Intercultural Performance

The history of Western avant-garde theatre and dance is a history of cultural appropriation. From Bertolt Brecht and Antonin Artaud to Robert Wilson and Julie Taymor, from Ruth St. Denis and Martha Graham to Merce Cunningham and Deborah Hay, Western artists have borrowed from, imagined, and incorporated Eastern aesthetics in their work. For many of these influential artists, encounters with Asia have, in fact, inspired key turning points in the development of their art.

In the case of dance, scholars such as Priya Srinivasan and Yutian Wong have done important historical work to uncover the ways Asian aesthetics have been appropriated in Euro-American concert dance.Footnote ³ Ruth St. Denis, one of the foremothers of modern dance in the United States, drew much of her inspiration and her choreography from South Asian dance. Likewise, Martha Graham was influenced by a range of East, Southeast, and South Asian aesthetics. These orientalist imaginings lent the choreography of these pioneers of American modern dance an air of the novel, the exotic, the sensual. Later, leaders in postmodern dance similarly looked East: for example, Merce Cunningham drew on Chinese philosophy, and Steve Paxton incorporated Asian martial arts to generate dance material. In all of these cases—and this is just a selection of examples—the choreographers, widely viewed as major innovators in the history of American dance, did not credit any of the people who might have been the sources of their inspiration.Footnote ⁴ Their appropriation of Asian aesthetics became historicized as the unique creations of individual artists who single-handedly renewed American dance.Footnote ⁵ As Wong and Srinivasan each argue, if these key figures in the history of American modern and postmodern dance based their choreographic style on fantasies of Asia, then we must account for the ways that orientalism is a constitutive part of the legacy of Euro-American dance.

Interculturalism also has a long history in the theatre. One of the most prolific periods in this history is the 1980s and 1990s, a time when a number of European and American artists engaged in large-scale projects that assimilated Western and Eastern forms, performers, staging conventions, epic stories, mise-en-scènes, or texts. Peter Brook's 1985 nine-hour adaptation of the Indian epic The Mahabharata was a seminal, and controversial, work of the period. Ariane Mnouchkine's 1987 L'Indiade was another. Eugenio Barba's search for “pre-expressive” principles through research in Asian theatre forms and Jerzy Grotowski's study of non-Western ritual marked other experiments in intercultural performance of the era. From Asia, Ong Keng Sen's 1997 Lear was a much-discussed East–West production.Footnote ⁶ The scholarship that arose in response to these works has been plentiful.Footnote ⁷ In some cases intellectuals and critics proclaimed a promising new trend in which artists were commingling aesthetics across cultures in ways that dismantled colonial barriers and heralded new forms.Footnote ⁸ Richard Schechner has been an exuberant champion of intercultural work. In a 1982 article, he welcomes a “culture of choice.”Footnote ⁹ While he acknowledges the danger of ignoring imbalances of power and cultural chauvinism in cross-cultural relationships, he is ultimately omnivorous: “The more contact among peoples the better. The more we, and everyone else too, can perform our own and other people's cultures the better.”Footnote ¹⁰ Other scholars decried the Western arrogance and imperial attitude they saw repeated in so many of these theatrical fusions.Footnote ¹¹ In multiple books and articles Rustom Bharucha, one of the few scholars of interculturalism who does not write from a position in the West but is an independent scholar based in India, vigorously condemns what he views as the stealing and evisceration of native traditions by condescending European and American artists,Footnote ¹² and even by Asian artists such as Ong who, Bharucha feels, equally “consume” Asia.Footnote ¹³ Reviewing the literature of the time, this busy period of intercultural theatre was either a demonstration of the persistence of colonialism or the rich result of a “‘promiscuous’” artistic curiosity.Footnote ¹⁴

I outline a bit of the fraught history of intercultural performance in order to situate Pichet Klunchun and Myself and provide a backdrop for my questions about the ethics and politics of contemporary interculturalism. Why return to these debates of thirty years ago? Where did they ultimately lead? In 2000, Schechner wrote, “One thing is sure, the borrowings and the impositions are not going to stop. The open question is—can there be, ought there to be, rules governing this interplay? If so, what might the rules be? Who would enforce them? Is enforcement something artists and intellectuals want to get into?”Footnote ¹⁵ It is true that since the 1980s and 1990s, many Western artists have continued to incorporate Asian forms in their works. There may be no satisfying answer to Schechner's questions, but they are still important to ask. The debates of those decades have caused some contemporary artists to be more conscientious than their forebears about the politics of cross-cultural work. If Mnouchkine was insensitive in her exploitation of “the Orient,” if Brook was tactless in his plundering of Indian tradition, if Barba and Grotowski were naive in their search for a universal theatrical language, artists today who experiment with East–West fusions cannot be as cavalier—and neither can scholars who study this work. Patrice Pavis, a key advocate in the earlier period, returns to the dilemma in “Intercultural Theatre Today (2010)”:

Whereas in 1996 Pavis described critiques of interculturalism as “moralistic ‘political correctness,’”Footnote ¹⁷ here he acknowledges a need for more circumspection, more contextual understanding, and an ethical dimension.

Increasing global contact and mobility has made cross-cultural encounter and exchange more and more a part of all forms of cultural practice. I argue that the debates over interculturalism are not over. Certainly the culturally hybrid work that is performed now is different from that of Mnouchkine and Brook. I might characterize it as more effortfully reciprocal. For example, choreographer Margaret Jenkins's Other Suns is a piece danced jointly by her American dancers and dancers from the Guangdong Modern Dance Company (GMDC) in China. One section of the dance is choreographed by Jenkins, one by Liu Qi from GMDC, and the last section is a collaboration. Despite these efforts at parity, however, I detect a lingering orientalist prejudice as I read Jenkins's blog of her residency in Guangdong.Footnote ¹⁸ Bel and Klunchun too labor to make their collaboration fifty–fifty, and compared to earlier intercultural performance, Pichet Klunchun and Myself is at once more respectful and more lighthearted about cross-cultural exchange.

At the same time, this shift toward reciprocity does not relieve us of the need to examine continually how cultural exchanges operate. What are the politics inherent in these encounters? Who has the privilege of being perceived as intercultural, and who is merely “modernized”? And does orientalism persist even in the more recent collaborations that earnestly attempt equal exchange and mutual respect? Can cross-cultural sharing help us escape orientalism, or is the notion of the East as absolute other to the West the mechanism that still fuels Western interest in Asian aesthetics?

In our increasing confrontation with and reliance on communities outside our traditional national and cultural borders we must develop strategies of engagement that neither reduce difference to an unspecified, decontextualized relativism nor reify colonial hierarchies and prejudices. A recent anthology in dance studies titled Worlding Dance offers us a neologism for thinking about the politics of cultural classification.Footnote ¹⁹ The book is concerned with dismantling ethnocentric taxonomies of dance that view Western modern dance and ballet as high art while subsuming all non-Western forms within the categories of “traditional” or “folk.” To “world” dance is to open up our colonialist perceptions of dance beyond ballet and modern to consider other dance forms as both contemporaneous with Western concert dance and as having their own aesthetic integrity. The interculturalism of the 1980s and 1990s worked in conjunction with a contemporaneous multicultural agenda that, like the intercultural experiments of the period, claimed to celebrate cultural difference but ended up ingesting it like so many indiscriminate exotic fruits. As Lena Hammergren argues in the Worlding Dance collection, new perspectives on world dance must recognize Homi Bhabha's distinction between cultural diversity, which reduces the multiplicity of cultures to a mere collection of interchangeable tokens, and cultural difference, which acknowledges the tensions, antagonisms, and differential levels of access that exist across various cultures.Footnote ²⁰ We must always remain sensitive to the uneven sociopolitical and economic contexts out of which various dance forms operate, especially if we want to do culturally hybrid work. In Marta Savigliano's concluding chapter in Worlding Dance, she suggests that globalization requires us to be “‘neighborly,’” to see our mutual cohabitation in the world as offering “instances of proximity—which do not constitute an idyllic relationality, but rather a permanent negotiation.”Footnote ²¹

Interculturalism is a necessary dilemma. We must engage with others. How do we do so with both a healthy curiosity and utmost respect? Does contemporary intercultural performance continue a tradition of exploitation or can it provide instances of neighborliness, of careful but productive negotiation across the unevenness of difference?

Pichet Klunchun and Myself

An examination of Bel and Klunchun's piece might begin by noting that its title, Pichet Klunchun and Myself, clearly establishes the speaker as Bel and not Klunchun. Even though this will be a dialogue, Bel is credited as the creator. The performance opens with Bel and Klunchun entering the stage and sitting opposite each other in two simple chairs. Klunchun, stage right, wears black pants and a black T-shirt.Footnote ²² He is barefoot. Bel, stage left, wears jeans, white sneakers, and a green track jacket. Although this is meant to be a two-way interview, it is notable that whereas Klunchun is barefoot and in dance clothes, Bel wears street clothes and shoes and holds a computer on his lap. The computer does not change hands when the interviewing roles shift, and thus the asymmetrical arrangement of power-knowledge suggested here does not fully equalize either. Bel begins by consulting his laptop and asking Klunchun a series of simple questions: what is your name, where were you born, why did you become a dancer, and so forth.Footnote ²³ The moment when Klunchun describes how he became a dancer offers an initial indication of the tenor of the piece. Klunchun tells how his mother went to the local temple and prayed to a god of dance for a son. Thus, even before he was born Klunchun's dedication to dance had already begun. Bel is perplexed by this explanation. Indeed, his recurring befuddlement with Klunchun's other matter-of-fact depictions of Thai culture characterize much of the ensuing dialogue. Bel shifts to ask questions about the dance form Klunchun is trained in: khon, a Thai masked dance drama. At several points Bel asks, “Can you show me?” Klunchun obliges and demonstrates first the vocabulary of the form, then the different character types, the narrative, the singing, and some excerpts from key scenes in the canon. Klunchun's body is impressive for its litheness, its precision, its technical control. Bel continues to play the uncomprehending questioner: he finds the distinctions across character types too subtle to differentiate, the semiotics of the form elude him, the symbolic depiction of death requires translation. Meanwhile, Klunchun acts out the role of willing informant who agreeably rewinds in order to detail what he originally presumes to be self-evident. The alternating moments of bewilderment and appreciation make for good humor. The audience laughs at the points when Klunchun demonstrates aspects of khon that seem clear to him, but are impenetrable to Bel. East–West cultural confusion—the East as unknowable but beautiful in its mystery, the West as boorish but open-minded—becomes a source of good-natured comedy. Throughout the interview Klunchun retains grace and composure, always happy to disseminate his understanding of this tradition, giving it respect and assuming Bel's respect for it in turn. As Bel's understanding of khon develops, so does his appreciation for it.

After approximately an hour, the artists switch roles, and Klunchun begins to interview Bel. A moment of culture clash is lodged early when Klunchun expresses disbelief that Bel could have a child without being married. The familiar trope of Asian “family values” gets reinforcement here. The interview continues with Klunchun asking Bel about his work. The key difference is that while Klunchun was asked to explain khon as a form, Bel is given the opportunity to describe his own work as a choreographer, an independent agent of his own artistic creation—even though Klunchun is a choreographer too.Footnote ²⁴ Once again, a tired East–West dichotomy emerges: the idea of the East as keeper of tradition and of the West as site of individual artistic innovation. Bel explains that he is “identified” as a choreographer, suggesting that his work in fact doesn't fit easily into conventional notions of choreography. He stands up to demonstrate an element of his work that he claims is a favorite and is something that he tries to insert in all of his pieces. Bel then casually stands upstage for several minutes simply looking around, listening and waiting. Naturally, Klunchun is bewildered by this demonstration, as Bel has set him (and the audience) up to expect something considerably more dynamic. Bel takes this opportunity to cite Guy Debord's theory of the “society of the spectacle” and explains that his aim is to disrupt the audience's expectation that they will be entertained.Footnote ²⁵ He wishes to dismantle the separation between dancers and viewers, to democratize the relationship. He strives to enliven audience consciousness about the “ontology” of theatre as a live time–space that performers and spectators share. Klunchun gently challenges this idea (but what about the money they have spent on tickets?), but soon comes around to recognizing Bel's objectives and even cites, in turn, the Buddhist philosophy of attentiveness to the present moment. Here we see an earnest multiculturalist effort to make equivalent two socioeconomically unequal situations. It is not difficult to understand why khon is now only “for the tourists,” whereas Bel can claim that his contemporary choreography is supported by the bet that dance audiences are willing to make when they purchase tickets to see avant-garde work.Footnote ²⁶

The interview continues in much the same structure, with Klunchun asking Bel to demonstrate some aspect of his work, Bel confounding the expectation set up by the request, Klunchun asking for elucidation, Bel explaining his aesthetic objectives. The piece comes to a climax when Bel offers to demonstrate a section of one of his pieces that contains nudity—he is attempting to get at the foundation of dance as a medium—the fleshly, live body. Bel begins to unbuckle his pants and Klunchun quickly entreats him to stop. They agree to end the conversation there.

Pichet Klunchun and Myself and Myself

Pichet Klunchun and Myself raises a lot of questions for me. As a choreographer, Klunchun is invested in preserving and revitalizing a dance tradition. With his sinewy, articulate, deeply trained body, he is a dancerly dancer. In contrast, Bel is invested in breaking down a dance tradition. In his baggy jeans and big glasses, his greasy comb-over and paunchy belly, Bel has rejected dancerly dance. What kind of work could come out of their collaboration? What happened in the studio that led them to this result—a result that might be viewed as a kind of (perhaps deliberate) failure to collaborate? Although Pichet Klunchun and Myself is not typical intercultural theatre in the tradition of Brook or Mnouchkine—what Daphne Lei calls “hegemonic intercultural theatre”Footnote ²⁷—it is clear that Bel is thinking about the issues at stake in cross-cultural exchange. He lists the following as topics the piece addresses: “Euro-centrism, inter-culturalism, or cultural globalization.”Footnote ²⁸ Perhaps the idea was that this conversation in its seeming rawness would avoid the pitfalls of interculturalism, which often attempts to smooth over incommensurabilities in favor of a hybridized but melded product. I have seen intercultural work that maps one aesthetic tradition onto another, quotes one form within another, adapts one narrative for another genre, and so forth. These productions usually fail to distribute compromise equally. Pichet Klunchun and Myself is unique in that it does not try to stitch together two disparate art forms; instead, it allows these two forms to remain side by side—at some distance from each other. And it lays bare the miscomprehensions that occur in the encounter.

But of course, this encounter is not a spontaneous, unedited conversation between two artists from different traditions who have just met one another. In fact, it is a scripted, structured, and planned performance.Footnote ²⁹ It was repeated over a hundred times from 2004 to 2012 in numerous venues around the world.Footnote ³⁰ In this way, it does not escape the realm of representation, or “spectacle,” that Bel endeavors to dismantle in his other work. It is representation made to seem unmediated. It is Bel's decision to choose talking as an artistic medium that I wish to examine in relation to questions of ethics in interculturalism.

Interestingly, in the introduction to his 1996 anthology on interculturalism, Pavis argued that true intercultural theatre must be “inter-corporeal.”Footnote ³¹ He believed that an “oxidation” of the other's body in oneself was necessary to resist “Europeanization” in intercultural practice.Footnote ³² From our more jaded vantage point, we might protest that it is presumptuous to assume that a European artist could acquire in his/her body a particular Eastern technique free of the problems of social, historical, and political context. Then again, perhaps it is essentialist to presume that an Eastern technique is not translatable—or is off limits—to a Western body.Footnote ³³ Whatever the case, it would appear that Bel and Klunchun elected to avoid these ethical pitfalls by resisting “inter-corporeal” work and replacing dancing with talking.Footnote ³⁴

Bhabha posits the idea of enunciation as the site where cultural difference is not merely articulated but in fact produced. The boundary point where two cultures—or two people—meet and must confront each other is a “Third Space” of enunciatory emergence.Footnote ³⁵ Bhabha offers the idea of enunciation as a generative site that reveals the hybridity of culture.Footnote ³⁶ For Bhabha, the recognition of cultural hybridity is a key corrective to Western-dominated ideologies that obscure hybridity in favor of unified narrations of seemingly singular cultural identities, identities that are then neatly polarized between the West and the rest—a polarization that has given interculturalism its exotic, avant-garde appeal. Enunciation, then, is a process of engagement that gives voice to the messiness of cultural difference. And cultural difference is always hybrid because it is always in negotiation with the Other: it is, in fact, a result of hybridity.

Certainly in the case of Pichet Klunchun and Myself Bel and Klunchun are involved in a process of enunciation at a border point between two different sets of cultural knowledge. The dissimilarities between the two artists' work clearly emerges through their conversation. The fact of their copresence and their willingness to dialogue does represent an acknowledgment of our hybrid world. The fact that both must speak in a language—English—that is not native to them further underscores the inescapable mediatedness of the Third Space of cultural encounter. As Bhabha writes, “The pact of interpretation is never simply an act of communication between the I and the You designated in the statement.”Footnote ³⁷ What is introduced in this space of interpretation is an “ambivalence.”Footnote ³⁸ In this meeting space Bel and Klunchun are both forced to acknowledge the assumptions each brings to his imagination of how others perceive his work and the assumptions each brings to his appreciation of the work of other artists. The interpretive gap “destroys this mirror of representation in which cultural knowledge is customarily revealed as an integrated, open, expanding code.”Footnote ³⁹

I am not sure, however, that this particular process of enunciation manages to dismantle a polarized view of European contemporary choreography vis-à-vis Thai classical dance. While Bhabha views the Third Space of enunciation as a site of possibility wherein the postcolonial subject can be in performative, discursive negotiation with hegemonic Western narratives, I still see, in this actual performance of enunciation, a familiar reiteration of colonialist ideas about the very fixed differences between East and West. Yes, the sight of Klunchun's lithe and expressive body in simple black workout clothes demonstrating steps from the khon vocabulary—without the accompanying tourist spectacle—does incite a necessary disruption of our image of the East and, in fact, closes a bit the distance that orientalism creates without, at the same time, allowing us to take hold of khon. Similarly, the experience of watching Bel strive to explain his work and the realization that he uses Klunchun merely as a screen through which to do so, not just to an Eastern audience but also to Western spectators, complicates a sense that the West is a place of unified cultural knowledge. In these respects this enunciatory piece does reveal the hybridity of cultures.

Still, the piece is not a spontaneous moment of enunciation. It is not an immediate encounter with difference but a scripted pair of interviews. Of course, Jacques Derrida has already deconstructed the notion that speech is any more or less mediated than writing; both are conditioned by the endless deferral of meaning.Footnote ⁴⁰ Bhabha is aware of this and, in fact, draws upon Derrida to support his formulations about hybridity as the disruption of totalizing narratives of nation and other. But Bhabha wants enunciation to be endlessly processual, continually performative, and at least in the case of Pichet Klunchun and Myself, which is a performance in the conventional sense, not just the theoretical sense, I think that enunciation fails to keep identities discursive. Even though the theory is that the opportunity for rehearsal, for repetition, and therefore for revision is inherent in performance, I feel that this performance does not allow for discursive resistance but in fact only reifies over and over again a fixed polarity. What is rehearsed in Pichet Klunchun and Myself is not a process of discovery and negotiation but a fixing of an orientalist narrative.

Emmanuel Levinas argues that it is our ethical responsibility to an Other that, in fact, constitutes our being. We are determined by our relationship to an exteriority, yet at the same time that exteriority always by definition escapes our full comprehension. The site where this necessary relationship to an exteriority that can never be fully comprehended occurs is the face-to-face encounter.Footnote ⁴¹ For Levinas, the face is the other that confronts us in its infinity—in other words, its unassimilability—and it compels us to speak to it. This impossible but inescapable encounter is the subject of Levinas's philosophy of ethics. One way that Levinas formulates an understanding of how we relate to each other is through the idea of saying and said.Footnote ⁴²Saying is the instant and immediate medium through which we relate to an other; it is a process that disrupts any impulse toward totalization (reducing the other into the same, much as multiculturalism seeks to do) because, perhaps like Bhabha's enunciation, it always reveals our separateness from the other. By contrast, the said is the content of speech already spoken; it is the more conventional impulse toward encompassing, digesting, comprehending, grasping. The problem, of course, is that saying always becomes the said, and perhaps this is why Bhabha's idea of enunciation does not fully satisfy. The challenge is how to make relations continue the “signifyingness of signification,”Footnote ⁴³ how to say without devolving into the solidity of the said, how to maintain the ethical exteriority of intersubjectivity.

We might say that Bel's efforts resemble the attempt to maintain “a saying that must also be unsaid.”Footnote ⁴⁴ In a way, the fact that his interview with Klunchun is made to seem spontaneous even though it has been scripted works to repeat the initial site of cross-cultural encounter, to maintain the immediacy of it. The piece has been performed hundreds of times now in numerous venues, so perhaps we can we view these multiple performances as multiple attempts to keep saying, to keep disrupting totalization. But of course, the piece is scripted. Even given the room there is in every performance for slippage, for nuance, for alteration, ultimately this performance reinscribes an existing order; it is something already said.

I think that both Bhabha and Levinas recognize the utopian quality of their respective formulations. Their theories of enunciation and of saying both carry the potential to make the encounter with difference ethical in its recognition of what cannot be appropriated or reduced, even as we must continue to engage as responsibly as we are able across third spaces (Bhabha) or face to face (Levinas). And perhaps Bel's endeavor might also generously be perceived as an attempt at ethical intercultural exchange even as it recognizes the challenges.

I cannot help but feel, however, that Bel's piece is ultimately not absolutely satisfying. Perhaps this is because I detect a self-interested motive on Bel's part. Power, ideology, and economic advantage always animate artistic choice. The placement of Bel's interview with Klunchun first is a conscious choice whose effect is to center the piece from Bel's point of view. Bel's encounter with khon, like the colonial encounter, really just becomes an opportunity for Bel to project himself against the absolute difference of the other in order to better justify his own identity. That is why the interview with Klunchun is placed first, so that we can better appreciate Bel. While there is little explicit juxtaposition between khon and Bel's avant-garde choreography, this piece still relies on the trope of East–West incommensurability. Khon is traditional, Bel's work challenges conventions of dance. Khon is representational, Bel's work attempts not to be. Klunchun is preservationist, Bel is avant-garde. Klunchun is modest, Bel is exhibitionist. All of these contrasts, of course, not only support hackneyed stereotypes of East versus West; they also ignore the significantly unequal histories and political economies of the environments from which these two artists come. As I argue above, Bel can rely on the bet that Euro-American audiences are willing to make when they purchase tickets to see avant-garde work; Klunchun's Thai audiences do not have this kind of economic freedom. Bel's intentions in Pichet Klunchun and Myself are admirable; and Klunchun's participation is self-possessed throughout. The decision to try to avoid cultural appropriation through the format of the interview is thoughtful and new. I am not sure, however, that the piece manages to shed the weight of orientalism.

An Ethics of Interculturalism

At one time, this dissatisfying conclusion served as the stopping point for this article. I simply did not know where to take my thoughts after it. The irreconcilable debate over interculturalism during the 1980s and 1990s seemed to remain here. Is there no way to create East–West intercultural work that resists orientalism? Is Bel's work just one more example of an artist with good intentions who yet again falls into the trap of exploiting the East for his own purposes? If that is so, then what? Aren't we a bit tired of wagging our finger at “bad” intercultural appropriations? What would a “good” one even look like? Hasn't Bhabha shown us that everything is always already hybrid anyway? Is this conversation done with, then? Do we just accept that interculturalism is? If not, then what does Pichet Klunchun and Myself help us to understand?

After presenting a version of this work in a few public forums, I received feedback that gave me some possibilities for thinking my way out of this conundrum. Dancer-scholar Keith Hennessey emphasized the fact that this is one of Bel's most widely toured pieces and that it has generated numerous responses. He suggested that I think about these responses as themselves generative of a continuing process of engagement with the issues the piece raises. Similarly, film scholar Dan Cuong O'Neill urged me to consider the key fact that this work is a dialogue performed for an audience and thus is generative of multiple layers of other dialogues. What's more, the global circulation of the piece (to more than fifty cities from Bangkok to Paris, Singapore to San Francisco, Riga to Mexico City, Istanbul to Melbourne) meant that it produced innumerable dialogues with varied interlocutors from varied sociocultural contexts who must have had a plenitude of different reactions. These spin-off dialogues include reviews, blog posts, and scholarly writing.Footnote ⁴⁵Pichet Klunchun and Myself has also spawned another interview-cum-performance piece called About Khon in which Bel asks Klunchun a series of questions that allow Klunchun to explain and showcase khon in greater detail.Footnote ⁴⁶ Finally, of course, I am myself in dialogue with the piece, as this article, yet another layer of discourse, hopefully attests. All of these layers could be read as continuing enunciations across subjectivities, a way that this initial intercultural encounter maintains its sayingness, its fundamental responsibility to engage the incomprehensible other.

But what is the nature of these enunciations? This is where the politics come in. One might argue that the numerous enunciations, the sayingness, the reverberating discursivity generated by the nomadic circulation of the piece save it from ossification into a singular (orientalist) narrative. We might contend that the piece is constituted not just by the two-part interview between Bel and Klunchun but also, fundamentally, by the numerous dialogues between the performance and the audience and with readers of the reviews, blog posts, and articles, and between audience members with each other. Perhaps it follows then that the orientalist relationship I see between Bel and Klunchun is challenged by the fact that it is performed for an audience, making the relationship more than merely dyadic, more than merely one European artist and his Asian foil.

Still, the ethics of intersubjective encounter are complicated by unavoidable differentials of power and economic and social circumstances between interlocutors. Dance scholar Susan Foster writes that the piece garnered “adulatory reviews and standing ovations especially across Europe and North America but receiv[ed] less positive responses in Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia, and Singapore.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Yes, allowing for the discursive multiplicity of Pichet Klunchun and Myself adds to the Bel–Klunchun dyad, but it does not ameliorate the orientalist dynamic already present between them.

Certainly the piece is “generative,” as Hennessey describes it. And that is definitely a worthwhile effect. Audience members, though, are primarily silent interlocutors. We do not get to talk back to the performers. Our written and verbal responses to the piece happen beyond the performance, as satellite discourses. In her scholarly article “Jerome Bel and Myself,” Foster advances a feminist critique by engaging in a fictional dialogue involving Bel. Her imagined dialogue, however, is one-sided; she can only make up what Bel might say in response to her critiques.

So where does this leave me? Back again to my dissatisfaction with the piece and perhaps with interculturalism in general. There is simply no way to absolve ourselves of the history of colonialism. All encounters between East and West are inescapably stained by the structures of orientalism. Pichet Klunchun and Myself, even if we concede its layers of discursivity, does not, cannot, in its earnest effort to comprehend, to create dialogue, to give equal voice, move outside of these structures. The piece cannot level out that which is not even.

But perhaps that should not be the pedestal on which I evaluate this piece. I have asked what Pichet Klunchun and Myself helps us understand. Perhaps the piece is useful not as an ideal model of “good” interculturalism but merely insofar as it helps me call attention to the process by which systemic inequalities get masked by the pretense of intercultural collaboration. In this way I might consider the piece useful as a productive failure. In its failure to create true reciprocity it produces instead a reminder of colonialism's impact; it produces residual discourses that, like this article, can reveal the processes by which orientalism structures the initial dialogue, even if they cannot overcome them. The piece does not succeed in leveling inequity; it merely serves to lay it bare. To extrapolate more generally, then, we might view interculturalism itself as a necessary failure. In our era of globalization it is our obligation to continue to connect across what are nonetheless impassable cultural, ethnic, and racial divides that will confoundingly reveal the ways that we are not equivalent.

Three special journal issues on theatre and globalization have urged us to consider such difficulties as the specific materializations of globalization in local instances of theatre making, the complications of global spectatorship, and the migrations of theatrical forms and theatre artists globally.Footnote ⁴⁸ While recognizing the ways that “bio-ethnic politics” coerce a notion of “Asia” as a place and a symbol, Haiping Yan also posits a “transnational theatre in the making” that might “attempt not only to understand what is becoming of the human geography of the world but also to envision how to partake in its alternative configurations.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Similarly, Janelle Reinelt celebrates the unique capacity of performance to “posit various possible conceptual and aesthetic schemas to provoke its spectators to seek their own finite relations to the enormous, sometimes overwhelming plurality of the new worldly context.”Footnote ⁵⁰ I do not feel that Pichet Klunchun and Myself offers a new envisioning of our global community, although I admire the impetus that led to the collaboration. The piece did inspire subsequent work by Klunchun, one piece with some help from Bel. Klunchun has since gained a measure of access to a global stage and cultural currency (and Bel has increased his). The touring of the piece widely across the globe as well as the numerous spin-off dialogues the piece has engendered offered some possibilities for symbolic “what-ifs.”

I have talked about Pavis's privileging of intercorporeality in interculturalism and Bel's rejection of corporeal collaboration in Pichet Klunchun and Myself. In “Substitution,” a chapter from Otherwise than Being, Levinas uses bodily terms in his philosophical formulations. He discusses being “in one's skin” as not being concealed by a wall between oneself and another but as merely the “meanwhile which separates inspiration and expiration.”Footnote ⁵¹ “Incarnation” (embodiment in flesh) does not enclose the self; rather, it “exposes it naked to the other to the point of making the subject expose its very exposedness.”Footnote ⁵² At the end of Pichet Klunchun and Myself, Bel, as noted earlier, attempts to demonstrate physically an aspect of his work that he has only so far described verbally. He begins to unbuckle his pants in order to expose his skin to us and to Klunchun. Klunchun quickly asks him to stop, and the performance ends. This piece is an attempt, mostly through language and lastly through the body, to expose oneself to an other. To his credit, Bel endeavors to bare himself to the world beyond, to bring himself to an other, to inspire and to expire through the skin of his body. But just as Levinas is paradoxical in his attempt to describe our “exposedness” (“the self in its skin both is exposed to the exterior . . . and obsessed by the others in this naked exposure”),Footnote ⁵³ Klunchun's refusal reminds us that this “exposedness,” our inescapable will to exteriority, is confounded by that very other to which we expose ourselves.

Levinas built a philosophy of ethics on his personal experience with the horrors of the Holocaust. He knew that people fail to act ethically in the most devastating ways. And yet he continued to argue that the essence of our being is our debt to an other that will always be irreconcilable to us—a subjectivity built upon the impossibility of intersubjectivity. For Levinas, ethics by definition resists the appropriation of the other.Footnote ⁵⁴ Ultimately, Levinas does not prescribe an answer to the problem of intersubjectivity. What he offers is a recognition of its limits. As Simon Critchley describes it:

In Levinas's philosophy of ethics, we are resigned to the awareness that even as our own selfhood is built upon a will to know the Other, that other is always irreducible to us—and that this is as it should be. In speaking of intercultural theatre, Schechner asks what rules should govern the interplay across cultures. Perhaps an “ethics of interculturalism” might be described as simply the obligation to continue to make evident the impossibility of communion in intercultural encounter, even as we keep trying.