The Traffic in Art and Culture, eds. George Marcus and Fred Myers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). Please consult published version for notes. ================================================================= Confusing Pleasures Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett "People [at the Los Angeles Festival of the Arts] had to look at stuff they did not know how to react to. That began to be an authentic experience. They simply had to react as human beings. They did not know [how to react]. They simply had to look." Peter Sellars 1991 What are the preconditions for creating interest in what audiences do not understand? Or, more specifically, how has the avant garde prepared us for watching and valuing what we don't know how to react to? The definition of authentic experience as one where audiences confront the incomprehensible is at the core of the 1990 Los Angeles Festival, which I see as a cultural form driven by an avant-garde sensibility. It might even be said that the 1990 Los Angeles Festival restaged the loci classici of avant-garde performance, among them those encounters with Chinese opera and Balinese performance in Moscow and Paris during the thirties that gave us Brecht's Verfremdungseffekt and Artaud's pure theatricality. This paper explores how the 1990 Los Angeles Festival, in staging work unfamiliar to its audiences, avoided "ethnographic" and "entertainment" approaches. The location of authenticity in a moment of aesthetic reception--rather than in the objects presented--gives to the Los Angeles Festival its special character. I The 1990 Los Angeles Festival, which took place from September 1-16, was an ambitious undertaking, given the number of events mounted in so compressed a period of time over so vast a space. In all, about 2900 artists appeared in 550 events in 70 venues. They included, within the curated program of 150 events, some 1400 artists--500 of them brought to Los Angeles from 21 Pacific Rim countries and various parts of the United States and 900 of them based in Southern California. Another 1500 artists, also based in Southern California, presented their independently produced work in 400 events within the Open Festival that accompanied the curated program. This activity was spread across Greater Los Angeles, primarily in the downtown and mid-Wilshire areas, Hollywood, and Westwood, but also in East Los Angeles, Santa Monica, Pasadena, Long Beach, Van Nuys, Hawthorne, San Pedro, and Huntington Park, among others. The venues included parks and gardens; museums, art galleries, and art centers; theaters, cinemas, and amphitheaters; community and cultural centers, temples, and churches; historic districts and ordinary streets, shop windows and storefronts; buses, a train station, a pier, an outdoor marketplace, and City Hall. The 1990 Festival events included not only formal performances (theatre, dance, music) and performance events that fit no easy categorization, but also literature programs, film and video, and exhibitions. The budget was about $5-million dollars. The 1990 Festival's grand opening ceremonies took place on the Labor Day weekend at Angel's Gate and Point Fermin Park, overlooking the Pacific. Centered around a great Korean Peace Bell, itself a marker of the 1976 Bicentennial, the proceedings were described in the program and ticket information booklet as follows: In the morning, the artists will gather at the Korean Bell for a blessing beginning with native American prayer. After a procession down the hill joined by Chinese, Hawaiian, Tongan, Japanese, Samoan and gospel musicians, all the groups will arrive at Port Fermin Park for an afternoon long gift exchange of song, dance and invocation--a gesture of welcome and respect traditional to many cultures. This is not really a sneak preview of performances in the Festival, but a spiritual jam session. In the evening, there will be social dancing to a hot local group, Rudy Regalado and Chevere Band, playing straight-ahead salsa.... Got the idea? Take a deep breath. Inhale the world. (Los Angeles Festival 1990:8) That Sunday, Los Angelinos visiting the African Marketplace at the Rancho Cienega Park would find four stages featuring music (jazz, blues, rock, salsa, reggae, R&B, and gospel), parades of floats as well as costumed groups of dancers and drummers, and performances by the Woomera Mornington Island Culture Team (aborigines from Queensland, Australia), performers from the Polynesian islands of Wallis and Fatuna, and Japanese American taiko drummers. Those who went to Olvera Street and Union Station could see the Ikooc (indigenous musicians from Oaxaca) and the Jemez Pueblo Matachines from New Mexico perform near the oldest church in the city, Iglesia Nuestra de Los Angeles. They were joined by the Bread and Puppet Theater. On the next day, the Moon Festival in Chinatown was incorporated into the Festival, which seems to have revived it after a ten-year hiatus. That afternoon shamans from the Chindo Island in Korea performed "their euphoric, electrifying dances in the courtyard of Pasadena's Pacific Asia Museum. Accompanied by an ensemble of musicians, these ritual healers from Korea's Chindo Islands will offer a special blessing to Los Angeles--an event sure to startle and amaze." (8) In the days that followed an extraordinary lineup of artists appeared in locations far and wide, from the Children of Bali (22 musicians and dancers aged nine to fifteen) and the Court Performers from the Yogyakarta Palace of Java to the Los Angeles Poverty Department (a performance group built from a workshop for homeless people directed by John Malpede) and the mixed-media installation Living With AIDS. Rather than the modular approach of so many international festivals, with formal national representation in dedicated pavilions or through official national performing troupes, the 1990 Festival sited itself in a city that Mayor Bradley declared was home to more Koreans and Cambodians than anywhere else except Korea and Cambodia. The world had already arrived and the task of the Festival was "to open up Los Angeles' neighborhoods to one another as never before, to introduce us to ourselves." (Bradley 1990:2) As constructed by the Festival, immigration was the international made local. Artists from abroad were "guests," rather than official state representatives. In a recent interview, Claire Peeps, who has been with the Los Angeles Festival since 19XX and is now its Associate Artistic Director, shed light on its history. The Los Angeles Festival was founded as the successor to the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival that accompanied the Olympic games in Los Angeles. Incorporated in 1985 as a non-profit organization (501c3), the Los Angeles Festival mounted its first festival in 1987. Though a new and different organization, the Los Angeles Festival drew several of its board members, including Maureen A. Kindel, who became the chair of its board, and Robert Fitzpatrick, who became its first director, from the Olympic Arts Festival's board and staff. It also retained some of the same patrons. Both the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival and the 1987 Los Festival featured internationally recognized theatre, music, and dance groups, most of them touring companies that worked within established western genres on a proscenium stage. They performed within a few established venues in Los Angeles, with the exception of Peter Brook, whose Mahabharata was staged in the Raleigh Studios in Hollywood, which were specially prepared for it. While the Olympic Arts Festival was more international, that is, more countries participated, the 1987 Los Angeles Festival concentrated on European artists. During the 1987 Festival, Robert Fitzpatrick announced his resignation as director and his new role as president of Euro Disneyland Corporation, though he continued to serve on the 1990 Festival's board of directors. During both festivals, he had been president of the California Arts Institute, which was founded as a training ground for Disney animation, eventually broadening its mandate. Several other key people also left the Festival for jobs with Disney. The Board initiated a search to fill the vacancy, invited Peter Sellars to direct the organization, and announced his appointment on the last day of the 1987 Festival. Sellars became both the director of the Festival and the president of the board of directors. Sellars, who had established an international reputation as a brilliant theatre artist, perhaps best known for his experimental staging of opera, first thought he would bring his own work and that of his colleagues to Los Angeles to form the core of the next Los Angeles Festival. He had been directing Mozart operas at PepsiCo SummerFare, near New York City, at the time. As he got to know the city and to make contacts at the University of California at Los Angeles, particularly Judith Mitoma, director of World Arts and Cultures, he realized that this plan "did not fit the Los Angeles landscape, literally or figuratively," in Peeps's words. Colleagues at UCLA had been thinking in terms of a Pacific Rim festival. The Los Angeles Festival picked up this theme and developed it in partnership with UCLA colleagues. The first issue was to determine whether the Pacific Rim theme was more than a political expedient serving international trade, with Los Angeles the center of a new global economy based in the Pacific and a burgeoning immigrant population from this region. Peeps recalls several questions that needed to be addressed: Was there a cultural theme here? Could this theme be "made real" in arts terms? What was the role of the arts in cultural survival? Under Sellars's direction, the Los Angeles Festival as an institution changed its organizational structure, curatorial process, and artistic vision, experimented with the international arts festival as a form in its own right, and redefined the Festival's relationship to the city. Peeps explained that the Los Angeles Festival prior to Sellars's arrival had been more traditionally structured. Like many other presenting organizations for the performing arts, it had had a single artistic director whose taste defined the programming, an associate artistic director, a general manager, a business manager, production staff, and marketing staff. When Sellars became director, the impresario model was abandoned for a more collaborative one that involved a director (Sellars), executive director (Judith Luther), associate director (Norman Frisch), program director (Claire Peeps), and curator (Judith Mitoma). By the 1993 Festival, Sellars was director, Allison Samuels was executive director, and Peeps and Frisch were associate artistic directors. This arrangement expressly divided and shared responsibilities between executive and artistic directors. It was tailored to having a working artist as a director. The reason was as much pragmatic as ideological, because Sellars could not be there full time to deal with the day-to-day operations and because he needed to focus on artistic issues. The organization also needed a director who had skills in public and community relations to operate not only in governmental, civic, and business spheres, but also within local communities, and to make a case for the arts and enlist support and cooperation. This structure produced neither the unified artistic vision of one person nor the consensus of a committee, but rather what Peeps characterizes as something between a democratic discussion and individual visions that are clearly discernable within the larger project. What the team shared was a concern for "the role of the arts in our lives and in cultural survival and an openness to any work in any part of the world that deals with a particular set of issues." The organization continues to be deeply committed to an intensive curatorial process. For the 1990 Festival, an interdisciplinary and intercultural advisory committee participated in preliminary planning meetings. Several other curators and curatorial committees addressed particular communities and events. For example, Paul Apodaca orchestrated Native American participation in the opening ceremonies, while others prepared local Los Angeles communities over a six-month period for the arrival of Japanese and Balinese performers. The 1993 Festival, which followed the uprising in Los Angeles, would engage local communities to a much greater degree. Both the 1990 and the 1993 festivals were followed by large conferences that evaluated the festival and were attended by scholars, artists, arts professionals, funders, educators, and community representatives. Proceedings of the 1990 Festival evaluation conference were issued. This process is labor intensive. It requires more staff, which makes the organization administratively heavy. It demands more time, which is why there are several years between festivals. And, it consumes more resources, about half the organization's budget--$4-million for the 1990 event, which lasted 16 days, and $X-million for the 1993 event. This is considerably less than the $11-million for the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival, which ran 10 weeks, and the $5.8 million for the 1987 Festival, which lasted 3 1/2 weeks. The planning and evaluation process is as important to the organization as the outcome or product and reflect a mission that is larger than the festival as an event. The recording, transcription, and circulation of the proceedings of such meetings is itself a major undertaking. The Los Angeles Festival allocates its costs accordingly. It will put more money into the planning process or into preparing an outdoor venue, while saying no to big ticket items like a symphony orchestra from abroad, whose costs can approach $500,000. But, this approach is hard to sustain in tough financial times. Even under the best of circumstances, it is easier to raise money for events than for process. And it is easier to raise money for international stars and established genres familiar to Los Angeles patrons and established audiences for the performing arts than it is for emerging experimental artists or accomplished performers from the Pacific Rim and the United States. The 1993 Festival made some significant changes in response to both artistic and financial considerations. While most of the events were still free, many more were sited indoors. Reeling from a statewide economic crisis and attempting to rebuild itself after the uprising, the city could no longer provide the pro-bono services needed for events in outdoor public spaces--police, security, sanitation, and traffic control for several miles around the area, including the closing off of streets, parking, and a free shuttle from parking to the event. Even with a city subsidy, the organization would have needed $250,000 to outfit each park site with stages, sound systems, electricity, and toilets. Instead, for example, the 1993 Festival featured master musicians and soloists whose work was perfectly matched in terms of scale, audience, and acoustics to such indoor venues as churches and temples. This was still not ticketed theatre. Indeed, as Peeps explained, the organizations that hosted performances and exhibitions were progressive institutions that had broken the ground locally for precisely the kind of dialogue the Festival hoped to encourage. They had already been tackling hate crimes, advocating for immigrants, dealing with housing issues, and building bridges across communities. A major benefactor of the 1993 Los Angeles Festival was The Community Redevelopment Agency of the City of Los Angeles. In the wake of the recent earthquake, plans for future activity are open and the organization, stripped to its bare bones, again rethinks the "festival" as a form and how to experiment with the event, the process, and the institution. When he took on the 1990 Festival, Sellars made a commitment to the Los Angeles Festival as "10 year-project to introduce Los Angeles to itself and to reintroduce the world to Los Angeles." (Sellars 1990:15) Increasingly, the organization is committed to the arts in advocacy terms and seeks to define their role in a civic agenda, not only for the intense weeks of the festival proper, but also throughout the year. It is serving both as a presenting organization and as a catalyst and broker within the arts community of Los Angeles more generally. Other organizations, such as the Los Angeles Philharmonic, are encouraged to work more closely and effectively with local communities, not only on the model of the Los Angeles Festival, but with the help of Sellars in his capacity as their creative consultant. This essay is based upon remarks that I delivered at the 1990 Festival evaluation conference, "New Geographies of Performance: Cultural Representation and Intercultural Exchange on the Edge of the Twenty-First Century." The conference took place on January 10-13, 1991. It was cosponsored by The Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, the Los Angeles Festival, and the World Arts and Cultures Program at UCLA and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, AT&T, and the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, among others. Sellars and his colleagues have consistently sought serious engagement with their work. It was in this spirit that they received my remarks, which took issue with several aspects of the event, and then invited me to join the Program Steering Committee for the 1993 festival. I attended one of several national 1993 Los Angeles Festival Planning Conferences, entitled Frontiers of a New Global Society: Los Angeles, Africa and the Middle East, on January 17-19, 1992, at the Hsi Lai Temple in Hacienda Heights--this temple, as described in the letter of invitation (November 18, 1991) from Sellars and Peeps, "is the largest Buddhist temple in the western hemisphere. Not only is it a vital gathering spot in the community and an extraordinary piece of architecture." I also participated in Program Steering Committee meetings during the 1991-92 academic year, while I was a Getty Scholar at the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities in Santa Monica. Though I was not at the 1990 Los Angeles Festival, I did attend the 1993 event, which addressed many of the issues raised at the evaluation conference. My discussion of the 1990 Festival, which is the focus of this essay, draws upon interviews, internal documents, press coverage, video documentation, and the evaluation conference in which I participated. The precise nature of the 1990 Festival, how it was conceived and received, will emerge in the discussion that follows. I will argue, first, that despite its departure from many conventions of international arts festivals, the 1990 event is deeply implicated in their history. It is, as mentioned, a successor to the Olympic Arts Festival. International art exhibitions are an essential feature of world's fairs, which began as truly international events in 1851, and of Olympic games. Inspired by world's fairs, the first Olympic games as we know them today, that is, as large, international events, were appended to international expositions in the 1890s. They became an independent venture during the early years of the twentieth century. (See MacAloon 1984) The arts elevated the status and enlarged the scope of events otherwise dedicated to industry, commerce, or physical skill. By the 1890s, massive international art exhibitions also became independent events. Some, like the Venice Biennale, which was established in 1895*, took place at the same location on a regular basis. But even when an international event occurred only once in a given location, it could have lasting effects on the place that had hosted it. Many museums were formed on the basis of collections and buildings featured at world's fairs. Or, as is the case here, an arts festival created on the occasion of the Olympic games became a permanent institution. Second, I will also explore how the 1990 Festival is implicated in the history of the avant-garde's relationship to that which lies outside accepted notions of art and culture. Key figures in the history of avant-garde performance have long used the performance traditions of Asia and other parts of the world, which they may have encountered only briefly in Europe, to mount their attack on the status quo. Artaud's exposure to Balinese theatre was limited to what he saw in the Dutch Pavilion at the Paris Colonial Exposition in 1931 and Brecht's encounter with Chinese opera took place in 1935 when Mei-Lan-fang toured Russia. (See Artaud 1958; Brecht 1964) That such limited exposure could have such enormous impact offers an important key to the 1990 Festival's optimism in the value of brief encounters with work not necessarily understood. With regard to the relationship of the avant-garde to anthropology, we have tended to pay more attention to literature and the visual arts and their repositories, namely museums, than to the performing arts and their venues, which is the focus of this essay. The performing arts present particular challenges and possibilities, first among them, the live presence of performers and ephemerality of their activity. This essay examines performance at the interface of cultural encounter. I begin by discussing two approaches that the 1990 Festival rejected outright--what the organizers characterized as the ethnographic approach and mainstream entertainment. I then relate the 1990 Festival to the values of the historical avant- garde. Finally, I examine the particular ways in which the 1990 Festival staged work unfamiliar to its audiences, why Sellars found it "thrilling beyond all expectations" to see "the genuine surprise of people who didn't understand what they were looking at and had no way of figuring it out. All they could do was look." (Braxton 1990) Central to this staging is the location of authenticity in a moment of aesthetic reception that resists conventional understanding, if not actually assaulting it. III When the organizers of the 1990 Los Angeles Festival of the Arts distanced themselves from the ethnographic--as they understood it--they were rejecting the "labels" (primitive, ethnic, folk) and academic claims to authoritative knowledge. For Sellars, the will to explain and understand such performances as Bedhaya Court dance or Kogi-eso was misguided, because futile, as were attempts to demystify Kun Chinese Opera or Wayang Wong dance theatre, to make these forms accessible and familiar. The tradeoff--mystery for information--was suspect, for Sellars envisioned an aesthetic experience predicated on an unmediated encounter. By ensuring that the strange would stay that way, the 1990 Los Angeles Festival resisted efforts to reduce or otherwise dissipate the force of performances by explaining them away. It was in this context that Sellars spoke disparagingly of "cultural baggage." As he spoke those words, I saw excess luggage. But the "cultural baggage" that he considered an impediment is precisely what ethnographers produce through the labors of fieldwork and bring into the festival and exhibition-- ethnographic insight is a prerequisite, if not a requirement, for the deeper understanding we propose. While incomprehensibility may be a necessary way to begin a cultural encounter, intelligibility is the ethnographer's destination. "Cultural baggage," from an ethnographic perspective, is not a nuisance, but an opening. It can be a corrective for the unacknowledged and unexamined stereotypes that "humans" bring to cultural encounters. It can be even more. A further clue to Sellars's objections may be found in the ways that anthropologists value shock and understanding. From an ethnographic perspective, culture shock, while an expected part of ethnographic fieldwork, appeals to the prurient interest of general audiences if not mitigated by empathetic understanding. This is the challenge posed by the brief intercultural encounters that museums, festivals, and tourism afford, even when produced by professional students of culture. But culture shock is more than an occupational hazard. It has historically been a defining experience in the making of anthropologists, and to some degree folklorists and ethnomusicologists--though perhaps less so, as we study ourselves. Making a virtue of necessity, we have learned to transvalue our lack of prior knowledge as an absence of preconception or bias. We attempt to avoid "ethnocentrism," or seeing the world in our own image. Trained to become virtual clean slates on which to write cultural logics beyond our own experience and imagination, we have often studied societies about which little has been published. Initial confusion, while valued, is not an end in itself. Rather, it anticipates a deeper and more empathetic understanding that requires extended immersion in the lives of those we study. Where hope of cracking the cultural code still prevails, fluency in that code is the objective--"Come as a blank, leave as a native." Shock, from this perspective, is a powerful prelude to intimate knowing. What at first seems odd, becomes just another way of being human. The strange is normalized. Eventually, I can imagine living the way of life that I am studying. At one extreme, then, empathetic knowing eventuates in "going native" or the desire to do so, whether temporarily through initiation and apprenticeship, or permanently. The dramatic structure of many fieldwork accounts arises from the process by which intimate knowing happens. When this process precipitates an epistemological crisis--when language and reason fail--the fieldworker may surrender to what Michael Jackson calls the embodied character of lived experience, a surrender which requires kinesthetic, practical, and bodily engagement. (Jackson 1983) Epistemological crisis is also a source of what James Clifford has characterized as "the surrealist moment in ethnography"--namely, "that moment in which the possibility of comparison exists in unmediated tension with sheer incongruity." (Clifford 1981:563) At the other extreme, not knowing is an ethnographic subject in its own right. Indeed, the desire to render oneself blank--and the impossibility of ever really doing so--has given to the fieldwork account special importance as a genre of ethnographic writing. The dramatic structure of much of this writing arises precisely from the author's struggle to transform himself from novice fieldworker at the beginning of the research to cultural connoisseur at the end of the project--and the incompleteness of that venture. Here the convulsions of culture shock intensify reflexivity by offering dramatic access to the ethnographer's own assumptions--not so she can empty herself out, but so she can become visible to herself. As she becomes a native of what she is studying, she becomes a stranger to herself. The double itinerary of culture shock thus leads simultaneously into and out of the ethnographer. To the degree that shock intensifies reflexivity, it also offers the possibility of critique. Ethnographic knowledge arises from an interpersonal encounter, and accounts of that encounter, whether written or filmed, are often attentive to the process of coming to know. We not only publish and teach in academic settings, but also produce public displays of our knowledge in museum exhibitions, films, and festivals directed to general audiences. We have developed our own ways of determining what to bring to festivals of art and culture, how to site performances, and how to shape the encounter. Our distinctive display genres and performance values range from elaborate mimetic recreations reminiscent of the ethnographic villages at world's fairs during the late nineteenth century and dioramas of natural history museums to extremely spare presentations of a singer and her songs on a clear stage. (See Cantwell 1993; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1991) Using what might be called an ascetic approach to staging, the Smithsonian's Festival of American Folklife, for example, often presents performers without costumes or sets on a bare platform in a tent on the Mall in Washington D.C. Audiences sit on backless bleachers in a setting that is at once informal and respectful, reminiscent perhaps of county fairs and other rural and small town gatherings. Scholars "present" performers using a "talk show" format in order to prepare audiences for what they will see. State-of-the-art sound and recording equipment are prominent, for the performances are fully documented and the recordings archived. This plain style of presentation--the very absence of the theatricality we associate with folkloric troupes- -is an "ethnographic" way of marking the authenticity of what appears on the stage. Many of the "performances" at folklife festivals are nothing more than the arts of everyday life-- conversational storytelling, ballad singing, cooking, and work skills. The very act of bracketing them for public presentation makes them "performances" of a special kind. They depend for their "reality effect" on a presentational mode low in theatricality and high in information. To avoid degenerating into casual exoticism, events like the Smithsonian's Festival of American Folklife place a premium on intelligibility and on reflecting the perspective of those who are performing. This Festival has its own ways of mediating the encounter consistent with its own ethos--what has been termed cultural equity and cultural conservation--and style. (See Feintuch 1988; Baron and Spitzer 1992) In his 1977 appeal for "cultural equity," Alan Lomax condemned the devastating effects on local music and culture of aesthetic imperialism and "centralized music industries, exploiting the star system and controlling the communication system." (Lomax 1972:3) As this statement suggests, ethnographic approaches to the display of performances from outside the official art world also carry a political load, one that both advocates for forms whose survival is precarious and criticizes the forces that undermine them. This is a position underpinned by a sense of social responsibility, be it expressed politically (as it was by the Federal Writers Project during the New Deal in the thirties), practically (as in the Settlement Houses and playground and pageant movements during the first half of this century), or intellectually within academic disciplines. We might situate this approach within a tradition of "ethnographic humanism," whose reigning values are cosmopolitan, progressive, and democratic, though its effects may not necessarily be consonant with its aims. (Clifford 1981:558) IV Sellars made it clear that he consciously avoided not only the didacticism of an ethnographic approach, but also the conservatism of "mainstream entertainment," what he characterized as "your typical Labor Day band/parade/barbeque fare." (Kleid 1990) He alerted audiences that the Los Angeles Festival would not be "the Festival of Fun Foods at your nearest mall." (Sellars 1990:14) Nor would it be Edinburgh or Spoleto. In other words, the Festival would avoid the kitsch of high and low culture. It would skirt painfully good and painfully bad taste. The Los Angeles Festival was to be neither a series of illustrated lectures, nor yet another celebration of the accessible arts, whether classical or "ethnic." The avant-garde understands well the artistic possibilities of bad taste and the transgressive potential of popular culture, with its love of anomaly and panoply of genres for presenting the strange--the old anatomy and medical museums, the side show, Ripley's Believe It or Not, Barnum's dime museum, the Guiness Hall of Records, the National Enquirer, tourism (which also replicates older forms of ethnography), and world's fairs, among others. These too are loci classici of avant-garde performance. But, enthrallment with anomaly verges on prurient interest, because it quickly attaches itself to the monstrous and grotesque for their own sakes. Anomaly in popular entertainment appeals to a fascination with that which defies explanation, with "'curiosities,' 'freaks of nature,' 'rarities,' 'oddities,' 'eccentrics,' 'marvels,' 'nature's mistakes,' 'strange people,' 'prodigies,' 'monsters,'" and even ethnographic objects, to the extent that they are "exotic," "primitive," or "oriental". (Bogdan 1988:6) What such objects and acts might lack in fame, they make up for in strangeness, or so it would seem from the way they are produced and promoted as popular entertainment in restaurants, nightclubs, theme parks, cruise ships, and amusement parks. Events like the Smithsonian's Festival of American Folklife and the Los Angeles Festival try to achieve the exuberance and wide appeal of popular entertainment, without exoticizing performances unfamiliar to their audiences. Sellars explained to the press how he tried to reach a wide audience: "It's about trying to remove as much of the starch as possible from a cultural experience. It's not a formal thing where you have to sit in row 36J for an entire evening and behave." What made the event so special, in his view, was siting "the greatest artists in the world in a completely alfresco environment where it's not a big deal, it's just living." (Kleid 1990:16) Maureen A. Kindel, chair of the Los Angeles Festival, reassured audiences that this festival was "casual, personal, intimate, and accessible. It is for everyone." (Kindel 1990: 2) These statements are somewhat disingenuous because they are reassuring about experiences whose power, in many cases, lies precisely in their potential to disconcert: associate director Norman Frisch made just this point when he wrote in the program, "I can promise you that the cumulative experience will be disturbing, challenging, even at moments offensive: a slap in the face, a bucket of water, a stain on the sheets. It has been for me." (Frisch 1990:21) Whether reassuring or warning their audiences, the Festival organizers clearly signalled a rejection of the stiff discipline of the opera house, Broadway theatre, symphony hall, and ballet, and the elitism expressed by their price of admission, clear separation of audience and performer, audience decorum, and highbrow status. (See Levine 1988) Instead, the Los Angeles Festival used a wide variety of venues, many of them outdoors in parks and other open public spaces, where environmental, multi-focus, multi-sensory, interactive events combined the casual accessibility of popular entertainment with the seriousness of "art." The embrace of popular entertainment offered yet another position from which to attack the status quo, for the 1990 Los Angeles Festival seemed to say that art takes forms you have never seen before in places you would least suspect, and that you are not required to undergo an onerous regimen of preparation to enjoy them. Quite the contrary. The organizers took as a measure of success such statements as, "I didn't understand it, but I had fun." They depended not on the didacticism of ethnography to normalize the strange, not on popular entertainment's appeal to a prurient interest in the irreducibly weird, but on the power of art, as they conceived it, to create fascinating confusion. If audiences at the Los Angeles Festival could enjoy what they did not understand, they might become more receptive to contemporary art more generally--one of the long range objectives of the Festival. Their very naivet‚ was a virtue, for if properly approached, the uninitiated audience might prove even more open to a broader range of artistic expression than the institutionalized publics cultivated by the cultural establishment. Given the draw of celebrity performers, one of the 1990 Festival's biggest challenges was to attract audiences to performers who were not superstars here, however famous they might be at home--indeed, according to Sellars, "Many of the performers in the Festival are not professional entertainers," which did not make them amateurs either. (Sellars 1990:15; Mitoma 1990:16) While the distinction was irrelevant, it presented a serious marketing problem because the media were less likely to pick up on the events. The organizers had to convince audiences who expected the assurance of star performers and familiar art forms that performances at the Los Angeles Festival from throughout the Pacific are "every bit as much sophisticated and legitimate as European culture. It's just different," in the words of Rudy Garza, the Festival's public relations director. (Snow 1990) The Festival organizers had to bring their audiences from fear of the unfamiliar to a love of the "just different," while preventing the just different from becoming really weird, on the one hand, or the Disney pap of "It's a Small World," on the other. The very audiences who until this point had resisted experimental art forms were a prime target for the Los Angeles Festival. V Values derived from the historical avant garde, and from experimental performance during the postwar period, drive this festival. They offer keys to the special pleasures afforded by the incomprehensible and, beyond pleasure, to the importance of making audiences experience, rather than interpret, what they see. The historical avant garde, by exposing the arbitrariness of the autonomous art object and the institutions that police the domain of art, challenged the status quo, the academy, bourgeois cultural institutions, and the culture industry. (See Brger 1984) So too did the Los Angeles Festival. It was surely no accident that the Festival did not shy away from controversy when it featured Rachel Rosenthal, the LAPD (Los Angeles Poverty Department), The Wooster Group, and David Wojnarowicz, one of several artists at the heart of a recent controversy regarding the public funding of art and the role of the NEA. Radical artistic movements during the first half of this century dethroned the notion that the aesthetic is a hermetic realm set apart from daily life and attempted to restore to art its social consequentiality. (See Schulte-Sasse 1984) Without intending to collapse important differences among the various movements and their proponents, I would single out the following tactics. Avant-gardists subverted the high seriousness, compartmentalizations, and purities of bourgeois art forms. They questioned the illusionistic naturalism of proscenium drama, the primacy of literature, and the subordination of the other arts to it. Some insisted on the sensuous presence of the object, its materials and formal properties, rather than on "content" located elsewhere. Others celebrated the trivial and banal, the obvious and commonplace, the low and the vulgar--in a word, that which lay outside received notions of art. Some rejected the notion of artistic genius and masterpieces. Some tried to recover the immediacy, physicality, and hybrid force of such popular forms as circus, the fairground booth, variety theatre, magic shows, puppet theater, folk plays, and street performance. Others were entranced by the pure theatricality of Asian forms, their quality of total performance--their success as Gesamtkunstwerk. Some aspired to the ecstatic, spiritual, and marvelous qualities of ritual and festival and saw here the possibilities for a physical theatre, rather than one centered in language. Others alienated the audience from identification with the action to produce a critical reflexivity which might serve the cause of radical social change. Consistent with these values, the Los Angeles Festival is a festival, "a moment," in Sellars's words, "in which the world is turned upside down and we can rethink which end is up," that is, the festival acquires special significance in the history of avant-garde performance as a model for what theatre, if not life itself, might be. (Sellars 1990:14) A history remains to be written of the sources to which the historical avant-garde, mid-century experimentalists, and more recent postmodern performance artists have turned for their critique of the very art world within which they worked and against which they rebelled--the European peasantry, rural America, the tribal, the industrial, the quotidian, in the case of the Los Angeles Festival, "multicultural artists" and "international performers." The following discussion places the 1990 Festival within a brief history of avant-garde encounters with such sources to better understand both the display traditions within which it is working and the distinctiveness of its approach. The Arts and Crafts Movement in late nineteenth-century Europe and the United States turned for its anti-modernist critique of the excesses of civilization and ills of industrialization to the European peasantry, rural and urban America, and to earlier periods of European art history, notably to the Gothic and Renaissance. Using these sources, and others further afield, the Movement, lead by William Morris, affirmed joy in labor, organic community, and the collapse of distinctions between art and craft. Repercussions of this Movement can be seen in the Bauhaus, architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright, and other proponents of form following function and truth to materials, as well as in folk festivals. (See Becker and Franco 1988) In their search for a preindustrial past that might save European and American society from itself, followers of the Movement found the "folk" at two social margins, the countryside and immigrants in inner city neighborhoods. By the end of World War I, as the gates to immigration were closing, Settlement Houses and sister organizations were staging exhibitions and folk festivals of the "homelands," an urban counterpart to their celebrations of rural life in such areas as Appalachia. (See Eaton 1932; Whisnant 1983) The last twenty-five years of immigration is not the first period of mass immigration that the United States has experienced, though it differs from the influx between 1880 and 1924 period in important ways. The predominance of Southern Europeans and Eastern Europeans at the turn of the century was new in relation to the Irish and German immigration of the mid- nineteenth century. Southern Italians and East Europeans, many of them Jews, so exotic at that time, can now celebrate their passage at Ellis Island, the Mayflower of mass immigration, while those who have arrived since 1965 from Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa are the newest new immigrants. These two periods of mass immigration have yielded their own displays of diversity, their own ideologies of pluralism, their own ethos, and their own theorists. (See Snow 1993; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1990) Such festivals, commemorations, and historical recreations should be seen in relation to the efflorescence of holidays in America after the Civil War, the rise of world's fairs, the pageant movement, immigrant homelands exhibitions and festivals, folk festivals, and international arts festivals. Many of these events, prototypes for the "multicultural" events of our own day, offered a cosmopolitanized notion of the common man, made the quotidian a site of utopian intervention, and gave to the arts (which included craft) a redemptive role. Just how widely the historical avant garde was prepared to cast its net for fresh sources can be seen from Jindrich Honzl's account in 1940 of theatrical experimentation in interwar Czechoslovakia: Cubo-futuristic theatrical experiments turned our attention to stages and theaters other than those built for the tsarist ballet, the box displays of high society, or for the cultural activity of the small-town amateurs. Through these experiments we discovered the theatre of the street, we became fascinated by the theatricality of the sports field and admired the theatrical effects created by the movements of harbor cranes, and so on. Simultaneously, we discovered the stage of the primitive theatre, the performances of a barker, children's games, circus pantomimes, the tavern theatre of strolling players, the theatre of masked, celebrating villagers. The stage could arise anywhere--any place could lend itself to theatrical fantasy. (Honzl 1976:76) The study of these forms in their own right by folklorists and ethnographers has long proceeded in relation to contemporary artistic interest in them, from at least the Romantic period, producing in many cases a shared sensibility, to mention only the preoccupation of eighteenth-century British literati in the ballad and French surrealists' fascination with primitive art. (See Stewart 1991; Clifford 1981) Sellars's attempt to distance the Los Angeles Festival from ethnography obscures the role of an "ethnographic attitude" in the formation of avant-garde sensibility and vice versa--as Clifford notes, "surrealist procedures are always present in ethnographic works, though seldom explicitly acknowledged." (1981:563) New categories create new subjects out of old materials. Nowhere is this clearer than in the role of curators of modern art in constituting "folk art" as a subject. (See Metcalf and Weatherford 1988) According to Holger Cahill, "Contemporary interest in it [American folk scupture] began with the modern artists who found in this folk expression a kinship with their own work." (Cahill 1931:18) That kinship is at the heart of the relationship between artistic movements and academic disciplines. During the thirties, The Newark Museum and New York's Museum of Modern Art showed "folk" and "popular" art "without apology or condescension," in the words of Alfred H. Barr. (1966 [1938]:9) "Primitive paintings" and "folk sculpture" were valued precisely because these curators believed them to be "unschooled," unpretentious, and for these very reasons a "truer and more indigenous expression of the American artistic sense"--that is, for the curators of these shows they had little to do with "the fashionable art" of their time, the academy, and were "never the product of art movements." (Cahill 1931:5) Thanks to a curatorial category, "folk" painting and sculpture became a "natural" resource for challenging the status quo, while affirming a uniquely "American" artistic sense. (See Vlach 1985) "'Primitivism' in Twentieth-Century Art" (1984) at the Museum of Modern Art in New York is a sequel to a series of exhibitions in the 1930s that had featured "folk art," "popular painting," and "modern primitives." Informed by the curatorial interests of Cahill, the MOMA mounted "American Folk Art: The Art of the Common Man" (1932) and "Masters of Popular Painting: Modern Primitives of Europe and America" (1938), which was the last in a trio of exhibitions that included "Cubism and Abstract Art" and "Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism," both in 1936. Five decades later, "'Primitivism' in Twentieth-Century Art" would document a similar conjuncture in the various European avant garde movements of the early twentieth century, this time in the form of "affinities" between the "tribal" and the modern-- Picasso's Guitar and a Grebo mask, for example. More recently, MOMA's "High & Low: Modern Art, Popular Culture" (1990) explored how "high" artists--from Braque and Leger to Warhol and Holzer-- appropriated the mass culture of industrialized cities, which the curators identified with such "low" sources as newspapers, advertising, billboards, comics, and graffiti. In a sense, the MOMA exhibitions of the thirties are closer in spirit to the Los Angeles Festival because they go beyond assertions of "kinship" between modern art and folk and popular forms--indeed, they exhibit the latter in their own right. In contrast, the two recent MOMA exhibitions are firmly wedded to "affinities," an approach that makes into a curatorial principle and exhibition strategy the primacy of "sources" in the study of art history. This principle is fully literalized in the installation of "High & Low," where the walls were plastered with copies of the actual newspapers from which the Cubists clipped pieces for their collages. The "sources" have no independent life in this approach to exhibition. Rather, they serve to reinforce the division between high and low that legitimates the MOMA's corner on the high market. In what seems like a global resurgence of interest in such juxtapositions, "Magiciens de la Terre," organized in 1989 by Jean-Hubert Martin at the Centre Pompidou and La Grande Halle de la Villette, used the rubric magical/spiritual to exhibit together artists as diverse as Barbara Kruger, the Yuendumu community of Alice Springs, Anselm Kiefer, Tibetan monks, and Nam June Paik: "From the great Canadian North to the Australian desert, from Arizona to China and Japan, from Africa to Central and Latin America, a small team set forth to seek out the art of today, visiting studios set up in disused factories as well as villages which have scarcely discovered electricity. The first worldwide exhibition of contemporary art." Authenticity here was located in the "genuine outsider," which according to one reviewer was in short supply. (Cardinal 1989/90) The contemporaneous, that which is in the present, was elevated to the truly contemporary, that which is of the present. (See Fabian 1983) Temporal elevation moved objects from the status of artifacts to that of (modern) art. The result is a disjuncture between the history of the category and much of what it was designed to classify, and the history of objects and processes newly added to it. The mandala made by three Tibetan monks using multicolored mineral powders--or the work of "outsider artists"--does not trace its history back to French impressionism or Russian formalism. The Tibetan mandala becomes contemporary by sharing the space of display, not by way of a common history of production. But in all its newly defined contemporaneousness, it is the lack of a shared history that produces its authenticity. The less history shared, the more genuine the outsider. This is how I read Cardinal, when he writes that the "genuine outsider" was in short supply. Paradoxically, however, Magiciens de la Terre and the 1990 Los Angeles Festival attribute to the "genuine outsider" closer contact with the mythic origins of art itself. These are the terms in which a shared history for insiders and outsiders is formulated and a critique of the European art world mounted. Postmodern choreographers such as Merce Cunningham (working with John Cage), Trisha Brown, and Yvonne Rainer and performance artists such as Linda Montano turn not to an earlier historical period or distant place or low cultural form but to the quotidian, the life world, ordinary movement, everyday talk--to the habitual and the mundane. Their embrace of the everyday is a refusal of such accepted performance values as spectacle, virtuosity, illusion, and glamour, as well as some of the more radical practices of experimental performance that with repetition had become somewhat predictable. VI To what did the Los Angeles Festival turn? To performers from the "Pacific Rim," which the Festival organizers juxtaposed with artists from various parts of the United States, mainly Los Angeles. The result was an anthology of Cambodian court dance, Gospel choirs, Sellars's Nixon in China, Javanese shadow puppets, China's Kun Opera, Trash Lizards, Pacific Island Kava Ceremony, Mariachi bands, and Eugene O'Neill's Hughie in English and Chinese. In this respect, the Los Angeles Festival restaged the world as seen from an experimental performance perspective. This is not quite the synthesis and hybridity of a Peter Brook, Jerzy Grotowski, or Eugenio Barba--what Richard Schechner would call interculturalism or what counted as ethnosyncr‚tisme in "Magiciens de la Terre." It is rather a restaging of their sources, so to speak, within a new masterwork, the FESTIVAL. On display at the Los Angeles Festival are many values that derive from the historical avant garde, prominent among them resistance to commodification and to the status quo, in both artistic and social terms. Many of those who worked on the Los Angeles Festival did so with a deep commitment to the project as something worth doing in its own right. Some gave up their salaries. Many gave of themselves far beyond the call of duty. Seventy percent of the Festival, according to Sellars, was free of charge. Commercial gain was not the primary consideration in determining what would be presented, and art forms that had resisted commercial exploitation, a quality that Sellars attributed to "much of non-Western culture," were accorded very high value, particularly since this was one of the reasons, in his view, that they had remained invisible to us. (Sellars 1990a:75) Or it could be said that their invisibility is what had saved them until now. Festival organizers challenged audiences to encounter work they might otherwise ignore or reject, to rethink the boundaries of "art," to step outside the art world, to actively participate rather than passively spectate, and to venture into parts of Los Angeles they had never before visited. These concerns bear on the central theme of these remarks, the pleasure of the unfamiliar and the incomprehensible. Consistent with avant-garde values, there is in the Los Angeles Festival a refusal to reduce art to something that can be explained. The test of a work's resonance is precisely its irreducibility, its resistance to interpretation. Aficionados of avant-garde and experimental performance can sit and watch something they don't "understand" because of what they have unlearned--namely, the expectations, attitudes, values, and sensibility associated with establishment art forms. This unlearning entails holding interpretation and judgement in abeyance. Such audiences know how to yield to "experience," to sensuous immediacy, to presence, energy, and actuality. They value abstraction, pure form, pure theatricality, pure performance. They are open to chance operations, indeterminacy, and improvisation. They enjoy the blurred boundaries between art and life and between performer and audience. A century of Dada cabarets, Futurist serate, Surrealist ballets, epic theatre, agitprop, Bauhaus puppetry, theatre of the absurd, happenings, environmental performance, postmodern dance, and performance art has cleared a space not only for radical artistic experimentation, but also for performance forms from other social and cultural worlds. Most important, these audiences have been trained to receive the latter as if they had emanated from the avant garde itself. Though the history of avant-garde and experimental performance has prepared its specialized audiences for this Festival, the problem is not the boundaries, clear or blurred, between high culture and low culture or between western and non- western art forms, but the split between the art academy and the avant-garde. Here the gate opens through which the rest of the world can enter, for once the avant garde says that what counts as art is not for the academy to decide, everyone--well, almost everyone--can come in. This is not quite what Lincoln Center did when Nathan Leventhal, president, told the New York Times, "`I had the same prejudices about jazz that opera lovers or ballet lovers might have,'...`But I've learned a lot, and now I am a convert. There is as much richness and as much variety in Duke Ellington as there is in Mozart,'" because Mozart was the standard jazz had to meet if it was to be accepted by the artistic academy. (January 10, 1991:A1) In allowing jazz to squeeze through the narrow aperture it opened for a moment, Lincoln Center reaffirmed the values of the academy. When Sellars asserted, "We have opened a door that can't be closed again," not only was the door opened wider and permanently--at least in principle--but also the conditions for admission had changed, for the Los Angeles Festival challenged the academy itself. This was the avowed "hidden agenda" of the Festival, according to Norman Frisch: "the possibility of a deep and extensive re-examination of the role of the arts in our most public and most private lives." (Frisch 1990:21) Many of the values of avant-garde and experimental performance were mapped directly onto the arts featured at the Los Angeles Festival, first and foremost, a reclassification of activities as "art," however they were understood in their home settings, and second, an affirmation that in many of the societies represented at the Festival "the working definitions of 'traditional' and 'contemporary' are not mutually exclusive." (Sellars 1990:15) According to the literature that was distributed to the press and the public, the performers come from communities that do not think of what they do as art, art and life are one, everyone's an artist, and they do not distinguish between high and low art. These are vital and spiritual communities; they are in tune with nature. Their arts illustrate the spiritual origin of art; they are about survival, not decoration; they heal. These arts are egalitarian, collective, and communally produced; they are participatory; they resist commodification. They're spontaneous and improvisatory; they are synthetic, combining music, dance, theatre, and oratory; they are all form. They range from the loftiest spirituality to the bawdiest humor; they meld the old and the new. They are repositories of ancient wisdom passed down through the generation. They celebrate the kinship of all people. As Judith Mitoma, curator of the 1990 Los Angeles Festival, explained: "Performance in these cultures occurs in the streets, in the temple, in the public square--contexts that democratize the arts to a great extent since access is assured for all levels of the community." (Mitoma 1990:18) The credibility of these claims does not concern me here. What matters is that they inform the ethos of the Los Angeles Festival. Indeed, they tell us much more about the Festival organizers than they do about the performances, for embedded in these affirmations of arts brought from afar--not only from other countries, but also from the margins of the American art world-- is a critique of American commercial theatre, academic art forms, and the culture industry. Read back on themselves, these affirmations are a plea for the arts to regain their emancipatory power in American life. Sellars saw the Festival as an answer to the decorativeness of European high culture and the vacuousness of mass culture: "Western civilization has produced a neurotic, afflicted, hyperextended society where psychoanalysis has replaced culture and Big Entertainment has replaced everything." (Sellars 1990a:3) The Festival was an antidote to "mall culture," to the cult of the superstar and the blockbuster, to the safety of conventional theatre, though the Festival publications made these points on pages facing advertisements for Hollywood films, cosmetics, alcohol, banks, luxury hotels, cars, airlines, tourism, realtors, and television. Someone had to pay for the Festival. The Pacific Rim, broadly conceived, offered the producers of the Los Angeles Festival yet another area for staging an attack on the status quo and for affirming the oppositional values of the avant-garde, values that they attached to the King Island Inupiat Singers and Dancers, Wallis and Fatuna, Children of Bali, and so many others. As Judith Mitoma stated, "We are also being challenged to recognize the value of their perspective on the world, to ask ourselves if their insights might enhance the quality of our lives." (Mitoma 1990:18) Hints of New Age Spirituality may also be detected, as well as affinities with the antimodernism of the Arts and Crafts Movement earlier in this century. Sellars expressed the utopianism of the Los Angeles Festival thus: "Interculturalism is the basis for the survival of the species." In his view, the place to start is with visibility, with looking at each other, for "We live in a culture of exile," defined both by the massive immigration of the last three decades and by "an unnamed internal exile from our own selves....our effort and our need to recover the lives of others is a need and a possibility to recover the missing pieces of our own lives." Looking would hopefully lead to talking, listening, and action. (Sellars 1991: 15) With all these good intentions, the Festival organizers still had to deal with audiences unprepared for much of what they would see. What was to be done with audiences who were as yet neither inoculated with ethnographic information that might make performances from afar more accessible, nor initiated into the experimental art world and its values? Sellars's comment at the conference--"Nothing happens for hours and that's the beauty of it"--is of the essence, for it suggests how experimental performance trains audiences to watch almost anything. After hours of Philip Glass or Lucinda Childs or other postmodern performers, where "nothing happens for hours and that's the beauty of it," audiences are in a sense primed for Inuit drumming, Woomera Mornington Island dance, and kulintang. Los Angeles audiences had to be told that "Many of our presentations do not 'reach a climax' in the second act," an indication that they were still in training, so to speak. (Sellars 1990:15) Sellars's refusal to supply Roland Barthes's missing term, a practice honed by avant garde practice, takes on special significance here. (Barthes 1977) It is one thing if the missing term is missing by design, if the signifier has been evacuated so it can float free--much experimental performance works in this way. In the Los Angeles Festival, it might be said that "ethnographic" performances offered a short cut to this effect, substituting inaccessibility for evacuation. That is, performances that are semantically dense for their home audiences acquire the desirable quality of free floating signifiers when produced for avant-garde reception. I do not mean to suggest that home audiences receive these performances in some archaic literalist mode. Barthes's discussion of the third meaning, obtuse meaning, may be helpful here. Discussing the work of Sergei Eisenstein, Barthes locates the filmic--and by extension, the performative--in "that which cannot be described," that is, where "language and metalanguage end." (Barthes 1977:64) That place is also a site of obtuse meaning. Techniques of defamiliarization override what Barthes calls gratuitous meaning, whether by severing the expected relations between signifieds and signifiers, refusing the logic of narrative, or emptying the sign of obvious meaning. The Los Angeles Festival took a shortcut to Barthes's obtuse meaning: to the extent that performances were presented as quotations, found objects, or readymades, they were instantly obtuse by virtue of their foreignness to many Los Angeles audiences. This is not to suggest, that for their home audiences, such performances are totally intelligible or without Barthes's "third meaning," but only that signifiers need not be evacuated for obtuse meaning to emerge. A mismatch of performance and audience will suffice. The unfamiliar, rather than defamiliarization, becomes the route to obtuse meaning. Signifiers float free, not because something familiar has been made strange by virtue of formal operations in the work itself, but because a disjunction between a performance and its audience has been created and preserved. The organizers of the Los Angeles Festival "quoted" from Japanese or Hawaiian culture, but in theory, if not in practice, withheld "translation" for the many Los Angeles audiences who were not speakers of those "languages." To some extent, this approach could be seen as a way of circumventing "hollow" meaning-- explanations of what the performance is "about" or what it "means"--and maximizing the potential for obtuse meaning, which by definition starts where language ends. The greater the absence of gratuitous meaning in unfamiliar performances, the greater the temptation to supply it. The organizers of the Los Angeles Festival studiously avoided this temptation, at least in principle. By shortcircuiting gratuitous meaning, audiences who have cut their teeth on experimental performance get a passport to all the performance traditions of the world: in principle, they need neither plot nor climax, neither special training nor explanation, to enjoy what they see. Other cultures become their performance art and even a measure of what is missing in their own lives. Would that our theatre was as vital as theirs! Would that our lives were as meaningful! Ethnographic expertise was just not up to the task, for all it could do, from the Festival organizers' perspective, was come between audience and performer with "information" that, even at best, offered little chance of conveying all that audiences back home could be expected to know. As Sellars remarked at the conference, "You're not Samoan. You can't know." A few factoids delivered by experts cannot close the gap. Nor should "information" create the illusion of instant communication. If, as Sellars suggested, "People in those societies don't sit around explaining everything....What about societies where the highest point is in the performance, in the dance, not in talking about it afterwards?", then his audiences should simply deal with the performances themselves--who is to say that everyone back home understands what these performers are doing? Or, that everyone can or should have access to everything. There is in these remarks a convergence between practical limitations on what audiences can be expected to know or learn and avant-garde principles of reception that, at least theoretically, require no preparation or expert foreknowledge and may even benefit from their absence. Consistent with this position, 1990 Festival organizers were skittish about "experts" telling audiences what to think. Phyllis Chang, educational coordinator for the Festival, told the press, "We've eliminated the third person...or the specialist who gets up there and says: 'I have studied Latino culture, and here are my findings.' It is not academic at all." (Haithman 1990:F6) The Los Angeles Festival was not infotainment. But the very casting of expert knowledge in these terms--a bespectacled egghead comes to mind--suggests a missed opportunity and a somewhat naive view of ethnographic expertise, for there are many convergences in sensibility between the Festival's avant-garde approach and ethnography in its more experimental mode. These convergences could have served the Festival well, for ethnographers also destabilize the locus of "understanding" and they do so on the very ground on which we stand. Sellars stated at the conference that "One of the aims of the Festival was to remove forever the concept of ethnomusicology and ethnic studies, which at its core is offensive, and to move to another level where we didn't have to have special parentheses around things. These were not 'primitive' artists or 'folk' artists. These were artists." (Sellars 1991:13) It could be said that the labels, and the categories associated with them, posed a challenge to the Festival's working concept of art and that the Festival organizers transformed this challenge into a provocation by restaging the "ethnographic" as "art." The Los Angeles Festival began precisely at the point where the ethnographic and the avant-garde converged and it forged its own path by undoing the ethnographic. How was this undoing achieved? The Festival organizers systematically removed ethnographic labels, withheld explanation, asserted the primacy of experience over hermeneutics, demanded attention to form as content, and affirmed the power of art to transcend difference by constituting difference as "just different" and asking audiences to respond as just "humans." In the absence of "ethnographic labels," performances chanced upon in unfamiliar places became objets trouv‚s--an artistic operation celebrated by the historical avant garde. Gathered together from the far reaches of the Pacific, performances of seemingly infinite number were dispersed across a sprawling megalopolis at the end of the second millennium in a maze cum menu of possibilities to be sampled, not grasped, in a decentered entirety. The compositional principle of the festival, in Norman Frisch's words, was "blend and clash," the component parts retaining their identities. (Frisch 1990:23) The "art" of such a festival arises from dislocation and juxtaposition, procedures that give to ethnography its surreal quality and to surrealism its ethnographic character. In both cases--and this is of the essence--we see how the elements in question "continually proclaim their foreignness to the context of presentation," be that context the printed book, museum display case, record album, film, or festival stage. (Clifford 1981:563) I have colleagues who turn the sound off when watching film, who prefer to watch dance without the music. They refuse to read program notes, reviews, or synopses. They won't go to a pre-performance lecture. They don't want anyone to explain to them what's going on. They prefer performances in a foreign language because they don't understand the words. Not "understanding" is precisely what makes it possible for them to ignore language, to attend to the purely performative. Not "understanding" is precisely what keeps them open to something entirely new. If anything, language gets in the way: as Sellars said at the conference, "Communication reaches the most satisfying level when we don't have to talk," a statement more likely to come from an avant-garde director than a conventional playwright. Language was the enemy because of its power to "assimilate Art into Thought, or (worse yet) Art into Culture," as Susan Sontag wrote in 1964. (Sontag 1966:13) This approach to performance, which informed many aspects of the Los Angeles Festival, is encapsulated in a distinctive conceptualization of authenticity. I have in mind the comment that the most authentic moment occurs when the audience confronts what it doesn't understand, a notion rooted in an avant-garde sensibility--I cannot imagine this formulation coming from the Cahuilla Bird Singers or Halau O'Kekuhi. "Understanding" Chindo Ssitkim-Kut or the Wooster Group's St. Anthony, or requiring that they be "explained," interferes with the purity of the aesthetic experience, because from an avant-garde perspective, explanation mediates what should be a direct encounter. Audiences should come to performances open. They should be willing to experience what is immediately before them and make up their own minds about what they see. Artistic intention and curatorial guidance--not to mention what the critics have to say--are finally irrelevant. Nor does it matter what the performers think of this approach to their work, though clearly the Festival organizers were respectful to the performers and wanted them to be comfortable. What matters is the total event as the organizers produced it. Understanding was to be deferred: according to Sellars, "We hope that after looking, there will be talk, and that after listening, there will be action." (Sellars 1990:15) When Norman Frisch stated that "Ours is an 'appropriated' festival," he meant that many of the performances at the Los Angeles Festival were cultural quotations. Extrapolating from Barthes on the postmodern text, he characterized the Festival as a "tissue of quotations" that "blend and clash" without forming a neat totality. (Frisch 1990:23) Consider for a moment the difference between works designed from the outset as theatrical events, however experimental and iconoclastic, and "heritage" performances excised from occasions and settings that have not been transplanted with them, an absence that the press, and even the program booklet, attempted redress by recreating in words what had been left at home. Hardja Susilo, Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Hawaii, explained in the program booklet, "Today...wayang kulit is performed in the context of weddings, celebrations of thanksgiving, national holidays, etc., in cities and villages everywhere. Such performances begin about 8:30 p.m. and end around 5:00 a.m. the following morning." (Susilo 1990:80) Such accounts point up with special clarity the partiality of strict quotation and what a larger bite might afford. I am reminded of Petr Bogatyrev's account of peasant reception of folk plays in Czechoslovakia during the first half of this century. The same plays were performed year after year. Audiences did not constantly demand new ones, but knew the old ones almost by heart and watched them with great interest. Rather than novelty of plot, "the focal point of a folk theatre performance lies in the treatment of detail." (cited by Honzl 1976:80; see also Bogatyrev 1976) Other cases could be cited. But as long as we repeat the mode of reception taught to us by avant-garde practice, as long as we turn our cheek towards the slap, we will not know what it is like to revel in the "detail" of performance worlds new to us but familiar to their local audiences who find the new in the repetition. A narrower opening, the detail requires a different grasp on the event, a different mode of reception. We need an orientation not to the performance as a self-contained artifact, but to the performance as a ramified event in which reception (not to be confused with interpretation) is integral. Such an approach would reveal to what degree the assumptions of an avant- garde approach to reception are culturally specific rather than offering a master key to art as a transcendent category. VII Cultural quotation is not ethnographic vivisection. It is not a cultural kidney on ice that is rushed to the festival body, readied for transplant, with the hope that the foreign organ will take. We are not dealing with a kind of ethnographic Th‚ƒtre Libre, which instead of slicing life quotes cultures. Nor, in the case of the many Los Angeles neighborhoods featured at the Festival--"Every two blocks it's a new world"--are we dealing with a bell jar that has been dropped over an ethnographic region of the city. The Festival does not bring a vitrine to the site, so that a neighborhood all of a sudden presents itself for viewing. The organizers were well aware that the Los Angeles Festival was the determining context for everything it presented. Indeed, the arts festival is in some cases the primary--if not the only--one for performance forms that have lost whatever "other" settings and contexts they once had. Even as some of these performances evoke an originary setting of the old days, they may in fact, only ever be performed at festivals of the arts. One of the Festival organizers commented that a performer who had immigrated to Los Angeles from Thailand worked at Federal Express during the day--but surely not in the elaborate costume he wore for the Los Angeles Festival of the Arts. Were audiences to assume that performers wore their "costumes" all the time? Or just for this occasion? The arts festival may have become the safe and appropriate place to be different, to be "ethnic." As such, these festivals have long been the repository of imagined communities and invented traditions. (See Anderson 1993; Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983) "Heritage" is not simply inherited. This is a claim that draws on a rhetoric of legitimation. Rather, "heritage" is constantly constituted and renewed. When Sellars aimed for a festival without labels, when he refused to identify the performers as ethnic, folk, or primitive, he was taking the ethnomusicologists, ethnographers, and folklorists to task, for these are in his view anthropological labels. But the Los Angeles Festival did use labels: "The Maoris," "The Koreans," "The Balinese," etc. Why were those labels benign and unproblematic? I am not arguing for the other labels. I want only to shatter the illusion that there were no labels, that designations geopolitical or ethnic or cultural are unproblematic, and to draw attention to the implications of these labels, their singularity, as if those who performed could be defined in their entirety by a geopolitical designation. The ease with which such labels were used suggests that the only way that American "minorities" and Pacific peoples can appear is in their essential "ethnic" or "national" mode, that people are best known in the festival genre, that culture divides while art transcends, and that the only safe differences are aesthetic ones. The dizzying array of diversity, while motivated by an exuberant spirit of inclusiveness, also risked the danger of banalizing difference by rendering it inconsequential, particularly in the humanizing face of art, the master category. Indeed the ethnographic survived as the hidden term in the Festival equation, where disavowal helped to create a lexical minefield. Having stripped the performances of ethnographic labels--it's all just art--the terminology dance began anew, only this time the preferred terms were tradition, heritage, and multicultural. These terms were offered by Susan Auerbach, former Folk Arts Coordinator for the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department and a thoughtful writer on her subject. Still, they are indicative of the dilemma, as is her statement in the program booklet: "Tradition encompasses change, and heritage-related arts range along a continuum from purist roots to hybrid and avant- garde offshoots, as the Festival amply shows." (Auerbach 1990:36) Roots are pure--folk arts programs "encourage cultural preservation"--and presumably they are purest at their putative source, whether removed in time or space or saved by immigration. Terms like fusion, blend, hybrid, evolving, and dynamism define the other end of the continuum. When both ends meet at the Los Angeles Festival, the result is a "cross-cultural arts venture" that will make Los Angeles itself a "multicultural mecca." The delicacy of these terminological manoeuvres is particularly clear when Cambodian musician Chim Reap, an immigrant, is "multicultural" (a euphemism for not white), but a group like the Gujo Hachiman Bon Odori, who were brought from Japan, are "international" (a euphemism for not American). As surrogates for "foreign," both euphemisms occlude difference--and the asymmetries of power--by pluralizing (and otherwise splitting and reconstituting) the other. Why is Chim Reap multicultural? Who, by implication, is (mono)cultural? If The Friendly Islanders of Tonga are international, who is by implication national? Whether "multi," "cross," or "inter," the entities so designated stand in a special relationship to those who are not, for, it would seem, "they" are plural, "we" are one. Euphemisms take us only so far, particularly when the categories and assumptions they seem to challenge are still very much alive. After all, just who counts as different or as different enough or as different in the ways that matter? And who does not? Is the Bread and Puppet Theatre, which is neither multicultural nor international, technically speaking, also "just different"? And if so, just different from what? The categories seem to be structurally intransigent and lexically fluid. Though the shifts in terminology do suggest some taxonomical give, they promise more than they deliver. For another spin on the problem, consider Arlene Croce's dismay when Mark Morris was dropped from the Los Angeles Festival for financial reasons. In her New Yorker piece entitled "Multicultural Theatre," Croce champions Morris as "a genuine expression of world dance" and "a multicultural microcosm"--his dancers are of "every color and physical description" and his choreography is "a blend of East and West." Opining on multiculturalism, "the latest buzzword" created by the university, Croce celebrates the ecumenicism of dance and bashes the political correctness of academics: "Multiculturalism has always existed in American dance; there is scarcely an American choreographer of note who has not been influenced both by the pluralism of our society and the way that dance just naturally soaks it up. Pinning a label on a simple phenomenon like that is something only an academic would want to do. And only political academics would want to isolate the elements of pluralism in such a way as to aggrandize some and stigmatize others." (Croce 1990:84) To at once trivialize the issues signalled by the term "multiculturalism" as a "simple phenomenon" that only academics would gussy up with a buzzword and then celebrate Morris as "a multicultural microcosm" only dramatizes the extent to which Croce herself has jumped on the bandwagon, but without having paid the price of admission. What is so insidious about Croce's position? She equates appropriation with pluralism, an equation that naturalizes the process by which "the West" separates forms from their performers, converts those forms into "influences," brings the influences into the center, leaves the living sources on the margins, and pats itself on the back for being so cosmopolitan: "There may be a need to promote the accessibility of Asian, Hispanic, and African dance companies, many of which lead a marginal life. But the dance forms themselves are hardly inaccessible--they're part of every dance tradition the West knows. At their purest (assuming that one can find village and street festivals that are uninfected by television and tourism), they still speak a rhythmic language intelligible to all." To think otherwise is "divisive." Croce's affirmations of the purities of difference and her identification of the "'other' (it's another buzzword)" with rhythm bear the traces of racist thinking. Multiculturalism in Croce's view, and she is not alone, is an invention of the intellectual academy and the enemy of the arts, for it presumes that ballet and modern dance are in decline and that "these other styles," kept outside by "mainstream prejudice" is the only hope for rejuvenation. On the contrary, she argues, "Morris speaks so many [dance] languages that it comes as a surprise when from time to time, he creates a work that has no trace of an accent--that is just 'pure' movement." In other words, Babel is the path to the transcendent purity of artistic form, and even more important, to greatness as a dance company, for Morris's work exemplifies "a vision of the universe and the individual's place in it." Enlightenment values reassert themselves and political realities are obscured in the elision of anything--multiculturalism?--that might stand between the smallest unit (individual) and the largest (universe). Yo! "After all, what is 'yo'? Only 'oy' spelled backward," a New Yorker cartoon at the time quipped. Step back a moment. What about "art"? Is that not a label? Who decided what to present at the Los Angeles Festival? The choices were not random. If, as Sellars stated, anthropological labels imply the superiority of Western art forms, then the label "art" is a way to elevate forms that have been so labelled. We dignify such forms by reclassifying them, by using categories we value, whether or not our categories bear any relation to those the performers use--as Mitoma noted, "Most of the international participants invited to the Festival do not consider themselves 'artists' in the general Western sense of the word." (Mitoma 1990:16) I want to dispel the notion that when art mediates, it makes us all just human. I want to challenge the idea that art does not mediate. That it speaks directly. Or, that when art speaks it does so in a universal "nonlanguage." Phyllis Chang's assertion that "We've eliminated the third person," when we have eliminated the academic specialist and her explanations fosters the illusion that the Festival organizers did not mediate what they presented, that they simply let "art" speak for itself. Yet, it is precisely the theatrical mediation effected by the Los Angeles Festival that distanced so many of the events from the ethnographic and bracketed them as art. Consider Croce's comment at the end of her review of Mark Morris that "In dance, high art has always needed to be nourished by folk art, and folk art has always needed the mediation of the theatre. Without the theatre, dance isn't a medium; it's the preserve of anthropologists, not of artists." The diction is suggestive: in its role as nourishment, is "folk art" only food for the master, who "mediates" by digesting it? This reading exposes the illusion of reciprocity in Croce's statement, which promotes the fiction of a quid pro quo that equates nourishment with mediation. Though Croce's sensibility is very different from that of Sellars, her pronouncement points again to the power of theatrical mediation to remove "folk art" from the "preserve of anthropologists"--and, inter alia, the tensions between artists and what Croce calls anthropologists and between their respective preserves. The Los Angeles Festival is a spectacular case of theatrical mediation. The mediation of theatre, however well intended and successful, skirts the apologetics of inclusion--as noted earlier, Lincoln Center was unabashed on this score, when it declared its plan "to elevate jazz to the same level as opera, ballet and symphony." Nathan Leventhal, president of Lincoln Center predicted: "I think people will be very pleased about the fact that we're giving recognition to jazz, and that jazz has a place at Lincoln Center," an assessment that would meet its true test when Lincoln Center went after funding. Money speaks loudly, even at the 1990 Los Angeles Festival, whose budget was considerably lower than those of its two predecessors. Were seventy percent of the events free of charge because they were hard to sell? Is "multicultural" a codeword for low budget? If money talks, what is it saying? It certainly speaks to asymmetries of power in the relationships that made the Los Angeles Festival possible and that has kept jazz out of Lincoln Center until now. The press was often at a loss. Were the critics to review performances or to report on them? Some articles reverted to the encyclopedia entry, offering a somewhat ethnographic or historical treatise on a particular art form assumed to be unfamiliar to the reader. Others fell back on the human interest story and wrote about the performers. Some followed the conventions of travel writing to describe their encounters with those who had come from afar. Others observed Sontag's dictum to "supply a really accurate, sharp, loving description of a work of art." (Sontag 1966:13) Some wrote about the Los Angeles Festival as a total phenomenon. At bottom, reviewers seemed too unsure of themselves to write about performances from Asia and other parts of the Pacific the way they normally reviewed theatre and dance in Los Angeles. Value judgements did not seem "politically correct" under the circumstances. While revealing a double standard--criticize art, describe the multicultural--their quandary also suggests how limited are the ways the performing arts are usually reported in the press and the need to experiment not only with performance and festivals, but also with the ways we write about them. The consumer reports quality of much performance criticism could do with a healthy dose of attentive description and critical analysis. Like the press, what audiences experienced was the Los Angeles Festival itself--notwithstanding Sellars's comment that the Festival was a huge maze, everyone made their own festival, no one saw everything, and one cannot really speak of a "shared" experience. Indeed, the maze, like the alphabetical list of events and the calendric grid of their occurrence, was a way to avoid hierarchy by using disorientation, arbitrariness, and parataxis to advantage. The Los Angeles Festival, a product of the contemporary art world, the university, civic institutions, corporate philanthropy, city government, and big business, needs an ethnomusicologist, a folklorist, an anthropologist, if it is to be understood as a cultural phenomenon in its own right. When a brochure titled "The Los Angeles Festival Guide, 1991," issued by the Cultural Affairs Department, was captioned "Celebrating America's City of Festivals," the message was that Los Angeles is party time. It is a happy place. The brochure stated further that these festivals "tell a story of a City that is culturally alive." Read the newspaper for the unstated story of urban decay, urban problems, gangs, and all the other fixtures of American cities. At the Los Angeles Festival, the city of Los Angeles was the hero and the script, the stage and the producer, whatever else the event might have been about. The 1990 Los Angeles Festival, like the guide to all the festivals occurring in Los Angeles throughout the year, signified that Los Angeles is civilized, that Los Angeles has a civic and public sphere. People work for the common good. Los Angeles has the arts. Los Angeles is in the vanguard. Los Angeles will lead the future. Los Angeles is multicultural. Diverse people can work together. The city is vibrant, a centre, a magnet. We can beat the sprawl. We can get off the freeway. We can park our cars. We can visit each others' neighborhoods. There is a there there. Thanks to the last twenty- five years of new immigration--and the airplane that brings performers from around the Pacific--we can really prove it. Just look at Little Tokyo, Chinatown, Olvera Street, Philippine Town, Koreatown, and other distinctive parts of the city. The Los Angeles Festival helped the city define itself in terms of those who have come to it from somewhere else and who assert hereness through thereness. * A key to the Los Angeles Festival is its location of authenticity in a moment of aesthetic reception, rather than in the objects presented. This move is informed by an avant-garde sensibility that, having challenged the category of art and admitted what the art academy excludes, gives to reception a constitutive role. While this sounds emancipatory, there are unexplored asymmetries here between performances that are coherent in their home contexts and the planned anarchy of their reception by Los Angeles audiences. Driving a wedge between ethnographic and artistic practice obscures the extent to which the two enterprises share procedures and values and the ways in which theatrical mediation "undoes" the ethnographic. The organizers of the Los Angeles Festival incorporated critiques such as this into their planning discussions for the 1993 Festival and continue to do so in their ongoing experimentation with the festival as a form. Notes Please consult published version for notes. Works Cited Allen, B., ed. 1990. Los Angeles Festival Program Book. Los Angeles: McTaggart-Wolk. Anderson, B. 1993. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised and expanded ed. London: Verso. Artaud, A. 1976. Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings. ed. S. Sontag, trans. H. Weaver, Los Angeles: University of California Press. ---. 1958. The Theatre and Its Double. trans. M. C. Richards, New York: Grove. Auerbach, S. 1990. Against the Odds: Sustaining Traditional Arts in Los Angeles. Los Angeles Festival Program Book. ed. B. Allen, 33-37. Los Angeles: McTaggart-Wolk. Baron, R., and N. Spitzer, eds. 1992. Public Folklore. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press. Barr, J. A. H. 1966. 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