by Ping Chong
Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Preface
An Interview with Ping Chong
Deshima - A Poetic Documentary
Prologue
Scene 1
Scene 2
Scene 3
Scene 4
Scene 5
Scene 6
Scene 7
Scene 8
Scene 9
Scene 10
Chinoiserie
After Sorrow - A Work in Four Parts
L’Histoire Chinoise
Whisper of the Stone
98.6: A Convergence in 15 Minutes
After Sorrow: An Epilogue
Pojagi
Photographic Credits
Copyright Page
For Ellen Stewart,
the founder of La MaMa E. T. C.,
who opened her theatre to the world
Special Thanks
Suzanne Sato, Muna Tseng, Courtney Golden, Sachiko Willis, Sara Zatz, Victoria Abrash, Bruce Allardice, National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, Asian Cultural Council and La MaMa E.T.C.
Preface
By Jessica Hagedorn
Around twenty-five years ago, I came across a profile of Ping Chong in one of those “hip” downtown papers—either the Village Voice or the now extinct Soho Weekly News. I had just moved to New York from San Francisco, and whichever alternative rag it may have been, what I know for sure is that a brief scene from the Obie Award–winning Humboldt’s Current was excerpted. A photo of Ping—intense, bespectacled, skinny and, at the time, long-haired—accompanied the piece. Intrigued, I clipped the page and tacked it on the wall by the rickety, multipurpose cardtable where I ate my meals and wrote. Ping Chong would be my funky new Role Model. He was clearly some sort of maverick Renaissance man—a theatre director, choreographer, filmmaker, video and installation artist all rolled into one. His being Chinese American, and creating challenging work in a world that was largely closed-off to artists of color, awakened my curiosity and was also deeply inspiring.
The first Ping Chong show I ever saw was Nuit Blanche, presented at La MaMa E.T.C. in 1981. The stark elegance and startling beauty of this production had enormous impact on me. If you ask me now what it was all about, I really couldn’t tell you. But I remember, quite vividly, dialogue spoken in Spanish, a film of the moon, the sound of a bird flapping its enormous wings, and a single flower in a vase bathed in blue light. I felt as if I had watched a dream of otherness come to life onstage, and left La MaMa excited by the possibilities of making theatre.
In the years that followed, I saw as much of Ping’s multimedia theatre pieces as I could.
The opportunity to meet Ping in person came a couple of years later. From 1981–1985, I worked as the Literary and Performance Series Coordinator at Basement Workshop, a gallery space on Catherine Street in Chinatown. Founded in the early 1970s, Basement Workshop was one of the first Asian American arts organizations in the country. Its mission was to promote, preserve and present works by Asian American writers and artists. Ping seemed the perfect choice to be a part of our program. He was from the neighborhood, after all—“The Local Boy Who Made Good in the Art World.” We tracked Ping down and invited him to teach a performance master class. I signed up for the workshop, eager to get to know Ping and to observe his creative process.
I took a lot away from that workshop, but the most valuable thing he taught us, which stays with me even today, was how to conjure theatre from seemingly random elements—a litany of foreign and English words, a chronology of events, a song, an object from someone ’s home. Simply put, in that class we learned the art of juxtaposition, of which Ping is a master.
In The East-West Quartet, the reader finally gets a chance to experience and savor Ping’s art on the page. While Ping’s scripts have been anthologized widely, this is the first time a thematic body of work has been published. The East-West Quartet brings together four works which are poetic explorations of the complex and often troubled relations between East and West: Deshima (Japan), Chinoiserie (China), After Sorrow (Vietnam) and Pojagi (Korea). Ping critiques, in each dazzling and stylistically different piece, the various ways in which the U.S., the British, the French and, even the Dutch, were involved in colonizing and exploiting these four Asian countries, but the smart, tough artist in him resists the easy and the obvious. In Deshima, for example, the Americans and Europeans are not the only guilty parties. The powerful Japanese are implicated as well, for oppressing and dominating other, more vulnerable Asian countries.
Looking at history from different perspectives is a constant theme in these four works, as are identity and nation-building. Questions are raised yet, thankfully, no pat conclusions are drawn. Is history only to be written or handed down from the conquistador’s point of view? How are events such as the nineteenth century Opium Wars or the twentieth century murder of Vincent Chin made different when viewed through the eyes of Asian or Asian American people? We are taken on a circuitous journey from sixteenth century Japan to the 1980s trade wars between the U.S. and Japan; from eighteenth century China to twentieth century Vietnam; and from fourteenth century Korea to present day and back again.
He has described himself as a “first generation Chinese American, specifically Cantonese, who still feels a profound connection to Asia,” but Ping Chong is also very much a risk-taking, singular American artist. Bold casting choices exemplify his anticipation and embrace of the multicultural explosion. In Deshima, African American actor Michael Matthews (who collaborated on the script with Ping) played the lead role of Vincent van Gogh, while a cast of Asian actors played colonizer and colonized. In Chinoiserie, an African American actress played the role of the murdered Vincent Chin’s grieving mother.
Austere and intimate theatre pieces, such as Pojagi and After Sorrow, or more sumptuous, epic multimedia ones, such as Deshima or Chinoiserie share certain stylistic elements that are hallmarks of Ping’s work: tidbits of historical information projected on a screen, the unexpected use of smart pop or classical music, the cinematic flourishes and allusions. Actors may also be called upon to waltz, make stylized gestures in the manner of Chinese opera or Restoration theatre, execute cha-cha dance steps or balletic martial arts moves.
Artfully and elegantly conceived, rich in metaphor, political yet deeply personal, the four works in The East-West Quartet tell us much about the pitfalls and ironies of history, the various contradictions, collisions and collusions within the East and the West, and the search for national and personal identity.
Ping Chong remains one of my cherished role models. A true citizen of the world, he refuses to be pigeonholed and goes his own way, as much at home on the streets of Beijing and Paris as he is on Canal Street in New York. He continues to make work that bristles with intelligence, that is filled with empathy for the human condition, that is angry yet beautiful—work that matters. It is all here in this book.
New York City
September 2004
An Interview with Ping Chong
By Victoria Abrash
VICTORIA ABRASH: Could you say a little bit about the genesis of the four plays of The East-West Quartet?
PING CHONG: Well, you want me to give you the long-winded version?
VA: The long-winded version, absolutely.
PC: When I began this project I had nothing in mind so grand as a quartet of plays about East-West relations past, present and future. But once I started down that road with Deshima and began to confront American ignorance about Asian cultures and history, that’s exactly what I ended up doing.
In 1988, I was working in Hol
land at the legendary Mickery Workshop Theatre. Ritsaert ten Cate, the artistic director, asked me if I was interested in making a work about Vincent van Gogh, because 1990 would be the centennial of van Gogh’s death. I said sure.
I went back to New York and I researched van Gogh, whom I know something about because of my own art history background, and it struck me that he was born in 1853, which was the year that Commodore Admiral Perry of the United States Navy went to Japan to open its door to trade, after Japan had been closed for two hundred years.
And van Gogh and the Impressionists were highly influenced by Japanese woodcut prints, which they learned about because chinoiserie and its Japanese equivalent were all the rage, and so you had porcelains and lacquerware going to Europe wrapped in Japanese woodcut prints, which were cheap like newspaper because it was a mass-produced item. I thought that was a fascinating piece of information.
And a van Gogh painting, I believe it was the Irises, was sold to a Japanese corporation for the highest amount of money ever at the time, and that was the beginning of Japan’s major purchases of Western art. In the nineteenth century, the Europeans had complained about the “uncouth Americans” buying up the European patrimony and culture, and now the West was saying that about Japan. And I was aware of the biases of the American press toward Japan’s purchases of American property.
And van Gogh had said a really odd thing at one point, which was that Arles in France will be the Japan of the future.
So I went back to Ritsaert and I made a new proposal. I said: “How about if I made a show about Japan and the West, with van Gogh as the frame?” I felt that there was very little known about the history of Japan and the West, and I wanted to do something about it. That’s how the whole Quartet started, as a single piece of work, with no intention of making more than one piece. The work is called Deshima.
This was a time when I was separating with my longtime acting ensemble, and Deshima represents a seminal work for the decade for me personally. It marked a transition from a decade of work with my resident company, to a decade of work based on exploring documentary as a possible form for theatre. Everything in the ’90s was documentary. Until Kwaidan in ’98.
VA: What do you mean when you say “everything was documentary”?
PC: Work that was based on historical research, based on factual information, based on interviews. Undesirable Elements [an oral history series that Ping Chong began in 1992, which explores culture and history through personal narratives] was the other seminal work for me, and both of them were made at the beginning of the ’90s.
You believe in the goodness of mankind
VA: What made you choose Deshima for the title?
PC: The title came from the name of the artificial island off of Nagasaki built to quarantine foreign traders. The Dutch lived on Deshima for two hundred years. The Japanese would only allow third-class prostitutes to go and service the Dutch, and the Dutch were not allowed to leave the island except when they were summoned. I didn’t know anything about Deshima when I started this project but I just thought it was metaphorically so rich.
VA: Had you used documentary material in your work before Deshima?
PC: The precedent is a fable version, in a sense. Humboldt’s Current, which I made in 1977, is the father of this kind of work, which travels through time and geography.
VA: So the idea of looking at history was already something that you were exploring.
PC: Right. There is a section in Humboldt where a series of slides said: “The electric light bulb is invented”; “Phnom Penh falls.” Chronology, time and history began in my work with Humboldt’s Current.
VA: And the idea of juxtaposing historical events and personal perspectives is something that also goes back.
PC: Yes. That all began with Humboldt’s Current. Before that all the works were personal. They didn’t move out into the world yet, into the relationship of the microcosm to the macrocosm. Humboldt’s Current was about colonialism, about the ethnocentricity of the West.
VA: And a lot of your work’s been about colonialism, in different aesthetics.
PC: My first three works: Lazarus in 1972, I Flew to Fiji, You Went South in 1973 and Fear and Loathing in Gotham in 1975, not so much. Fear and Loathing, was about cultural estrangement. Cultural estrangement hadn’t manifested itself in the first two pieces yet.
VA: Your first piece Lazarus is kind of fundamentally about cultural estrangement.
PC: Yes, you’re right, but not explicitly. Lazarus and I Flew to Fiji were more poetic, more cryptic, more elliptical about cultural estrangement. And there’s always that sense of the anthropological, from the very first. From Lazarus on, this idea of someone whose vision of the world cannot be the same anymore, after coming back from the dead, becomes anthropological, because he now sees the world in this objectified, or new, light.
VA: Is all of the text of Deshima documentary?
PC: Not all of it. Deshima was also the first time that I partnered with a single writer. In almost all the work (except the earliest work, which I created myself), from the point when I met actress Louise Smith with Nuit Blanche in 1980, the text was developed through improvisation and collaboration with the actors. But in Deshima, the performers I was working with were not generative creators, except for Michael Matthews, and so Michael and I wrote Deshima together.
I would say half the text was documentary text. Everything about the Jesuits, the whole missionary effort, all the text in the missionary scene was historical information. Of course, some of it was fictionalized. The Executive Order for the internment of the Japanese Americans was verbatim, except for some absurdist twists in it. The one narrative in the internment camp scene, an anecdote told by a daughter about her mother’s willowware set, is actual also. Michael wrote everything that he said in the script. I would give him the seed, I’d give him the concept, and he would swing with it. So in the waltz in Indonesia in honor of the king of Holland, I talked about how it was the sunset of empire and should have a nineteenth century romantic tone to it, and he came up with that romantic speech with the dancer duet at the end of that section. The trade war speech that he wrote at the end was really a collaboration. We worked closely on that last speech. But the opening text where the Dutchman brings gifts to the Daimyo and enumerates the gifts is an actual list of gifts that were sent as “tribute.”
Because the show would be performed in Holland, I wanted to cover the Dutch history in Indonesia, which was controversial even at the theatre I was working, because at that point the Dutch really hadn’t owned up to their colonial history, even in 1990.
VA: So you were working with Japan and then you decided since it was Holland, since this was Dutch history, you would expand?
PC: Well, no. The reason I brought Indonesia up is because the Japanese took Indonesia from the Dutch. I wouldn’t have brought that in arbitrarily. It was another page of the history that related to Japan. In fact, the surrender of Indonesia to the Japanese was also an abridged verbatim text of the handover between the Dutch Governor General to the Lieutenant General of Japan, who was in charge at that time.
VA: It sounds as if this was a level of research that you’d never done before.
PC: I’d never done anything like it. It was very intensive research, yes. But it was interesting how my dramaturg tried to convince me not to talk about that history of Holland, which was basically that the Dutch enslaved the Indonesians for three hundred years.
VA: But you did say it.
PC: I did. And I got flak for it from the press, racist flak: “How dare this Chinese man? Who is this Chinese man to tell us about our colonial history?”
But we took the show to the Glasgow European Cultural Capital Festival in 1990, as one of four Dutch productions. So there I am, this Chinese man making this Japanese show, produced by the Dutch, representing Holland. And what was interesting was that the show was trashed in Holland, and when we took it to Glasgow, the audiences said: “Yes. This is
what the British are doing to us. We really understand what this show’s about.”
Do you want me to talk a little bit about the casting, which was unusual, in a sense?
VA: Yes.
PC: Because I chose to have all Asian cast members in the show, to play colonizer and colonized—
VA: Except for Michael Matthews.
PC: Except for Michael. It was a deliberate choice to use a black man as the lead, because of the subliminal and subversive nature of so much in the West, which demeans the black man and does not allow him to be a leading man, in the same way there’s still no anchorman who’s Asian. There’s an Asian anchorwoman, but there’s no Asian anchorman. And the Asian male in America is still something that is neutered, largely. Jackie Chan is no exception. He’s a clown.
When a Dutch reporter asked me why I had a black man play Vincent van Gogh, my answer was: “Why not?” [Laughs] It was kind of a sneer when he said that: “Why are you casting a black man as our great artistic icon?” Which told me more about their attitudes than they realized.