The Role of Academics in the Performing Arts
Uchino: What role are academics playing in the performing arts scene in your respective countries?
Amitha: Not much.
Uchino: Not even writing histories and archiving?
Amitha: Some academics are doing research on the performing arts but I think the two worlds are so separate, which is a shame. I guess academic works are becoming more accessible now due to online resources. There are a few academics in Thailand who are respected among theatre artists and critics. There's one who collects (unpublished) contemporary play scripts and regularly invites artists to work with students and direct student productions. There's another who's headed Thailand Research Fund's Criticism Project for over a decade. The project has published numerous books on arts criticism over the years. When it comes to archiving, there's an effort right now from a young media company to create an archive of contemporary theatre in Thailand. I don't know of project by academic to write or update theatre history books in Thailand. I would like to read more academic writing about Thai theatre but there aren't so many books coming out.
Sharmilla: In Malaysia, we have the hardcore public university academics and they are often aligned with the government. Because of this, they work with much more established government-funded arts institutions and so have a certain ethos and a certain way of working.
There are some who try to bridge things and work quite closely with the independent performing art scene. I don't know how well that relationship works. I know that certain faculties seem to do better. Usually it seems to depend entirely on who is in charge. If you have someone who is passionate about it and who sees the value, it makes a big difference. Once they leave and someone else comes on board, it may change. It isn't consistent. We have a national academy for the arts where they teach performing arts primarily. ASWARA (Akademi Seni Budaya Dan Warisan Kebangsaan), or the National Academy of Arts, Culture and Heritage, focuses a lot on bridging traditional art forms and bringing them into a more contemporary space. A lot of our dancers graduate from there and they are very good. It's a pretty effective national institution. Unfortunately, the roadblock often happens with the need to earn money. But in terms of their quality as an educational institution, they are pretty good. I don't know about the academic work that they are putting out. Again, it's probably a closed world and, as a journalist, I have very rarely turned to academia to inform my work.
Amitha: When it comes to political theatre or art, sometimes artists like to invite academics—a historian or scholar who studies violence, for instance, if the artist's work is about that issue. But this is only for certain politics. So, it's divided in that sense, but I don't consult them either.*5
*5 However, there's a recent project on khon, classical Thai mask dance drama, which brings together classical and contemporary dancers, academics of various fields, and critics. The project features performance, documentary, writings, and panel discussions.
Katrina: My background is in academia—cultural studies—and I feel like even during my undergraduate years, where I studied Comparative Literature, I felt like all the papers I needed to write were papers that no one else would read other than the people who were actually in the classroom with me. So I knew from the start that there was that divide between the writing that would attract a readership outside of academia and the writing I would do inside. When I started actually writing reviews, it was because my editor said my cultural studies background is enough for me to start doing it. That was my entry point.
There is a very academic sense of what culture is about and what the text is and, while I do not work as an academic anymore, I feel like that connection is something that is such part of the writing that I do even when the form is for a popular audience versus an academic one. And it's that relationship that has allowed me to maintain a degree of credibility with academia, because they realize that I will be very careful about the way I view something, and that if they sat down with me and wanted to have an academic discussion about something that I wrote, then I could bring it to the level of an academic discussion with the jargon that they appreciate.
Having said that, there is a seeming distrust of academic writing in Manila, because sometimes those in academia who try to write film reviews will write them in a way very few people understand. The vocabulary is different. It's bad enough that we are writing in English, so that already limits the audience, but to be writing in a kind of English that is filled with jargon that few would be familiar with—that gives them a bad reputation. I myself appreciate this kind of writing, but I know that it comes from the privilege of having read what they have read.
I do appreciate the fact that in the ten years that I was consistently writing arts and culture criticism, people in academia actually started talking to me about my writing. It took a while before they realized that I was serious and knew what I was doing. But it was an important juncture in my writing career, because it meant that I was doing something right, that I wasn't just catering to popular audiences but that the academics who actually teach art, people who have PhDs, actually appreciate that I am writing it in this particular way, and that they weren't looking down on it. Someone like Patrick Flores, who curated the Singapore Biennale this year, was crucial because he is a major scholar of contemporary art. I didn't know him and he was never my teacher, so when he started talking to me, I realized I must be doing something right. And later on, he started to invite me to his exhibitions.
This intersection between the academe and the "outside world" is also being acknowledged by theatre departments in the universities. There is much work being done to reach out to a bigger public beyond students, which is a good thing. There is an awareness of the need to reach beyond the niche audience of academia, and. it's a good thing to be acknowledging that, especially given the smallness of Manila.
Each Relationship with "Southeast Asia"
Uchino: You brought up the name Patrick Flores. I was just wondering about networking in the region. Is "Southeast Asia" an effective notion? Or is it just a geographical label that has nothing to do with what you actually do?
Katrina: My undergraduate degree in comparative literature focused on Asian and Third World studies. For four years, the literature I studied was not Shakespeare or American authors but Southeast Asian, Japanese, and African authors. I had a very early awareness about Southeast Asia as a region but also about the developing world, which included Southeast Asia. The commonalities always interested me.
There was also a short-lived undergraduate Traveling Classroom Program (with SEASREP*6) that I was part of in the year 2000. We traveled across Thailand with students from other SEA countries for two weeks, with lectures and discussions with Thai academics. I might have been too young to understand all of it, but it was very interesting, and along with my undergraduate degree, it was my entry point to Southeast Asia.
Since then, I always knew I wanted to do work related to the region, but then there was no real opportunity to do so. But when I started being flown into Singapore for the Singapore Biennale and the Singapore Writers Festival, it was like coming home to a very familiar regional space that was Southeast Asia.
*6 SEASREP (Southeast Asian Studies Regional Exchange Program) is the program to develop studies of Southeast Asia by scholars from Southeast Asia since 1995. This program is co-funded by the Japan Foundation and the Toyota Foundation.
Sharmilla: It's interesting because I didn't used to care about Southeast Asia very much. I think I might actually have to thank the Singapore Biennale for it. When I first went to the Singapore Biennale nearly ten years ago, I got this sense of where I belonged. Malaysia is small and so much of the influences are from the West or India and China, yet we don't belong in any of those spaces. They are so huge and different. When I went to the Singapore Biennale, the year I went had a Southeast Asian focus. And then I saw all of these works from the Philippines and Thailand for the very first time and I realized, these guys are like a forty-minute or two-hour flight away from me and I know so little about what they do. Yes, they are different in terms of language. Yes, they are different in terms of culture. But I felt a greater interest and connection with them, perhaps because we are all smaller countries or overlooked cultures. I felt that this was where my "pulse" was. The more I have met people from this region - though I can't yet put my finger on what it is that connects us, because we are very different and I don't think we have even figured out a way that we can effectively work together - but I nonetheless feel like there is more connecting us than with the United States or United Kingdom. Historically, in terms of even simple things like the way people express themselves, there are many differences. But the more I work with people in this region, the more exciting I find it and the more I want to work in Southeast Asia.
Amitha: When I first went to the Singapore Arts Festival in 2007 or 2006, I knew so little and it's partly due to arts infrastructure. Journalists struggle to get travel budgets. I paid to go to Edinburgh myself, for instance.
Sharmilla: I am seeing more Southeast Asian performers and artists coming to Malaysia over the last five years than I did before. But language is often a challenge.
Amitha: In Thailand, we wanted to go to Japan or get our work shown in Japan. Even BIPAM looked to TPAM, not Singapore Arts Festival, for its model. We have gradually become more conscious about the need to learn more about other places in Asia. A lot of what we hear about the countries comes from international correspondents for major newspapers. We now know so much about what's going on in Malaysia and Singapore, but almost nothing for other countries like Myanmar or Cambodia. At the Asian Arts Media Roundtable, we discussed how we really need to do more about that and with BIPAM. At first, BIPAM had a more wide-ranging program and then focused on Southeast Asia. That is because when we went to TPAM, it was curious to see so many fellow Southeast Asians in Japan. "Why don't we have a place in Southeast Asia to do that?" we wondered. It's very exciting that people are now more aware of that and agree with this approach.
Uchino: Thank you all very much.
Interviewer: UCHINO Tadashi
Uchino Tadashi is a leading performance studies scholar, whose border-crossing research and thinking has been critically acclaimed in various interdisciplinary quarters of academics, artists and activists. He was professor of Performance Studies at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (1992-2017) in University of Tokyo and now professor of Performance Studies at Gakushuin Women's College. His publications include: The Melodramatic Revenge: Theatre of the Private in the 1980s (1996); From Melodrama to Performance: The Twentieth Century American Theatre (2001); Crucible Bodies: Postwar Japanese Performance from Brecht to the New Millennium (2009) and The Location of J Theatre: Towards Transnational Mobilities (2016). He is currently a contributing editor for TDR, a member of board of directors for Kanagawa Arts Foundation, the Saison Foundation and Arts Council Tokyo, and of selection committee for Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize and a member of ZUNI Icosahedron's Artistic Advisory Committee.
Photo: HIRAIWA Toru
