Encounters

My sojourn as a creator, for the past six years, of intercultural projects bringing together traditional Asian arts and contemporary interdisciplinary expression has only just begun. In March 2000, I directed Desdemona in which 10 artists--actors, musicians, designers, video/installation artists--from India, Korea, Myanmar, Indonesia, and Singapore worked together on-stage. Desdemona premiered at the Adelaide Festival and then went on to the Munich Dance Festival and the Singapore and Hamburg Festivals. In 2001 it metamorphosed into a visual arts exhibition/performance/outreach program at the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum. Desdemona was preceded by the 1997 Japan Foundation Asia Center Lear that I directed in collaboration with 30 traditional and contemporary artists from all over Asia. This article is a reflection on these collaborations, a window into an intercultural journey.

I should first introduce The Flying Circus Project that is at the root of my thinking. The Project is an ambitious large-scale laboratory that brings together diverse Asian artists--documentary filmmakers, drag queens, visual artists, rock and computer musicians, disk jockeys, modern dancers, and actors, as well as ritualists and other traditional performers. For four weeks, different cultures, aesthetics, disciplines, and of course, individual personalities encounter each other in a series of training classes, workshops based on improvisation and reinventing traditional art forms, discussions, and lectures. Thus far, three laboratories have brought together 150 artists from India, Korea, China, Tibet, Taiwan, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Myanmar, Japan, Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Singapore in a process that I call "cultural negotiation," with no view to end-product or final presentation. The Project has also included a few "guests" from Europe and the U.S.A.

The question posed by the Flying Circus Project is, "Can we, as artists from Asia, bring another perspective and forge a different relationship to intercultural performance than what has developed in the United States for instance?"

To even begin answering that question, we need to explore what is contemporary in Asia. In November 1997, I set out for an eight-week research trip to India in preparation for the second Flying Circus Project. Thus began the journey of what was to become Desdemona. I was already thinking of Shakespeare's Othello, whose interracial marriage seemed the perfect way to open up issues of culture and race that we are confronted with in any intercultural exploration.

But I also wanted to move away from earlier interpretations of Othello, especially the obsessive stereotyping of black machismo. What if Othello was played by a woman or by a slight, slender boy? (Finally, I cast two Indian performers in this role, a man and a woman: Madhu Margi, a kudiyattum actor, and Maya Rao, a modern theatre actress also trained in kathakali.)

Desdemona opens with Othello asking, "Who am I? What am I?" The audience learns that his father and his father's father were also named Othello, and that he is childless. Haunted by his father, Othello longs for a son, also to be named Othello. To him, Desdemona is a sex slave who will produce a male heir for him.

Desdemona appears, talking of how her people were colonized by Othello's father's father. Not allowed to have names, they were designated by numbers. Her own name, Desdemona, was bequeathed to her secretly by her mother. To Othello, who has no memory of his mother or his mother's mother, Desdemona represents a challenge, bringing to the fore a female identity unearthed through memory. As the performance unfolds, Desdemona hallucinates about her death, her mother, and about being stabbed by a sword. She wants to drink the poisonous saliva of the sword. The sword, mother, and Desdemona slowly fuse into a single passion. It is this passion that threatens Othello and that he destroys. As he kills Desdemona, Othello utters these words: "In you, I do not exist."

Desdemona returns as a ghost. She takes revenge by possessing Othello's body and the body of a male slave, transforming them into beautiful...