Encounters

Abstract

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 , I directed Desdemona in which  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  it metamorphosed into a visual arts exhibition/performance/outreach program at the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum. Desdemona was preceded by the  Japan Foundation Asia Center Lear that I directed in collaboration with  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  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 , 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