auteurs who drew upon non-​Western artistic material and labor. Peter Brook’s 1985 nine-​hour adaptation of the Indian epic The Mahabharata was a seminal work of the period. Ariane Mnouchkine’s 1987 L’Indiade was another. Eugenio Barba’s search for “pre-​expressive” principles through research in Asian theater forms and Jerzy Grotowski’s study of non-​Western ritual marked other experiments in intercultural performance of the era. From Asia, Yukio Ninagawa’s 1986 Medea and Ong Keng Sen’s 1997 King Lear were much-​discussed East-​West productions.7 The scholarship that arose in response to these works has been plentiful (Pavis 1996; Dasgupta and Marrance 1991; Williams 1991; Lo and Gilbert 2002). In some cases intellectuals and critics proclaimed a promising new trend in which artists were commingling aesthetics across cultures in ways that dismantled colonial barriers and heralded new forms (Pavis 1996; Latrell 2000). Richard Schechner (1982, 1996, 2000) was an exuberant champion of intercultural work. In a 1982 article, he welcomes a “culture of choice” (4). While he acknowledges the danger of ignoring imbalances of power and cultural chauvinism in cross-​cultural relationships, he is ultimately omnivorous: “The more contact among peoples the better. The more we, and everyone else too, can perform our own and other peoples’ cultures the better” (4). Other scholars decried the Western arrogance and imperial attitude they saw repeated in so many of these theatrical fusions (Brown 1998; Jefiyo 1996). In multiple books and articles Rustom Bharucha (1990, 1996, 2000, 2001, 2004), one of the few scholars of interculturalism who does not write from a position in the West but is based in India, vigorously condemns what he views as the stealing and evisceration of local traditions by condescending European and American artists, and even by Asian artists such as Ong, who, Bharucha feels, equally “consume” Asia (2001). Reviewing the literature of the time, this busy period of intercultural theater was either a demonstration of the persistence of colonialism or the rich result of a “promiscuous” artistic curiosity (Schechner 1996, 49).

8  Love Dances

New Interculturalism: Situating Love Dances I outline a bit of the fraught history of intercultural performance in order to situate Love Dances and to provide a backdrop for my questions about the ethics and politics of contemporary interculturalism. Why return to these debates of thirty years ago? Where did they ultimately lead? In 2000, Schechner wrote, “One thing is sure, the borrowings and the impositions are not going to stop. The open question is—​can there be, ought there to be, rules governing this interplay? If so, what might the rules be? Who would enforce them? Is enforcement something artists and intellectuals want to get into?” (7). It is true that since the 1980s and 1990s, Western artists have continued to incorporate Asian forms in their works: take, for example, choreographer Mark Morris’s interpretation of a classic Middle Eastern love story, Layla and Majnun (2016). There may be no satisfying answer to Schechner’s questions, but they are still important to ask. The debates of the 1980s and 1990s, what William Peterson has called “classic intercultural theory” (2011, 587), have caused some contemporary artists to be more conscientious than their forebears about the politics of cross-​cultural work. If Mnouchkine was insensitive in her exploitation of “the Orient,” if Brook was tactless in his plundering of Indian tradition, if Barba and Grotowski were naive in their search for a universal theatrical language, artists today who experiment with East-​West fusions cannot be as cavalier. I might characterize some of the more recent culturally hybrid work as more effortfully reciprocal. For example, choreographer Margaret Jenkins has engaged in a few long-​term collaborations with Asian dance companies. Her work with Tansuree Shankar Dance, based in Kolkata, lasted for four years and involved numerous visits by both companies, exchanges of video material, and co-​created choreography. Similarly, Jenkin’s work Other Suns is a piece danced jointly by her American dancers and dancers from the Guangdong Modern Dance Company (GMDC) in China. One section of the dance is choreographed by Jenkins, one by Liu Qi from GMDC, and the last section is a collaboration. Despites these efforts at parity, however, Clare Croft (2013), who researched the Jenkins-​ Shankar collaboration extensively, notes that while the partnership was very actively dialogic, Jenkins’s company ultimately maintained clear dominance and privilege in the production of the work. Likewise, I detect a lingering Orientalist prejudice as I read Jenkins’s (2011) blog of her residency in Guangdong.8

Love in the Shape of Loss  9 If artists can no longer blithely borrow, neither can contemporary scholars be apologists for such borrowing. Patrice Pavis (2010), a key advocate in the earlier period, revisits the dilemmas of interculturalism in “Intercultural Theatre Today (2010)”: Times have radically changed. The effects of globalization on our way of doing and understanding theatre are increasingly evident. Hence the renewal, or the complete mutation of interculturalism; hence our growing consideration for the phenomena of globalization, our will to think of theatre according to the world which produces and receives it, taking into account its socioeconomic and ethical dimensions. (13)

Whereas in 1996 Pavis described critiques of interculturalism as “moralistic ‘political correctness’ ” (79), here he acknowledges a need for more circumspection, more contextual understanding, and an ethical dimension. A number of scholars have identified a turn toward “new interculturalism” (Chaudhuri 2002). In the 2000s and 2010s, scholars such as Ric Knowles (2010), Daphne Lei (2011), Charlotte McIvor (2016, 2019), and Royona Mitra (2015) began to note intercultural endeavors that complicate the earlier, more reductive notions of predefined cultural traditions encountering each other across fixed hegemonic maps. Their research works to tease out the complexities across multiculturalism, postcolonialism, ethnic and racial difference, intraculturalism, and interculturalism. In their 2019 anthology, McIvor and Jason King list eleven attributes of new interculturalism. These include considerations of minoritarian interculturalisms, for example, or intercultural projects that develop not across national boundaries, but locally across different cultural communities within nation-​state borders. They resist what Ric Knowles terms “source-​to-​target” binaries, essentially Western practices of appropriation of non-​Western material, in favor of “interculturalism from below” (2017, 2). They diversify the more well-​worn routes of intercultural exchange. They emphasize the processual nature of intercultural exchange, or what Leo Cabranes-​Grant terms “engines of emergence” (2011, 501). Daphne Lei expresses the hope that the economic ascendancy of East Asia in the early 2000s might give rise to artistic collaborations in which the Asian partner enjoys greater artistic agency than in earlier East-​West productions (2011, 585). Brian Singleton (2014, 82) claims that new media technologies such as the internet make it easier for artistic forms to spread globally, thereby diminishing the exotic effect of HIT-​type productions and inviting less

10  Love Dances formal, more frequent, and better-​informed collaborations. Royona Mitra (2015), the one dance scholar in the earlier list, studies Bangladeshi British choreographer Akram Khan’s partnership with other Asian artists, wrestling with the postcolonial, transnational complexities of representations of Westernness and otherness in contemporary intercultural work where the boundaries between the West and the rest are not always so clear. New studies of interculturalism must still examine how cultural exchanges operate. What are the politics inherent in these encounters? Who has the privilege of being perceived as intercultural and who is merely “modernized”? And how does Orientalism persist even in the more recent collaborations where hegemonies are less clear and artists earnestly attempt equal exchange and mutual respect? For example, despite Lei’s (2011) optimism about the ways that greater economic power in Asia might occasion greater artistic agency for Asian artists, Croft’s (2013) research on Margaret Jenkins would suggest that the balance of agency in that collaboration was still tipped toward the Western partner. One of the duets in my study, Pichet Klunchun and Myself, while initiated and funded by an Asian-​based curator, still managed give greater voice to Jérôme Bel, the European choreographer in the equation, over Pichet Klunchun, the eponymous Thai artist. Can cross-​cultural sharing help us escape Orientalism, or are the prejudices of Western superiority and the notion of the East as absolute other to the West still the unavoidable mechanisms that fuel East-​West collaborations? In our necessary confrontation with and reliance on communities outside of our traditional national and cultural borders, we must practice strategies of engagement that neither reduce difference to an unspecified, decontextualized relativism nor reify colonial hierarchies and prejudices. An important anthology in dance studies titled Worlding Dance offers us a neologism for thinking about the politics of cultural classification (Foster 2009). The book is concerned with dismantling ethnocentric taxonomies of dance that view Western modern dance and ballet as high art while subsuming all non-​ Western forms under the categories of “traditional” or “folk.” To “world” dance is to open up our colonialist perceptions of dance beyond ballet and modern to consider other dance forms as both contemporaneous with Western concert dance and as having their own aesthetic integrity. The interculturalism of the 1980s and 1990s worked in conjunction with a contemporaneous multicultural political agenda that, like the intercultural experiments of the period, claimed to celebrate cultural difference but ended up ingesting it like so many indiscriminate exotic fruits. Likewise, McIvor (2019) demonstrates

Love in the Shape of Loss  11 the ways that, recently, artistic interculturalism has been instrumentalized as a governmental and social agenda in the face of new influxes in European immigration. As Lena Hammergren (2009, 15–​16) argues in the Worlding Dance collection, new perspectives on world dance must recognize Homi Bhabha’s distinction between cultural diversity, which reduces the multiplicity of cultures to a mere collection of interchangeable tokens, and cultural difference, which acknowledges the tensions, antagonisms, and differential levels of access that exist across various cultures We must always remain sensitive to the uneven sociopolitical and economic contexts out of which various dance forms operate, especially if we want to do culturally hybrid work. In Marta Savigliano’s concluding chapter in Worlding Dance, she suggests that globalization requires us to be “neighborly,” to see our mutual cohabitation in the world as offering “instances of proximity—​which do not constitute an idyllic relationality, but rather a permanent negotiation” (2009, 184). I mention at the beginning of this introduction that this project was occasioned at a particular xenophobic moment in Euro-​American history—​ the United States under Trump, Britain contending with Brexit, and Europe facing a refugee crisis. What are the ways in which the duets I study are determined by or respond directly to this moment? The works I investigate are not necessarily a direct result of these events, though one artist in my study, Emmanuelle Huynh, does explicitly mention concern over the plight of refugees in Europe in her duet with Otake Eiko.9 Instead, I argue that they have the potential to model ethical forms of cultural contact in this contemporary era of intolerance. In particular, I contend that the duet as a form emphasizes interpersonal relationality in ways that might serve as a counter to the dehumanization upon which anti-​immigration sentiment and racism relies. That is, perhaps in this moment duets are just more humane than the epic ensembles of the HIT era. I discuss this further in the section on love later in this introduction. I also submit that the artists I study are exemplary of the ways that people carry uniquely personal ethnic and family immigration histories that do not always fit the monolithic notions of culture or nation upon which xenophobia relies. I think these unique stories remind us that cultures and nations have always been richly multiplicitous. Cultures have collided throughout history, and tensions over that colliding have always arisen. Of course, there are specific sets of geopolitical dynamics that give rise to the contemporary collisions at the time of writing this book—​ specific resentments toward Mexican and Central American, as well as Muslim and Middle Eastern, migrants in the United States, resentments

12  Love Dances toward Eastern European, Middle Eastern, and North African migrants in Britain and Europe. Meanwhile, the personal histories of the artists in my study arise out of other, earlier geopolitical conflicts and resulting routes of migration: World War II, Hiroshima, the Korean War, French colonialism and US American military intervention in Vietnam, international tourism and cultural imperialism in Thailand, Japanese imperialism in Korea and Southeast Asia, economic meltdowns in Argentina, and slavery and continuing racist oppression in the United States. Interculturalism remains a contemporary fact and a necessary dilemma. We must engage with our cultural others. How do we do so without repeating the dynamics of violence and imperialism that have historically structured our global relationships? How do we do so as a way to counteract the xenophobic sentiments that overwhelm Europe and the United States? Does contemporary intercultural performance continue a tradition of exploitation, or can it provide instances of neighborliness, of careful but productive negotiation across the unevenness of difference? Love Dances explores this early twenty-​first-​century landscape of global encounter. This book enters the interculturalism conversation after the HIT period and the period of “classic intercultural theory,” and as a companion to “new interculturalisms.” Aligning with new interculturalism, I emphasize the intersubjective, the processual, and the intersectional nature of cross-​ cultural exchange. While the choreographers I study here are, admittedly, elite artists, they are not Western auteur directors mounting epic productions that stage encounters across grand national cultural traditions (“French Culture” or “Japanese Culture” with capital letters). I look at intimate duets rather than large group productions because I want to understand how an ethical interculturalism might start at the interpersonal level. Chapter 1 examines Pichet Klunchun and Myself, a performed interview between Pichet Klunchun, a Thai classical dancer and choreographer, and Jérôme Bel, a French avant-​garde choreographer. Chapter 2 looks at Flash, a duet between African American popper Rennie Harris and Asian American butoh artist Michael Sakamoto, along with Simulacrum, a duet between Japanese flamenco master Kojima Shoji and Argentinian contemporary dancer and kabuki performer Daniel Proietto. Finally, ­chapter 3 explores two duets initiated by Vietnamese French contemporary dancer Emmanuelle Huynh: one called Spiel, with butoh artist Kasai Akira, and another called Talking Duet, with Japanese American choreographer Otake Eiko. All of these duets, in addition to exploring differences across culture and aesthetics, interrogate the

Love in the Shape of Loss  13 messy, intersectional questions of race, gender, sexuality, nationhood, and power, even as the artists share personal concerns about love, loss, abandonment, trauma, childhood, parenting, aging, dying, and art making. The artistic forms in which these dancers work are inextricable from their unique aesthetics as individuals—​rather than as generalized representatives of their particular ethnic group. That is, it is important to note that the forms they work in are not always the forms that an Orientalist lens of “authenticity” expects. In her important article, “Towards a New Asian American Dance Theory: Locating the Asian American Dancing Body,” Yutian Wong cites choreographer Shobana Jeyasingh’s distaste for the term “East-​West collaboration” because it tends to confine Asian diaspora artists simplistically to the Eastern side of the dyad, assuming that we all necessarily excel in the “national tradition that matches one’s racially identifiable ethnic body” (2002, 83). Orientalism tends to attach presumed knowledges to Asian bodies (that we are all experts in martial arts!) in ways that the dancers in my study necessarily disrupt. Their personal and artistic histories challenge conventional notions of who is Asian and who is Euro-​American, as well as what counts as an Eastern or Western tradition. Unlike earlier studies of interculturalism, which tend to focus primarily on the representational dynamics of intercultural exchange (how certain collaborations represent this or that artistic tradition, and what that, in turn, suggests about the broader cultures represented), Love Dances concentrates on duets as a way to understand intercultural collaboration as a process of discovery that is as much interpersonal as intercultural. As processes, I borrow from Cabranes-​Grant’s notion that intercultural encounter is an “engine of emergence” (2011, 501), rather than just a contact zone at which two statically defined cultures meet. I am more interested in the engine than the emergence. That is, I am interested in the developmental over the productive, the work that happens between two people in the collaborative moment. In contradistinction to studies of HIT work, I consider the crucial, but underexamined felt aspects: the affective registers of encounter, the emotional and sensorial impetus for, and impact of, cross-​cultural contact. Finally, why dance? This book asserts that the practice of interculturalism via dance is unique. I argue that the medium of dance holds particular potential to circumvent the rational supremacy of language, the presumption of enunciable comprehension across difference. Intercultural dance, instead, can honor the inarticulability of intersubjective knowing. Two dancing bodies—​ differently raced, differently gendered, differently aged, with

14  Love Dances different sexual orientations and different cultural backgrounds—​moving together, responding and reacting physically to one another, can be both beautiful and baffling in the (a)synchronicity they co-​create. Dance can make visibly and viscerally manifest the effortfulness of collaboration, the satisfaction in moments of unison, and also the exquisite persistence of our unique, sovereign selves. I discuss this in more depth below in the section “Modes.” The following sections identify the various key themes that reverberate throughout Love Dances: love and refusal; loss and empathy; talking and dancing; improvisation and vulnerability; third spaces and cross-​cultural collaboration as a pedagogy of ethics.

Love French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas ([1961] 1998, [1974], 2011) argues that our very being is predicated on the will, the necessity, to face the other and find ways to engage, even as we can never totally comprehend that other face that stares back at us and compels us to respond. How do we respond ethically? How do we encounter one another with compassion and empathy, despite our motives and our biases, our differences and our histories? Throughout Love Dances, I explore the idea that love is key to this question of the ethics of interculturalism. After all, isn’t love the thing that drives us toward union, toward externality, toward care for another, while also requiring us to honor our separate selves? Alain Badiou (2012) describes love as the experience of the world from the point of view of difference. Love, he says, is woven from experience with otherness. For Badiou, desire for the guarantee of sameness is not love. Interestingly, he likens love to theater. He offers that theater is a moment at which thought and body are exposed to each other such that you cannot separate them: In theater, “The two [body and idea] are mixed up, language seizes the body, just as when you tell someone, ‘I love you’: you say that to someone living, standing there in front of you, but you are also addressing something that cannot be reduced to this simple material presence, something that is absolutely and simultaneously both beyond and within” (85). Thus, I suggest that love is what structures the dance collaborations I study. These collaborations are engagements with difference; they are engagements with the body as thought; they are engagements with energies created by each individual body, but also energies released out and beyond them. Love Dances argues that love is an essential condition

Love in the Shape of Loss  15 of interculturalism and, conversely, that interculturalism can also set the conditions for loving. We must love one another in order to connect, to seek ways to do so, and, at the same time, to accept one another’s ultimate inaccessibility. At the same time, embracing one another’s differences and collaborating anyway can also inspire yet more love. Love Dances is not hopelessly romantic, however! I want to be clear that even though I discuss duets in this book, I am not referring to heterosexual or amorous love. Ramsay Burt, in a book chapter where he analyzes the male-​male partnership between Pichet Klunchun and Jérôme Bel that I also explore, prefers to call the collaboration a “duo” over a “duet,” arguing that duets tend to assume a heterosexual partnership and a “universalized romantic meaning” (2016, 141). Relatedly, he de-​emphasizes any suggestion of the romantic by working with the term “friendship” instead of love. In this book, I do not give up the term “duet” or an idea of love because I favor an expanded notion of partnership despite common understandings of the term “duet,” and because I believe in the more powerful emotion of (non-​romantic) love as operational in the efforts of interculturalism. I take a feminist approach in order to advocate for the value of the intimate and the bodily, the relational and the affective, as key to intersubjective encounter in realms outside of the heterosexual. Feminist studies scholar Ara Wilson (2012) argues that the intimate can be a way to sidestep or complicate overdetermined and limiting identity categories. “Intimacy, as an unfixed but legible term, works to cover an open-​ended array of relations (rather than assuming the couple or family); to avoid assigning identities based on relationship (for example, gay identity based on same-​sex practices); and to investigate relationships alongside their categorizations (for example, both the experience of family relations and the evaluations of proper kinship)” (48). For my purposes, I would argue that a practice of intimacy makes room for the interpersonal alongside the intercultural. That is, the artists get to be individuals with multiple, relationally defined identities, in addition to the cultural identities they bring to the collaboration. In their collection, The Global and the Intimate: Feminism in Our Time, which includes Wilson’s article, Geraldine Pratt and Victoria Rosner make a similar argument: “Feminist scholarship on attachment tends to depict the subject as relational and critiques the masculinist bias in monadic models of subjectivity” (2012, 19). Subjectivity as defined by multiple relationalities provides a fuller picture than understandings of the subject as purely singular.

16  Love Dances A focus on relationality can serve as a counter-​ analytic to broad metanarratives of globalization. I study duets because, in the face of rising xenophobia in Europe and the United States, I am interested in exploring the global forces that determine cultural exchange as they land on the plane of the personal. As I write in the opening to this introductory chapter, in our era of heightened global contact, cross-​cultural encounter is a necessary fact. How do we find ways to connect to our global others? Obviously, the political dynamics, the historical hegemonies, the intractable vestiges of colonialism, these factors all condition intercultural contact. In the context of these conditions, can the interpersonal offer a model for connection? In their collection, Pratt and Rosner (2012) argue that a focus on the intimate offers a necessary feminist approach in the face of broad-​scale narratives of the global. They demonstrate how attention to aspects of affect and relationality in global theory can serve as feminist correctives to masculinist geopolitical discourse. They state, The intimate forces our attention on a materialized understanding of the body when we theorize on a global scale. Is it possible to theorize global processes while remaining attentive to the pleasures and travails of individual embodiment? How might we find ways to hold on to emotion, attachment, the personal, and the body when we move into a more expansive engagement with the world? How, in other words, can we find the intimate in the global? (11)

The intercultural collaborations in Love Dances are all examples of the ways that geopolitical history plays out in individual experiences. French colonialism and US American military intervention in Vietnam. International tourism and cultural imperialism in Thailand. Japanese imperialism in Korea and Southeast Asia. Hiroshima. Slavery and continuing racial oppression in the United States. Poverty in Argentina. Orientalism. The Korean War. The Vietnam War. World War II. The Charlie Hebdo attacks. The Fukushima nuclear disaster. All of these geopolitical events and forces shape the identities and experiences of the dancers in this book—​their turns toward dance, the forms they choose, the personal questions they bring to their art making. The global and the intimate intertwined. At the same time, it is important to note that the personal cannot always bear all the weight of, or serve as the resolution to, long histories of global hegemonies: “Intimacy, after all, is equally caught up in relations of

Love in the Shape of Loss  17 power, violence, and inequality and cannot stand as a fount of authenticity, caring, and egalitarianism” (Pratt and Rosner 2012, 16). Perhaps in intercultural encounter it is important to maintain awareness of the ways that global forces always condition the exchange: “The intimate can be nearsighted, self-​important, and limiting; toggling between the intimate and the global is, among other things, an ethical turn designed to unsettle certainty and create accountability, to break out of the intense self-​directed or dyadic gaze to acknowledge the world beyond” (20). At many points in the collaborations I study the dancers fail at, or even resist, intimacy. It is worth noting that it is the Asian subject in the exchange who resists, thereby suggesting that specific imperialist histories (for example, domination of Thailand by French and British powers, or US American militarization in Japan) might allow some people to be overly presumptuous about their freedom to access others, thereby causing those others to seek ways to preserve their sovereignty. Asian American studies scholar Vivian Huang (2018) invites us to think about how Asian American women might embrace the Orientalist stereotype of inscrutability as, in fact, an anti-​racist, decolonialist tactic. In her study of performance artists Yoko Ono and Laurel Nakadate, she argues that the Asian woman cannot ever escape an external understanding of her conditioned by Orientalist tropes of hospitality, or of her body as an object to be given over to the white, male colonizer. In response, Asian women might be able to appropriate this construction of her and use it not to negate a practice of hospitality but to “say yes” in ways that resist easy narration or knowability and thereby confuse the binary between subject and subjectified, host and guest. In each of the pairs I study in this book, the Asian artist, while primarily open and willing, inserts a subtle form of refusal in their exchange with their collaborator.10 This tactical appropriation of Oriental inscrutability is “the holding together of distance and intimacy, one that mines the particular crux of Asian and feminine becoming, one that cannot entirely refuse the language of hospitality in the register of the real, but that is also not wholly delimited by such a discourse” (Huang 2018, 196–​197). I note Huang’s use of the term “intimacy” here to connect her argument to the nuance in Pratt and Rosner about toggling between the intimate and the global, cautioning that an uncritical embrace of intimacy cannot account for the ways that history and prevailing geopolitical hegemonies always condition even one-​to-​one relationships. Thus, while intimacy serves as a useful framework for interculturalism, I also want to argue for the more specific idea of love, or actually, loving as a model for understanding how to collaborate with our cultural others. Sometimes

18  Love Dances the motivation for intimacy can be love, but loving is not always the same as intimacy. The artists in Love Dances must respect that sometimes the act of loving requires distance, not knowing, not connecting. Furthermore, I do not rely upon an idea of love as an end goal or a total solution. And I do not presume a universal notion of love. In fact, I do not expect that the artists I study would necessarily even choose the term to describe their experiences. And I do not presume to imagine that each of them defines or experiences the word in the same way (do any two people? even lovers?); rather I use my particular understanding of the word (and the feeling) as my framework for describing how I think their partnerships operate. I favor a contingent idea of love as motivation, as process, as endeavor, and as pedagogy. Part of what draws me to the term is its operation as both a noun and an adjective, but importantly also as a verb (Love Dances and Love Dances). Perhaps it is more accurate to say that I am interested in intercultural collaboration as ongoing, always stumbling, acts of loving.

Loss I also look at the necessary other side to love. In literature, in art, in philosophy, as well as in dance, the theme of love is consistently paired with intimations of death. Eros and Thanatos; the life instinct and the death drive. With love comes loss. We do not grieve what we have not loved; and we cannot love without the risk of losing. Intercultural encounter, then, like any intersubjective encounter, is a practice of attachment and of loss. Loss is built into the collaborative efforts of the artists I study in this book because engaging across difference is unavoidably imbued with the failure to apprehend. The dancers communicate shakily across multiple second (or third or fourth) languages; they ask the wrong questions and misunderstand each other’s answers; they fail to grasp one another’s dance forms; sometimes, as I have mentioned, they even deliberately resist cooperation. These losses, and indeed sometimes refusals, I argue, are not reasons to bemoan the impossibility of intercultural understanding, however. Instead they remind us of the necessarily fragile nature of encounter. Otherness can never be fully assimilated. If collaboration can never fully accomplish understanding, then what compels performance collaborators to keep collaborating? Why persist in the effort if it is necessarily going to fail? Several years ago, I was chatting

Love in the Shape of Loss  19 with another parent in the Little League stands. We were bonding over our experiences in interracial marriages. I asked this father how he would describe his experience being a Jewish American guy married to a Chinese American woman. In a word, he said, “miscommunication.” He went on to describe various experiences he had had, for example, of being with his in-​ laws and not understanding how or why decisions got made even as they were discussed, in English, right under his nose. Or why his wife would sometimes make certain choices, inexplicable to him, when her parents were around that she would never make when they were not. Obviously, every family is its own microculture, and not all quirks of a particular family can be attributed to ethnicity. One of my favorite passages from Maxine Hong Kingston is, “Chinese-​Americans, when you try to understand what things in you are Chinese, how do you separate what is peculiar to childhood, to poverty, insanities, one family, your mother who marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese?” (1989, 6). We each have particular differences, yes, but I also think that there are unique challenges that come with working across ethnic cultures, misunderstandings that cannot be ameliorated via explanation, or pedagogy, or even direct experience. Nevertheless, love compels us to continue striving to understand each other across cultures, despite the losses in translation. Not only is loss inevitable in any practice of collaboration, but loss is also a constitutive element of the specific practice of performance. Peggy Phelan (2003) reminds us of this. Live, embodied performance is a moment in which we assert our aliveness and thus also our mortality. For Phelan, the act of performing is a way to wrestle with our own subjectivity as defined by loss: “What psychoanalysis makes clear is that the experience of loss is one of the central repetitions of subjectivity. . . . perhaps the human subject is born ready to mourn” (1997, 5). In addition, she has famously argued that the ephemerality of live performance means that performance is ontologically predicated on its own disappearance (1993). While many after her have challenged her assertion that performance is absolutely ephemeral, I still think that she is right to identify a shadow of loss that always attends live (re)enactment.11 As she writes, “It may well be that theatre and performance respond to a psychic need to rehearse for loss, and especially for death. Billed a rehearsal, performance and theatre have a special relation to art as memorial” (1997, 3). Performance is the ever-​asymptotic attempt to reach the things, the moments, the other bodies we have lost. At the same time, performance marks the very fact that we will never get there. One of the metaphors she

20  Love Dances uses is that of a detectives’ chalk rendering of a body drawn in the place of its death; the chalk serves to outline what is no longer there. I have attempted to make the case that loss is constitutive both of intersubjective encounter and of the practice of performance itself. That’s a lot of loss. And, in Love Dances, there’s more! Not only is loss integral to the collaborative, performative structure of their work, but the artists in this book also concern themselves with trauma, death, and dying in the content of their exchanges. Klunchun and Bel discuss the ways that death is represented in Thai classical dance and in Bel’s work. Rennie Harris and Michael Sakamoto commiserate over the ordeals of their childhoods and their affinities for dance forms (hip-​hop and butoh) that emerge out of crisis. Kojima Shoji and Daniel Proietto share stories of abandonment and alienation. Emmanuelle Huynh and Otake Eiko carry the tragedies of the Charlie Hebdo attacks and the Fukushima nuclear disaster in their thoughts as they duet. In the chapter on friendship in dance duos that I mention earlier, Burt (2016, xx) similarly notes the ways that the dance partnerships he studies seem to occasion references to death. What is it about facing our others that causes us to think about death? Is the self-​annihilation of love a kind of death? Or do we seek love as a counter to our inevitable death? Burt goes to Maurice Blanchot to explain that friendship renders death powerless (163). I argue further that not only does friendship render death powerless, but that sometimes experiences with death engender friendship. It is probably a truism to say that one of the ways that people bond is through shared pain. I know that after my husband died I sought out other widows and widowers to help affirm and assuage my own suffering. And now I in turn reach out to the newly bereaved to offer my empathetic connection. Levinas explains that the face of the other bears with it the command, “You shall not kill” (1996, 167). Thus, the encounter with another person is immediately the encounter with both death and love. It stimulates simultaneously the temptation to overpower and the demand to care. I observe this pull between attraction and aggression, attachment and bereavement, in the dance duets I study—​at the levels both of form and of content. I draw upon scholarship in racial melancholia, Afro-​pessimism, and queer negativity to help me think through intercultural collaboration as a form of loss and mourning. At the same time, I posit the beginnings of a theory of Asian/​Asian American passive refusal as a practice of agency in the face of loss. All but two of the artists in Love Dances are queer, Asian, female, or Black—​or some combination thereof. As such, they share familiar

Love in the Shape of Loss  21 experiences with alienation, and these experiences make room for collaboration to be a form of commiseration. Shared grief can be a restorative practice. Joshua Chambers-​Letson argues that “black and brown queer and trans death, like the deaths of women of color, produced by different yet overlapping histories of colonialism, capital accumulation, white supremacy, and cis-​heteropatriarchy, share something with each other not in spite of but because of their difference” (2018, xvi–​xvii). Queer negativity assumes oppositionality as the ontological condition of queerness. The hatred and violence of homophobia paired with the astonishing number of fatalities due to the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s, entwine queerness and death. Queer individuals are the negative of the universal or the normative, the negative, even, of subjectivity. Accordingly, queer theorist Lee Edelman (2004) sees in queerness the potential for critique. Queerness, he argues, occupies a position outside the teleological narrative of “reproductive futurism” contained in heteronormative logics. Welcoming this antagonistic position can serve as a refusal of the false intelligibility constructed by the linear telos of heteronormativity. Drawing from psychoanalytic theory, Edelman advocates for a queer embrace of the death drive as the ultimate culmination of telos, but also as simultaneously the surplus and the dismantling of the signifying logic of the Symbolic—​death as outside of and also the end of meaning. To equate queerness with death then also equates queerness with, defiantly, the unsignifiable and the irrational, or, perhaps, the unequatable. While my personal disposition makes it difficult to get behind the ultimate hopelessness of Edelman’s formulations, Love Dances does exemplify queer negativity as an acceptance of the unknowable and the irresolvable. In Simulacrum, for example, after discussing his childhood alienation as “thin and fragile,” unlike the other boys, Kojima repeats his mournful closing phrase, “You just have to get used to some things . . . when there is no choice.” Alongside him, Proietto, under a dim, watery spotlight, mimes the dance of a child drowning in the waves of a tsunami, a recollection from Kojima’s boyhood (Øyen 2017). In addition to an expression of queer negativity, Kojima’s sentiment might also be translated to the Japanese phrase, shikata ga nai, or “It cannot be helped.” This Japanese ethos is often understood as an attitude of resignation, but also can be read as a form of dignified endurance.12 I see it as related to a theorization, elaborated from Huang’s thinking about hospitality and inscrutability, of Asian passivity as an alternative form of political agency. Shikata ga nai is an assertion of survival against loss.13 In addition

22  Love Dances to Huang, other Asian American studies scholars have forwarded similar reframings of what counts as antiracist activism.14 For example, Hoang Tan Nguyen (2014) posits the efficacy of “bottoming” in Asian American gay male sex as a strategy of empowerment that champions the value of receptivity. Meanwhile, Anne Cheng challenges normative ideas of antiracist politics in much of her oeuvre: she considers ideas of grief over grievance (2001), passing over visibility (2005), and objecthood over subjecthood (2018). I am drawn to these Asian Americanist reframings and posit here a related theory of the politics of passive refusal.15 I also rely on theories of racial melancholia, an understanding of non-​ whiteness as fundamentally melancholic. The melancholia of racial otherness is, to be clear, not an essential attribute, but a symptom of long histories of political and social oppression. The interdiction from mainstream personhood that is imposed upon people of color and immigrants causes an insurmountable sense of loss (see Cheng 2000; Eng and Han 2003; Singleton 2015; Winters 2016). Scholars of Afro-​pessimism argue that the profound and enduring violence of slavery, dispossession, imprisonment, and subjugation of Black people in the United States indelibly inscribes Blackness with nonexistence—​ontological death. The racial, ethnic, and national otherness of the artists in Love Dances suggests their familiarity with the melancholic condition. Melancholia, however, rather than being dooming, can sometimes be productive. Sigmund Freud (1957), in his well-​known essay “Mourning and Melancholia” posits a binary where mourning is the healthy response to loss, while melancholia is the pathological inability to “get over” it. David Eng and David Kazanjian (2002), however, resist this binarization and think instead about the ongoingness of melancholia as a form of political resistance and creative refusal. Especially for minoritarian subjects, staying with loss (shikata ga nai) is a strategy of holding onto what remains: “Avowals of and attachments to loss can produce a world of remains as a world of new representations and alternative meanings” (5). African American studies scholar Christina Sharpe (2016) uses the term “wake work” to describe the creative acts of survival that African Americans develop “in the wake” of Black existential precarity. And, returning to Phelan (1997), we might understand the practice of performance as simultaneously a rehearsal of and against loss. All of this to say that, for the Asian, Black, female, and queer dancers I study in Love Dances, loss is both inextricable from their identities and, perhaps paradoxically, a foundation of their creativity.

Love in the Shape of Loss  23 In addition, shared loss engenders shared growth. Shared grief begets shared empathy. After Kenny died, I remember having the disconcerting feeling that, up until then, I had been moving through the world with a naive veil over my eyes and that, all of a sudden, I was now able to see the grief and the pain that so many people suffered. As I walked down the street, I suddenly realized that each person carried tragedy of some kind, and I was amazed and dismayed that I had missed all of it in the time before my own tragedy. My capacity for empathy grew exponentially, and I began to seek out others who knew loss. In these intercultural duets, the practice of collaboration is also a practice of commiseration. I argue that the moments of loss the artists share, just as much as the moments of synchronicity they find, teach us how to connect across cultural difference. In facing our others we may risk our own annihilation, but we also perform compassion. Love Dances insists that we must make the brave effort to approach one another. This book asserts an ethics of intercorporeality, of danced collaboration—​with all of its politics, its failures, its losses—​in order to shed light on intercultural encounter and to suggest ways that we might recognize one another’s bereavements and thereby strive to connect to our others with generosity, with hope, and with love.

Modes I have not yet discussed form. If these artists are to approach their encounters with love, how do they do so? What modes of exchange do they use? In what languages do they communicate? What creative processes do they try? What is the artistic product that they co-​create? And which of their methods seems to work? That is, which forms of collaboration bring the artists, and/​or perhaps the audiences, to some place of greater understanding about how to engage across difference? In thinking through these questions, I also address further why this book is about dance, why I believe that the medium of dance offers a unique form of intercultural collaboration that can accomplish what other expressive mediums cannot. Each of the duets I study in Love Dances employs both dance and spoken text. While there may be different reasons, and certainly different effects, in each piece, I think that the choice to include both modes across all the pieces is revelatory. For Bel and Klunchun, whose “duet” is a fully scripted pair of interviews, talking accomplishes the literal exchange of information.

24  Love Dances The occasional moments of dancing are offered as demonstrations of the ideas discussed verbally. Meanwhile, Harris and Sakamoto perform a relatively equal amount of talking and dancing in Flash. The text contextualizes and narrativizes, while dance provides a more sensorial level of expression. I note, however, that for Harris verbalizing in the piece also comes in the less legible form of moaning and sobbing, which I discuss in relationship to Fred Moten’s (2002) notion of “mon’in’ ”—​moaning as Black mourning. In Simulacrum, Proietto and Kojima employ text and dance as foils for one another. Multimodality in this instance is not about the reinforcement of the abstract via the rational, the dancing explained through words. On the contrary, the combination of talking and dancing sometimes deliberately works to undermine any presumption of decipherability or one-​to-​one correspondence. In Spiel, lots of talking happened between Huynh and Kasai in rehearsal, as a way to develop connection. The brief exclamations that are uttered in performance, however—​single words or short phrases blurted out sporadically—​are not aimed toward legibility but toward a more metaphysical form of connection. In Talking Duet talking was both coherent expression and sometimes insistently not about decipherable communication. For Otake, especially, it was actually way to circumvent knowability (Huang’s theory of inscrutability applies here). In the complicated efforts of interculturalism exemplified by these works, talking, dancing, and talking-​ and-​dancing sometimes diversify meaning, sometimes double up meaning, but sometimes also resist meaning. In short, they show us what it means (not) to connect interculturally. They remind us that intersubjective engagement is always multisensorial. Throughout the chapters of Love Dances, I draw upon but also extend Emmanuel Levinas’s formulations of the saying and the said, as well as Homi Bhabha’s theory of enunciation, to think through the ways that layering talking with dancing offers a rich landscape for cross-​cultural exchange. The intercultural dances I study expand the possibilities for collaboration beyond what verbal exchange alone can accomplish. In doing so they complicate Levinas and Bhabha, whose theories privilege the linguistic, and thus make room for more multifaceted theories of intersubjectivity. Bhabha (1994) posits the idea of enunciation as the site where cultural difference is not merely articulated but in fact produced. The boundary point where two cultures—​or two people—​meet and must confront each other is a “Third Space” of enunciatory emergence. Bhabha offers the idea of enunciation as a generative site that reveals the hybridity of culture. For Bhabha, the

Love in the Shape of Loss  25 recognition of cultural hybridity is a key corrective to Western-​dominated ideologies that obscure hybridity in favor of unified narrations of seemingly singular cultural identities, identities that are then neatly polarized between the West and the rest—​a polarization that has given interculturalism its exotic, avant-​garde appeal. Enunciation, then, is a process of engagement that gives voice to the messiness of cultural difference. And cultural difference is always hybrid because it is always in negotiation with the other: it is, in fact, a result of hybridity. I appreciate Bhabha’s emphasis on the processual and the generative nature of cultural contact. I will argue throughout this book that the duets I explore exemplify his theory of enunciation, but I will add that they also demonstrate the ways that enunciation must be understood not merely as linguistic, but, importantly, as inextricably corporeal. If enunciation across cultural difference is inherently hybrid, then I would argue that it is through the physical interactivity, the sharing and giving of weight, the touching, the reacting and responding, the mutual creation of energy and force and line and shape—​both of two bodies and beyond them—​counteracted also by the very material boundaries of bodies, that we understand this hybridity of enunciation. Levinas ([1961] 1998) argues that it is our ethical responsibility to an other that, in fact, constitutes our being. We are determined by our relationship to an exteriority while at the same time that exteriority always by definition escapes our full comprehension. The site where this necessary relationship to an exteriority that can never be fully comprehended occurs is the face-​to-​face encounter. For Levinas, the face is the other that confronts us in its infinity—​in other words, its unassimilability—​and it compels us to speak to it. This impossible but inescapable encounter is the subject of Levinas’s philosophy of ethics. One way that Levinas ([1974] 2011) formulates an understanding of how we relate to each other is through the idea of saying and said. Saying is the instant and immediate medium through which we relate to an other; it is a process that disrupts any impulse toward totalization (reducing the other into the same, much as multiculturalism seeks to do) because, perhaps like Bhabha’s enunciation, it always reveals our separateness from the other. By contrast, the said is the content of speech already spoken; it is the more conventional impulse toward encompassing, digesting, comprehending, grasping. The problem, of course, is that saying always becomes the said, and perhaps this is why Bhabha’s idea of enunciation does not fully satisfy. The challenge is how to make relations continue “the signifyingness of signification” (Levinas

26  Love Dances [1974] 2011, 5), how to say without devolving into the solidity of the said, how to maintain the ethical exteriority of intersubjectivity. It is important to note that Levinas employs the face as a representation of the incomprehensible but inescapable other. In Love Dances I will draw out the corporeal potential in Levinas. For example, I look at the actual face-​off of Harris and Sakamoto in ­chapter 2. In ­chapter 1, while I rely on Levinas’s idea of saying as the continual effort/​failure to comprehend, as I do with Bhabha, I extend his linguistic metaphor of saying toward dancing. Saying is a bodily activity. In fact, I would even argue that dance, as an ephemeral form rather than an inscribable text, is more successful at maintaining the saying over the said, at resisting fixity and thereby perhaps at sustaining the exteriority of intersubjectivity, the unassimilability of intercultural otherness. In c­ hapter 1, I use this argument to critique the ways that Bel’s interview with Klunchun tends to reinscribe Western cultural prejudices partly because of its reliance on a pre-​written verbal script. In its liveness, dancing is the absolute present of enunciation, the saying that resists the said. Perhaps this makes dance an ideal mode for ethical intercultural encounter. Why then do the dancers in Love Dances talk at all? I guess the combination represents our impulse to work at comprehension despite the impossibility of legibility, to balance knowability with respect for the infinite. Dancing and talking combined can both multiply the layers of potential meaningfulness and also confound any conceit of coherence. Perhaps then it is in the gaps between expression, or maybe even in the overloaded intersections of expression, that we discover fleeting moments of understanding—​intercultural moments of apprehension that are only ever, should only ever be, evanescent. In The End of the Cognitive Empire, Boaventura de Sousa Santos argues forcefully that Eurocentric theories have failed to liberate us from a colonial mindset. He argues that we need an epistemological shift that would reinterpret the world from a new vantage point, away from epistemologies of the North to epistemologies of the South. By epistemologies of the South he means “the production and validation of knowledges anchored in the experience of resistance of all those social groups that have systematically suffered injustice, oppression, and destruction caused by capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy” (1). Included in these epistemologies Santos especially valorizes the intelligence of the body and even states that “dance, in particular, deserves special attention in this regard as it is one of the most complex forms of lived, experiential, bodily knowledge” (93). Dance’s epistemological value lies, in part, in the ways that it “intensif[ies] grief

Love in the Shape of Loss  27 and joy” (93). While this book relies on a good deal of Euro-​American theory, I also deploy the corporeal knowledge of the dancers as, if you will, an epistemology of the South. It is their bodily work that contends with and complicates Levinas’s metaphorical theory of the face-​to-​face encounter, or Badiou’s formulations of love and difference. You might say that the dancers in this book engage in a South-​North intercultural duet with Euro-​American theory. Lastly, in terms of modes, I want to discuss the choice the artists in this book make between choreography and improvisation and how this relates to the necessity for vulnerability in cross-​c ultural collaboration. In the preceding section on loss, I cite Levinas’s formulation of the dualistic nature of interpersonal encounter as a moment that incites both an imperative toward care and an instinct toward violence (I refer to his citation of the biblical command, “You shall not kill”) (1996, 167). The other face in front of you is vulnerable because it is injurable, and it inspires care because it is vulnerable. Judith Butler (2010) draws on Levinas and similarly equates vulnerability with susceptibility to harm. Feminist philosopher Erinn Gilson (2014), however, complicates this equation by forwarding a definition of vulnerability as not injurability but as openness to unforeseeable change. This definition allows for vulnerability to be a desirable, generative, creative state, rather than a circumstance to be avoided or pitied. Artistic collaboration requires this kind of vulnerability. In the choreographic process, dancers must show up together in a studio, with their fragile bodies, and be willing to offer ideas and to concede ideas, and in so doing they may be criticized or scrutinized, and possibly also changed. In improvisation, I argue, dancers must exercise this vulnerability in the immediate moment, in front of an audience, again with their fragile bodies. In a circumstance of unpredictability, they must nevertheless submit themselves and simultaneously be deeply receptive and deeply available, subject to injury and subject to care, contributive, but also protective—​a ll in the instantaneous, unknowable present, in the face of the other. Their openness to unforeseeable change must be radically accessible. I discuss this radical vulnerability in my analysis of the improvised duets in ­chapter 3. As my culminating chapter, c­ hapter 3 is devoted to love. Love, after all, is that complicated, contentious condition which brings together all the themes of this book: intimacy and refusal, connection and disjunction, union and independence, openness and vulnerability.

28  Love Dances

Third Spaces and Pedagogy We might argue that if love is the negotiation of the pairs of themes I have listed, then it should necessitate a trope of third spaces. After all, Badiou describes love as a thing “both beyond and within” two people (2012, 85). And if I want to contend that intercultural collaboration in dance performance is a practice of loving, then third spaces would also apply. Homi Bhabha (1994) has termed the site of cross-​cultural encounter itself a third space. Performance as an ephemeral practice leaves remains. Loss leaves remains. The act of language translation creates a mediated space of expression. Talking combined with dancing leaves a third space of meaning. The gap between the saying and the said is a third space. Finally, the collaborations I study are duets performed, crucially, for a third actor, that is, the audience. Dance scholar Dee Reynolds (2012) argues that “the dance’s body” is that entity between performer and spectator. The “body” of the dance, then, does not exist solely with the dancers, but in the relationship with their audience. In her book, Eros Ideologies: Writings on Art, Spirituality, and the Decolonial, Laura Pérez (2019) looks at examples of Latinx art as forms of decolonialism rooted in radical love. She writes, To speak of eros ideologies is to map many “third” ways of conceiving of politically, socially, and globally meaningful realities. It is a way of nonpolar dualism, a way rooted in an identity politics that traditional Mayans have called In Lak’ech, but where you are my other me, tú eres mi otro yo, a theo-​philosophy echoed across cultures and times and useful to us now perhaps as never before, where “identity” is plural, friendly, transformative, attracted, and attracting. (16)

To love as a form of decolonialism is to see oneself in others (you are my other me), but also to retain one’s autonomy, to recognize interconnection as essential, and to never fully presume understanding, all at once. I argue that, in a study of intercultural “love dances,” the presence of all of these third spaces is key to understanding how intercultural collaboration can be pedagogical, perhaps even decolonial. That is, the ontological remains that are necessary to loss in general and constitutive of performance as a practice, the third spaces created in cross-​cultural encounter and language translation, the alternative meanings that emerge in the combination of talking and dancing, all of these serve as potentialities, as moments of saying

Love in the Shape of Loss  29 that have not settled into the said. Given these potentialities, then, perhaps it is the audience that is positioned to decipher the contingent meanings that are possible. Perhaps these duets not only provide personal experiences of encounter for the dancers, but they also provide a broader pedagogy of cross-​ cultural encounter for spectators, a wider lesson in intercultural comportment. Love Dances, then, is a study of the instructive power of intercultural exchange, or what both watching and doing intercultural dance can teach us about how to be neighborly in a globalized environment. At the same time, there is a lot of scholarship on the value of “becoming,” and I will admit that sometimes I am skeptical of the romanticization of ambiguity and potentiality. I wonder if such arguments are maybe too easy and perhaps not always cognizant of the differential privilege of living in a space of uncertainty for varied identity categories. Maybe my vote for love and for the potentialities of third spaces is a form of what Lauren Berlant (2011) critiques as “cruel optimism,” a futile insistence on hope that actually manages to be an obstacle to recognizing and acting against truly egregious circumstances. Is arguing for love in interculturalism a denial of the ways in which cultural, racial, gender, and sexual power differentials do real harm? My rejoinder might be to return to my notion of loss integration, the cast-​ off bicycle that has grown with the tree, the both/​and. Ultimately, I do not think I am being naive. I return to my personal experience. I know that difference can hurt, I know that it cannot always be ameliorated. I know that loss happens. And I also know, clichéd as it is, that from pain and loss comes growth, richness, beauty, increased compassion, and the firm knowledge that, in the effort to connect, trauma is absolutely not avoidable.

Chapter Summaries I organize the chapters of this book by dance work and by theme, though it is important to note that all of the main concerns—​loss, love, talking and dancing, vulnerability and refusal, third spaces, and pedagogy—​are present in each of the duets. Thus, these themes and concerns intertwine themselves throughout the book, developing across the pages, rather than being confined to single chapters or single dance pieces. In ­chapter 1, “Talking: Pichet Klunchun and Myself,” I examine a collaboration between French avant-​garde choreographer Jérôme Bel and Thai classical dancer Pichet Klunchun. This chapter considers the unique modality

30  Love Dances of this collaboration in relationship to the politics of interculturalism. Pichet Klunchun and Myself is not a dance, but two verbal interviews (by Bel of Klunchun and then vice versa) performed for an audience. There is no actual intermingling of forms—​Thai classical dance with European contemporary choreography—​in this performance. I wonder what was behind the decision not to create a more conventional work of choreography. Does this piece, which carefully resists an appropriation of form, which literally attempts equal dialogue, manage to avoid the Orientalism of so much other East-​West intercultural performance? Does the decision to abandon a commingling of forms actually suggest a more realistic acknowledgment that most intercultural work is appropriative and ultimately unethical, and do the dancers, in fact, demonstrate in this piece an attempt to get at intercultural exchange in another way? Does the decision not to dance but to talk offer a more ethical approach to engaging with cultural difference? Ultimately, I argue that despite earnest and innovative artistic effort, Bel and Klunchun’s piece does not manage to circumvent the political pitfalls of interculturalism. After exploring the losses in translation of Pichet Klunchun and Myself, in ­chapter 2, “Mourning: Flash and Simulacrum,” I shift to discuss two pieces in which cultural miscomprehension occurs alongside personal expressions of loss. I start with a discussion of Flash, a duet between Rennie Harris, a popper, and Michael Sakamoto, a butoh artist. I compare Flash to Simulacrum, a duet between an Argentinian contemporary dancer who also studies kabuki and a Japanese dancer famous for flamenco.16 Analyzing both works’ incorporation of dancing and talking, I demonstrate how the grief the artists disclose to each other and the conjunctions and disjunctions they find in the different forms of danced mourning they practice result in a moving expression of cross-​cultural empathy, an impetus toward understanding in the face of the incommensurability of tragedy. The third chapter of the book, “Loving: Spiel and Talking Duet,” turns to love as the motivation to connect, even in the face of incommensurability. I examine two more duets: Spiel, an improvised partnership between Vietnamese French choreographer Emmanuelle Huynh and Japanese butoh artist Akira Kasai; and Talking Duet, a talking and dancing improvisation between Huynh and another Japanese, butoh-​inspired choreographer, Eiko Otake. These are messy, experimental, loving collaborations. I note the artists’ exceptional commitment to the complicated work of connecting. Huynh is deeply aware of the failures, the losses, the refusals, and the miscomprehensions that happen in collaboration, as well as attentive to the

Love in the Shape of Loss  31 fragility and impermanence of living. It is her persistence through continual loving acts of not-​knowing that makes these collaborations meaningful. In the epilogue I return to reflecting upon the ethics of interculturalism. I consider the fractious contemporary moment of this book’s writing. In the third decade of the millennium, we confront old/​new examples of racism and xenophobia, overlaid by a deadly global pandemic. In the face of these, I say, we need more love dances. Total comprehension of our cultural others is an impossibility, and, at the same time, Love Dances suggests that we persist in the effort. The practice of choreographic collaboration can be exemplary for how we might engage across the challenges of difference. This book emphasizes the investigation that happens in the process of intercorporeal exchange, and also in the creative work that is presented to a seeing, listening, feeling audience. I argue that this felt investigation is an act of losing and of loving, across divides. Love Dances insists that we pay attention to the interpersonal and the affective—​ emotions, sensations, the intimate, and the bodily. And it insists on an ethics of care, knowing the ways that the shared vulnerability of grief can inspire powerful empathy for our others. Love Dances is a call for loving over loss and of learning how to connect, impossibly.

1 Talking Pichet Klunchun and Myself

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.1 The resulting piece is unlike most intercultural collaborations. In the world of concert dance, East-​West interculturalism manifests 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—​the Thai classical dance form khon with European contemporary dance—​in this performance. The intercultural “choreography” here is constituted by a staged conversation between the artists and some isolated physical demonstrations by each. This first chapter of Love Dances explores the ethics and politics of intercultural dance via a piece that draws on the modality of speech over that of movement. My discussion here both sets the stage for and also contrasts against the other works examined in the book, all of which combine talking and dancing. I also place Pichet Klunchun and Myself within a longer history of intercultural dance and theater, reminding readers of the continuing context of Orientalism. As a duet between a white, European, heterosexual, cis-​male, avant-​garde choreographer and a Thai, heterosexual, cis-​male, khon dancer, the work reproduces some of the more hackneyed patterns of Orientalist encounter, in contrast to the more complex not-​exactly-​East-​ not-​exactly-​West collaborations I study later in this book. As such, the piece provides a backdrop against which the other pieces may be understood. Finally, in this chapter I note the ways that the cross-​cultural and the aesthetic

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Talking: Pichet Klunchun and Myself  33 dynamics of this particular partnership tell us something about the pitfalls of intercultural collaboration, as well as the pedagogical potentials. Jérôme Bel, born in 1964, is a French choreographer who first gained prominence with his 1994 piece, Nom donné par l’auteur (“Name given by the author”), which was deliberately scant on dancing and instead involved quotidian interactions with objects like a vacuum cleaner and a hair dryer. He has since created numerous conceptualist choreographies that tend to be self-​consciously reflexive about what counts as dance, performance, spectacle, or the dancer. Bel is a widely heralded artist in Europe and internationally and has been the subject of numerous scholarly works, including a dedicated monograph (Siegmund 2017). Pichet Klunchun, at the time that Pichet Klunchun and Myself premiered in 2004, was a classically trained khon dancer who had experienced some recognition for his work, including choreographing the opening and closing ceremonies for the Asian Games in Bangkok in 1998. In 2001, he was awarded an Asian Cultural Council grant to study Western contemporary dance in the United States for seven months. At the time of Pichet Klunchun and Myself, he had recently established his own dance company dedicated to training young Thai classical dancers and innovating within the khon form (Bel, n.d., under “biography pichet klunchun”). Working with Bel, of course, gave Klunchun entrée into new opportunities and privileges. Since that collaboration he has gone on to choreograph numerous works combining khon with contemporary dance, his company tours internationally, and he has won several European and US American awards. In his press material, Bel explains that logistical circumstances in Bangkok, where he traveled to work with Klunchun, necessitated what he terms a “theatrical and choreographic documentary” (2005, under “pichet klunchun and myself (2005)”). I am wondering what was behind the decision not to create a more conventional work of choreography. Of course, 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. Bel claims that it was traffic in Bangkok, jet lag, and the context of the Bangkok Fringe Festival that determined the choice to perform a dual interview, but I am interested in the deeper cultural biases that might have shaped the structure of this collaboration. Does this piece, which carefully resists an appropriation of form, which literally attempts equal dialogue, manage to avoid the Orientalism of so much other East-​West intercultural performance? Or does the choice

34  Love Dances not to interact corporeally represent what Dwight Conquergood (1985, 8–​9) terms the “skeptics cop out,” a way of dodging the challenges that come with real engagement? Put another way, do the “logistical circumstances” that led to this piece reveal the earnest failure of genuine intercultural exchange, or does the decision to abandon a commingling of forms actually suggest a more fatalistic recognition that most intercultural work is ultimately unethical? Does Bel, in fact, demonstrate in this piece a unique attempt to get at intercultural exchange in another way? Does the decision not to dance but to talk offer a more ethical approach to engaging with cultural difference? Ultimately, I will argue that, despite its creative efforts, Pichet Klunchun and Myself reinforces Orientalist logics.

Pichet Klunchun and Myself An examination of Bel and Klunchun’s collaboration might begin by noting that its title, Pichet Klunchun and Myself, clearly establishes the speaker as Bel and not Klunchun. Even though this will be a dialogue, Bel is credited as the creator. The performance opens with Bel and Klunchun entering the stage and sitting opposite each other in two simple chairs. Klunchun, stage right, wears black pants and a black T-​shirt.2 He is barefoot. Bel, stage left, wears jeans, white sneakers, and a green track jacket. Although this is meant to be a two-​way interview, it is notable that whereas Klunchun is barefoot and in dance clothes, Bel wears street clothes and shoes and holds a computer on his lap. The computer does not change hands when the interviewing roles shift, and thus the asymmetrical arrangement of power-​knowledge suggested here does not fully equalize either. Bel begins by consulting his laptop and asking Klunchun a series of simple questions: what is your name, where were you born, why did you become a dancer, and so forth. It should be noted here that the dialogue is staged as if it were spontaneous, but in fact it is scripted, and they have performed it dozens of times over many years. The artists, who are both nonnative speakers of English, retain the syntax and language usage that presumably would be present in an unscripted conversation. The moment when Klunchun describes how he became a dancer offers an initial indication of the tenor of the piece. Klunchun tells how his mother went to the local temple and prayed to a god of dance for a son. Thus, even before he was born, Klunchun’s dedication to dance had already begun. Bel is perplexed by this explanation. Indeed, his recurring befuddlement with Klunchun’s

Talking: Pichet Klunchun and Myself  35 other matter-​of-​fact depictions of Thai culture characterize much of the ensuing dialogue. Bel shifts to ask questions about the dance form Klunchun is trained in: khon, a Thai masked dance drama. At several points Bel asks, “Can you show me?” Klunchun obliges and demonstrates first the vocabulary of the form, then the different character types, the narrative, the singing, and some excerpts from key scenes in the canon. Klunchun’s body is impressive for its litheness, its precision, its technical control. Bel continues to play the uncomprehending questioner: he finds the distinctions across character types too subtle to differentiate, the semiotics of the form elude him, the symbolic depiction of death requires translation. Meanwhile, Klunchun acts out the role of willing informant who agreeably rewinds in order to detail what he originally presumes to be self-​evident. The alternating moments of bewilderment and appreciation make for good humor. The audience laughs at the points when Klunchun demonstrates aspect of khon that seem clear to him, but are impenetrable to Bel. East-​West cultural confusion—​the East as unknowable, but beautiful in its mystery, the West as boorish but open-​ minded—​becomes a source of good-​natured comedy. Throughout the interview Klunchun retains grace and composure, always happy to disseminate his understanding of this tradition, giving it respect and assuming Bel’s respect for it in turn. As Bel’s understanding of khon develops, so does his appreciation for it. After approximately an hour, the artists switch roles and Klunchun begins to interview Bel. A moment of culture clash is lodged early when Klunchun expresses disbelief that Bel could have a child without being married. The familiar trope of Asian “family values” gets reinforcement here. The interview continues with Klunchun asking Bel about his work. The key difference is that while Klunchun was asked to explain khon as a form, Bel is given the opportunity to describe his own work as a choreographer, an independent agent of his own artistic creation—​even though Klunchun is a choreographer, too. Once again, a tired East-​West dichotomy emerges: the idea of the East as keeper of tradition and the West as site of individual artistic innovation. Bel explains that he is “identified” as a choreographer, suggesting that his work in fact doesn’t fit easily into conventional notions of choreography. He stands up to demonstrate an element of his work that he claims is a favorite and is something that he tries to insert in all of his pieces. Bel then casually stands upstage for several minutes simply looking around, listening and waiting. Naturally, Klunchun is bewildered by this demonstration, as Bel has set him (and the audience) up to expect something considerably more

36  Love Dances dynamic. Bel takes this opportunity to cite Guy Debord’s (1995) theory of the “society of the spectacle” and explains that his aim is to disrupt the audience’s expectation that they will be entertained. He wishes to dismantle the separation between dancers and viewers, to democratize the relationship. He strives to enliven audience consciousness about the “ontology” of theater as a live time-​space that performers and spectators share. Klunchun gently challenges this idea (but what about the money they have spent on tickets?), but soon comes around to recognizing Bel’s objectives and even cites, in turn, the Buddhist philosophy of attentiveness to the present moment. Here we see an earnest multiculturalist effort to make equivalent two socioeconomically unequal situations. It is not difficult to understand why khon is now only “for the tourists,” while Bel can claim that his contemporary choreography is supported by the bet that dance audiences are willing to make when they purchase tickets to see avant-​garde work.3 Interestingly, earlier in the piece, toward the end of Bel’s interview of Klunchun, Klunchun discusses his efforts to make khon relevant to local 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.” The interview continues in much the same structure, with Klunchun asking Bel to demonstrate some aspect of his work, Bel confounding the expectation set up by the request, Klunchun asking for elucidation, Bel explaining his aesthetic objectives. The piece comes to a climax when Bel offers to demonstrate a section of one of his pieces that contains nudity—​he is attempting to get at the foundation of dance as a medium—​the fleshly, live body. Bel begins to unbuckle his belt and Klunchun quickly entreats him to stop. Abruptly, they agree to end the conversation there.

Talking Pichet Klunchun and Myself raises a lot of questions for me. As a choreographer, Klunchun is invested in preserving and revitalizing a dance tradition. With his sinewy, articulate, deeply trained body, he is a dancerly dancer. In contrast, Bel is invested in breaking down a dance tradition. In his baggy jeans and big glasses, his greasy combover and paunchy belly, Bel has rejected dancerly dance. (We might argue, of course, that as a white, heterosexual,

Talking: Pichet Klunchun and Myself  37 cis-​male, European artist, Bel has the greater privilege of rejecting dancerly dance.) What kind of work could come out of their collaboration? What happened in the studio that led them to this result—​a result that might be viewed as a kind of (perhaps deliberate) failure to collaborate? While Pichet Klunchun and Myself is not typical intercultural theater in the tradition of Peter Brook or Ariane Mnouchkine, it is clear that Bel is thinking about the issues at stake in cross-​cultural exchange. He lists the following as topics the piece addresses: “Euro-​centrism, interculturalism, and cultural globalization” (2005, under “pichet klunchun and myself (2005)”). Perhaps the idea was that this conversation in its seeming rawness would avoid the pitfalls of interculturalism, which often attempts to smooth over incommensurabilities in favor of a hybridized but melded product. I have seen intercultural work that maps one aesthetic tradition onto another, quotes one form within another, adapts one narrative for another genre, and so forth. These productions usually fail to distribute compromise equally. Pichet Klunchun and Myself is unique in that it does not try to stitch together two disparate art forms; instead, it allows these two forms to remain side by side—​at some distance from each other. And it lays bare the miscomprehensions that occur in the encounter. But of course, this encounter is not a spontaneous, unedited conversation between two artists from different traditions who have just met one another. In fact, it is a scripted, structured, and planned performance (Hennessy 2009).4 It was repeated over a hundred times from 2004 to 2012 in numerous venues around the world.5 In this way, it does not escape the realm of representation, or “spectacle,” that Bel endeavors to dismantle in his other work. It is representation made to seem unmediated, a fact I will return to at length subsequently. First, however, it is Bel’s decision to choose talking as an artistic medium that I wish to examine in relation to questions of ethics in interculturalism. Interestingly, in the introduction to his 1996 anthology on interculturalism, Pavis argues that true intercultural theater must be intercorporeal. He believes that an “oxidation” of the other’s body in oneself is necessary to resist “Europeanization” in intercultural practice (15). Pavis idealizes the notion that, rather than superficially borrowing trappings of Asian aesthetic practice, Western artists must intensively learn and embody these practices, and in that way their collaborations would not be still fundamentally European with some Eastern appropriations, but more fully intercultural. From our more jaded vantage point, we might protest that it is presumptuous to assume

38  Love Dances that a European artist could acquire in their body a particular Eastern technique free of the problems of social, historical, and political context. Then again, perhaps it is essentialist to presume that an Eastern technique is not translatable—​or is off limits—​to a Western body.6 Whatever the case, it would appear that, despite one moment when Klunchun imitates a ballet grand jeté and another when Bel learns a khon phrase, Bel and Klunchun elected to avoid these ethical pitfalls by resisting intercorporeal work and replacing dancing with talking.7 The question remains: Does talking overcome the political obstacles of cultural difference while still achieving intercultural connection? Does intercorporeality deepen the exchange, or does it carry its own ethical pitfalls? I explore these questions later in this chapter and continue to consider them throughout subsequent chapters. Whereas Bel and Klunchun avoid corporeal exchange, the other pieces in Love Dances combine bodily interaction with talking. In this book’s introduction, I outline postcolonial studies scholar Homi Bhabha’s (1994) theory of enunciation. I explain that Bhabha uses the act of enunciation as a metaphor to describe how cultures confront one another. Enunciation marks the point of exchange, the “third space,” where two cultures not only meet, but also emerge. In distinguishing themselves via enunciation, via an act of reciprocal articulation, they, in fact, mutually produce one another. As I state in the introduction, Bhabha offers the idea of enunciation as a generative, co-​constitutive site that reveals the hybridity of culture. Cultures are always hybrid because it is in the act of translation in the face of other cultures that they are themselves determined. Enunciation describes this process of intercultural engagement, a form of constant negotiation that gives voice to the messiness of cultural difference. For my purposes in analyzing Pichet Klunchun and Myself—​a dance that is not a dance, but an interview—​I am interested in Bhabha’s formulation for its reliance on a verbal act to define what happens in intercultural exchange. Certainly, in the case of Pichet Klunchun and Myself Bel and Klunchun are involved in a process of enunciation at a border point between two different sets of cultural knowledge. The dissimilarities between the two artists’ work clearly emerge through their conversation. The fact of their co-​presence and their willingness to dialogue does represent an acknowledgment of our hybrid world. The fact that both must speak in a language—​English—​that is not native to them further underscores the inescapable mediatedness of the third space of cultural encounter (not to mention deep histories of colonialism). As Bhabha writes, “The pact of interpretation is never simply an act

Talking: Pichet Klunchun and Myself  39 of communication between the I and the You designated in the statement” (1994, 36). What is introduced in this space of interpretation is an “ambivalence.” In this meeting space Bel and Klunchun are both forced to acknowledge the assumptions they each bring to their imagination of how others perceive their work and the assumptions they bring to their appreciation of the work of other artists. The interpretive gap “destroys this mirror of representation in which cultural knowledge is customarily revealed as an integrated, open, expanding code” (37). I am not sure, however, that this particular process of enunciation manages to dismantle a polarized view of European contemporary choreography vis-​ à-​vis Thai classical dance. While Bhabha views the third space of enunciation as a site of possibility wherein the postcolonial subject can be in performative, discursive negotiation with hegemonic Western narratives, I still see, in this actual performance of enunciation, a familiar reiteration of colonialist ideas about the very fixed differences between East and West. Yes, the sight of Klunchun’s lithe and expressive body in simple black workout clothes demonstrating steps from the khon vocabulary—​without the accompanying tourist spectacle—​does incite, via the corporeal, a necessary disruption of our image of the East and, in fact, closes a bit the distance that Orientalism creates without, at the same time, allowing us to appropriate khon.8 Similarly, the experience of watching Bel strive to explain his work and the realization that he uses Klunchun merely as a screen through which to do so, not just to an Eastern audience but also to Western spectators, complicates a sense that the West is a place of unified cultural knowledge. In these respects, this enunciatory piece does reveal the hybridity of cultures. Still, the piece is not a spontaneous moment of enunciation. It is not an immediate encounter with difference but a scripted pair of interviews. Of course, Jacques Derrida (1976) has already deconstructed the notion that speech is any more or less mediated than writing; both are conditioned by the endless deferral of meaning. Bhabha is aware of this and, in fact, draws upon Derrida to support his formulations about hybridity as the disruption of totalizing narratives of nation and other. But Bhabha wants enunciation to be endlessly processual, continually performative, and at least in the case of Pichet Klunchun and Myself, which is a performance in the conventional sense, not just the theoretical sense, I think that enunciation fails to keep identities discursive. Even though the theory is that the opportunity for rehearsal, for repetition, and therefore for revision is inherent in performance, I feel that this performance does not allow for discursive resistance but in

40  Love Dances fact only reifies over and over again a fixed polarity. What is rehearsed in Pichet Klunchun and Myself is not a process of discovery and negotiation but a fixing of an Orientalist narrative. Vulnerability is integral to intercultural exchange. Erinn Gilson, in her work on the feminist ethics of vulnerability, defines vulnerability as openness to change and, specifically, openness to “being affected and affecting in ways that one cannot control” (2014, 2)—​perhaps it is like a willingness to enter together into a third space of enunciation. The tight structure of Pichet Klunchun and Myself does not make room for spontaneous enunciation, for unforeseeable change, and therefore for vulnerability. Without this vulnerability there is little possibility for genuine cross-​cultural collaboration. In the introduction to this book I also refer to French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas ([1961] 1998) in order to consider an ethics of interculturalism. I return to that material again here with specific regard to Pichet Klunchun and Myself, and I will engage with Levinas in subsequent chapters, as well. As I outline in the introduction, much of Levinas’s work is occupied with the ethics of intersubjective encounter. He posits an idea of the face as the site at which and through which a process of encounter with an other operates. For Levinas, the face represents the unassimilable but insistent other that confronts us and demands our ethical response. In addition to the notion of the face, Levinas ([1974] 2011) offers the contrasting models of saying and said as a way to understand interpersonal relationality. For Levinas, saying is an always-​in-​process medium through which we might ideally relate to one another, while the said marks an impulse toward final, total apprehension. Of course, saying always ends up becoming what has been said, and this inevitability is how Levinas describes the impossible imperative to maintain “the signifyingness of signification” ([1961] 1998, 5). That is, an ethics of intersubjective encounter would both acknowledge the will to totalization and nevertheless continue the effort to respect our other’s exteriority and separate, unknowable sovereignty. For Levinas, the question is how to sustain sayingness in an asymptotic, never-​ settled relationship to the said. We might argue that Bel’s efforts resemble the attempt to maintain “a saying that must also be unsaid” (Levinas [1961] 1998, 7). In a way, the fact that his interview with Klunchun is made to seem spontaneous even though it has been scripted works to repeat the initial site of cross-​cultural encounter, to maintain the immediacy of it. The piece has been performed hundreds of times now in numerous venues, so perhaps we can we view these multiple

Talking: Pichet Klunchun and Myself  41 performances as multiple attempts to keep saying, to keep disrupting totalization. But of course, the piece is scripted. Even given the room there is in every performance for slippage, for nuance, for alteration, ultimately this performance does not make space for the uncontrollable-​ness that is necessary for vulnerability and thus for being affected and affecting. Instead, it reinscribes an existing order. It is something already said. I think that both Bhabha and Levinas recognize the utopian quality of their respective formulations. Their theories of enunciation and of saying both carry the potential to make the encounter with difference ethical in its recognition of what cannot be appropriated or reduced, even as we must continue to engage as responsibly as we are able across third spaces (Bhabha) or face to face (Levinas). And perhaps Bel’s endeavor might also generously be perceived as an attempt at ethical intercultural exchange even as it recognizes the challenges. I cannot help but feel, however, that Bel’s piece is ultimately not absolutely satisfying. Perhaps this is because I detect a self-​interested motive on Bel’s part. Power, ideology, and economic advantage always animate artistic choice. The placement of Bel’s interview with Klunchun first is a conscious decision that centers the piece from Bel’s point of view. Bel’s encounter with khon, like the colonial encounter, really just becomes an opportunity for Bel to project himself against the absolute difference of the other in order to better justify his own identity. Bel places his interview with Klunchun first, so that we can better appreciate Bel. While there is little explicit juxtaposition between khon and Bel’s avant-​ garde choreography, this piece still relies on the trope of East-​West incommensurability. Khon is traditional, while Bel’s work challenges conventions of dance. Khon is representational, while Bel’s work attempts not to be. Klunchun is preservationist, Bel is avant-​garde. Klunchun is modest, Bel is exhibitionist. As dance scholar Susan Leigh Foster (2011b) analyzes it, Bel occupies the masculinist position (Western, contemporary, experimental), while Klunchun is feminized (Eastern, traditional, conservative). The final moment of the piece exemplifies this gendered power dynamic well. Bel’s move to take off his pants is provocative and discomforting. It is an aggressive, presumptuous, and domineering act that places Klunchun (and perhaps also spectators) in a subordinate position of reactivity.9 All of the preceding contrasts, of course, not only support hackneyed stereotypes of East versus West, but also ignore the significantly unequal histories and political economies of the environments from which these two artists come. As I argue

42  Love Dances earlier, Bel can rely on the bet that Euro-​American audiences are willing to make when they purchase tickets to see avant-​garde work; Klunchun’s Thai audiences do not have this kind of economic freedom. Certainly, the decision to try to avoid cultural appropriation through the format of the interview is thoughtful and new. Bel and Klunchun engage each other earnestly and graciously. Unfortunately, however, the piece does not manage to shed the weight of Orientalism.

An Ethics of Interculturalism At one time, my conclusion that Pichet Klunchun and Myself is Orientalist served as the unsatisfying stopping point in my analysis. The irreconcilable debate over interculturalism during the 1980s and 1990s seemed to remain stuck here. Is there no way to create East-​West intercultural work that resists Orientalism? Is Bel’s work just one more example of a white, cis-​male, European artist with good intentions who yet again falls into the trap of exploiting the East for his own purposes? If that is so, then what? Aren’t we a bit tired of wagging our finger at “bad” intercultural appropriations? What would a “good” one even look like? Hasn’t Bhabha shown us that everything is always already hybrid anyway? Is this conversation done with, then? Do we just accept that interculturalism is an unavoidable ethical minefield? If not, then what does Pichet Klunchun and Myself help us to understand? After presenting a version of this chapter in a few public forums, I received feedback that gave me some possibilities for thinking my way out of this conundrum. Dancer/​scholar Keith Hennessy emphasized the fact that this is one of Bel’s most widely toured pieces and that it has generated numerous responses. He suggested that I think about these responses as themselves generative of a continuing process of engagement with the issues the piece raises. Similarly, film scholar Dan Cuong O’Neill urged me to consider the key fact that this work is a dialogue performed for an audience and thus is generative of multiple layers of other dialogues. What’s more, the global circulation of the piece (to more than fifty cities from Bangkok to Paris, Singapore to San Francisco, Riga to Mexico City, Istanbul to Melbourne) meant that it produced innumerable dialogues with interlocutors from varied sociocultural contexts who must have had a plenitude of different reactions. These spin-​off dialogues include reviews, blog posts, and scholarly writing.10 Pichet Klunchun and Myself has also spawned another interview-​cum-​performance

Talking: Pichet Klunchun and Myself  43 piece called About Khon (2008) in which Bel asks Klunchun a series of questions that allow Klunchun to explain and showcase khon in greater detail. Finally, of course, I am myself in dialogue with the project, which adds yet another layer of discourse. All of these layers could be read as continuing enunciations across subjectivities, a way that this initial intercultural encounter maintains its sayingness, its fundamental responsibility to engage the incomprehensible other. But what is the nature of these enunciations? This is where the politics come in. One might argue that the numerous enunciations, the sayingness, the reverberating discursivity generated by the nomadic circulation of the piece save it from ossification into a singular (Orientalist) narrative. We might contend that the piece is constituted not just by the two-​part interview between Bel and Klunchun but also, fundamentally, by the numerous dialogues between the performance and the audience and with readers of the reviews, blog posts, and articles and between audience members with each other. Perhaps it follows that the Orientalist relationship I see between Bel and Klunchun is challenged by the fact that it is performed for an audience, making the relationship more than merely dyadic, more than merely one European artist and his Asian foil. (Incidentally, I encounter this need to consider spectatorship, the fact of a third interlocutor in any duet, throughout the other chapters of this book.) Gerald Siegmund (2017), in his comprehensive monograph on Bel’s oeuvre, views Pichet Klunchun and Myself more generously than I do. In fact, referring to a 2013 article that I originally published about it, which is where I first argue that the work’s title emphasizes its unilateral authorship, Siegmund counters my reading and contends that because the piece includes “and Myself ” in the title Bel makes it evident that it is he who frames the discourse of the piece and that this conscious framing makes room for critical reflection and thus ameliorates the potential for exoticizing subjectification (206). According to Siegmund, Bel and Klunchun are not self-​identical subjects in the piece, but representations, or performances, of themselves and this fact affords room in the piece for debate and discussion. He says, “Bel’s discourse may therefore frame the performance, but it is also part of the game where it is confronted with another view on dance from another part of the world. Thus, the frame enters the performance itself, where it may be discussed and opened up. Bel therefore does not appear unmarked and outside representation, but as part of the performance itself ” (214). I am sympathetic to the idea that the piece is self-​conscious of its framing

44  Love Dances and that this distancing, along with the reverberating layers of discourse among audiences that the piece generates, means that it affords critical reflection. In a somewhat conflicting way, however, earlier in this same chapter Siegmund claims that the works in which Bel features the autobiographical voices of other artists (Véronique Doisneau [2004], Cédric Andrieux [2009], Lutz Förster [2009], and Pichet Klunchun and Myself [2004]) are instances in which he democratizes the power structures in dance and cedes authority as the choreographic auteur (178). While Siegmund briefly acknowledges that, in fact, Bel, retains authorial credit, he is still committed to the idea that these pieces challenge the subjectification of the individual dancer by allowing them to speak. Siegmund largely develops his argument via the content of the pieces, focusing on the stories the dancers tell of their subjectification in the institutions in which they worked as dancers. In my opinion, their larger subjectification by Bel, the fact that Bel is the framer who makes the artistic and directorial choices and maintains detailed control over these works, is an unignorable factor. In fact, it is worth noting that, in the case of Lutz Förster, Bel eventually removed his credit as author from the piece as the work evolved away from Bel’s artistic concerns. Siegmund explains, “Indeed, Lutz Förster sits uneasily within Jérôme Bel’s oeuvre” (211). Thus, in a single chapter Siegmund’s arguments, on the one hand, somewhat overlook the mediated nature of these not-​really-​autobiographical series of dances but, on the other, rely upon the importance of mediation in the case of Pichet Klunchun and Myself. Furthermore, this mediation is not always evident enough to invite criticality. Bel’s artistic works are carefully authored while appearing not to be. In Cedric Andrieux, the text may have been largely written by Andrieux, and his gym bag and workout clothes may suggest a level of informality, but every sip of water the dancer takes from the bottle he has set downstage is choreographed. As Siegmund attests, “Pichet Klunchun and Myself is, by March 2011, as carefully scripted and staged as are all of Bel’s other performances” (208). For me, it is not enough that the title, as Siegmund reads it, hints at self-​reflexive framing. Some intent in the exchange itself would need to demonstrate a critical challenging of Orientalist structures. Additionally, despite the (arguable) reflective potential afforded by the self-​consciousness of the piece and the productive extra-​theatrical discourse that it generates, the ethics of intersubjective encounter are still complicated by unavoidable differentials of power and economic, social, and racial circumstances between interlocutors. I do not think it is entirely accidental

Talking: Pichet Klunchun and Myself  45 that while Bel’s other dancer biographies give the white, European subjects solo stage and allow them to relay details of their individuality within institutional structures of dance (Paris Opera Ballet, Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Tanztheater Wuppertal), in Pichet Klunchun and Myself Bel presents Klunchun as a representative of an entire dance form, rather than as an individual artist. Foster, who is considerably more critical of the piece than Siegmund, notes that it garnered “adulatory reviews and standing ovations especially across Europe and North America but receiv[ed] less positive responses in Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia, and Singapore” (2011a, 197).11 Allowing for both the discursive multiplicity and the self-​conscious framing of Pichet Klunchun and Myself complicates a simple Bel-​Klunchun dyad, but it does not ameliorate the Orientalist dynamic already present between them. Certainly the piece is “generative,” as Hennessy describes it. And that is definitely a worthwhile effect. Audience members, though, are primarily silent interlocutors. We do not get to talk back to the performers. Our written and verbal responses to the piece happen beyond the performance, as satellite discourses. In her scholarly article about the piece, mentioned earlier, Foster (2011b) advances a feminist critique by engaging in a fictional dialogue involving Bel. Foster’s imagined conversation with Bel, however, is one-​sided; she can only make up what Bel might say in response to her critiques. My dissatisfaction with the piece serves as a reminder to be wary of the politics of interculturalism in general. There is simply no way to absolve ourselves of the history of colonialism. All encounters between East and West are inescapably stained by the structures of Orientalism. Pichet Klunchun and Myself, even if we concede its layers of discursivity, does not, cannot, in its earnest effort to comprehend, to create dialogue, to give equal voice, move outside of these structures. The piece cannot level out that which is not equal.

Pedagogy But perhaps that should not be the pedestal by which I evaluate this piece. I have asked what Pichet Klunchun and Myself helps us to understand. Perhaps the piece is useful not as an ideal model of “good” interculturalism but insofar as it helps call attention to the process by which systemic inequalities get masked by the pretense of cross-​cultural cooperation. In this way the piece could be useful as intercultural pedagogy. In its failure to create

46  Love Dances true reciprocity it produces instead a reminder of colonialism’s impact; it produces residual discourses that, like this chapter, can reveal the processes by which Orientalism structures the initial dialogue, even if they cannot overcome them. The piece does not succeed in leveling inequity; it merely serves to lay it bare.12 All of the duets I study in Love Dances must contend with the stain of Orientalism and of the racialized oppressions that come from long histories of colonialism. This chapter evaluates a work that is particularly problematic and thereby serves as a foil to the other, more thoughtful, more reflective, intercultural collaborations in this book, but it also works as a guide for remembering that Orientalism and racial dynamics necessarily determine those projects as well. To extrapolate more generally, then, we might view interculturalism itself as a necessary failure. In our era of globalization it is our obligation to continue to connect across what are nonetheless impassable cultural, ethnic, and racial divides that will confoundingly reveal the ways that we are not equivalent. In the subsequent chapters I explore the ways that losses in translation are constitutive of intercultural encounter. And, as I begin to suggest here, I advocate for the power of interculturalism otherwise, that is, for the hope that we persist in our encounters despite the losses. It may be that in the losses and the failures we might learn better ways of being with each other. Three special journal issues on theater and globalization urge us to consider concerns such as the specific materializations of globalization in local instances of theater making, the complications of global spectatorship, and the migrations of theatrical forms and theater artists globally (Yan 2005; Harvie and Rebellato 2006; Graham-​Jones 2005). While recognizing the ways that “bio-​ethnic politics” coerce a notion of “Asia” as a place and a symbol, Haiping Yan (2005, 227) also posits a “transnational theatre in the making” (242) that might “attempt not only to understand what is becoming of the human geography of the world but also to envision how to partake in its alternative configurations” (243). Similarly, Janelle Reinelt celebrates the unique capacity of performance to “posit various possible conceptual and aesthetic schemas to provoke its spectators to seek their own finite relations to the enormous, sometimes overwhelming plurality of the new worldly context” (2006, 152). I do not feel that Pichet Klunchun and Myself offers a new envisioning of our global community, although I admire the impetus that led to the collaboration. As I have mentioned, the piece has inspired subsequent choreographic collaborations by Klunchun, one piece with some help from Bel. Klunchun has since gained a measure of access to a global stage

Talking: Pichet Klunchun and Myself  47 and cultural currency (and Bel has increased his). The touring of the piece widely across the globe as well as the numerous spin-​off dialogues the piece has engendered offered some possibilities for symbolic “what-​ifs.” I have talked about Pavis’s privileging of intercorporeality in interculturalism and Bel’s rejection of corporeal collaboration in Pichet Klunchun and Myself. In “Substitution,” a chapter from Otherwise Than Being, Levinas ([1974] 2011) uses bodily terms in his philosophical formulations. He discusses being “in one’s skin” not as being concealed by a wall between oneself and another but as merely the “meanwhile between inspiration and expiration.” “Incarnation” (embodiment in flesh) does not enclose the self; rather, it “exposes it naked to the other to the point of making the subject expose its very exposedness” (109). At the end of Pichet Klunchun and Myself, Bel attempts to physically demonstrate an aspect of his work that he has only so far described verbally. As I describe earlier, he begins to unbuckle his belt in order to expose his skin to us and to Klunchun. Klunchun quickly asks him to stop, citing Thai modesty. Bel rather impertinently pushes back by saying that he has seen semi-​naked women in Thai bars, but Klunchun cannily retorts that those bars are for Westerners. The performance ends there. This piece is an attempt, mostly through language and lastly through the body, to expose oneself to an other. Bel endeavors to bare himself to the world beyond, perhaps as a way to bring himself to an other, to inspire and to expire through the skin of his body. But just as Levinas is paradoxical in his attempt to describe our “exposedness” (“the self in its skin is both exposed to the exterior . . . and obsessed by the others in this naked exposure”), Klunchun’s refusal and Bel’s presumption remind us that this “exposedness,” our inescapable will to exteriority, is confounded by that very other to which we expose ourselves (112). I encounter different kinds of disrobings throughout several duets across the book, and each deserves discussion for its particular tone or degree of vulnerability. In this case, I imagine that for Klunchun Bel’s exhibitionism does not feel like an act of vulnerability, but in fact one of coercion. Thankfully, Klunchun does not submit to his aggression, but demonstrates knowing self-​possession. It is worth noting that I encounter similar refusals by Kojima Shoji in another intercultural duet in c­ hapter 2 and by Otake Eiko in yet another in c­ hapter 3. I think these refusals are a form passive resistance to self-​divulgence in the face of a colonial presumption of intimacy, a way to retain the borders of the self in the power-​laden contact zone of intercultural collaboration. I think they represent what I might term a decolonial politics of Asian passivity.

48  Love Dances Levinas built a philosophy of ethics on his personal experience with the horrors of the Holocaust. He knew that people fail to act ethically in the most devastating ways. And yet he continued to argue that the essence of our being is our debt to an other that will always be irreconcilable to us—​a subjectivity built upon the impossibility of intersubjectivity. For Levinas, ethics by definition resists the appropriation of the other (Critchley 2002). Ultimately, Levinas does not prescribe an answer to the problem of intersubjectivity. What he offers is a recognition of its limits. As Simon Critchley describes it: [For Levinas] ethics is not . . . the overcoming or simple abandonment of ontology [that is, total comprehension] through the immediacy of ethical experience. It is rather the persistent deconstruction of the limits of ontology and its claim to conceptual mastery, while also recognizing the unavoidability of the Said. (2002, 18)

In Levinas’s philosophy of ethics, we are resigned to the awareness that even as our own selfhood is built upon a will to know the other, that other is always irreducible to us—​and that this is as it should be. In speaking of intercultural theater, Richard Schechner (2000, 7) asks what rules should govern the interplay across cultures. Perhaps an “ethics of interculturalism” might be described as simply the obligation to continue to make evident the impossibility of communion in intercultural encounter, even as we keep trying. I argue that while Pichet Klunchun and Myself does not in itself demonstrate criticality, the work of the artists to engage with difficulty across difference offers viewers the opportunity to reflect upon the ethics of interculturalism. It is in this way that the piece is a pedagogically productive failure. In this first chapter of Love Dances I have introduced some of the key ideas and frameworks that I develop further in subsequent chapters. Orientalism, colonialism, power, resistance, and appropriation are present in all the duets I study. I have introduced the question of modalities in intercultural dance, looking at the affordances and the effects of talking as a method of cultural understanding between dancers. All of the duets I discuss in Love Dances turn to verbal modes in one way or another, each with different outcomes and effects. I have briefly noted the importance of vulnerability, openness to unforeseeable change, as key to interculturalism. I have considered, as well, the exposure of the body and the power of refusal as ways to think about the tensions between the desire to connect and the need to preserve sovereignty. Finally, I have introduced the question of mediation; I note Bel’s

Talking: Pichet Klunchun and Myself  49 framing as auteur and as performer of himself and I acknowledge the discursive life of Pichet Klunchun and Myself that persists beyond but is still constitutive of the performance as a whole. In subsequent chapters of this book I examine the kinds of mediations that operate in other intercultural duets, including the third spaces that are shaped across two dancers’ intercultural communications and the audiences that are necessary to establish the triangulation that Dee Reynolds (2012) calls “the dance’s body.” I argue that these mediations are what enable the collaborations to be instructional. As I suggest with Pichet Klunchun and Myself, and as I develop further in the following chapters, framing and distancing are key to the pedagogical value of these duets for an ethical interculturalism.

2 Mourning Flash and Simulacrum

The face of a lover is an unknown, precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment. —​James Baldwin, Another Country

Two cis-​male dancers, one Asian, one Black, stand beside each other. To a mournful cover of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U,” they pop an elbow, a wrist, a rib cage, a knee. They pivot, they hinge. But this is not standard hip-​hop; they pop lugubriously, if that can be said without paradox. They pop with drooping wrists, their bodies simultaneously tensed and limp. Meanwhile, their faces contort with eyes rolled up and mouths agape, or eyes squinted and lips drawn wide (Harris and Sakamoto 2016). This is Flash, a duet between Rennie Harris, a popper, and Michael Sakamoto, a butoh artist. The section I have described represents a bodily synthesis of the two movement vocabularies. The choreographers describe the work as “a ‘conversation’ between the artists’ respective aesthetics (hip-​ hop and butoh), cultural backgrounds (African American and Japanese American), and personalities” (Harris and Sakamoto 2015). In their time together on stage, Harris and Sakamoto teach each other their particular ways of moving and share the childhood traumas that brought them to these kinetic modes. Two cis-​male dancers, one Asian, one white, stand beside each other. The younger white man—​trim and nimble, clear in his every move—​gently holds the wrist of the older Asian gentleman, who appears bony and brittle but maintains an intensely compelling presence. The younger white man carefully positions the elder Asian man into a small stance, feet turned in, head tilted, hands delicately poised. Over the dainty notes of a piano lullaby, a

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Mourning: Flash and Simulacrum  51 voice-​over describes the proper way to be an elegant Japanese woman: “The neck very loose, the back very small, very smooth and soft with the hands. The back always has to be very small. Get your feet closer together. A little crossed in front.” Together, the two men shuffle a few soft, small steps forward, subtly inclining their heads as they travel. They imagine themselves as graceful women admiring the ocean (Øyen 2017). This is Simulacrum (2016), an intercultural duet performed by Daniel Proietto, an Argentinian contemporary dancer who is also trained in Japanese kabuki, and Kojima Shoji, a celebrated flamenco dancer from Japan. Interwoven among other narratives, Simulacrum dramatizes the story of Kojima’s mother, who was forced to give up her son to her brother and sister-​in-​law because the couple was unable to have children of their own. In this chapter, I want to consider the chiasmatic crossings that characterize the two collaborations I have just described. I look at the ambivalent ways that these male dancers sometimes face toward each other and sometimes turn away. I examine the tone of melancholy that pervades the two pieces. This chapter is about loss, the loss in translation that is inevitable in intercultural encounter, the personal loss that can trigger the impulse to connect to other humans who know loss, the social loss of marginalization due to race or non-​normative gender or sexuality, and, finally, the ways that the experience of loss can be paradoxically generative. In my examination of Flash, I describe the crisis out of which butoh and hip-​hop arise, I discuss the trauma of racial melancholy and the masculinist discomfort with vulnerability, and I note the ethics of care the artists practice in the face of the irreconcilable. In Simulacrum, as in Flash, loss manifests both at the level of form and in the content of the piece. In fact, of course, form and content are inseparable, so loss is baked in throughout. In Simulacrum, it appears as language mistranslation, as disjunctions between text and dance, as the in-​between spaces of intercultural and gender drag, and via stories of abandonment, death, poverty, and social ostracization. Ultimately, I argue that encountering these various kinds of losses, as the artists in these two pieces do in their different ways, becomes the very impulse for dance making. This creativity is in contrast to my analysis in the previous chapter, where I contend that in Pichet Klunchun and Myself the topic of loss manifests in the artists’ discussion of how they represent death in their respective aesthetics, but the piece itself, in its tightly scripted structure and colonial dynamics, forecloses vulnerability, and thereby does not make room for the kind of loss that incites generativity.

52  Love Dances As I discuss in the introduction, after my husband died I was confused about the notion of loss integration that I was being told would come. I did not know what it would mean to integrate a loss that felt so overpowering and so demanding. I could not imagine into what my loss could possibly be integrated. As time has passed and life has moved forward, however, I am ever more drawn to the images I describe in the introduction. A stone statue overgrown with moss, its shape detectable but its details softened. A child’s lost bicycle incorporated into a growing tree. The bicycle integrated into the trunk and slowly ascending with the growth of the tree. Loss does not go away; we carry it along with us even as we move forward into our new becoming. What my own loss has taught me is that we cannot connect with others without the eventuality of loss, and we cannot continue on without that loss accompanying us. The moss grows over the statue and the tree trunk rises, not in spite of loss but in the shape of it. Likewise, the effort of intercultural collaboration is always a practice of integrating loss. In the desire to connect we are always bound to miss. Or, as James Baldwin ([1962], 2013) reminds us, the face of a lover is an unknown, even as, and also because, we have poured ourselves into it. It is a mystery whose torment we nonetheless invite. What we lose in the incomprehensibility of our lover is, of course, not the same as losing our lover to death, but their passing does remind us in the most ultimate way how they were never really ours to begin with.

Flash Flash is an example of two artists who invite the mystery they behold in the faces of each other. Harris and Sakamoto were motivated to collaborate because they wanted to explore the intersections across popping and butoh as dance forms. Rennie Harris is a Philadelphia-​based hip-​hop choreographer credited with being one of the first dance artists to bring street dance to the concert dance stage. His work is renowned for its dramatic impact and choreographic intricacy. Michael Sakamoto is an interdisciplinary dancer-​ artist-​scholar-​curator from Los Angeles. His butoh-​based, multi-​genre work focuses on questioning our received sociocultural constructs and exploring intercultural dialogue. Sakamoto first became interested in Harris’s work after learning about his 2003 solo Lorenzo’s Oil, in which he incorporates butoh in the still moments between popping (Acocella 2014). Harris (2017) has described seeing photographs of butoh artists and exclaiming, “Oh my

Mourning: Flash and Simulacrum  53 god, this is popping!” Harris was teaching at the University of California, Los Angeles, while Sakamoto was there earning his MFA and later his doctorate. Sakamoto proposed a collaboration. He has explained that his earliest dance experiences, before training seriously in butoh, were with popping as a teenager, and that although he is not a hip-​hop dancer, popping is actually his corporeal base (Sakamoto 2017b). Thus, both dancers maintain a personal affinity with the other’s movement form. Flash begins with Harris and Sakamoto entering from opposite sides of the stage, Harris down left and Sakamoto up right. They stand and stare at one another as we hear a voice-​over of a conversation in which they discuss the commonalities of butoh and hip-​hop, as well as the differences in their aesthetic approaches. Slowly, they come to sit in chairs facing each other, occasionally shifting in their seats as the recorded conversation continues. One of the commonalities they discuss is that butoh and hip-​hop share similar origin narratives. Both arise out of social trauma and crisis. For butoh, it is nuclear destruction and general upheaval in the aftermath of World War II in Japan. For hip-​hop, it is violence, poverty, and racism in the Bronx in the 1970s. In an article on Flash, Sakamoto writes: My shorthand for butoh is the three C’s: the chaos of an unmoored standard of living, the contradiction of a liminal state suspended between identities, and, most importantly, the resultant crisis of paradoxical being, producing what Hijikata labeled, and most followers of butoh have come to know as, “the body in crisis. (2017a, 76)

Likewise, about hip-​hop Harris says: The idea of it [hip-​hop] is always being in crisis, and that’s why it’s important to propel forward and always be progressive and think out of the box, cuz we’re always in this sort of situation that we need to move out of, so I get that in regards to the connector between butoh and, so to speak, neo-​ Japanese culture. (Quoted in Sakamoto 2019, 526)

In addition to similarities in origin, it could be argued that there are some similarities in form and tone between these two aesthetic traditions, as Harris notes. Popping and butoh both engage in shapeshifting, in highlighting transitional moments and metamorphic processes, and in creating bodily illusions. Both are characterized by isolations of muscular

54  Love Dances tension simultaneous with places of bodily release, and both are driven by internality. Popping requires the quick contraction of muscles to bones in order to achieve its effects. Butoh similarly relies on an intensity of control in order to move slowly and with deeply concentrated attention. Like butoh, popping directs kinetic energy inward rather than throwing force out. In an interview with the author, Harris (2017) describes popping as the most introverted of hip-​hop forms. Accordingly, his particular signature has been to employ the freezes, tics, and isolations of popping as physical manifestations of inner turmoil (Chang 2002, 5). Butoh, similarly preoccupied with inner turmoil, employs gnarled limbs and agonized facial expressions to express its dark visions. Despite these historic and formal similarities, however, the seams between the two forms are visible when Harris and Sakamoto put them together. They are still clearly discrete forms, and the ways that the dancers combine them are also distinct. Harris’s popping is exceptionally articulate, though subtle and minute, and remains primarily in his upper body. (At the time of the performance he was suffering from hip arthritis.) He incorporates the facial expressions of butoh, widening his eyes or opening his mouth. He also performs pedestrian moments of standing, walking, and sitting and, affectingly, periods of quaking and sobbing, his hands held up to his mouth. Meanwhile, Sakamoto employs the sickled, turn-​in stance and the shifting facial expressions of butoh, but he moves from position to position via the jerkiness of popping rather than through the usually slow-​motion evolution of butoh. Baldwin ([1962], 2013) reminds us that even as we see ourselves reflected in the face of our lover, our lover also retains their mystery. The lure of collaboration is magnetic in its ability to both draw toward and push away.

Facing Off The opening voice-​over ends with Harris saying, “I’ve always wanted to battle a butoh artist.” At that proposition, the dancers stand and walk toward each other. A spotlight goes up. A ringmaster announces the two competitors, rousing music begins, a bell rings. They begin, against expectations, by slowly circling the perimeter of the stage from opposite sides. They do not engage each other. Meanwhile, a slide show of photos of the artists as young boys projects onto the back scrim. Eventually, they enter the cypher, ready to face off (figure 2.1). They alternate a few rounds of dance battling, albeit

Mourning: Flash and Simulacrum  55

Figure 2.1  Michael Sakamoto and Rennie Harris in Flash (2015). Photo by JaNelle Traylor.

in the lugubrious “butoh-​funk” (Harris and Sakamoto’s shared term) mode I have described. A voice-​over of Harris boasting and taunting begins. Very quickly, however, he moves from verbal flexing to admitting that he is actually quite shy and only postures as way to hide and to cope. In the same vein, Sakamoto then talks about not ever feeling like he fits in, about feeling alienated and displaced. Throughout this book I draw upon and extend Levinas’s ([1961] 1998) philosophy of the ethics of encounter. Levinas tells us that our very ontology is, in fact, constituted by our ethical responsibility to an other, even as that other will never be completely apprehendable. Levinas employs the idea of the face of the other as the ultimate site of both ontological affirmation and impossible interrelationality. As Baldwin ([1962], 2013) phrases it, the face of a lover is an unknown, even as it is invested with so much of oneself. The opening to Flash is an evocation of the Levinasian face-​off. Levinas writes, “The face of the other in its precariousness and defenselessness, is for me at once the temptation to kill and the call to peace, the ‘You shall not kill’ ” (1996, 167). That is, the interface with another human being engenders simultaneously calls to aggression and to compassion, to kill and to love. Or, as Baldwin would have it, the face of a lover bears not just love but also torment

56  Love Dances ([1962], 2013, 172). Harris and Sakamoto begin their confrontation ready to compete, to battle but quickly end up revealing their vulnerabilities to one another. For Levinas, this is the essence of interpersonal encounter. It is always an entwining of the lure of antagonism and the ethical imperative of care. I think that this admission of mutual vulnerability in a moment of antagonism can also be understood within an intersectional framework of racial melancholia and the violence of gender normativity. The scene juxtaposes the aggressive postures of masculinity that have shaped Harris and Sakamoto with the fuller reality of their insecurities and tendernesses—​the staging of a boxing match paired with sweet images of the artists as young boys, the combative stances that dissolve into softness, and the voice-​overs of the artists’ inner uncertainties. It is a clear indictment of the social expectations of masculinity. At the same time, we must also fold into this picture Harris’s identity as a Black man and Sakamoto’s experience as an Asian male. A number of critical race theorists have discussed the inherent melancholy of raced identity (see Singleton 2015; Winters 2016). For example, Eng and Han (2003), in a chapter on depression in Asian American college students and the trope of melancholy in Asian American literature, reference Sigmund Freud’s influential essay “Mourning and Melancholia.” While Freud establishes a binary in which mourning is understood as a healthy form of grieving and melancholia is a pathological response to loss, Eng and Han discuss sustained melancholy not as pathological, but as, in fact, constitutive of the subjectivity of the racial other, and also as potentially productive (364–​365).1 They demonstrate the ways that Asian Americans carry an abiding sense of loss inherent to their identities as marginalized subjects; subjects who are determined by compromised national belonging, failure to achieve the impossible imperatives of assimilation, social pressures to fulfill the model minority myth, and general illegibility in the face of dominant white culture. They write that racial melancholia “delineates an unresolved process that might usefully describe the unstable immigration and suspended assimilation of Asian Americans into the national fabric” (345). This multifaceted and prolonged melancholy, Eng and Han argue, is not pathological but, in fact, potentially politically resistive in its refusal to allow for the oblivion of racial and ethnic difference. Unlike the mourner, who ultimately rejects loss, the melancholic insists on “a type of ethical hold” (365) on alterity, on the absence that makes them permanently indeterminate and unassimilable. Furthermore, Eng and Han note a nuance in Freud, who, while designating

Mourning: Flash and Simulacrum  57 melancholia as illness, also avers that the melancholic’s identification with their lost object “ ‘is the expression of there being something in common which may signify love’ ” (quoted in Eng and Han 2002, 364). That is, the racial melancholic’s refusal to “get over” their loss, to let go and assimilate, is an act of ongoing love for the lost object, the bicycle growing with the tree. For Eng and Han, it is also a form of activism. Anne Anlin Cheng (2000) similarly deploys melancholia as a framework for understanding not only Asian American subjectivity, but also African American ontological being. For different historical reasons, African Americans are also, and arguably more deeply, determined by loss. Drawing from scholars and writers including Saidiya Hartman, Toni Morrison, and Ralph Ellison, Cheng uses melancholy to describe the constitutive grief of Blackness. Slavery, violence, and segregation define Black subjectivity so profoundly that impoverishment and loss are abiding and irresolvable. Thus, racial melancholia. Like Eng and Han, Cheng, citing W. E. B. Du Bois and Paul Gilroy, suggests that this intrinsic grief may also be productive: “Indeed, racial melancholia as I am defining it has always existed for raced subjects both as a sign of rejection and as a psychic strategy in response to that rejection” (20). In a similar vein, Black studies scholar Christina Sharpe (2016) utilizes the term “wake” in all of its multiple meanings—​as a ritualistic form of sitting with the deceased, as the surface disruption caused by a passing boat, as the term for coming out of sleep and into awareness—​both to recognize the ways that African Americans are always already and forever grounded in the historical fact of the Middle Passage and of slavery, but also to affirm the creative acts that African Americans engage “in the wake” of Black existential precarity. She calls these activities “wake work.”2 I think that Flash is exemplary of the kind of melancholic creativity to which Eng and Han, Cheng, and Sharpe allude. Harris and Sakamoto express a state of gendered and racial melancholy in their performances. This is first apparent in the dance battle when Harris admits to covering up his essential self-​doubt with bravado, and Sakamoto reveals his feelings of alienation while growing up in Los Angeles. After the dance battle, the artists move into a section of “melting monologues” (a term Sakamoto learned from performance artist Rachel Rosenthal) in which they alternate performing solos (­figures 2.2a and 2.2b). They tell their personal stories via talking, singing, and dancing, while the other dancer fades into more minimal movement. For Sakamoto, the monologues call up his insecurities as a child growing up in East Los Angeles in the 1970s and 1980s during a period of high racial

58  Love Dances

Figure 2.2a  Rennie Harris in Flash (2015). Photo by Waewdao Sirisook.

tension. He also expresses his nostalgia for 1970s funk and old Hollywood musicals as sites of disidentification—​that is, sites wherein minority subjects like Sakamoto ambivalently, with simultaneous desire and irony, inscribe themselves into mainstream popular culture (Muñoz 1999). Eng and Han’s ideas about the Asian American melancholia of nonbelonging are evident in Sakamoto’s mournful reminiscences of his childhood fascination with—​and impossible difference from—​Fred Astaire. His most powerful memory is of the “ghetto bird moonlight” of helicopters surveilling his neighborhood in the middle of the night, a reminder of constant policing in the Black neighborhood in which he was living. Sakamoto accompanies his monologue with butoh-​inflected isolations, moving through a series of tableau-​like poses and facial contortions via a kind of stuttered flow. He offers an exaggerated grimace with turned-​in limbs. He shuffle-​walks, heel-​toe-​heel-​toe, bending at the knees and elbows, while undulating his wrists. He sing-​talks “Puttin’ On the Ritz” and mimes tipping his top hat and flaring his tails. He is imagining Fred Astaire and playing with, as he says, “another way to be a man.”

Mourning: Flash and Simulacrum  59

Figure 2.2b  Michael Sakamoto in Flash (2015). Photo by Waewdao Sirisook.

Here, of course, Sakamoto expresses the wounds of emasculation that are a hallmark of anti-​Asian racism. Meanwhile, Harris monologues about his exploitation as a teen dancer and, later, obliquely but painfully describes his childhood experiences of abuse. Harris employs a quiet muttering and muffled sobbing as he walks slowly across the stage. At one point, he mimes his molestation, bringing his hands to his crotch, his throat, his mouth. At another point, he belts out a half-​sung, half-​moaned version of “Somewhere over the Rainbow,” calling up Sammy Davis Jr.’s ambivalent rendition. Black performance studies scholar Fred Moten characterizes moaning as a form of mourning, or “mo’nin,’ ” and argues for it as a practice of “anti-​interpretive nonreduction of nonmeaning” (2003, 63)—​especially for Black subjects. Deliberately resisting literality but also meaninglessness, inhabiting a space of intersecting opposites, the phonic wordlessness of moaning, he argues, is an expression of the condition of (im)possibility of Black life, which is always also “Black (Life Against) Death.” Moten contends that the aesthetic affordance of mo’nin’ is an affirmation “not of, but out of, death” (72). The

60  Love Dances bicycle growing with the tree. Harris’s “mo’nin’ ” in Flash is exactly this sounding of Black grief and Black resilience. While butoh and hip-​hop, as genres, share origin narratives and tonal preoccupations, the monologues in Flash help to make more literal connections between Harris and Sakamoto as individuals. While the dance forms carry crisis in their constitution, the artists also demonstrate the kinds of crisis they carry in the histories of their bodies, and thus maybe also demonstrate why these dance forms appealed in the first place, as well as why they felt impelled to connect personally. Sharpe (2016) and Saidiya Hartman (2007) contend that the personal trauma Black people experience is never not tied to the historical fact of slavery; it is the necessary “afterlife of slavery” embodied in “skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment” (Hartman 2007, 6). As Sharpe argues, “Our individual [Black] lives are always swept up in the wake produced and determined, though not absolutely, by the afterlives of slavery” (8). Similarly, Asian American non-​belonging is transgenerational, as Eng and Han (2002) discover in their study of depression and suicide in Asian American college students, and is a theme in Asian American literature (Cheng 2000). Sakamoto’s blood memory lies, of course, in the trauma of Japanese American incarceration during World War II. The personal crises Harris and Sakamoto express in Flash are deeply tied to the wider sociopolitical terrors of racism and male chauvinism. Their expression via the terror-​stricken forms of hip-​hop and butoh exemplify a kind of productive melancholia or “wake work,” a strategy of survival, and even of creative thriving, against ontological negation. As Harris puts it, connecting racist horror to art making: “One of the things I realized is that the very first time in the Middle Passage that slaves were made to dance in shackles to rhythms of tea kettles is the birth of Black contemporary art” (quoted in Chang 2002, 4).

Facing Away: Commiseration in the Incommensurable Even as they verbally make associations across their personal histories, sharing their experiences of trauma, emasculation, and racism, it is notable that for much of these alternating solos and, in fact, for most of the rest of the piece, Harris and Sakamoto rarely look at each other. Additionally, save for two moments of about thirty-​two counts each of synchronized choreography, they do not engage intercorporeally. It could be said that each dancer

Mourning: Flash and Simulacrum  61 performs his unique version of a popping-​butoh fusion without really aiming for a direct pedagogical exchange. The interculturalism happens in the each of their bodies separately, as independent experiences of interculturalism. Spatially, the dancers primarily inhabit their own spheres on stage. In the final section, in fact, they move along separate illuminated pathways going in separate directions.3 Perhaps this avoidance is a way to minimize the incredible vulnerability that comes with sharing our deepest sufferings with another person, as they have done throughout the piece. I recall a parenting expert once suggesting that the best way to have difficult conversations with a child is in the car, when both parent and child are facing forward. Perhaps the melting monologues offer a way to try to resist the Levinasian encounter with the face of the other, in its violence and its insistence—​even as Levinas argues that our existence is predicated on that encounter, even as we cannot avoid it. In all of the duets I study in Love Dances, tropes of loss, trauma, and death are prevalent. Trauma is clearly present in Flash. It is present in the way that Harris and Sakamoto describe the origins of hip-​hop and butoh in social disorder and the way that they define both forms as manifestations of the body in crisis. Butoh’s full title, ankoku butoh, means dance of darkness, and the form is well known for its preoccupation with mortality. Sakamoto writes, “Butoh and hip-​hop dance both attach to and make a friend of an ambivalent corporeality between pleasure and pain, joy and despair. They are each a consequence of disfigured landscapes, tracing psyches afflicted with chaos and contradiction” (2019, 526). Recall also that beyond the fact that the two forms share traumatic origins, Harris and Sakamoto also express personal trauma in their autobiographical exchanges in the piece—​and this personal pain, we know, is rooted in the social stress of racism and gender normativity. Finally, loss also occurs in the ways that the artists (aside from the opening scene) avoid eye contact with each other as they each express their separate experiences of suffering. In Flash, the artists not only discuss social and individual loss, but also demonstrate the way that loss is inextricably built into the process of encounter. There is inevitably something lost in translation across intercultural exchange. Again echoing Levinas: there is no way that one can ever completely access the other that faces us in all their simultaneous helplessness and incommensurability. One section humorously highlights this incommensurability. After Sakamoto waxes nostalgic about his childhood fascination with 1970s funk music, Harris exclaims, “You wanna be Black, homie!” He then begins to

62  Love Dances instruct Sakamoto in how to strut like a hyper-​macho Black man. Sakamoto mimics the motions, but ends up looking floppy and silly. Harris puts a hand to his eyes and says, “Man, you are killing me!” Then it is Sakamoto’s turn. He begins to wave his arms gently and tells Harris that if he wants to be a real Asian he has to relax and “breathe without breathing.” Harris is, naturally, confused by this instruction. “Ain’t nuthin’ happening,” he exclaims. Sakamoto continues smoothly bending and straightening his legs, then calls out, “Don’t really follow me . . . but follow me.” Again, Harris is confounded. This lighthearted exchange reminds us that despite noting similarities between popping and butoh, and even despite the dancers’ work to stitch the two forms together, we must also acknowledge the impossibility of fully inhabiting an other’s cultural-​corporeal history. The artists’ failures to transmit remind us not to make too much of presumed equivalences. They are an acknowledgment of the limits of intercultural collaboration, and of how those limits are inextricable from our racial identities. It could also be argued, however, that the attempt to collaborate does not only remind us of what is incommensurable. The sharing that we see in Flash also reminds us that commiseration helps us to process trauma. In an interview with me (2017), Harris explained that he normally does not do collaborations. Even though in much of his past work he has been quite revealing about his experience with childhood sexual assault, he claimed that performing alongside another artist made him feel much more exposed. At the same time, he acknowledged, there was a way in which he felt compelled to expose his damaged self even more fully in collaboration with Sakamoto. He discussed how Sakamoto’s considerate nature, his habit of bringing tea and gifts to their rehearsals, and of persistently asking and listening, helped to lower Harris’s barriers. Harris admitted to usually not being comfortable in the face of another’s suffering (he gave as an example an incident with a very good male friend who was going through a romantic breakup and who had asked Harris to come over and spend a moment with him and how Harris had made an excuse out of his own discomfort). He noted how Sakamoto’s compassion encouraged a common thoughtfulness. He, too, began to bring drinks and snacks to rehearsals. Harris also conjectured that his painful stories encouraged Sakamoto to likewise reveal his own hurts. Facing the other exposes our vulnerabilities, exposes us to potential brutality, reminds us of our incompatibilities, the mystery and the torment. Let us not forget, however, that it also incites shared grieving, care, and sociality. Commiseration is a practice of mutual empathy. The face of the lover

Mourning: Flash and Simulacrum  63 is invested with oneself. Or, in Mayan thought, In Lak’ech, or translated to Spanish, Tu eres mi otro yo, you are my other me (Pérez 2019). Joshua Chambers-​Letson (2018) calls this kind of mutually inspired caring a “communism of incommensurability.” In his book After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life, he explores the “communist” possibilities of minoritarian performance in the face of social death: Performance, like communism, like the party, is an ephemeral, temporary happening in which singular beings crash into each other for a time to become a being singular plural [this is a reference Jean-​Luc Nancy]. But then the dawn breaks, the performance ends, the party comes undone, and they slip away from each other, falling back into the void. The party is the communism of incommensurability where, as Siouxsie [1980s punk artist Siouxsie Sioux of Siouxsie and the Banshees] described it, an “aura of sadness abounds [in] you” but gives way to being-​with and being together-​ in-​difference, where the past isn’t lost, the future isn’t foreclosed, and the present is the presence of infinite, boundless, and renewable life. (xxi–​xxii)

Driven to write his book while grieving the death of his mentor, performance scholar José Muñoz, Chambers-​Letson writes a hopeful “manifesto” for communism where he celebrates the work of queer-​of-​color performing artists who resist their everyday conditions of annihilation via radical sociality. Flash is exemplary of the sorrowfully generative, mournfully lively communism of incommensurability that Chambers-​Letson theorizes. Or, as Moten puts it, linking performances of mourning to life to death to resistance to love: “Black Art, which is to say Black Life, which is to say Black (Life Against) Death, which is to say Black Eros” (2003, 72).

Simulacrum Let me now shift to an intercultural duet called Simulacrum, which is performed by Daniel Proietto, an Argentinian contemporary dancer who is also trained in kabuki, and Kojima Shoji, a celebrated flamenco dancer from Japan. Simulacrum is produced by a Norwegian dance theater company called winter guests (a name without capital letters) and directed by the company’s artistic director, Alan Lucien Øyen. Øyen was trained in ballet and contemporary dance and performed professionally for the Norwegian

64  Love Dances national company of contemporary dance, Carte Blanche. In 2006 he established his own company, winter guests, and he has been prolific in his production of dance theater works characterized by dramatic poignancy and visual elegance. In 2018, he was one of the first two guest choreographers commissioned to create a full-​ length piece for Tanztheater Wuppertal after Pina Bausch’s passing. He has been supported by the Norwegian Arts Council since 2004. Øyen consistently adopts a collective approach in his winter guest productions and Simulacrum is exemplary of this. The sets were co-​designed by a US American and a Norwegian designer and the script was written, with Øyen, by British playwright and frequent writing partner Andrew Wade. The work was created during residencies in Norway, France, Japan, and the United States. The piece, as these facts suggest, is a highly intercultural collaboration. At the heart of the collaboration, of course, are Kojima and Proietto. Proietto is in his mid-​thirties, a beautifully fluid and lithe contemporary dancer, who, remarkably, was allowed to be trained in kabuki by legendary master and culture-​keeper Kanjuro Fujima VIII. Kabuki is a four-​hundred-​ year-​old Japanese performance form passed down through the bloodlines of ordained families; it is usually performed only by men. Proietto was taught the traditional role of the female impersonator, or the onnagata. Meanwhile, Kojima is in his late seventies, a lauded flamenco dancer who left Japan as a young man in the 1960s and journeyed for three weeks across the Siberian hinterlands and down to Spain in order to study flamenco. After many years of performing in Spain he returned to Japan and started a school and dance company. Whereas Flash demonstrates the ways that butoh and hip-​hop share similar origin narratives and aesthetic impulses, Simulacrum explores the chiasmus of an Argentinian man dancing Japanese onnagata alongside a Japanese man dancing Spanish flamenco (in this way the piece is an East-​ West-​South intercultural collaboration). Both men, in several sections, dance in drag. Kojima is inspired by the famed Argentinian flamenco dancer La Argentina (Antonia Mercé) (figure 2.3a). Proietto impersonates Kojima’s mother (­figure 2.3b). The intricately timed and choreographed piece is divided in two parts. The second part is a specially commissioned nihon buyo (Japanese classical dance) choreographed by Master Fujima; it is danced by Proietto in full onnagata costume and makeup and tells the tragic story of Kojima’s mother, who was forced to give up her son to her brother and his wife, who were unable to have a biological child of their own.

Figure 2.3a  Kojima Shoji in Simulacrum (2016). Photo by Martin Flack.

Figure 2.3b  Daniel Proietto and Kojima Shoji in Simulacrum (2016). Photo by Martin Flack.

66  Love Dances The first part, which is the main object of my analysis, references this story, among other interwoven ficto-​biographical narratives. Simulacrum opens with Kojima tracing elegant flamenco gestures in the air to a spare and wistful melody. Proietto interrupts, asking, “Shoji, what are you looking for?” Kojima explains that he is remembering the fishpond in his childhood home. Memory and recollection become important concerns in the piece. A procession of scenes unfolds in which Kojima and Proietto address each other or the audience, dance solo or in synchronicity, and step in and out of flamenco, kimono, and pedestrian dress. Proietto describes his onnagata training: “It’s not the drag I’m attracted to; it’s the possibility of a complete transformation. . . . Okay, and the drag.” Kojima puts on flamenco shoes and takes up a fan while a pedantic male voice describes the basic elements of flamenco. An intricately crafted wooden dais with pull-​out drawers, steps, ledges, and a folding shoji screen serves as a key actor and anchor in the piece. At one point, Proietto and Kojima sit on the dais pantomiming a journey by train—​ Kojima is traveling from Tokyo to Madrid while Proietto is on the subway in Buenos Aires (figure 2.4). Shadow images of a landscape skim past on the shoji screen. Proietto discusses his childhood in Buenos Aires: poverty, family fights, numerous moves, experiences of alienation, lecherous older

Figure 2.4  Daniel Proietto and Kojima Shoji in Simulacrum (2016). Photo by Martin Flack.

Mourning: Flash and Simulacrum  67 men mistaking him for a girl, and, finally, gender drag and dance as escape routes. Following after this scene, an old film of La Argentina plays on the screen. Kojima, long hair trailing down his back, dances alongside her image, perhaps re-​enacting his initial thrill upon seeing her as a young man and, at that moment, committing to learn flamenco. Scenes continue to shift. The artists share more memories from their childhoods, demonstrate their respective forms, dance together, listen to and watch each other. Recollections are conveyed in fragments, sometimes fictionalized in their performative representation, sometimes enacted by the other performer. Sections are deliberately spliced in nonlinear fashion, verbalized stories are separated from their choreographed representations, dance demonstrations interject at unexpected moments, stories begin and then resume again later. Themes of nostalgia, yearning, and grief, along with displays of craft, artistry, and care, resound throughout. Øyen titled the piece Simulacrum in reference to Jean Baudrillard’s theory of simulacra. According to Baudrillard, who develops this idea in his 1981 book Simulacra and Simulation, our society is saturated with symbols and signs rather than true meanings and real things. He argues that, in this age (the early 1980s, but, of course, highly prescient of this early twenty-​first-​century digital age), human experience is merely a series of simulations of experiences. Furthermore, these simulations are not faithful references to anything real or originary, but are in fact copies for which there is no original, nor even any pretense of an original. Our contemporary reality is pure simulacra. For Øyen, the idea of the simulacra feels apt for a dance theater piece with so many layers of appropriation, mimicry, transmission, translation, and fictionalized autobiography. About onnagata, Proietto pronounces, “Women watching men play women to learn how to be more attractive to men. A simulacrum. The truth distorted to influence authenticity.” These layers of performative representation, of cross-​cultural adoption, of gender acts, suggest both an unfaithfulness to authenticity and also the invention of new imaginaries. I argue that Simulacrum emphasizes the productive power of fabrication—​as a strategy for healing trauma, for liberating the self, and for cultivating cross-​cultural empathy. Put another way, I think Øyen’s choice of “Simulacrum” as a title signals a kind of creative mourning, a production in/​of absence, a generation in the shape of loss. As with Flash, loss is palpable in both the form and the content of Simulacrum. It manifests in language mistranslation, in non-​correspondences

68  Love Dances between text and dance, in the in-​between spaces of intercultural and gender drag, and via stories of abandonment, death, poverty, and social rejection. At the level of form, loss manifests in the multiple structures of mediation at play in the piece. First, there is language mediation. Several layers of linguistic translation are necessary both in the creative process that gave rise to Simulacrum and in the performance of the piece itself. Of course, translation necessarily entails loss. It is impossible for the whole of a meaning to be fully transmitted in the move from one language to another; just as it is impossible for understanding to transmit completely across cultures. There are gaps, deficits, misses. For example, in the opening scene of the piece, Kojima and Proietto talk to each other in a combination of Spanish, English, and Japanese. Then Proietto interrupts the dialogue and addresses the audience directly, explaining in English that, while he and Kojima communicate with each other mostly in Spanish with some Japanese, they cannot assume that their audiences are fluent in both of these languages, too, so they will continue the performance primarily in English. Already though, of course, spectators may have lost some things in the multilingual opening, and will continue to miss a few more pieces of untranslated dialogue as the piece progresses. Other necessities for language translation abounded in the development process for the piece as well. For example, in rehearsal, even though Proietto could speak with Kojima in Spanish, Øyen found that it was necessary also to have a Japanese-​English translator. At other times, a Spanish-​ English translator was required. (When I interviewed Kojima and Proietto together I also used the services of a translator, which adds a layer of mediation to my analysis of the performance.) There are moments, however, when the efforts and failures of translation can be paradoxically productive. In my interview with Øyen (2018a) he describes an evocative moment in the creative process during which Proietto and Kojima were on stage and Proietto was teaching Kojima some onnagata postures as they conversed quietly in Spanish (this ultimately becomes the scene I describe in the opening to this chapter). Proietto was giving instructions in Spanish: “Very smooth and soft with the hands. The back always has to be very small. Get your feet closer together, a little crossed in front.” “I’m going to fall!” Kojima responded. “It’s very difficult to be a woman.” A translator, meanwhile, whispered his English translation of their conversation to Øyen as they sat together observing from the house. Øyen was touched by the delicacy and intimacy of the moment, the care with which Proietto taught Kojima, the comfort in vulnerability that they were

Mourning: Flash and Simulacrum  69 able exhibit with each other. He also noted the seeming paradox of this agile Argentinian contemporary dancer instructing this older Japanese man in how to move like the ideal Japanese woman. Later, Øyen asked the translator to re-​enact and record his translations of the dialogue, hoping to recreate that whispered, breathy delivery in the final piece. It turned out, however, that the intimate moment could not be effectively replicated, and ultimately Øyen employed a trained actor to simulate the dialogue. It was this recording that became the voice-​over in the scene as it ultimately manifested in the work. (These multiply layered translations share similarities with a process I will discuss in c­ hapter 3 in a duet called Spiel.) I should briefly note that the fact of Øyen’s position as receiver in this moment, not to mention director of the piece as a whole, reminds me that he serves as yet another important level of mediation. As I discuss in ­chapters 1 and 3, mediation is an inherent part of the process of intercultural performance and, in fact, is one vehicle for transmitting the pedagogical value of collaboration. These examples of linguistic reinterpretation underscore the tone of loss, but also of creative generation, or intercultural learning, that characterizes Simulacrum. Another formal component of the piece that is imbued with loss is the intermedial combination of text and choreography. As in all of the other duets I discuss in Love Dances, Proietto and Kojima both talk and dance. And, as in the other duets, I wonder about this mixture. What does the talking afford that the dancing does not? What does the dancing afford that the talking does not? What is afforded in putting them together? In Simulacrum, verbal text is used in various ways: direct address to the audience, fourth-​wall soliloquy, dialogue between Kojima and Proietto (sometimes as themselves in the present, sometimes as imagined versions of themselves from the past), and recorded voice-​over by a third person—​once in the form of an authoritative “audio guide” that describes the traits of flamenco and, later, as a translation of dialogue as Proietto instructs Kojima in how to be an onnagata (the scene I have already described). In the audio guide moment, talking serves a parodically didactic function: as Kojima demonstrates basic flamenco positions, the narrator explains, “The arm work, or braseo, is always expressive. These fluid movements are usually initiated by the elbows. The hand movements, or floreo, are completely separate from the braseo. The rhythmic units are called compas, which include twelve, four, or three beats.” The authority of the description works as a counterpoint to the uncertainty and intangibility of memory and of artistic transmission that we experience in the surrounding scenes. For example, not long after

70  Love Dances the audio guide narration, the dancers go to Kojima’s childhood home, only to discover that Kojima has left the key in Tokyo, perhaps deliberately. (In my 2018 interview with him, Øyen recalls this experience of their trip to the city of Mugi, arriving at the house before Kojima revealed that he had not brought the key.) Proietto encourages him to describe the inside of the house. Kojima repeats over and over, “No me recuerdo. No me recuerdo.” I don’t remember. The mind refuses what it does not wish to recover. Not everything is open to elucidation.4 I want to take a moment to note that this is a refusal on Kojima’s part to recall a difficult personal moment, but also an interdiction to others who would presume entry. Passive refusal is a trope I note in several collaborations in this book. In ­chapter 1, Klunchun declines Bel’s attempt to drop his trousers; in ­chapter 3, Otake Eiko fakes the improvisational structure and ducks the questions asked of her. It is not incidental that it is the Asian artist in the pair who resorts to a performance of “inscrutability” (a historically Orientalist stereotype) in these moments of attempted apprehension. I think that these deliberate little escapes from knowability are acts of agency and critique in the face of what Vivian L. Huang identifies as white Western expectations of “Asian hospitality” (2018). They are subversions that push against a persistent history of Western colonial incursion into Asia and politically convenient constructions of Asians as subservient and submissive. While the collaborations I discuss in Love Dances vary in degrees of equity, we cannot forget the framework of Orientalism that still inflects all of these works. Klunchun, Kojima, and Otake each obligingly open themselves up to intimate collaboration with their European partners, but there are also small moments in which they assert their sovereignty through an ironic co-​optation of the stereotype of “Oriental” inscrutability. I would argue that these moments also turn the lens on the spectator, who similarly must question their own set of racialized expectations about Asian passivity. Kojima has made himself available to these two Western male collaborators (three counting the writer Andrew Wade): he has given them his personal story of childhood trauma, with which they have taken artistic license, translating it into dance theater; he has submitted himself to Øyen’s artistic direction, which Øyen has noted was at times challenging (2018a); and he has accepted Proietto’s efforts to teach him Japanese nihon buyo. It is not a wonder that Kojima would balance this level of openness with a few small rebuffs. Nor is it a wonder that these dynamics are racially inflected.5

Mourning: Flash and Simulacrum  71 To return to my discussion of the gaps between text and movement, the voice-​over of the dance lesson between Proietto and Kojima offers a less pedantic moment of instruction than the audio-​guide scene I have described. Like Kojima’s neglecting of the key, it is a moment in which possible presumptions about the ownership of cultural-​corporeal knowledge are challenged. It is also a moment of physical vulnerability and unfamiliarity: the Argentinian man teaching the Japanese man how to move like a “Japanese woman.” Kojima is not fully successful in assuming the onnagata movements. In both scenes, the dancers’ movements mime the words we hear in the voice-​over, thus synchronizing text and dance. Even as we see this synchrony, however, I would nevertheless argue that ultimately we are jarred from the comfort of epistemological certainty. The miming of movement to words acts as a kind of hyperbole set against the disjunctive mimicries and imaginaries surrounding: of a young Latino man instructing an older Japanese gentleman, of Kojima’s spindly Japanese form dancing flamenco with his long hair and John Lennon sunglasses, of Proietto disappearing behind a screen and transforming into the silhouette of an onnagata, of the dancers’ fragmentary misrememberings. I think that the moments of simultaneity belie the larger truth that things are never that simple. This disjunction is made even more clear in other sections throughout the piece where dance and text are intertwined. For example, at one point, Proietto, speaking in the first person, recites a memory Kojima once told of escaping a tsunami and, that night, watching a young boy’s drowned body dancing in the silvery waves. Proietto says he/​Kojima was five or six. Later, Kojima says he was seven. Then, several sections removed, at the end of the piece, Proietto inhabits the dancing body of the boy, skimming under a watery spotlight, his lissome form spinning, arching, falling, drowning, reaching. At that point, Proietto’s achingly beautiful dance is paired with Kojima’s text recalling his sadness as a skinny, fragile boy watching as other boys fished. He remembers sitting on the beach with the “visiting aunt” whom he knew to be his mother, though this fact was never spoken. He repeats the sorrowful phrase, “You just have to get used to some things—​when there is no choice.”6 Proietto, who speaks as Kojima in the earlier text, now becomes the boy, or maybe also Kojima’s mother, but also Kojima himself—​and perhaps Proietto represents grieving more generally, and maybe also resilience. In fact, Kojima’s repeated phrase about “getting used to some things” might be translated into the common Japanese expression, shikata ga nai, or “It cannot be helped.” Though this expression is more conventionally understood as an

72  Love Dances attitude of resignation, I argue that the phrase as asserted by Kojima might also be interpreted as an utterance of endurance. I want to align the expression with the other instances of passivity I have previously named, acts of passivity that, I argue, are also performances of agency. As with Huang’s theorization of hospitality, we might reframe an understanding of shikata ga nai not merely as a form of defeatism, but perhaps also as an expression of resilience in the face of loss. In my interview with Øyen, he acknowledges that grief is a preoccupation in his work. In fact, of the final scene I have described, Øyen states that there is a letting go happening, “a death”—​he is referring to the dying boy as well as to Kojima’s repeated phrase of forbearance (“You just have to get used to some things—​when there is no choice”). Interestingly, within his remark about death, Øyen also shifts quickly to the “third setup” that he says is afforded by talking and dancing. Form and content enmesh here. The gaps in decipherability that arise in the space between the two forms make room for a paradoxically hyper-​abundant absence, a revelation in negation: The letting go. There’s a death in that, making these kinds of juxtapositions, which sometimes creates a third setup. That’s why I like dance and text, as well, because you kind of over-​inform the audience, so you’re forced to take in two levels of information. . . . I think of it a little bit like negation. You know, the dance isn’t really there, but it is. Removing part of the information gives something richer, saying, “The house was not on fire,” which gives you information about a house that’s standing there, and the image of a burning building. You get twice as much. . . . It’s the things that aren’t there that get to be there, if you know what I mean. (2018a)

For Øyen, the effect of offering text and movement together is not for one mode to affirm the other—​the corporeal to symbolize the literal or the literal to clarify the corporeal—​but, in fact, for each to belie any presumptions of conviction on the part of the other. In the ongoing juxtaposition of both, one mode repeatedly suggests something the other does not, bringing a wisp of an idea into smoky vision and thereby also signaling its absence. In the space of this absence we fill our imaginative yearnings, our fabricated simulacra, our creations of things that are not there. The remains of loss. The aesthetic choice to juxtapose dance and text, to remove information, to creatively imagine stories as they did (not) happen—​these are tied to telling stories about grief. Øyen folds his discussion of a preoccupation with

Mourning: Flash and Simulacrum  73 mortality into a description of his interest in memory and storytelling. He says he is “obsessed with death” and describes his artistic fascination as being with that which is “compressed between the bookends of life and death.” He goes on to explain that we tell stories as ways “of looking back, to be able to go forward somehow.” In other words, loss integration. The bicycle in the tree. Storytelling is itself an inherently mournful process. It is both true and always also false, false because it is a narrative retrieved from memory, which is always faulty (always imbued with loss) and always also creative (always therefore imbued with gain). The losses constitutive of the formal choices in Simulacrum work to resonate the themes of mourning that make up the content of the piece. I want to turn to one last aspect of form that is an expression of loss and simultaneous creative remains. Intercultural and gender drag are significant to this work, which is, after all, titled Simulacrum. Rebecca Schneider (2011), in her discussion of performance re-​enactment, troubles an idea of simulacra as empty, fake, or valueless (while it could be argued that Baudrillard inflects the term with a certain disdain). She draws on Elizabeth Freeman’s formulation of “temporal drag” as an insistence on the presence of pastness in instances of re-​performance and the ways that this asynchronicity is crucial to a queer politics (14–​15). The various forms of drag performed in Simulacrum likewise work against normative, linear time and antitheatrical commitments to “authenticity” in order to affirm the value of queer performativity, or, in other words, the generativity of the fake, the dreamed, the transitive. The story of the drowning boy, with its danced evocation several scenes removed, is just one example of the “temporal drag” in Simulacrum: the ways in which the dancers shift in and out of different roles, different memories, the ways that the piece enacts the fragmentary, nonlinear nature of recollection, and the ways that unrelated fragments, juxtaposed, reveal unexpected connections and new ideas. Of course, I do not reference Freeman’s term “temporal drag” merely theoretically. While not always explicit, queerness I do think, is at play in Simulacrum. I should note that Kojima does not discuss his gender or sexuality publicly, nor his choice to wear his hair long and dance in a skirt—​and his flamenco dancing remains within the male tradition. Øyen conjectures that his choice to dance in a skirt might be a way to conjure his mother—​ thus a form of temporal drag (correspondence, June 11, 2020). As I have already pointed out, he does discuss his social ostracization as a “fragile” boy. Meanwhile, Proietto identifies as pansexual, though Øyen tells me that his

74  Love Dances childhood struggles with acceptance were more to do with class than sexuality. Obviously, queerness is intersectional with other identity categories, including race, age, class, and religion. Both artists discuss the social alienation they experienced as children due to their gender nonconformity. Both find freedom in gender drag, as well as in cross-​cultural transformation. I think that these transformations serve as strategies of recovery from experiences of oppressive gender and sexual norming (figure 2.5). In my earlier discussion of Michael Sakamoto’s fascination with Fred Astaire, I gestured toward the idea of disidentification. The late performance studies scholar José Muñoz (1999) champions the “worldmaking” possibilities of queer-​of-​color practices of disidentification.7 He argues that, in response to experiences of social violence, queer subjects paradoxically retrieve the white, heteronormative codes of the cultural mainstream in ways that parodically read themselves into these (now subverted) codes. Insisting on a radical politics via hope and futurity, Muñoz cites these performances of disidentification (neither identification nor counter-​identification) as strategies of survival for queer-​of-​color subjects.8 Proietto’s performance of kabuki, a traditional Japanese performance form whose strict gender codes are enforced by men in drag, might be a practice of disidentification. At several

Figure 2.5  Kojima Shoji and Daniel Proietto in Simulacrum (2016). Photo by Martin Flack.

Mourning: Flash and Simulacrum  75 moments in the piece, Proietto slips into different kimono and transforms himself into an onnagata. In one scene, Kojima helps him change while Proietto tells us, in somber voice-​over, how dressing in a kimono reminds him of a beloved photograph of himself as a child wearing a polka dot dress. And then he wonders about his own memory of the event that caused him to be wearing the beloved lost dress, which spurs a thought about how many treasured things he lost as a child because of the family’s multiple displacements. In another scene, Proietto expresses the ambivalent disgust and thrill he felt when men leered at him on the subway as a young boy. He says, “We are all transformed by each other’s attention.” Loss and the elation of both gender and intercultural transformation become interconnected in his mind. In dancing as an onnagata, Proietto shapes a third space of imagination, an Orientalized space of the exotic, for sure, maybe even an example of yellowface, but maybe also a counterpublic space that straddles between embrace and rejection of gender conformity, a space of possibility for a man who remembers the fraught exaltation he felt as a boy wearing his sister’s polka dot dress. Similarly, Kojima masters the art of flamenco perhaps as a strategy of defiance, of self-​determination, and maybe also a practice of mourning. A fragile boy, abandoned by his mother, he embraces a quintessentially Spanish, quintessentially gendered form. Called a “Chinaman” in the early years of his training, he later won awards in Spain and now dazzles with his prowess. And sometimes he dances in a skirt. As in racial melancholy, Asian American alienation, and Black social death, loss similarly inheres in queer life. I think that Simulacrum expresses the deep, perhaps not fully articulable, imbrications of Proietto’s and Kojima’s gender traumas, the other formidable tragedies of their lives, and their performances of intercultural, interracial, and gender drag as means of resilience. Again, perseverance in the shape of loss.

Conclusion In this chapter on mourning, I have argued that intercultural collaboration can be a practice of collective lamentation and thereby of creative generation in the face of loss, a sort of assessment of the remains. As Chambers-​Letson states it, referencing Jean Luc-​Nancy, “Death gives birth to community” (2018, xvi). And in Nancy’s own words, “It is death—​but if one is permitted to say so it is not tragic death, or else, if it is more accurate to say it this way,

76  Love Dances it is not mythic death, or death followed by resurrection, or the death that plunges into a pure abyss: it is death as sharing and exposure, it is death as the unworking that unites us” (quoted in Chambers-​Letson 2018, xvi). In coming together to make art and performing for spectators, Harris and Sakamoto, Proietto and Kojima, unwork loss. This is not to say that they “get over” it, but that they expose it, share it, and thus transform themselves in its image. As Chambers-​Letson further explains it: There is one thing that no one can be fully emancipated from. Death, like performance, is a central site for the production of collective being, and in the face of death’s unjust distribution to black and brown queer and trans people, minoritarian performance becomes a means for sustaining life—​ life that is still living, as well as the lives that we have already lost. (28)

To return to the image of the bicycle that has grown into and with the tree, we are shaped by our losses. But sharing our sorrow generates community. And community is an affirmation of life. At the same time, with connection inevitably comes more loss. I believe that intercultural collaboration teaches

Figure 2.6  Michael Sakamoto and Rennie Harris in Flash (2015). Photo by JaNelle Traylor.

Mourning: Flash and Simulacrum  77 us both of these things: that commiseration is generative and that connection is inevitably also loss. Anticipating this book’s next chapter, however, let us say that loss is inextricable from love. “The face of a lover is an unknown, precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment” (Baldwin [1962] 2013, 172). I argue that performing empathetic grief across the unknowability of difference is an act of love. In this respect, Harris and Sakamoto, Proietto and Kojima, are lovers. In a significant moment in Flash, Sakamoto dances beside a stationary Harris, under a voice-​over of Sakamoto reciting, first, a list of body parts (which makes me think of a score for a popping dance), then of action words, and lastly the word “love,” at which point he directs a palm to Harris’s heart. Harris reacts with a chest contraction. Love and pain, connection and avoidance. The concluding section, accompanied by “Nothing Compares 2 U,” is the final statement of love and torment. The lyrics of the song express mourning for love lost and the incomparability of the lover. The dancers dance independently of one another, asserting their individual bodily sovereignty, then they come together for thirty-​two counts of synchrony, and finally they turn stage right and follow each other out as the lights fade. Flash and Simulacrum represent continuous, ongoing acts of tenacious, mournful, failed communion in the shape of loss (figure 2.6). Or, as Sakamoto puts it, “Flash is the instant of knowing and loss, of the wisdom of not-​knowing. It’s the moment after you were about to give up the search but before your ego kicks in and muddies the waters. Flash is illumination, stealthiness, transcendence, the impermanence of life and the urgency of transformation” (2017a, 84).

3 Loving Spiel and Talking Duet

In February 2013 I was in Toulouse, France, to attend a performance of Spiel, a collaboration between Vietnamese French contemporary dance choreographer Emmanuelle Huynh and Japanese butoh artist Kasai Akira.1 The evening of the performance began with a long wait in the vestibule of the theater as the audience slowly assembled, squeezing into the shrinking space. At last we were released into the theater. The seats were arranged on risers along three sides of a black marley stage. Ushers stationed at the edges of the stage pointedly warned us not to step on the marley as we took our seats. Watching audience members file into the theater was a performance in itself. Repeatedly, people walked onto the marley to get around to a seat. The ushers, and then eventually other audience members, would admonish them. This process became a kind of lighthearted game we all watched and participated in: noting people who stepped onto the marley and cautioning them collectively. I note this pre-​performance event because I think it suggests something intriguing about each of the two pieces I analyze in this chapter. The second piece, Talking Duet, is another collaboration Emmanuelle Huynh initiated, this time with Otake Eiko. In Spiel, the boundary established and transgressed that evening in Toulouse reminds us of the performative nature of the duet to come and thus highlights it as a tripartite, rather than simply dual, exchange. Likewise, Talking Duet, despite being called a duet, highlights this trilateral dynamic even further because of its explicit inclusion of a moderator and audience questioning. The third spaces in these encounters thus become important components of study. As I argue at the beginning of this book, in our era of accelerated global contact and mobility, cross-​ cultural encounter and exchange are more and more a part of all forms of cultural practice, not to say life in general. Interculturalism is a contemporary fact and a necessary dilemma. What are the limits and the possibilities of mutual understanding? How do we

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Loving: Spiel and Talking Duet  79 connect with our cultural others? I contend that Spiel and Talking Duet, as body-​to-​body, person-​to-​person intercultural exchanges performed in front of an audience, carry the potential to model how we might work through encounters with alterity off the stage and in the world. This is why the space for the audience in Toulouse, and the questions from the audience in Talking Duet, become so important. They emphasize the pedagogical nature of this dance work. That said, these duets are not intercultural productions with a capital “I.” In fact, they are not promoted by the artists as intercultural so much as interpersonal. In this book’s introduction, I lay out a brief history of intercultural theater and dance, from the epic productions of the 1980s through to the “new interculturalisms” of today, which are messier and less pronounced in their boundaries. The choreographers I study in this chapter are internationally known artists who, while not mounting epic productions that stage collaborations across grand national cultural traditions—​what Daphne Lei (2011) has termed “Hegemonic Intercultural Theatre (HIT)”—​are also not necessarily representing particular local minority communities either. For example, Huynh’s collaborative work has been funded by the French Institute Alliance Français and by the French Institute of Japan, so there is no denying that she represents “French Culture” in her international projects. Still, the intercultural collaborations I discuss here, like the collaborations I study throughout this book, beg examination not as encounters of difference across established monolithic traditions (“French Culture” or “Japanese Culture” with capital letters), but as processes of discovery that are as much intersubjective as intercultural—​exemplary of a “new interculturalism.” As processes, I borrow from Leo Cabranes-​Grant’s (2016) notion that intercultural encounter is an “engine of emergence,” rather than just a contact zone at which two statically defined cultures meet (though, as I discuss later, I am more interested in the engine than the emergence). Further, the broader artistic forms in which these dancers work (butoh, European contemporary dance) are deeply inextricable from their personal aesthetics as individuals. I look at duets in this book, and in this chapter, rather than large-​group productions. In contradistinction to studies of HIT work, it is the personal approach to interculturalism that animates my analysis, even while I argue that these individual experiences provide a kind of pedagogy of cross-​cultural encounter for spectators, a wider lesson in intercultural comportment. Incidentally, these two duets contribute to the conversation on new interculturalisms in another way, as well. Following Royona Mitra’s (2015)

80  Love Dances book on Akram Khan, this chapter similarly examines the work of a well-​ established Asian European choreographer seeking out collaborations with other Asian artists, acknowledging the postcolonial, transnational complexities of representations of Westernness and Otherness in contemporary intercultural work where the boundaries between the West and the rest are not always so clear. As I will demonstrate, however, dynamics of power are still present in these not-​quite-​East-​not-​quite-​West pairings. In addition to thinking about these duets as forms of pedagogy for intercultural work, this chapter also examines the efficaciousness of different modes of intercultural collaboration in performance, namely talking and dancing, and improvisation as opposed to set choreography. Of course, this, too, is a thread I follow throughout the book. Pichet Klunchun and Myself, which I discuss in c­ hapter 1, is a scripted dual interview and, thus, consists predominantly of talking with occasional dance demonstrations. Flash and Simulacrum, which I cover in ­chapter 2, are choreographed works that blend dance with some voice-​over and some live scripted verbalization. What is different in Spiel and Talking Duet is that the combination of talking and dancing is improvised. As in all of the duets in Love Dances, I am curious about this multimodal approach. Why do these dancers turn to language in their collaborations? Is talking somehow a more effective mode of cross-​ cultural comprehension? Why dance at all then? What does talking accomplish that dancing does not? And vice versa? Or is the combination of both talking and dancing a more complete model of intercultural exchange? Specifically here, I add the question: what is the effect of improvisation? Of all the pieces I study in Love Dances, these are the only two that rely entirely on improvisation of both text and movement. Is improvisation more amenable to intercultural connection than set choreography? I believe that the element of vulnerability, of openness to unforeseeable change, that improvisation necessitates is crucial to consider in answering this question. Related to the element of vulnerability, I continue my investigation of the notion of Asian passivity as a practice of decolonial agency. The possibilities in improvisation for balancing both receptivity and, at times, selective refusal allow for a certain form of political assertion that does not compromise a willingness to collaborate. To recapitulate, I am interested in the pedagogy of third spaces and the efficacy of different modes of intercultural exchange. In conjunction with these interests, however, I also examine ideas of potentiality and failure, love and loss. I explore the ways that the triangular structure of these performances

Loving: Spiel and Talking Duet  81 opens up a form of understanding not available in a private duet. Performance creates a site for modeling exchange more broadly. Accordingly, making these duets social is a way to visibilize the potentialities, but also the failures and repudiations that happen across difference; the losses in translation between the dancers, but also the sincerity and the love. To conclude, I consider love as the guiding principle for a relationship of idealized potentiality, of never fully realized but ever sought genuine exchange and mutual understanding. Ultimately, it is love that I want to stress as the key condition of an ethical interculturalism. Love is not a state, but more a delicate process—​a dance—​of balancing opposing forces: separation and connection, loss and gain, autonomy and care, refusal and vulnerability. These opposing forces are in operation throughout the dances I discuss in this chapter. It is their careful negotiation that determines an ethics of intercultural encounter, a collaboration across cultural difference that is approached with love.

Spiel Spiel is a mutual improvisation between two artists with different cultural backgrounds, different formal training, different genders, different native languages. Emmanuelle Huynh was born in 1963 to a Vietnamese father and a French mother. She grew up in France and trained in contemporary dance. Before launching her own company, she danced with Nathalie Collantes, Hervé Robbe, Odile Duboc, Catherine Contour, and the Knust Quartet. Her first acclaimed solo work was Mua (1995), a piece performed entirely in darkness and inspired by Huynh’s first visit to Vietnam. From 2004 to 2012 she was the director of the Centre National de Danse Contemporaine in Angers, France (Huynh, n.d., under “Plateforme Múa”). Huynh is known for her intimate, cerebral work; she is deeply receptive and adaptive to the bodies and spaces that she includes in her highly collaborative performances. Kasai Akira (b. 1943) is a Japanese butoh dancer who was mentored by butoh pioneers Ohno Kazuo and Hijikata Tatsumi and is considered to be among the most influential of the early butoh practitioners. After studying with Ohno and Hijikata in the 1960s, Kasai moved to Germany in 1979 and spent seven years studying eurythmy, a form that has been crucial to his aesthetic. His work is characterized by its liveliness and verticality, which contrasts with conventional ideas of butoh as extremely slow and low to the ground. He has said that his dancing is more music-​oriented than visually based. Importantly,

82  Love Dances Kasai views dance as an inherently social activity meant to engage at the affective intersection between dancer and audience (Wikipedia 2020). When Huynh and Kasai first met they used neither French nor Japanese (nor Vietnamese), but another language, German, in order to communicate. This is what Homi Bhabha (2004, 55) would term an “enunciation” across the “Third Space” of cultural difference, an enunciation that articulates the hybridity of all culture in a postcolonial world. In addition to talking with each other during the creative process, the two artists engaged each other in a game of choreographic “playback” (borrowed from contact improviser Lisa Nelson), where each would copy the movements of the other. Incidentally, the word “spiel” in English means a long speech or a sales pitch, while in German it means a game. Both meanings are at work in this duet. In her artist’s notes, Huynh (2010) discusses their process as an opportunity to “step into each other’s movement ‘houses,’ visiting them, crossing certain thresholds together.” She describes their work as an experience of “transubstantiation” and of climbing “inside the skin of the other person.” At the same time, she also acknowledges that there is a gap between original movement and copy, wanting to recognize it not as a loss but as “an interpretation.” Their work together becomes a form of “speaking across the gap.” Huynh’s descriptors shift between spatial or corporeal metaphors and verbal metaphors. This shifting echoes Bhabha’s Third Space of enunciation in which he similarly combines a spatial and a verbal metaphor, in his case, in order to theorize postcolonial encounter. Meanwhile, Levinas ([1961] 1998, [1974] 2011) describes the site at which our necessary relationship to an other occurs as a face-​ to-​face encounter. For Levinas, the face is the other that confronts us in its unassimilability and requires us to speak to it. Here, again, we can note a combination of corporeal and verbal metaphors in a theory of intersubjective encounter. Levinas, Bhabha, and Huynh, too, each describe cross-​ cultural engagement as a space between two bodies that is bridged by speech. I think that intercultural dance performance, however, realizes this bridge more completely in that speech is used literally but also becomes figurative for various mediums of transmission across difference, including kinesthetic exchange. When Huynh talks about making “a grammar of understanding” (Huynh and Kasai 2011) or “speaking across the gap” (Huynh 2010), she is referring not just to all of the conversations they had in rehearsal but also to their choreographic playback process, the way that they connect via re-​ performing each other’s movement. Levinas and Bhabha rely heavily on linguistic frameworks; Huynh’s work helps me to extend their formulations

Loving: Spiel and Talking Duet  83 about intersubjective encounter to consider how crucial not just language, or even just the body (Levinas’s ideas, after all, center the face), but the moving, dancing, expressive body, is to interculturalism. Let me describe the piece that resulted from the playback process. With the house lights still up, Huynh and Kasai sit upstage center in two chairs. They are both wearing black pants and black blazers, with red lipstick and red fingernails. Huynh rises, walks to center stage, and turns to face Kasai. She nods to him, then begins a short phrase, drops it, and casually returns to her chair. Kasai rises and takes Huynh’s place. He returns her nod and then copies her phrase, adding his own before returning upstage. Huynh steps forward and copies Kasai’s phrase, subsequently adding her own. This exchange continues for several cycles. The stark differences between the dancers become evident. He is slight and wiry; his movements jumpy, staccato, gnarled. She is broad jawed and broad shouldered; her dancing attenuated while also square and methodical. He is seventy; she is fifty. She imitates his movements more faithfully, at least in shape, though she can’t quite approach the frenetic quality of the original. He picks up on a few of her moves, but gets to them in his own way and shapes them according to his more tightly wound body and jerky tempo (figure 3.1a).

Figure 3.1a  Emmanuelle Huynh and Kasai Akira in Spiel (2010). Photo by Marc Domage.

84  Love Dances Gradually, the house lights dim and both dancers move into the stage space. They begin to improvise on their own. Each of them seems to occupy his or her own territory on the stage, often with their backs turned to one another, involved in their own actions (figure 3.1b). Kasai is focused on engaging the audience. He runs frantically from one bank of the three-​sided stage to the other, dancing right up at the edge of the marley, flinging his body around, slapping himself loudly, banging his knees to the floor repeatedly. He peels off layers of clothing until he is in just a dance belt. Even that he toys with removing. He looks out at the audience, working to get a reaction. He speaks directly to them, using short phrases in English. “The river!” he says, referring to the theater, Theatre Garonne, which is located on the bank of the Garonne River. “Je t’aime!” (I love you), he proclaims. On a few occasions, he touches a spectator. Huynh, meanwhile, dances in the spaces opposite Kasai. She does not address the audience either physically or verbally, but she does seem attentive to Kasai’s actions, following him in her peripheral vision. Huynh’s dancing is measured, her phrasing punctuated. She performs a sequence of several moves, pauses, perhaps faces another

Figure 3.1b  Emmanuelle Huynh and Kasai Akira in Spiel (2010). Photo by Marc Domage.

Loving: Spiel and Talking Duet  85

Figure 3.2  Kasai Akira and Emmanuelle Huynh in Spiel (2010). Photo by Marc Domage.

direction, performs another sequence. She dances alone but with awareness, gauging Kasai, marking the time. Every so often the dancers call out to each other—​short exchanges using a few German, English, or French words. “Dance or spiel,” Huynh says. “Akira,” she calls. A few times there seems to be some cue and they improvise together or perform a set phrase for a brief period and then dance away from each other again. Over time Huynh, too, removes her pants and jacket and dances in a camisole and panties. By the end they have both changed into white, silky slips (figure 3.2). The dance draws to a close when Huynh gradually makes her way back upstage to stand against the back wall; Kasai eventually follows her and the lights go to black.

Third Space: Lag, Displacement, Creative Remains In considering Huynh’s aims as stated in her artist’s notes, I wonder whether the dancers manage to “climb inside each other’s skin” (2010). It seems to me that their efforts to imitate one another, to inhabit each other’s movement styles and bodily habitus, are not fully seamless. Even the attempt simply

86  Love Dances to connect with one another and dance together is not always successful in this piece. In Bhabha’s (2004) formulation of the Third Space of postcolonial encounter he describes the notion of time lag as the disruption that occurs when the cultures of the colonizer and the colonized confront each other. This confrontation jars the discourse of progress falsely presumed by modernity. In Spiel, Huynh’s Vietnamese French identity, the intercultural legacy of Western modern dance, Kasai’s Japanese identity, the intercultural heritage of butoh, all of this combined with the dancers’ linguistic, age, and gender differences, produces a clash of multiple time-​spaces, bodily epistemologies, and colonial histories. Their collaboration could never be a smoothly synchronous event; it is necessarily a collection of lags. Dance scholar Deidre Sklar (2008) discusses kinesthetic remembering as an endeavor that is both immediate and displaced. The playback process is just this kind of kinesthetic remembering. It both brings another person’s actions into immediate subjective experience and is, at the same time, a temporal, spatial, and corporeal dislocation. As Huynh embodies Kasai’s movement sequence, re-​membering it as her own, she simultaneously decomposes it—​importing it to another time, another place, another body. This effect brings to mind Cabranes-​Grant’s (2016) use of the term “anaphora” (borrowing from Étienne Souriau) to describe his theory about the “networked” nature of intercultural encounter. In linguistics, anaphora is the repetition of certain words or clauses that refer back to other terms, or the replacing of a noun with a pronoun. Cabranes-​Grant explains, “Anaphora expands its range by reappearing at different locations; it creates lines of continuity by introducing variations and informative transfers. Metonymy amplifies proximity; metaphor mixes and conflates its elements; anaphora moves away in order to come back” (2016, 15). Anaphora thus allows us to understand interculturalism as a web of displaced connections. Huynh acknowledges the displacements in Spiel when she says, “It’s all about differences and not being able to communicate and being able through impossibility to understand each other” (Huynh and Kasai 2011). Here she expresses a paradox: understanding through impossibility. Huynh is aware that she and Kasai do not achieve mutual understanding, that total empathy is an impossibility. Still, she insists that they try. She says, “So it’s a process, [an] open process, so that people can understand that we are building our relationship environment, that we are building our understanding” (Huynh and Kasai 2011).

Loving: Spiel and Talking Duet  87 The thing to note here is Huynh’s description of the piece as an open process designed so that other people can recognize their efforts to build understanding. This work is not meant simply as a private exercise between Huynh and Kasai; it is a dance meant to be watched by others. And it is this relationship between the performers and the audience, the space between the marley stage and the spectators’ seats, that I argue carries some further potential for intercultural knowledge. Going back to my opening anecdote, this is why I find the admonitions about not stepping onto the marley so revealing. Paired with Kasai’s efforts to reach through to the audience and Huynh’s efforts to bring Kasai back into collaboration with her, these boundaries and boundary-​crossings highlight the potential that exists in that liminal space between interlocutors. The third space between Huynh and Kasai is the gap in translation, the lag in the playback, the anaphora, the dis-​placement between two bodies, that, I argue, is detectable by the audience. Borrowing from Rebecca Schneider’s (2011) work on performance re-​enactments, playback might be called a practice of “performing remains.” The idea of remains as a source of creative generation in the shape of loss is a recurring theme in Love Dances. Schneider argues that the presence of an audience at a re-​ enactment serves as the reminder of those remains, of the “leak” of time in re-​performance. In her discussion of Civil War re-​enactments she writes, “My presence and the presence of others who did not cross-​temporal-​ dress . . . always served as a reminder that it was not, or not entirely, 1861, 62, 63, 64, or 65” (9). As an audience member, I do not experience the internal kinesthetic remembering that would result from doing Kasai’s or Huynh’s phrases on my own body. Instead I observe, from outside, the residue, the stuff that Huynh does not manage to pick up from Kasai. I see that Kasai does not achieve the length of Huynh’s lines or the flow of her phrasing. Huynh does not capture the multidimensionality of Kasai’s shapes or the quirkiness of his timing. Kasai does not tune into a collaborative mode through much of the piece, and I notice the ignored cues, the pregnant but empty space between the two dancers, their backs to each other, on the stage. It is precisely my position on the other side of the marley that allows me this perspective. In fact, as Dee Reynolds (2012) argues in Kinesthetic Empathy, “the dance’s body” is that entity precisely between performer and spectator. The “body” of the dance, then, does not exist solely with the dancers, but in the relationship with their audience.

88  Love Dances In addition to their intercorporeal efforts on stage, words were an important element of Huynh’s and Kasai’s process of getting to know one another. Huynh says that in rehearsal they would dance for ten minutes and talk for an hour. She recorded all their conversations. As a companion to the performances of Spiel, Huynh intended to publish a book that chronicles her process with Kasai. In going back to audio from their sessions, however, she encountered the problem that she had only recorded the interpreter’s translations of Kasai’s words from Japanese into French, not Kasai himself speaking. Later, as a remedy, Huynh commissioned another translator to retranslate the French back into Japanese as a way to get back to Kasai’s original words. Then Kasai listened to these translations, editing them back into “his words.” Thus, in both the piece and the subsequent book, in both the corporeal and the textual modes of engagement, we see multiple efforts at playback, or anaphoric chains, and, consequently, multiple sites of disjunction and loss. Whether described temporally as lag, or spatially as displacement, intercultural encounter is never commensurable. Levinas built a philosophy of ethics around the assertion that the essence of our being is our debt to an other that will always be irreconcilable to us—​a subjectivity built upon the impossibility of intersubjectivity, or, as Huynh states it, “understanding through impossibility” (Huynh and Kasai 2011). Ultimately, Levinas does not prescribe an answer to the problem of intersubjectivity. What he offers is a recognition of its limits. For Levinas, we are resigned to the awareness that, even as our own selfhood is built upon a will to know the other, that other is always irreducible to us—​and that this is as it should be. I suggest that the audience is necessary in Spiel not to witness the successful attainment of mutual understanding between two people, but to note evidence of the impossibility of communion in intercultural encounter, to observe the lag, the dislocations and deformations, the pregnant emptiness of the space of exchange—​even as the dancers keep trying.

Talking Duet Despite the impossibility, Huynh is ever persistent in her efforts to connect with others. In 2013 she initiated a collaboration with Otake Eiko. Otake is a Japanese butoh-​informed dancer who has worked in the United States in deep partnership with her husband, Otake Takashi (they are called “Eiko and

Loving: Spiel and Talking Duet  89 Koma”) for forty years.2 Like Kasai, they originally trained under Hijikata Tatsumi and Ohno Kazuo as young students in Japan. Then, in the 1970s, they left for Europe and eventually the United States to pursue their own artistic path. In 2014, Otake began performing solo work, as well as collaborations with other artists. Huynh was introduced to Otake during a trip to New York. She became eager to learn about Otake, her artistry, and her life experiences. Together, Huynh and Otake developed a structured improvisation called Talking Duet, which they have since performed in Brussels (May 2015), New York (June 2015 and February 2016), and Berkeley (April 2016). As with Spiel, Talking Duet employs dancing and talking in a multimodal endeavor at mutual understanding. Unlike Spiel, the talking does not happen only primarily in rehearsal. As the title implies, talking is a central element of the performed work. In what follows, I describe the piece and examine its combination of verbal and corporeal methods, its failures and losses, and the triangulated third space of the “dance’s body” (Reynolds 2012). My analysis follows much the same path I follow with Spiel. To conclude, however, I shine a light on the hope and love that both pieces ultimately evoke. I participated in and observed Talking Duet performed on April 19, 2016, in the Bancroft Studio at UC Berkeley. Bancroft Studio is a converted church, with a soaring ceiling, gleaming wood floors, tall, paned windows on the south side, and a huge rose window on the west side. It is late afternoon and amber light streams through. The audience is seated across two long rows on the north and east sides of the studio. Otake and Huynh have placed two ballet barres at angles along the west side of the space. A large swath of red fabric lies across the floor on the northeast side. Otake’s grandmother’s purple kimono lies northwest of center. Newspapers are scattered across the stage perimeter on the east and north sides. Finally, Otake has set a large glass bowl of water (borrowed from Anna Halprin’s house) at the southeast side. I am the emcee and an interlocutor in the piece. I open by introducing the dancers’ biographies and the context for the piece and explaining how the structure will proceed, including the fact that audience members are invited to write out questions for the dancers and pass them to me. During this time, Otake and Huynh are already on stage, moving casually. Huynh does a series of yoga poses and stretches; Otake sits on the floor. This is their warmup. When I finish talking, the dancers begin to move through the space in silence. They come together and lie beside one another on the floor, head to foot (figure 3.3). Slowly they float their limbs in the air. They begin to roll over

90  Love Dances

Figure 3.3  Otake Eiko and Emmanuelle Huynh in Talking Duet (2015). Photo by Lucile Adam.

one another, move around one another, remaining in contact, pausing, then moving, then pausing again. (The improvisational rule they are following is to start and stop together, and then to start when the other stops or stop when the other starts; the idea is to feel each other and get attuned) (figure 3.4a). This duet is lovely. The dancers are attentive to one another. Huynh seems solicitous of Otake. She is strong and lithe, while Otake seems brittle and dainty (she is neither). At one point they hold each other’s head; they trade off gently, bearing each other’s weight on different parts of their bodies. Huynh is in her early fifties, Otake in her mid-​sixties (figure 3.4b). Huynh wears a form-​fitting, red T-​shirt and black shorts. Otake wears black pants and a loose gray and black sweater. There is delicacy and caring in the duet, and it is mesmerizing to watch them “listen” to each other and to see what they will do next in relation to one another. I interrupt the dancing: “Emmanuelle, I have a question for you: What is your artistic obsession?” Otake remains stationary on the floor and Huynh takes the stage space. She answers in bits and pieces, her sentences broken by pauses, speaking one word or phrase at a time. Her movements parallel this rhythm. She dances through a short phrase, stops in a position, talks, then performs another phrase, walks through the space. She offers lots of

Loving: Spiel and Talking Duet  91

Figure 3.4a  Emmanuelle Huynh and Otake Eiko in Talking Duet (2015). Photo by Lucile Adam.

Figure 3.4b  Emmanuelle Huynh and Otake Eiko in Talking Duet (2015). Photo by Lucile Adam.

extended limbs, lunges, and big shapes (figure 3.4c). She tells us that her artistic obsession is linking things together, or “making life enter art”; she adds that she has been thinking a lot about how to make immigrants feel welcome in Europe. I ring a bell to indicate the end of this response and then I direct a question to Otake: “Eiko, tell us a memory of your father.” Otake slowly begins to sit

92  Love Dances

Figure 3.4c  Otake Eiko and Emmanuelle Huynh in Talking Duet (2015). Photo by Lucile Adam.

upright and Huynh exits. Otake takes her time, eventually raising her arms and bringing them to her mouth. Then, sliding her hands to the sides of her head, she says, “He was a communist.” Carefully she moves to standing, takes a few steps, arms extended above her. She looks at me and says, “I’m done.” I go on to ask a question of Huynh, then Otake again, then a question for both of them, which they answer in turn. Then more questions for each, drawing a few from a predetermined list, my own list, and questions passed to me from the audience. One of the questions from a spectator for Otake is about the ghosts of history in the room. In another exchange, Huynh recounts when she first learned that her psychoanalyst was killed during the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attacks in Paris in 2015. Eventually, I ask them to “keep talking,” which is a cue for them to begin asking questions of one another. At this point they face each other across the stage on the diagonal and begin to mirror and respond to each other’s moves. A silent conversation. Eventually, they begin to verbalize, asking each other questions. After three exchanges I interrupt and say, “Eiko and Emmanuelle, I have one last question for you: what was your first experience with death?” At this point Otake is slung over Huynh’s back and they linger there for a moment. Otake comes down and begins to talk about her grandfather. Then Huynh shares her story. Then silence. They stay in contact with one another, moving slowly as they re-​attune to one another’s movement choices. Huynh is on her back on the floor with her legs in the air. Getting up from the floor and

Loving: Spiel and Talking Duet  93 moving a few feet behind Huynh, Otake steps out of her pants and stands in her loose, long sweater. Huynh walks back and stands next to her. Shoulder to shoulder they pause. Then they bow and the audience applauds.

Talking and Dancing as Modes As the interlocutor, I was privileged to watch Huynh and Otake rehearse and to be a part of their choice-​making process. We decided on some of the possible questions I would ask during the performance by starting with a list from postmodern dance pioneer Anna Halprin, with whom they had met earlier in the week. Then we added some of our own. Huynh and Otake liked a mix of difficult personal questions and a few lighter ones. In rehearsal, it was clear that they found it hard to answer questions comprehensively and to dance at the same time—​tough to focus on both actions simultaneously. It was decided that answering partially, or even just pronouncing words for the sound they made, was still artistically compelling. During the performance, Huynh and Otake approach the combination of talking and dancing differently. Otake never really reveals herself in her talking. She gives us words, phrases, images. They are disjointed. Her most expressive moments are in movement, when the smallest gesture with her fingers can be achingly articulate. True to her aesthetic, she moves slowly, with the aim seemingly not to hold shapes but to evolve from one shape to another. Sometimes she moves in a more pedestrian fashion, pouring water from the glass bowl onto the floor, moving the ballet barres, tearing up newspaper, or simply walking around the space. Huynh provides more earnest and literal answers to the questions. She narrates memories and shares emotions. Meanwhile, her movements are outstretched and she steps with deliberation from one pose to another. In addition, for Huynh, taking a moment to walk quickly through the space seems to give her time to think so that she can then re-​establish herself and verbally offer a new thought with a new set of movements. During the talkback after the performance the two artists reveal their different approaches. Otake claims that she does not like talking. She says that it “conflicts” with her dancing; it takes her out of the transformative place that she likes to be when dancing. She explains that as soon as she talks, especially because she is speaking English, too much of her identity (Japanese, female, older) is revealed. Of course, I would argue that these identity markers

94  Love Dances are revealed through her body, too. Still, I understand her point; normally the aesthetic effect of Otake’s work is to transport the performance space to somewhere non-​mundane, nonliteral, to create a surreal experience. Otake is a butoh-​trained artist. To talk is to break the otherworldly effect of the work. She admits that throughout the performance she “ducks” the questions asked of her, or gives partial answers, or tries to turn her utterances into primarily sound. These vocalizations put me in mind, again, of Levinas, or of Levinas as understood through Judith Butler. In the last chapter of Precarious Life, Butler (2006) wonders about the efficacy of the humanities to foster empathy across Otherness (she is responding to a comment made by a university president that the humanities have nothing more to offer our times). She goes to Levinas to consider this question. Levinas uses the idea of the face as the Other that addresses me and makes a moral demand on me. Butler draws on a Levinas essay, “Peace and Proximity,” in which he refers to another text, Vassili Grossman’s Life and Fate, that describes a woman waiting in line for news of a relative who is a political detainee. The scene depicts the woman’s emotions as read through her back and the suffering sounds that are not words that emit from her. Butler writes: So we can see already that the “face” seems to consist in a series of displacements such that a face is figured as a back, which, in turn, is figured as a scene of agonized vocalization. And though there are many names strung in a row here, they end with a figure for what cannot be named, an utterance that is not, strictly speaking, linguistic. (2006, 133)

What is important for my purposes is that the “face,” a metonym for the body, expresses itself physically and vocally, but the utterance of the face is non-​ linguistic. It exceeds the limits of the verbal. Butler continues: The face, if we are to put words to its meaning, will be that for which no words really work; the face seems to be a kind of sound, the sound of language evacuating its sense, the sonorous substratum of vocalization that precedes and limits the delivery of any semantic sense. (2006, 134)

In rehearsal, Huynh and Otake agreed that their answers did not always need to make coherent sense. In performance, Otake, especially, allows single words and phrases to hang in the air. Kasai does this in Spiel, as well; so does

Loving: Spiel and Talking Duet  95 Rennie Harris in Flash (as I discuss in ­chapter 2). Kasai’s vocalizations are examples of his aesthetic of “voice power,” an external and metaphysical force that, he believes, the dancing body can tune into as a way to extend beyond oneself into pure energy, as well as to connect with others (Nicely 2019, 198–​199). Thus, the body does what language cannot do, but the voice, also, expresses itself both as something inherently physical and as something beyond the literalness of language. In their utterances they communicate, but they do not necessarily talk, nor are they specifically dancing. Butler, via Levinas, helps me to understand that there are actually three modes in Talking Duet and in Spiel: talking, corporeal movement, and utterance. In addition, what the two dances help me to understand beyond Butler and Levinas is that while these three modes are distinct, they are also deeply tied; they are the physical-​vocal expressions of the face-​body of the Other. Huynh recognizes the intertwining of the physical-​vocal. While she concedes Otake’s point that the literalness of language can “conflict” with the expressive capacities of the body, she maintains that she still appreciates the possibilities they afford when put together. She says that sometimes in performance when she has been stuck and then she throws out a word a “crystallization of sense” happens that she could not have reached otherwise (2016). Interestingly, Huynh likens this experience of crystallization to psychoanalysis, which utilizes a “talking cure” to verbalize and thereby to draw out some psychic disorder that is often manifesting itself somatically. For Huynh the combination of verbalizing and moving becomes a fruitful method of realization. Unlike the fantastic dream worlds that Otake is known for creating, Huynh’s aesthetic is pared down, human, matter-​of-​fact; it deliberately exposes its own process. As for Otake’s comment about how speaking on stage makes her too real, it is, in fact, Otake’s real persona, and her life experiences, that Huynh is interested in knowing, through both dancing and talking together. Huynh says of talking in their piece: “And it’s now a way or so of meeting because that’s true, I’m curious, profoundly curious of Eiko, as a woman, as a person, as an emigrant, all what we say. Yeah, so, it’s not an added, it’s another tool” (2016). Otake grants that she remains interested in, if daunted by, the challenge of talking on stage,3 while Huynh views talking as one strategy toward greater comprehension. Otake is reluctant about being fully revealed, while Huynh remains curious and continues to insist.4 As in Spiel, a great deal of talking for Talking Duet also occurred in rehearsal, in the various coffees and meals shared, the communications and

96  Love Dances negotiations that happen in order to coordinate the logistics of meeting, or even just sitting in the taxi on the way from the airport. Still, while the dancers did lots of discussing throughout the process, in the end, the goal was to experience one another intercorporeally. Otake argues that there was too much verbalizing and feels that the structured improvisation was a way to engage differently: “But this is, again, how to get out of our dinner conversation, our lunch conversation. We wanted to have a structure. We are talking, but we are not moving. So it’s one of those things we have to always think about . . . because we can be talking forever.” Huynh agrees that the movement improvisation was a way to “train us in something common,” even while “knowing that anyway we will be very different, very separate” (2016). In his book on embodied technique, Ben Spatz (2015) takes some time to compare language versus embodiment. He argues that language requires a “low ratio between effort and articulation.” In other words, the act of speaking allows for a wide range of varied articulations with very little physical expenditure. Nevertheless, talking is still an embodied technique, just one in which “symbolic meaning takes precedence over the meaning of effortful embodied production” (49). So while we learn from Levinas that the physical and the vocal are figured in each other, at the same time, Spatz cautions us not to use “language” as a metaphor for embodied practice. This metaphorization is a temptation because we want to emphasize the ways that embodied technique is epistemic, is a form of knowledge production and communication. Recall that even Huynh, in describing the work of Spiel, refers to their dancing as “speaking across the gap.” Of course, she also describes their duet as a form of “transubstantiation” and a way to climb “inside the other person’s skin” (Huynh 2010). Spatz insists that dance is different from speaking: Dance is linguistic only to the extent that we fail to recognize the physical work it entails: not just the effort involved in a single performance, but the long-​term effort of training and rehearsal. . . . When we “read” embodied practice in terms of signification alone, we ignore much of its meaning, which is located not in the relationship between signs but in the quantity and quality of embodied effort that goes into the enactment of technique. (2015, 50)

I think that it is this difference that compels Huynh and Otake, as well as Huynh and Kasai, to combine modes in their efforts to comprehend one another. Talking and dancing, and even non-​linguistic vocalizing, offer

Loving: Spiel and Talking Duet  97 interfigural but still distinct forms of expressing and of knowing that, combined, tell more than their sum.

The Dance’s Body While they could have been “talking forever” in rehearsal and over dinner, the obligation to produce a work, and the repeated performances of that work, are essential elements of Huynh and Otake’s collaboration. Performing for an audience makes social a process that was previously private. It should be noted, however, that although the production of a publicly shown work is the goal for Huynh and Otake, the improvisational structure of the piece ensures that Talking Duet retains the processual, exploratory character of their chats and rehearsals, with the audience invited into the act of in-​the-​ moment creation. In my analysis of Spiel I argue that the audience is key to recognizing the losses in translation between Huynh and Kasai. I think this is also true in Talking Duet. In fact, in this piece the audience becomes an even more explicitly acknowledged element of the performance. Even as it is called a “duet,” in fact, it is a trio. The fact that Talking Duet invites the audience to engage with the dancers is a recognition of the spectators’ vital role in cross-​cultural understanding. It gives the work of mutual comprehension broader sociopolitical implications, rather than only personal ones. Referring back to Dee Reynolds, we recognize the “dance’s body” as a triangulation. My position as interlocutor symbolizes this tripartite relationship. During the talkback, Huynh explains: We all know that a triangle is different from a face to face. So the context for the insertion of SanSan, the fact of teaching, both of us, and knowing that we are in a transmission place made us think of it a bit differently. . . . And inviting SanSan made us really think that this place that SanSan is having belongs to this work. . . . We feel like going on, but not going on just being the two of us. It’s going on being attached to some context that we want to choose and work with the context of this place. (2016)

When Huynh refers to “the fact of teaching” and “the context of this place,” she means that she and I, and Otake, too, are teachers, and she highlights the fact that the Berkeley performance is held on the university campus, primarily for students. For Huynh, it is important that her work with Otake, their

98  Love Dances duet-​plus, is pedagogical, that it transmits across to others, and thus that it matters beyond her and Otake. It is certainly true that Huynh and Otake, like Huynh and Kasai, learn a great deal through their intercorporeal transmissions in rehearsal and over lunch, and that they come to comprehend each other in a way that their audiences cannot. I argue, however, that the goal in Talking Duet and in Spiel is not only for an encounter to be experienced by the two practitioners, but for an audience to bear witness to this transmission, to have the privilege to make determinations about it, and, further, for an audience to participate in this modeling of intercultural exchange.

Improvisation: Vulnerability and Refusal, Failure and Potentiality What, however, is modeled for the audience? What do we learn about intercultural collaboration? Intercultural collaboration requires immense vulnerability. Indeed, most artistic work requires a level of vulnerability, of willingness to offer a genuine part of yourself to others. In the case of intercultural work, however, the degree of unknowability of your collaborator raises the stakes of risk. Additionally, compared to the vulnerability I see in the dances I discuss in c­ hapters 1 and 2, the improvisational mode in Spiel and Talking Duet asks for an even greater degree of openness. When Huynh and Otake were in residency at UC Berkeley I took both of their dance improvisation workshops. Otake taught a class based in her Delicious Movement pedagogy. We were invited to lie upon the studio floor with our eyes closed while Otake quietly offered imagery—​of seaweed in the ocean, of rocks in the desert, of our bones beneath our watery flesh—​as inspiration for slow movement. The extreme slowness over a sustained period brought me into a state in which the borders of my body and the surrounding space blurred, time expanded, and space distended. Gradually, with my eyes closed I became less concerned about external perceptions and I was able to give myself over to what came rather than trying to dictate my own next actions. After some time, we paused and Otake invited us to watch her move. She encouraged us to come in uncomfortably close while she closed her eyes and trusted our watching. It felt incredibly intimate to observe her body on the floor, the slight lifting and falling of her chest, the veins in her neck. She moved so subtly, as if surrendering to some quiet force; it felt as if we

Loving: Spiel and Talking Duet  99 were watching someone in their sleep. Next, we were asked to do the same in pairs. Surveying another person’s moving body on the floor encouraged delicacy; allowing oneself to be surveyed, again with eyes closed, inspired a willingness to be vulnerable. This was unlike a typical dance technique class, in which students and teachers watch each other as a matter of course. This kind of watching, without prescribed choreography, without striving to replicate a given phrase and have one’s ability measured, without the impassivity of distance or the ability to stare back, required mutual trust and care, rather than competition and evaluation. To be clear, power is not taken out of the relational exchange in Delicious Movement, but in the intimacy of proximity and the unpredictability of improvisation a level of surrender into vulnerability is necessary. I think this is the kind of vulnerability Huynh and Otake exercise with each other and for their audience in Talking Duet. During that residency week, I also took Huynh’s improvisation workshop. We practiced the go-​pause score that she and Otake perform in Talking Duet. Working with a partner, we remained in physical contact with each other and began by moving together and pausing when we felt our partner pause, starting again when we felt our partner start. We danced wordlessly and without designating a leader, feeling our pauses and starts collectively. Next, one of us transitioned into remaining still while our partner moved and moving when our partner came to stillness. We danced like this for over an hour, which enabled full immersion into an acute bodily attentiveness. As with Otake’s workshop, I felt the borders of my body blur, I felt time and space become malleable. As Otake puts it in her manifesto on Delicious Movement on her website, “Move to experience [that] time is not even and space is not empty” (Otake and Otake 2020). In both of these workshops I experienced the need to fully yield to another body, even as I could not anticipate that other body’s actions, impressions, or experiences. For the sake of the exercises it was necessary to give myself over in order to become both entirely harmonious but still distinct from my partner. Improvisation requires collaborators to pay careful, loving attention to another dancing body, not knowing what that dancing body will do, and then to respond to that other body, while yourself not knowing your own actions in advance or how your partner will respond to your moves. All at once, you must be receptive to the unknown and responsive in your own way, simultaneously vulnerable and contributive. I have discussed, in c­ hapter 2, a notion of intersubjectivity as dualistic, containing both an imperative toward care and an instinct toward violence.

100  Love Dances In my discussion of the ambivalently aggressive tension in Flash I quote Levinas: “The face of the other in its precariousness and defenselessness, is for me at once the temptation to kill and the call to peace, the ‘You shall not kill’ ” (1996, 167). Butler (2010), in her book Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?, published six years after Precarious Life ([2004] 2006), also relies on this idea of the other as inherently vulnerable and thus both subject to protection and to aggression. Erinn Gilson (2014), however, in her work on the feminist ethics of vulnerability, challenges Butler’s overreliance on a definition of vulnerability as susceptibility to violence. She critiques Levinas for this limitation as well. She warns that linking vulnerability to harm necessarily leads to a binarization where invulnerability becomes the positive term and vulnerability the devalued state. Instead, she aims to reposition vulnerability as a feminist ethic. As I touch upon in ­chapter 1, she expands a notion of vulnerability to mean willingness to change and to relinquish control (which we do not see in Pichet Klunchun and Myself): “In its more fundamental sense vulnerability may be understood as an openness to being altered and, more specifically, being altered in ways that destabilize a previously stable, or seemingly stable, state” (65). Understanding vulnerability in this way allows me to link vulnerability not only to injurability, but to creative collaboration. Huynh and her dance partners, in their submission to the rules of improvisation, in their submission to each other, open themselves up to unforeseen affects. That is, they make themselves vulnerable, both to their audiences and to each other, and this is what allows for their artistic creation across cultural difference. While definitely appreciating Gilson’s notion of vulnerability as availability to change, I still also agree with Levinas and Butler that vulnerability can sometimes be risky. In dance improvisation, it is important to keep yourself physically safe; you have to know your own body and resist manipulation when necessary. There are times when you need to remain self-​contained. Kasai and Otake mitigate risk by balancing vulnerability with refusal. For example, although Otake claims to prefer dancing to talking, during the talkback she confesses that she also “faked” parts of the movement improvisation.5 By way of explanation she says that she is “not very good in rules” (2016). It turns out, then, that Otake both ducks the verbal questions and fakes the improvisation structure. Here I note again the quiver of resistance that I see exercised by several of the dancers in this book. Specifically, it is the native Asian artist in the pair: Pichet Klunchun declines to watch Jérôme Bel remove his pants, Kojima Shoji deliberately

Loving: Spiel and Talking Duet  101 forgets the keys to his childhood home, Kasai ignores his cues, and Otake ducks questions. Inscrutable Orientals! More seriously, of course, we might argue that avoiding apprehension is a strategy of political resistance for the disempowered, a way to disrupt Western presumptions of familiarity. Interculturalism does not erase power dynamics. And intimacy is not always a practice of loving. As I establish in c­ hapter 1, interculturalism is practiced upon an already existing historical field of Orientalism. In response, repudiation can be an assertion of sovereignty, an ethical refusal to offer one’s vulnerability in a space that might not always feel safe. In the case of Bel removing his pants, this presumption of intimacy is not a loving act, and so Klunchun refuses it explicitly. On the other hand, Kasai and Otake gamely undress at the ends of their respective duets with Huynh (who matches them accordingly). Meanwhile, Kojima’s forgetting might be seen as a delicate resistance to knowability or appropriation. These collaborators’ restrained unruliness does not reject connection completely; in many places they remain remarkably open. This only makes their vulnerability all the more poignant. In Spiel, the audience, situated beyond the marley boundary, is particularly poised to identify the openness as well as the resistances between Huynh and Kasai. Similarly, Huynh and Otake choose a question-​and-​answer format for their duet because they understand that their work is pedagogical. What the audience learns along with the dancers, I think, is the very struggle of learning, the misses and failures across mutual understanding, the refusals as well as the earnest efforts to make themselves available. Fortunately, Huynh is undaunted by the losses and resistances as they are revealed in performance. She acknowledges that there will be separation and yet she persists through the ducking and faking in Talking Duet, as she does through the lags and displacements in Spiel. Returning to Butler’s disquisition on Levinas, we are reminded that the face of the other is always unattainable: For Levinas, then, the human is not represented by the face. Rather, the human is indirectly affirmed in that very disjunction that makes representation impossible, and this disjunction is conveyed in the impossible representation. For representation to convey the human then, representation must not only fail, but it must show its failure. There is something unrepresentable that we nevertheless seek to represent, and that paradox must be retained in the representation we give. (2006, 144)

102  Love Dances It is impossible for Huynh and Kasai, or Huynh and Otake, to become fully attainable to each other, whether through movement or through talking. It is the effort, the process, the repetition, even despite the ultimate acknowledgment of unassimilable difference, that tells us something about ethical collaboration. As Butler explains: It is worth noting . . . that identification always relies upon a difference that it seeks to overcome, and that its aim is accomplished only by reintroducing the difference it claims to have vanquished. The one with whom I identify is not me, and the “not being me” is the condition of identification. (2006, 145)

Perhaps a more optimistic way to think about the persistence-​amid-​failure that characterizes these intercultural collaborations is through an idea of potentiality. Bojana Kunst (2009) theorizes collaboration as both a strategy of coercion in a neoliberal society, and as having the potential for a more liberated future. First, she critiques the current demand for teamwork and cooperation as “part of the obsessive administration of the neoliberal subject” and contemporary capitalistic production’s emphasis on efficiency, time management, flows, goals, and deadlines. She wonders, “Can we also collaborate with no revolutionary, corporative, metaphysical deadline on the horizon?” Then, interestingly, Kunst turns to dance; she references choreographer Eleanor Bauer discussing the current predicament of the freelance performing artist and the imperative of the dancer to be flexible labor: Could this not be precisely the description of the contemporary collaborative worker, equipped for continuous high performance? That of the always critical and active labourer, whose subjectivity is totally subjected to the modes of contemporary capitalistic production?

Kunst suggests here that even the arts have been co-​opted by the neoliberal impulse. She goes on to consider, however, what a genuine exchange might be like. We have to think about the future of collaboration in the rupture between the impossibility of the refusal of the collaborative processes in which we are already implemented, and the possibility of genuine exchange, which has yet to happen.

Loving: Spiel and Talking Duet  103 Although we are caught in a capitalist economy in which we cannot actually refuse collaborative culture, Kunst sees the potential for more authentic connection. I think here of the micro-​refusals of Klunchun, Kojima, Kasai, and Otake—​ambivalent fragments of resistance amid more generous openness to change. For Kunst, truly transformative collaboration is necessarily conditioned by failure and unactualized potentiality. In fact, it must only ever be yet to happen: Potentiality can come to light only when not being actualised: when the potential of a thing or a person is not realised. A certain failure, an impossibility of actualisation, is then an intrinsic part of potentiality. At the same time, only when the potential is not being actualised, one is opened to one’s being in time, to one’s eventness. In this openness one experiences the plurality of ways that life comes into being and is exposed to the plurality of possible actions. Through collaboration, we condition our future lives together, which of course means that, in order to open up the time, we have to take time out of the obsession with presence and participate in the time what has yet to happen.

This idea of collaboration as unrealized potentiality is, of course, emblematized by Huynh’s work. I repeat here her description of her partnership with Kasai: “It’s all about differences and not being able to communicate and being able through impossibility to understand each other” (Solano 2011). And of her “non-​stop talking” with Otake: “But then that’s the part of going on, and insisting since two years. And I feel like insisting more” (2016). Huynh recognizes that earnest intercultural collaboration is not about goals but about insistence and repetition, not about full comprehension but about potentiality. Interestingly, Kunst’s own collaborator (in their research on collaboration), Ivana Muller (2008), likens this potentiality to theater: It is like theatre. When we make theatre, we prepare ourselves for the moment of the meeting with the spectator; that moment in the future that will become our mutual here and now. Days and days in advance . . . trying to imagine how it is all going to be. Rehearsing that moment over and over again. Rehearsing its potentiality, its accuracy, its power, even, absurdly, its

104  Love Dances Authenticity. So in fact, a big part of working in theatre is conditioning our future together.

Recall, of course, the importance of the marley as boundary between audience and performers in Spiel, and also my role as interlocutor in Talking Duet. These structures remind us of the performative nature of these pieces. They emphasize the repetition and rehearsal that collaboration requires and, importantly, the idealized moment of meeting the other in performance. Huynh and her collaborators know about the potentiality of the stage for conditioning futures together. And the performative form of improvisation, in particular, makes room for the coexistence of potentiality and failure, availability and refusal. Improvisation requires dancers to be simultaneously receptive to unforeseeable change and responsive in a loving way, submissive but also sovereign—​ all in the effort to create collaboratively.

Love If collaboration requires the recognition of unrealizable potentiality, however, then what compels collaborators to keep collaborating? Why persist in the effort if it is necessarily going to fail? At last, in this final chapter, I would like to think through this conundrum via a notion of love. Love, after all, is that emotion that is defined by separation but also driven by the idea of union. It is a play of power and vulnerability, unknowability and care. It is a dance. One of Huynh’s earlier works, A Vida Enorme /​episode 1 (2003), evokes this idea of love as conditioned by separation. For the piece, she sought the linguistic help of Nuno Bizarro, a contemporary dancer from Portugal, because she wanted the sensuous poems of Portuguese poet Herberto Hélder to be dictated aloud alongside her French translation. Huynh says that she fell in love with Bizarro, now her husband, partly through listening to him speak a language she did not understand. Obviously, Huynh has a long-​abiding interest in trying and failing to understand the other as an act of love. In watching Spiel I note close mutual attunement between the dancers, but also many moments in which Kasai moves away from Huynh, addressing himself to the audience, hamming it up, while Huynh waits patiently for him on the other side of the stage. In a 2015 interview with me, Huynh admits to

Loving: Spiel and Talking Duet  105 sometimes being frustrated with Kasai, feeling like a mother having to scold and cajole. But she also proclaims deep respect for Kasai. She says that she loves him. Likewise, Kasai proclaims, “J’taime!” repeatedly during the performance. I know that he was deeply committed to working with Huynh. In Talking Duet, Huynh and Otake are similarly tender with each other. Although Otake claims to fake the improvisation, it is clear that she attunes herself to Huynh. The section in which they alternate gently bearing each other’s weight is delicate and full of care. Huynh is clearly devoted to Otake and continues to want to know her and connect with her. Otake, while she plays at ducking and faking, also says that her job for this performance is “to make myself totally available to her” (2016). I am not referring here to romantic love between Kasai and Huynh or Otake and Huynh, but love as the impulse toward compassion, to care for, to connect with. At the same time, this love respects disobedience, declines control, and strikes a balance between vulnerability and autonomy. Alain Badiou (2012) describes love as the experience of the world from the point of view of difference. Love, he says, is woven from experience with otherness (36). For Badiou, desire for the guarantee of sameness is often mistaken for love, but it is not love. Interestingly, he likens love to theater. He offers that theater is a moment at which thought and body are exposed to each other such that you cannot separate them: in theater, “The two [body and idea] are mixed up, language seizes the body, just as when you tell someone, ‘I love you’: you say that to someone living, standing there in front of you, but you are also addressing something that cannot be reduced to this simple material presence, something that is absolutely and simultaneously both beyond and within” (85). So I argue that love is what structures these two dance collaborations. These duets are deliberate engagements with difference; engagements with the body as processes of understanding. The playback method in Spiel is precisely that mixing up of body and idea, where Huynh and Kasai use their bodies as simultaneously form and content. Through the embodied practice of playback, they both make themselves present to one another and strive to comprehend each other. Likewise, in Talking Duet, the go-​pause improvisation and the conversational exchange are also intimate meetings of body and idea that require multimodal “listening” in order to engender mutual creative expression. These two duets are professions of love in that they are each an engagement with two presences created by two individual bodies, but also with an affective, experiential moment that is created through them and

106  Love Dances beyond them. We, as spectators, are privileged to bear witness to this mutual effort and joint creation. I do not intend to be excessively utopian about love as the ultimate answer to the difficulties of intercultural collaboration. Love sometimes involves threat, coercion, hurt, and dominance. Even as the power differentials between these pairs of artists does not match the kinds of gaps we saw in the HIT productions of the 1980s and 1990s, between Huynh and Kasai there are certainly gender, age, language, and national differences. Between Huynh and Otake there are differences in age, language, and immigrant versus native-​ born experience. And I saw both pieces in France and the United States, sitting among a Western audience with all the presumptions spectators might bring about Asia and Asian artists. I am not arguing that love overcomes these imbalances of power. In fact, I contend that thinkers on love precisely understand that any engagement with an other is inherently unbalanced. Love is the thing that both acknowledges and strives to accept differentials, just at Huynh accepts the deliberate unruliness of her collaborators. Butler, in Frames of War, again echoes Levinas in her assertion of the sociality of being. All lives are social lives. Our moral responsibility to each other is determined by how we feel about one another and, though Gilson views Butler as overly concerned with injury as our primary ethical determinant, Butler does note that our feelings can be complex: “The very fact of being bound up with others establishes the possibility of being subjugated and exploited. . . . But it also establishes the possibility of being relieved of suffering, of knowing justice, and even love” (2010, 61). In other words, Butler shows us how our ontological interdependence can be both injurious and also loving. She emphasizes that, in fact, our ability to love is conditioned by the fact of our externally determined nature: “Of course, the fact that one’s body is never fully one’s own, bounded and self-​referential, is the condition of passionate encounter, of desire, of longing, and of those modes of address and addressability upon which the feeling of aliveness depends” (54–​55). Throughout this book I have tied love to loss. We cannot love without the inevitability of loss. We do not grieve the loss of someone whom we did not love. Gilson sees it otherwise: Although certain intuitions might lead us to believe that the emotional vulnerability of love boils down to a fear or acute awareness of loss—​loss of the loved one, loss of the self one is in relation to the loved one, loss of love itself—​Butler’s own account, despite its emphasis on loss, reveals that this

Loving: Spiel and Talking Duet  107 vulnerability is a more basic one. The vulnerability of loving lies in the way the self is made what it is through such relations. . . . So, what renders one uniquely vulnerable in the experience of love is not the possibility of loss but the exceptional openness that characterizes the relationship and, indeed, the expectation that one will change in unforeseen ways in relations to the loved one. (2014, 65)

For Gilson, the vulnerability of love leads to a remaking of the self. Transitively then, genuine intercultural collaboration requires love. Erika Fischer-​Lichte (2014, 11), in her formulation of “interweaving performance cultures,” imagines a utopian potential for intercultural work to eventually give rise to future self-​transformations. In his book on interculturalism in colonial Mexico, Cabranes-​Grant argues that “intercultural exchanges tend to increase the legibility of certain types of poiesis” (2016, 3). One of his key ideas is that interculturalism can be an “engine of emergence.” That is, he posits interculturalism as a form of creation, of becoming. While I am drawn to these visions of the productiveness of interculturalism, my turn to love is a way not to emphasize what new forms arise from the intercultural process but to describe the impulse that brings people to the collaborative process, indifferent to its result. As I write in the introduction, my interest in love is a focus on engines more than on emergence. Badiou writes that “love contains an initial element that separates, dislocates and differentiates” (2012, 28). And love is that which struggles over “the hurdles erected by time, space and the world” (32). In “Shattered Love,” Jean Luc Nancy (1991, 103–​104) suggests that love exposes the self as an openness to the excess that is beyond being. And in the exposure it reveals both self and other as endlessly plural, shattered. Love is the constancy to remain receptive even through the comings and goings of understanding, the shatteredness of being. The lags, the dislocations, the pregnant spaces, the ducking and the faking between Huynh and Kasai, Huynh and Otake, but also the vulnerability and the tenderness, are all states of tension that are the condition for ongoing acts of love. They are acts not only determined by love, but also enormously generative of it.

Epilogue The Wages of Dying Is Love

. . . the wages of dying is love —​Galway Kinnell

This epigraph is excerpted from a heart-​wrenching, heart-​bursting poem by Galway Kinnell about his infant child and the certainty of mortality—​that he will die, that she will lose him, that someone, someday will lose her. “The wages of dying is love,” Kinnell writes at the end of the poem. The recompense we earn for the fact of death is that we get to love. I was beginning to write this book as Donald Trump was elected president of the United States, the Brexit referendum had just passed in the United Kingdom, refugees at the southern shores of Europe were being turned away, and Rohingya peoples were being massacred by the Myanmar army. Since then, migrant children at the southern borders of the United States have been separated from their parents, Hindu nationalists are harassing Muslims under Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil is destroying ways of life for indigenous Amazonians, and Uighurs in far west China are being forced into reeducation camps. And, in the space of three months in early 2020, three Black Americans—​Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd—​were murdered at the hands of police or white racists in the United States. Also, Covid-​19 hit. Writing the chapters of this book in the midst of these examples of ethnic cleansing, xenophobia, and racism, overlayered by a global pandemic, I was spurred by my belief in the importance of intercultural collaboration as a force for good in the world. It is true that the surprising traction of ultranationalism and the reactionary aftermaths of the Black Lives Matter protests reveal how quickly hegemony and white supremacy re-​establish themselves. And Trump’s repeated references to the “Chinese virus” and the “kung flu”

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Epilogue  109 and respondent attacks against Asian Americans across the United States—​ nearly 2600 in the first five months of the pandemic—​1remind us of the persistence of anti-​Asian racism. In contrast, however, the swift spread of the coronavirus demonstrates how globally interconnected we are and how absolutely crucial it is to be responsible to each other. And the challenge of the Covid-​19 lockdowns suggests how vital intercorporeal togetherness is. In short, we need more love dances. And yet. I write these final pages on the morning of November 4, 2020, as ballots are being counted for a highly contentious US presidential election. France and Austria have just experienced three horrific acts of Islamist terror and resultant Islamophobic reactions. Regardless of the final outcome of the election, with voting numbers here far from the clear renunciation of racism, xenophobia, and bald aggression I had hoped for, I have to admit that my faith in the potential for reaching across divides is shaken. Are love dances enough? If they are enough, then I must submit that they are really, really hard. They won’t resolve everything; they won’t bring full comprehension, ever. Are we still willing? The intercultural duets that inspire this book engage in the brave and arduous work of misunderstanding but dancing anyway. They are acts of loving that recognize that love is itself a dance, a negotiation, a give and take, and a willingness to lose. They are practices of empathy and shared mourning. In this, perhaps, they serve as woefully inadequate but still valiant models for living under the triumvirate pandemics of structural racism, imperialism, and a deadly virus. For me, these duets are also opportunities to think about my partnership with my late husband. They mirror how he and I negotiated our racial and cultural differences with love. They also show me how to keep loving in spite of difference and loss. And they speak to me about how love and loss engender gratitude and compassion. Recently, I was at a bat mitzvah for a girl who had lost her father seven years prior. The girl shared a story about how her mother, my friend, had gone to their rabbi after her husband had died. She asked the rabbi how she could move forward after such loss. The rabbi told her to go forth with benevolence toward others and she might find that her own heart healed a little bit. It seems counterintuitive. Grief can feel so isolating, vain even. But, in fact, the other side to loss is connection. My own experience confirms this. As I mention in the introduction, after Kenny died, I felt as though I had been moving naively through the world under a veil of invincibility, and then after his death my eyes were suddenly opened to the

110  Love Dances many people around me suffering pain, a pain that had been heretofore invisible to me. On the one hand, I felt that I was the only one aching in my own vain grief, and, on the other hand, I developed an empathy muscle I had not known was there. Reaching out and connecting with someone else’s anguish is a process of lovingkindness in the face of the inexplicable. Mourning collectively is an act of love. Kenny was a scholar of nineteenth-​century American literature. In an article he wrote on Herman Melville, he describes a visit to Melville’s grave and contemplates what we have to learn about dying. Pictured on Melville’s grave is a scroll, a writer’s scroll left mysteriously blank. I wish I could bring its beauty before us now, wanting to know what to make of this silent stone, requiring your help. . . . Its simplicity is finally confounding. The utterly blank scroll on Melville’s grave, like the whiteness of the whale, is an invitation to further interpretation, an ending containing innumerable beginnings. Like the stones of Jerusalem, the removal of Melville’s blank gravestone serves to reveal there stones still larger, below it. Let us welcome this and respond to its biding, loving the questions themselves, like locked rooms. In the end it becomes a marker of an end that is no end at all. We can make seeds to spring from stones. (1998, 36–​37)

Here Kenny tells us that in death we are left with unanswerable questions, but also with innumerable beginnings. Intercultural duets may not deliver the United States or Europe from this period of harm and division. I still think they give us a vision for beginnings. If the wages of dying is love, then, by all means, let’s dance.

Notes Introduction 1. To “set a phrase” in dance means to draw from originally improvised movements and decide on exact moves and a precise sequence and, usually, to memorize the now established arrangement. 2. In this book I study intercultural collaboration. I also occasionally use the term “cross cultural” as a less specific descriptor for interaction across cultures; I do not mean it to be distinct from “intercultural.” Jacqueline Lo and Helen Gilbert (2002), in their study of theater practice, identify “cross cultural” as the more expansive term, under which intercultural, postcolonial, and intercultural theater fall (32). They argue that multicultural theater is a response to state-​driven cultural policies, while postcolonial theater is a product of imperialism. Intercultural theater, they contend, is derived from intentional encounters between cultures and performing traditions (36). 3. In one case I study an East-​West-​South collaboration. 4. Recognizing that the term “Asia” can serve to encompass different communities depending on the speaker, for my purposes I use “Asia” and “Asian” to include East, Southeast, and South Asia. 5. Please see my 2017 article “When Is Contemporary Dance?” on the contended meanings of the term “contemporary” in the contexts of concert, commercial, and “world” dance. 6. 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 (2007) has successfully begun this work with the choreography of Ruth St. Denis. 7. 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. 8. In her 2011 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 “a metaphor of a culture at once burning to grow and shift and encompass,” and is awed by what she imagines is

112 Notes 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 had been changed, how they learned to pay attention, to be present, to trust, and how this was a close to learning to fly as they thought they might get.” 9. For the Japanese artists in this study—​Kasai Akira, Kojima Shoji, and Otake Eiko—​ as well as for other East Asian names, I follow the convention of using the surname first, than the given name. Thai names conventionally begin with the given name, and I follow that convention here. For Euro-​American, Latin American, and Asian diasporic individuals, I use given names, then surnames. 10. While Huang studies Asian women in her article, I apply her formulations to the male artists in my study as well. I would argue that the persistent feminization of Asianness in general allows for her ideas to be more broadly relevant beyond only Asian women. 11. See Peggy Phelan’s (1993) ontology of performance as disappearance. For challenges to Phelan’s notion of performance as disappearance see Auslander (1999); Taylor (2003); Hamera (2007); Reason (2006). 12. The phrase has often been used to describe the attitude of Japanese Americans to the injustices of their incarceration by the US government during World War II. For example, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston, in the memoir Farewell to Manzanar (1973), use the phrase as a chapter title and a way to explain Jeanne’s family’s quiet acceptance of their imprisonment. In this case I do not think the phrase is understood as a practice of resistance so much as forbearance. 13. In an email conversation with me, Miyoko Conley noted that my formulation works when the phrase is asserted by the speaker, as with Kojima, but perhaps not so well when the phrase is ascribed to someone else’s situation, as is sometimes the case. In those instances, having the sentiment projected onto you can feel like an imposition of defeat, rather than acquisition of agency. 14. Relatedly, African American studies scholar Kevin Quashie (2012) makes the case for an ethos of quiet as an alternative to the overdetermined framework of resistance most often imposed on understandings of Black life. 15. I am thankful to Dahlia Nayar and Crystal Song for helping me to think through this scholarship. 16. In addition to the Argentinian and Japanese dancers, the director of Simulacrum is Finnish. This makes the work more than just an East-​West duet, but maybe an East-​ West-​South trio.

Notes  113

Chapter 1 1. An earlier version of this chapter appeared as “Even as We Keep Trying: An Ethics of Interculturalism in Jérôme Bel’s Pichet Klunchun and Myself,” Theatre Survey 55 (2) (May 2014): 185–201. 2. The following depiction of the piece is based on my three experiences of it: a recording of the work performed at the Novell Theater 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 the Redcat Theater in Los Angeles in February 2009. 3. In 2011, Thailand’s per capita GDP was USD 9,700 while France’s was USD 35,000. In the most recent numbers from 2017, Thailand is at USD 17,900, while France is at USD 44,100 (World Factbook 2020, under “Guide to Country Comparisons”). 4. According to Keith Hennessy, 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 (2009). 5. 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 (Mahasarinand 2011). Nevertheless, according to Bel’s website, it was still performed up to at least 2018 (under “archive”). 6. In a special issue on theater and globalization in Contemporary Theatre Review, Martin Welton (2006) 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 theater. As a Western practitioner of the Indian form kalarippayattu, he is hopeful that his practical understanding of this martial art might help “resist the division into 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. 7. There is one instance when Bel learns a khon phrase from Klunchun and one moment when Klunchun imitates ballet. 8. See Anne Anlin Cheng’s Ornamentalism (2019) for a discussion of the Asian (usually female) body as constituted by and as elaborate ornamentation. 9. Thank you to Jay O’Shea, Rebecca Rossen, and Karen Shimakawa for underscoring this point. 10. A writer for Thailand’s The Nation views the piece as an “informative study” of khon and “modern conceptual dance” (Baker 2012). More than one reviewer, including Roslyn Sulcas (2007), describes it “entertaining” (see also Howard 2006; Madden 2006). Natasha Rogai (2008) finds the piece entertaining, too, but says that it “does not develop into a profound dialogue on eastern and western dance.” On the other hand, a critic for The Australian describes it as “a brilliantly lucid deconstruction of two approaches to dance” (Christofis 2006). Jennifer Dunning (2007) 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.” The Sunday Times of London describes the first half as being “like a Thai-​dancing guidebook come to

114 Notes 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 (Taylor 2006). One Australian critic uses food metaphors to describe the artistic “fusion”: “In short: funny French with Thai spice” (Howard 2006). 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” (Madden 2006). Keith Hennessy, 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 and 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. (2009) 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. Yvonne Hardt (2011) has written about Pichet Klunchun and Myself as a form of ethnography through performance. 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, while Bel is asked to be informant for only his own work. In another article about the piece, dance scholar Susan Leigh Foster (2001b) advances a feminist critique, interspersing her argument with a fictional dialogue involving Bel. Foster also has a more extended chapter about Pichet Klunchun and Myself in her book Choreographing Empathy (2011a). Finally, Gerald Siegmund (2017) discusses the piece in his monograph on Bel, Jérôme Bel: Dance, Theatre and the Subject. 11. I have not personally found any direct evidence of these kinds of contradictory responses across Asia and the West, but the previous note does suggest a difference in reception between Rogai (2008) of Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post, who is critical, and Christofis (2006) of The Australian, who is laudatory. 12. Ramsay Burt (2016) in Ungoverning Dance, uses my evaluation of the duet as inequitable (in an earlier article) to show how Klunchun and Bel have not cultivated an ethical friendship, but merely an expedient, short-​term relationship, or what Zygmunt Bauman calls a “pure relationship” (quoted in Burt 2016, 152–​153).

Notes  115

Chapter 2 1. Note that Freud’s formulation of subjectivity would suggest that the ego itself, regardless of race, is constituted by loss (Eng and Han 2002, 361). 2. It should be noted that Sharpe distinguishes her idea of “wake work” from melancholy and, especially, mourning because she wishes to highlight the ongoingness of Black violence and death. She asks, “How do we memorialize an event that is still ongoing?” (2016, 20). 3. Despite my claims of separation here, it is important to note that Sakamoto informed me that, in fact, they were deeply in synch with each other throughout the piece. In the final section, while they do not look at each other, they are continually reading each other’s energy, as well as paying attention to the pulse of the music. Sakamoto says that this is a very Africanist musical and choreographic approach, a way to appreciate micro-​diversities of expression within a shared rhythmicity (correspondence, June 18, 2020). 4. Upon reading my analysis of this moment, Øyen wished to make clear that he is not certain why Kojima forgot the key, and that Øyen’s decision as a director to evoke it as a moment of deliberate forgetting is a form of artistic license (correspondence, June 11, 2020). My choice, then, to see it as potentially an act of decolonial refusal likewise cannot be absolutely denotative. I would argue, of course, that it is possible that some of the refusals I cite in this book are not fully intentional, but this does not make them any less politically potent. 5. This balance between hospitality and inscrutability is not limited to Asian Americans. Kenneth Speirs (yes, my late husband), in his article on the nineteenth-​century Black cowboy Nat Love’s phenomenal autobiography, The Life and Adventures of Nat Love (1907), writes about Love’s “strategy of (ap)proximation” (2005, 307). During Love’s employ as a Pullman porter and later in his writing, Love negotiates the requirements of Black servility, but also of Black recognition: “What we might call Love’s strategy of approximation may call to mind W.E.B. DuBois’s notion of ‘double-​consciousness,’ an idea first articulated in The Souls of Black Folk in 1903, nearly contemporaneous with Love’s work. Love’s strategy of approximation, I want to suggest, is a kind of double-​ consciousness, a way to write to a white reader that attempts to ease the conflict between the expectations of his white passenger/​reader and his black cultural identity. While Love clearly resists certain forms of intimacy, he also recognizes that his own success, as both a porter and an author, depends upon the sympathy and engagement of powerful white passengers and readers” (2005, 307–​308). 6. See the introduction for a further discussion of this phrase. 7. “Disidentification is meant to be descriptive of the survival strategies the minoritarian subject practices in order to negotiate a phobic majoritarian public sphere that continuously elides or punishes the existence of subjects wo do not conform to the phantasm of normative citizenship” (Muñoz 1999, 4). 8. “Disidentification is the third mode of dealing with dominant ideology, one that neither opts to assimilate within such a structure nor strictly opposes it; rather, disidentification is a strategy that works on and against dominant ideology. Instead

116 Notes of buckling under the pressures of dominant ideology (identification, assimilation) or attempting to break free of its inescapable sphere (counteridentification, utopianism), this ‘working on and against’ is a strategy that tries to transform a cultural logic from within, always laboring to enact permanent cultural change while at the same time valuing the importance of local everyday struggles of resistance” (Muñoz 1999, 11–​12).

Chapter 3 1. An earlier version of this chapter appeared as “Acts of Loving: Emmanuelle Huynh, Akira Kasai, and Eiko Otake in Intercultural Collaboration,” in The Methuen Drama Handbook of Interculturalism and Performance, ed. Daphne Lei and Charlotte McIvor (New York: Methuen Drama, 2020), 133–​152. 2. See Candelario (2016) for a thorough study of Eiko & Koma. 3. “So that’s why I ducked. But I didn’t want to refuse it. So sometimes ducking is . . . the words, the voice, as part of the body.” 4. Otake: “We have been talking nonstop.” Huynh: “I think I will sleep a lot on the plane! But then that’s the part of going on, and insisting since two years. And I feel like insisting more.” 5. It was not clear to me from the audience perspective how exactly she was not faithful to the improvisation guidelines, nor was it obvious to Huynh, who expressed surprise when Otake confessed to faking.

Epilogue 1. https://​stopaapihate.org/​wp-​content/​uploads/​2021/​04/​Stop-​AAPI-​Hate-​Report-​ National-​200805.pdf    https://​stopaapihate.org/​national-​report/​ (Accessed May 4, 2021).

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Index For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–​53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. Figures are indicated by f following the page number Afro-​pessimism, 20–​21, 22 authenticity, 16–​18, 67, 73, 103–​4 Orientalism and, 13 Badiou, Alain, 14–​15, 26–​27, 28, 105–​6, 107 Baldwin, James, 50, 52, 54, 55–​56, 77 Bel, Jérôme, 10, 12–​13, 15, 20, 23–​24, 26, 29–​30, 32–​49, 70, 100–​1 Bhabha, Homi, 10–​11, 24–​26, 28, 38–​40, 41, 42, 82–​83, 86 Butler, Judith, 27, 94–​95, 99–​102, 106–​7 butoh, 2–​3, 12–​13, 20, 30–​31, 50, 51, 52–​55, 57–​62, 64, 78, 79, 81–​85, 86, 88–​89, 93–​94 Cabranes-​Grant, Leo, 9–​10, 13, 79, 86, 107 capitalism, 20–​21, 26–​27, 102–​3 Chambers-​Letson, Joshua, 20–​21, 63, 75–​76 Cheng, Anne Anlin, 21–​22, 57–​60, 113n.7 colonialism, 6–​7, 16, 20–​21, 26–​27, 38–​39, 41, 45–​46, 47, 48–​49, 51, 70, 86, 107 See also imperialism contemporary dance, 2, 5–​6, 12–​13, 29–​ 30, 32–​49, 51, 63–​64, 68–​69, 78–​107 cross-​cultural, 2, 3, 6–​8, 10, 13, 14, 16, 24, 27–​29, 30, 32–​33, 36–​37, 40–​41, 45–​ 46, 67, 73–​74, 78–​79, 97 See also interculturalism death, 3–​4, 18, 19–​21, 35–​36, 51–​52, 61, 67–​68, 72–​73, 75–​76, 92–​93, 108–​10 Black social death, 59–​60, 63, 74–​75 decolonialism, 16–​18, 28–​29 decolonial refusal, 69–​70 passivity and, 47, 80

Denis, Ruth St., 5–​6 Derrida, Jacques, 39–​40, 57–​58 disidentification, 74–​75 drag gender drag, 51, 64–​68, 73–​75 intercultural drag, 51, 67–​68, 73, 74–​75 temporal drag, 73–​74 duet, 1–​5, 12–​13, 15, 20, 29–​31 audience and, 28 enunciation and, 24–​25 improvisation and, 27 interculturalism and, 10, 13, 23, 27, 32–​49, 50–​77, 78–​107, 108–​10 multimodality and, 24–​25 pedagogy and, 29 xenophobia and, 11–​12, 16 empathy, 14, 23, 31, 86, 94, 109–​10 cross-​cultural empathy, 30 kinesthetic empathy, 87 Eng, David Han, Shinhee and, 22, 56–​60 Kazanjian, David and, 22 enunciation, 24–​25, 38–​40, 41, 42–​43 failure, 3, 18–​19, 23, 30–​31, 33–​34, 36–​37, 61–​62, 77, 80–​81, 88–​89, 98–​104 intimacy and, 16–​18 love and, 104–​7 productive failure, 45–​46, 48 translation and, 68–​69 feminism feminist dance critique, 45 intimacy and, 15, 16 vulnerability and, 27, 99–​100 flamenco, 2–​3, 12–​13, 30, 51, 63–​75

126 Index Flash, 12–​13, 23–​24, 30, 50, 51, 52–​63, 55f, 58f, 59f, 64, 67–​68, 76f, 77, 80, 94–​95, 99–​100 Foster, Susan Leigh, 10–​11, 41–​42, 44–​45 Freud, Sigmund, 22, 56–​57 Gilson, Erinn, 27, 40, 99–​101, 106–​7 globalization, 2, 3, 9–​11, 12–​13, 15–​18, 28–​29, 31, 36–​37, 42–​43, 45–​47, 78–​ 79, 108–​9 relationality and, 2, 12, 16 grief, 3, 4–​5, 18, 21–​22, 26–​27, 56–​57, 63, 66–​67, 71–​73, 99–​100, 106, 109–​10 Blackness and, 57, 60 shared grief, 20–​21, 23, 30, 31, 62–​63, 77, 109–​10 Halprin, Anna, 89, 93 Harris, Rennie, 12–​13, 20, 23–​24, 26, 30, 50, 52–​63, 55f, 58f, 75–​76, 76f, 77, 94–​95 hip-​hop, 2, 20, 50, 51, 52–​54, 60–​61, 64 popping, 3, 12–​13, 30, 50, 52–​54, 61–​ 62, 77 Huang, Vivian L., 16–​18, 21–​22, 23–​24, 70, 71–​72 Huynh, Emmanuelle, 11–​13, 20, 23–​24, 30–​31, 78–​107, 83f, 84f, 85f, 90f, 91f, 92f imperialism, 11–​12, 16, 109 See also colonialism improvisation, 1, 14, 27, 30–​31, 70, 80, 81–​ 85, 88–​93, 95–​96, 97, 98–​106 incommensurability, 2, 30–​31, 36–​37, 41–​ 42, 60–​63, 89–​91 interculturalism, 2–​4, 5–​7, 13, 16, 26–​27, 29–​31, 42–​45, 52–​53, 61, 75–​77, 78–​ 81, 82–​83, 87, 88, 107 classic intercultural theory, 8, 10–​ 11, 12–​13 dance and, 2–​4, 10, 13–​14, 23–​25, 27, 32–​34, 36–​42, 45–​49, 50–​54, 60–​75, 78–​88, 98–​104, 108–​10 drag and, 51, 67–​68, 73, 74–​75, 109, 110 hegemonic intercultural theatre (HIT), 6–​7, 9–​10, 11–​13, 79, 106 history of, 5–​7, 79, 86 loss and, 18, 20–​21

love and, 14–​15, 16–​18, 28–​29, 106, 107 new interculturalism, 8–​14, 79–​80 pedagogy and, 45–​49, 80–​81 theater and, 5–​7, 9, 32–​33, 36–​38, 48, 79 intersubjectivity, 12–​14, 15, 18, 20, 23–​24, 25–​26, 40, 44–​45, 48, 79, 82–​83, 88, 99–​100 intimacy, 12–​13, 15, 16–​18, 27, 31, 68–​69, 70, 98–​99, 100–​1, 105–​6 colonialism and, 47 feminism and, 15, 16 global and, 16–​18 interculturalism and, 3 kabuki, 2–​3, 12–​13, 30, 51, 63–​64, 74–​75 Kasai, Akira, 12–​13, 23–​24, 30–​31, 78, 81–​88, 83f, 84f, 85f, 94–​95, 96–​97, 98, 100–​1, 102, 103, 104–​6, 107 kinesthetic, 82–​83, 86, 87 Klunchun, Pichet, 10, 12–​13, 15, 20, 23–​ 24, 26, 29–​30, 32–​49, 70, 100–​1, 103 Kojima, Shoji, 12–​13, 20, 21–​22, 23–​24, 47, 50–​51, 63–​76, 65f, 66f, 74f, 77, 100–​1, 103 Kunst, Bojana, 102–​3 Lei, Daphne, 6–​7, 9–​10 Levinas, Emmanuel, 14, 20, 24, 25–​27, 40–​41, 47–​48, 55–​56, ​61, 82–​83, 88, 94–​95, 96, 99–​101, 106 loss, 1–​2, 3–​5, 12–​13, 14, 18–​23, 27–​28, 29–​31, 45–​46, 51–​52, ​61, 67–​69, 71–​72, 74–​77, 80–​81, 82–​83, 88, 101, 106–​7, 108, 109–​10 Blackness and, 57 loss integration, 4–​5, 29, 52, 72–​73 love and, 77, 106–​7 melancholia and, 56–​57 remains and, 28–​29, 72, 73, 87 translation and, 3, 18–​19, 30, 45–​46, 51, 61, 68, 80–​81, 87, 97 love, 12–​13, 14–​18, 23, 26–​27, 29, 30–​31, 52, 54, 55–​56, 62–​63, 80–​81, 84–​85, 88–​89, 99, 104–​7 intimacy and, 100–​1 loss and, 1–​5, 18–​23, 77, 108–​10 love dances, 28–​29, 31, 108–​9 melancholia and, 57 third spaces and, 28–​29

Index  127 Moten, Fred, 23–​24, 59, 63 mourning, 3, 4–​5, 19–​20, 30, 57–​59, 63, 67, 72–​73, 74–​76, 77, 109–​10 Black mourning, 23–​24, 59, 63, 115n.2 intercultural collaboration as, 20–​21 melancholia and, 22, 56–​57 Muller, Ivana, 103–​4 multimodality, 23–​24, 80, 88–​89, 105–​6 See also talking and dancing Muñoz, José, 57–​59, 63, 74–​75 Nancy, Jean-​Luc, 61, 63, 107 neoliberalism, 102–​3 Nguyen, Hoang Tan, 21–​22 Orientalism, 3, 8, 10, 13, 16–​18, 29–​30, 32–​ 34, 39–​40, 41–​42, 43–​46, 48–​49, 74–​75 contemporary dance history and, 5–​6 inscrutable Oriental, 16–​18, 70, 100–​1 Otake, Eiko, 11–​13, 20, 23–​24, 30–​31, 47, 70, 78, 88–​105, 90f, 91f, 92f, 106, 107 pedagogy, 14, 18–​19, 28–​29, 32–​33, 45–​49, ​61, 68–​69, 78–​79, 80–​81, 97–​98, 101 Pérez, Laura, 28, 62–​63 Phelan, Peggy, 19–​20, 22 Pichet Klunchun and Myself, 10, 12–​13, 29–​30, 32–​49, 51, 80, 99–​100 playback, 82–​83, 86, 87, 88, 105–​6 postcolonialism, 9–​10, 38, 39, 79–​80, 82–​ 83, 86, 111n.2 potentiality, 28–​29, 80–​81, 98–​104 Proietto, Daniel, 12–​13, 20, 21, 23–​24, 50–​ 51, 63–​76, 65f, 66f, 74f, 77 queer, 3, 22, 73–​74 negativity, 20–​22 queer of color, 63, 74–​76 racial melancholia, 20–​21, 22, 51, 56–​60 racism, 11–​12, 31, 53, 59–​61, 108–​9 anti-​Asian, 57–​59, 108–​9 anti-​Black, 108–​9 refusal, 3, 14, 18, 22, 27, 29, 30–​31, 48–​49, 56–​57, 69–​70, 80–​81, 98–​104 Asian passivity and inscrutability as, 16–​ 18, 20–​22, 33–​34, 47, 70, 71–​72, 80 queer refusal, 21

resistance dance and, 16–​18, 23–​24, 26, 103 Orientalism and, 29–​30, 33–​34, 37–​38, 39–​40, 42 passivity as, 47, 48–​49 political resistance, 22, 26–​27, 56–​57, 59, 63, 100–​1 Reynolds, Dee, 28, 48–​49, 87, 88–​89, 97 Sakamoto, Michael, 12–​13, 20, 23–​24, 26, 30, 50, 52–​63, 55f, 59f, 74–​76, 76f, 77 saying and said, 24, 25–​26, 28–​29, 40–​41 sayingness 42–​43 Schechner, Richard, 6–​8, 48 Schneider, Rebecca, 73, 87 Sharpe, Christina, 22, 57–​60 simulacra, 67, 73 Simulacrum, 12–​13, 21, 23–​24, 30, 51, 63–​ 75, 65f, 66f, 74f, 77, 80 Sklar, Deidre, 86 Spatz, Ben, 96 Spiel, 12–​13, 23–​24, 30–​31, 68–​69, 78–​ 89, 83f, 84f, 85f, 94–​96, 97, 98–​99, 101, 104–​6 Talking Duet, 12–​13, 23–​24, 30–​31, 78–​81, 88–​98, 90f, 91f, 92f, 104–​6 talking and dancing, 14, 23–​24, 26, 28–​31, 32–​45, 48–​49, 50–​51, 54–​55, 57–​60, 61–​62, 66–​67, 68, 69–​70, 71–​73, 74–​75, 77, 80, 82–​83, 84–​85, 88–​97, 100–​1, 102, 103 Thai classical dance, 2–​3, 12–​13, 20, 29–​ 30, 32–​49 khon, 32–​36, 37–​38, 39, 41–​43 theater collaboration and, 103–​4 dance theater, 63–​64, 70, 93 globalization and, 46–​47 interculturalism and, 5–​7, 9, 32–​33, 36–​38, 48, 79 liveness and, 35–​36 love and, 14–​15, 105–​6 third space, 14, 24–​25, 28–​29, 38–​39, 40, 41, 48–​49, 74–​75, 78, 80–​81, 82–​83, 85–​89 translation, 21–​22, 28–​29, 34–​35, 38, 51, 62–​63, 67, 68–​70, 71–​72, 88, 104 loss and, 3, 18–​19, 30, 45–​46, 51, 61, 68, 80–​81, 87, 97

128 Index translation (cont.) mistranslation, 51, 67–​68 mediation and, 28, 68–​69 technique and, 37–​38 transnational, 9–​10, 79–​80 theater, 46–​47 trauma, 1–​2, 12–​13, 20, 29, 50, 51, 53, 60–​61, 62–​63, 67, 70, 74–​75 triangulation, 48–​49, 97

vulnerability, 2, 14, 27, 29, 31, 40–​41, 47, 48–​49, 55–​57, ​61, 62–​63, 68–​69, 71, 80–​81, 98–​105, 106–​7 Asian passivity and, 80 foreclosure of, 47, 51 masculinity and, 51, 56–​57 world dance, 3, 10–​11 xenophobia, 2, 3, 11–​12, 16, 31, 108–​9