by Ping Chong
Deshima was large-scale, fifty costume changes; and then with each piece the scale got smaller. After Sorrow was a chamber piece. After Sorrow structurally is a curious program because it starts with China and then it gets to Vietnam. My speaking at the end about my going to Vietnam and about how my mother went to Vietnam is my linking the author to history. The tricky thing about After Sorrow is that it starts out not being about Vietnam at all. It starts out being about my history, you could say, and then I end up being in After Sorrow. It’s a very subtle convergence. It’s a convergence of my history with that history.
Originally, the piece was going to be quite different. I actually do have a piece that I had wanted to do, and that piece still intrigues me, and perhaps one day will get done. That was a piece with two performers. It was called Ho et Escoffier, because Ho had been a pastry chef—
VA: As in Ho Chi Minh—
PC: with Escoffier in Paris, and for me that was as good a metaphor as any about colonialism and power. So I’m still intrigued by that idea. But a handicap I had at that time was that I don’t read French, and I could not afford to get to extensive French sources on their presence in Vietnam. So I was kind of strapped in a lot of ways until I came upon this idea of miniaturizing the entire microcosm, of turning it into this chamber piece.
In After Sorrow there are four short pieces. The first piece is about a Chinese woman and her husband, who has gone to America, and she never sees him again. It’s about the Chinese diaspora. That’s “L’Histoire Chinoise.” The second piece, “Whisper of the Stone,” is kind of mystical really, about the idea of the Chinese box, the box within the box within the box within the box, or the mystery of Chinese culture. It is the most metaphysical. China’s relationship to Vietnam is not explicitly stated, and that is certainly arcane to some extent. It’s not explicated, but there is a deep history between China and Vietnam, because China ruled Vietnam for 1,000 years. The third is “98.6,” about differences and similarities between two Chinese immigrants: choreographer Muna Tseng and myself. The fourth is the Vietnam piece: “After Sorrow,” a ritual and meditation on history and war. In “After Sorrow” there’s a shrine of the son, with a picture and everything. The fact is that Vietnamese culture was highly influenced by Chinese culture, to some extent. That whole setup with the ritual is very Chinese. It’s a harder piece to explain to people in terms of how these four pieces line up, but if you look at it closely, you can see what it is.
In the “After Sorrow” piece, when the Quaker woman returned to Vietnam, the village that she wanted to visit gave her a grand welcome, banging drums, etc., except the drums were made from old American war canisters, and the officials wouldn’t let her out of their sight. Finally a woman pulls her away and insists she stay with her. And she wonders, Why does this woman have this kind of power that she can get away from the officials and take her to her home? It was a show about reconciliation, because the Americans have not really come to peace with this event, nor have they ever understood the Vietnamese.
There was also a composer, a Hong Kong composer on this piece who did original music for it, Josef Fung. His training is in Western classical music. He graduated from a conservatory in Austria, but at the same time, he knew his Chinese music as well. So it was a combination of classically trained modernist Western music with traditional Chinese music and contemporary Chinese music.
After Sorrow has a lot of silence in it, and that’s a throwback to Lazarus, really, in the earliest days—that sense of silence in the world, which was, like a haiku or a Beckett piece. Like Lazarus, it is very Beckett-like in its austerity, but with a Zen spirit.
“After Sorrow” was all voiceover until the dénouement, when the Vietnamese woman tells why she invited the Quaker woman to the house and what happened to her son. That was the only time she spoke. That was the conceit.
VA: And what about putting your own voice into this one?
PC: Well, once again it was a carryover from Chinoiserie. It was also a tie-up, because I went to Vietnam, my mother had been there before, and I went as an American trying to get a sense of the place that we had bombed. My mother had been there as a performer for the Chinese diaspora in Vietnam.
That piece was very personal, going from the personal to the historical. It begins with this Chinese woman and her husband going to America. The audience sees the separate pieces and draws their own connections. So it’s a much more sophisticated, much more oblique piece in that sense.
Okay. So that takes us to Korea, right?
VA: Yes.
PC: I had planned to end the cycle with After Sorrow, largely because to do the research on these projects was punishing, and to reduce it down to a piece was punishing, and I didn’t want to go through it again. I was going to quit. But a Korean theatre scholar, Dong-il Lee, whom I had met in Minnesota sometime in the ’80s, saw Chinoiserie and said: “You’ve got to do a piece about Korea.” He pestered me into making a piece about Korea, and that’s how that came to pass. And I’m glad I did it, because I would have never had the Korean experience if I hadn’t done that.
We took After Sorrow to Korea after it premiered at La MaMa [in New York City], and in the course of that, I got to observe—the Koreans have a very strong shamanic culture of rituals and rites. Dong-il took me to a shamanic ritual performed to ensure the safe journey of the dead. And this fantastic event (it was actually a staged event for a theatre conference), a very beautiful ritual that I saw at dusk outside at the residence of a former princess, as well as the color white, which they use a great deal in the shamanic ritual, all this was very inspirational to the shaping of Pojagi [the fourth work of The East-West Quartet, which centered on Korea]. I decided that the form of Pojagi would be, not this ritual but a ritual of summoning the dead back. And so it began with these two masked figures who basically summon. The whole event was talking to the dead, in a sense.
VA: And the dead being?
PC: Korea’s history. Korea was closed for seven hundred years to the West, and ironically, because of that, it is the most Confucian of all the East Asian countries. Even though Confucianism came from China, Korea is actually more Confucian than China or Japan, because it had been closed for seven hundred years.
The Korean piece, except for the Korean War, doesn’t have the relationship with America as much as the other three pieces. The others go to America and to the relationship of those peoples in America, whereas Pojagi remains in Korea, so to speak. The others look at the postcolonial aspect of people being in the U.S. as immigrants; we didn’t do that with the Korean piece, we strictly kept it to being a piece about what happens in their homeland. This piece was interesting in that it was a chronological history all the way up to the present.
VA: So you didn’t jump around in time at all?
PC: I didn’t. It moved forward in time, which is rare for me.
At around this time I was doing workshops at the National Theatre of the Deaf, and I’ve always loved sign language. I thought it was a fascinating movement vocabulary. And I decided to use it in this piece as the silent language of the Koreans. I wanted to create a language that was not a stand-in for the Korean language, but really a stand-in for the fact that Korea is a country whose voice is not really heard, because Korea’s fate was in the hands of larger nations and their political machinations.
And my favorite part in the show is when there is a summary of the show, which is silent except for the sign language. A summary in movement, because from the very beginning of the show there’s been sign language, and then at this point I summarize everything that’s happened up to that point with sign language and no text. It became a purely choreographic pleasure. Which I liked. Well, it was a choreographic pleasure, plus the summing-up of Korean history up to the present.
We developed Pojagi at Anna Deavere Smith’s Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue at Harvard in the summer of ’99, and premiered it at La MaMa the following spring. In between we brought Pojagi to Korea, performi
ng on the eve of the millennium before 3,000 Koreans, outdoors, within fifteen minutes of the DMZ, near the bridge where prisoners were exchanged after the Korean War. I spent the turn of the millennium there at the DMZ. That was fabulous.
VA: So whereas in the other pieces you would use dance as the language, in Pojagi the dance was sign language.
PC: Mostly. It had shamanic dance as well.
VA: And it was literally accurate sign language?
PC: Well, actually it was sign language and some Chinese opera gestures. Yes, there was a little bit of Chinese opera in there.
VA: And for Pojagi, you felt that it was important that the actors be Korean performers, Korean American?
PC: Korean, yes, because we used the Korean language in it, too.
Pojagi was mostly written by me, with some help from found sources. The tourist section at the DMZ was an adaptation of the spiel that the GI gives, plus the consent form you had to sign there.
VA: Can you share any thoughts on the Quartet as a whole?
PC: The through-line exists in all four pieces, and perhaps that’s true of most of my work, there’s always a sense of ritual in everything. After Sorrow and Pojagi share more in common than Deshima and Chinoiserie formally. After Sorrow (the last part, “After Sorrow,” particularly) is really a meditation, a ritual of history: you just see this figure moving onstage. She barely talks and the voices are all coming from the recording until the very end when she explains what happened to her son, that’s the only time she speaks onstage. So what you’re getting is an entirely visual experience, and the
performing style is completely ritualized. Pojagi is also very ritualized. Whereas in Chinoiserie and Deshima, you still have characters, people stepping in and out of characters. In After Sorrow, in the set of the rice-planting field, the grass is partly orange and partly green. That is a reference to Agent Orange. The piece is about a kind of resolution, trying to resolve the conflict between our two nations at the end, but through the experiences of two individuals. The rice planting helps to ritualize that last piece.
I don’t think about that when I do that kind of thing. It just comes. There’s not an overt reasoning to it.
VA: Does anything else come to mind that you would like to say about the Quartet?
PC: I did not start off to write a quartet of plays about East-West relations, it just happened that way. But looking at them as a unit I see them as a meditation on the consequences of history both in terms of nations and individuals. They are about the connection of the past to the present and the future. And they are about the intended and unintended effects of colonialism—both Asian and European—on nations and peoples and individuals.
But The East-West Quartet is about something else too. Toward the end of Chinoiserie, we project, the famous photo of the meeting of the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific railroads at Promontory Point in Utah in 1869, the place where East met West literally and figuratively. Ninety percent of the workforce on the railroad was Chinese, but when the picture was taken there weren’t any Chinese in it. They had been excluded from the picture.
In Chinoiserie, we digitally restored the Chinese to the picture, in recognition of their sacrifice and great contribution to the building of this nation. I hope that The East-West Quartet brings a certain long overdue justice to the experiences of Asians in America and contributes to a greater understanding of the complicated and often tragic history of competition among Europe, America and Asia.
New York City
September 2004
Deshima
A Poetic Documentary
For Ritsaert ten Cate
Production History
Deshima received its American premiere at La MaMa E.T.C. in New York City on January 1, 1993. It was conceived, directed and choreographed by Ping Chong, it was written by Ping Chong and Michael Matthews. The set design was by Watoku Ueno and Ping Chong, the lighting design was by Thomas Hase, the costume design was by Carol Ann Pelletier, projections were by Jan Hartley and Ping Chong and the sound design was by Brian Hallas and Robert Bosch. The stage manager was Virlana Tkacz and the managing director was Bruce Allardice. The performers were: Deena Burton, Barbara Chan, Ching Gonzalez, Brian Liem, Larry Malvern, Michael Matthews, Emerald Trinket Monsod, Dawn Saito and Perry Yung.
Deshima was produced with support by the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the AT&T Foundation, Fan Fox & Leslie R. Samuels Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. The production toured the United States and was presented at the Tokyo International Festival of Performing Arts, the Nagoya Festival and the Nagasaki Public Theatre (1995), and at the Singapore International Festival (1996).
Deshima was originally produced by the Mickery Workshop Theatre in Holland. It was first performed as part of the 1990 Spring Dance Festival in Utrecht, Holland, and was presented later that year at the Tramway Theatre in Glasgow, Scotland, as part of the European City of Culture Festival.
Introduction
Deshima was conceived as a “poetic documentary” in which every element is referenced to a historical event in the complicated and often brutal history of contact and competition between Japan and the West. Inspired by events in the shared histories of the United States, Europe and Asia, and built on both documentary and original materials, Deshima weaves its story as a multidisciplinary poem composed of layers of text, music, choreography and image.
The play takes its name from a man-made island built off Nagasaki in the 1600s to quarantine European traders and prevent them from contaminating Japan with Western ideas. For two hundred years, Dutch merchants lived on the island of Deshima until Commodore Perry’s expedition “opened” Japan by force in 1853. Thus this artificial island serves as a metaphor for the ongoing process of simultaneous resistance and accommodation in relations between Japan and the West.
Deshima is structured as a series of intersections. Cultures collide, histories and eras are juxtaposed, and aesthetics clash to create a prismatic sense of history, time and implication. It cuts back and forth in time, and blends first-person accounts, archival photos and recordings with overlapping aural, visual and choreographic invention. The experiences of the early Jesuits in Japan, the negotiations of a Dutch trader with the Daimyo, the World War II internment of the Japanese in America, the Japanese domination of Indonesia, and the trade wars of the 1980s are just some of the histories that are explored. Linking it all is the narrator and the character of Vincent van Gogh, the Western artist with a passion for Japan, born the year Admiral Perry arrived in Japan. His paintings never sold in his lifetime but are now seen as part of Europe’s
cultural patrimony, and create a cause for alarm when bought for record sums by wealthy Japanese businessmen.
Deshima draws on traditional Eastern and Western dance as a particular expression of culture. A stylized Indonesian dance contrasts with a stylized European waltz. The Jitterbug embodies the exuberance of twentieth century America. The president of Sony discusses business and technology on tape while a stately, traditional Indonesian court dance holds the eye. Energized contemporary dance sets a context for a montage of Japan’s postwar era.
In examining the effects of trade, religion, art and race on East-West relations from the sixteenth century to the present, Deshima is also an exploration of the world today, in which cultural distinctions are being profoundly and inevitably changed by the global communications revolution.
Playwright’s Notes
Staging:
I describe Deshima as a poetic documentary. A “documentary” because each element in the production—the text, choreography, gesture, sound and visual design—is inspired by an incident in the complicated history between Japan and the West. “Poetic” because the form is associative not narrative. Deshima raises questions but does not answer them.
Deshima is a multidisciplinary work. The audio, projecti
on and visual effects as well as the choreography play a large part in this piece.
Characters:
Deshima is an ensemble work. Each performer plays many roles. It is integral to the production concept that the role of the Narrator be played by an African American man and the others by Asian American actors/dancers. The Narrator assumes many roles throughout the piece—servant, metaphysical commentator, Japanese businessman, American businessman, van Gogh, etc. The Narrator is always dressed in a fashionable modern suit except at the end of the piece when he becomes the “Sower after Millet” in the van Gogh painting. The other performers wear costumes appropriate for the scenes.
Prologue
The set consists of large Japanese shoji screens, which form back and side walls. Space between allows for entrances and exits. The back wall serves as a projection surface. The floor is black. Black drapes provide side masking. Various prop and set elements are brought on and off as needed.