The Association for Asian Performance: A Brief History

This short narrative of the life of the Association for Asian Performance (AAP) is both a personal statement and an institutional history. It is not a description of personal careers, of books written, of plays directed. It is personal in the sense that I call on people’s memories, including my own, to tell a story spanning forty-six years. Memory can deceive. To some extent, I am describing the elephant based on partial accounts of ears, legs, trunk, and tusks, and I may have made mistakes. Still, without memory we are not human. The narrative is also an institutional account, a story of a changing institution based in part on information published in news bulletins and newsletters (see Published Works Cited). Many thanks to AAP members who shared their reminiscences. And my sincere apologies to the many wonderful AAP members and officers whose names do not, for reasons of space, appear below.