Hearing Difference: The Third Ear in Experimental, Deaf, and Multicultural Theater

Chapter 5. Performing at the Edge of Hearing: Ping Chong, Augusto Boal, and Tara Arts

Chapter 5 Performing at the Edge of Hearing: Ping Chong, Augusto Boal, and Tara Arts S ince 1990, Ping Chong, an Asian American director, has developed two cycles of works, Undesirable Elements and the East/West Quartet, that articulate the importance of listening to performances at the edge ofhearing in order to shift our understanding of cross-cultural issues. Undesirable Elements, Chong relates, was inspired by a noisy experience at an Amsterdam bar. The piece questions how we can hear unfamiliar speakers in an environment that creates a circumstantial deafness or the need to enact the third ear, by a process of listening to the sounds, bits and pieces ofwords and phrases, and the use of gesture and facial expression. In other words, how can sense be made out of a "sea ofvoices and moving bodies"? What might those efforts have to do with how we relate cross-culturally? The East/West Quartet addresses how we might hear the other through the noise that is created by the collisions bet\iVeen cultures and individuals. In both works, Chong clears a space for these voices that sound from a variety of distances. In Undesirable Elements he highlights the sounds of these voices, and in East/West Quartet he uses sound to frame key moments of hearing the silences of another. These works articulate thresholds bet\iVeen hearing and nonhearing, and the third ear provides a boundary crossing bet\iVeen the states of sound and silence. The notion of deafness, which I use here as a cultural inability to "hear" difference, revolves around the ways in which the inscriptions of our own culture limit how and under what conditions we hear the other. Alfred Tomatis and other have noted that when it comes to hearing sounds PERFORMING AT THE EDGE OF HEARING that are outside the normative frame to which we are accustomed, we often literally cannot hear those sounds; they register as noise or we do not hear them at all. In describing a contact moment with an unfamiliar language, Paul Carter notes: The sound in-bet\iVeen creates a temporary meeting place-but any attempt to build a mutually intelligible structure upon it inevitably ends in confusion. [...J The sound in-between does not originate on one side or the other. It is provoked by the interval itself [...JIt is a historical device for keeping the future open, for delineating a space where, in future, misapprehensions and differences can begin to form a new cross-cultural argot, one based on the incremental convergence of sound and gesture. (SB 12-13) The tendency to create a new hearing, or the attempt to avoid seeming deaf to others so as not to exclude certain voices from the public forum, cannot be rectified simply by deciding to listen to someone in a kind and unproblematized new humanism. Deafness, as we have discussed, has and continues to hold a repressed position in our cultural imaginary. By considering deafness and its cultural resonances, a theoretical link can be developed between the position of alterity framed by Deaftheater and other performance work that challenges the sensorial and cultural biases toward hearing others. Listening-turned toward the in-bet\iVeen regions of sound, silence, and the moving bodybecomes an attempt to cross over from the familiar into the domain of the unfamiliar. Ping Chong's Production Background Ping Chong and Company first formed in 1975 as the Fiji Theater Company . Chong's production work, which has often been described as surrealistic , has included numerous collaborations with Meredith Monk, both before he formed his company and after, and the development of his own HEARING DIFFERENCE multimedia theater works, film production, and visual art installation. Because Chong, like Wilson, first pursued a career in the visual arts and film, his style remains highly visual. Chong's work was particularly influenced by Joseph Cornell, an artist who created a variety of themed boxes filled with found objects. This type of work, predicated on chance processes, is marked by the individual vision of the artist, but it also carries a variety of cultural traces that point to the excess of meaning, that which cannot be contained in anyone work of art. Chong's work also traces the intersections among cultural artifacts, visual constructions, personal meaning, and the use of performance space. Chong's work is also influenced by Asian aesthetics. He explains that "Kabuki and Chinese opera, for instance...