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1 enter the voice of the dragon Fred Ho, Bruce Lee, and the Popular Avant-Garde Kevin fellezS i am trying to create a new american opera that appeals to today’s youth—particularly inner city youth—who think of opera as something conservative and exclusionary [ . . . ] i at least want my artistic/theatrical concept to be more exciting and captivating, and for the martial arts to demolish the aesthetics of grade-b action films, boring broadway and moribund modern dance. —fRed ho, “beyond asian american Jazz” i believe that i have a role [ . . . ] the audience needs to be educated and the one to educate them has to be somebody who is responsible. We are dealing with the masses and we have to create something that will get through to them. We have to educate them step by step. —bRUce lee, Words of the Dragon Fred Ho’s Journey beyond the West: The New Adventures of Monkey (1996) is an “Afro Asian score for ballet,” an eclectic brew of high and low culture, as well as Afrodiasporic and Asian American cultural elements. Journey beyond the West is a reinterpretation of popular Chinese Monkey King tales, a figure who protects the lowly and oppressed from evil spirits and the caprices of the gods. As Susan Asai notes, “Within the socialist framework of Ho’s politics, The Monkey King can be thought of as the equivalent of a working-class hero defying the capitalist, bourgeois forces that oppress the masses.”1 Through all of his works Ho has built an aesthetic informed by political histories as well as his insistence on the efficacy of music to serve as a revolutionary tool of “the people.” 36 Kevin fellezs It is not only Chinese mythology that inspires him. In the composition, “Monkey Decides to Return Home ‘To Right the Great Wrongs’” from Journey , Ho’s voicings for the horns recall Chinese opera themes, assisted in no small part by the use of instrumentation borrowed from Chinese operatic ensembles. Another work, Voice of the Dragon: Once upon a Time in Chinese America (1997), is a reinvention of ancient Chinese myths, the Chinese martial-arts tradition and its popular-culture form, the martial-arts action film, as well as Asian and Afrodiasporic musical influences Ho describes as “Afro-Asian new American multicultural music.”2 We can hear this merging of political acumen and musical hybridity throughout his work. His work is thus positioned in “already hybrid” spaces complicated by his use of elements gleaned from popular culture. Understanding his own work as operating within a tradition he terms the “popular avant-garde,” his use of popular-culture elements is both aesthetic strategy and political advocacy. Defining the popular avant-garde as an aesthetic program dedicated to “elevating standards, promoting the necessity and importance of experimentation but at the same time being rooted, grounded and vibrantly connected to the people,” Ho castigates accessibility in art as a needless “dumbing down, a pandering” to popular audiences.3 He is also wary of various connotations of “avant-garde” because “it can be both purveyor of change or perpetuator of privilege, solipsism and snobbish elitism [particularly if it implies] the completely anti-political position of l’art pour l’art (art for art’s sake, which I and others would assert, is political by asserting the autonomy of art and ideas as standing above society and thereby tacit acquiescence and accommodation to the status quo).”4 While Ho’s work operates within a context of an historical Asian American jazz movement and its set of political commitments, I pursue a slightly different tack in this chapter, focusing on Ho’s articulation of a popular avantgarde . A key element of his aesthetic that has been largely overlooked is the martial-arts film and, in particular, the philosophical texts (films and writings ) of actor Bruce Lee as a way of representing Asian American struggles for recognition, thinking about Asian American sources of spiritual knowledge and aesthetic sensibilities, and as an example of the contradictory impulses Ho gathers together in the creation of the popular avant-garde. In ways similar to the journey hua pen narratives took to become valorized as literati cultural production, Ho appropriates the work of Bruce Lee and the marital-arts action-film genre in the creation of his popular avant-garde in order to educate his audiences, provide models of revolutionary and liberatory political action, and to give voice to counterhegemonic perspectives. [3.145.130.31] Project MUSE (2024...

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