This year-long entry-level program was designed as an introduction to the cultural history and performing arts of Asia, focusing on four countries in particular: China, Japan, India, and Indonesia. Our readings this year were arranged to progress from a strong focus on historical and cultural background in fall, to the performing arts in winter, to fictional literature in spring. Fall quarter studies were comprised primarily of segments of history, culture and philosophy, including the following texts: The Wonder That Was India, pt.1 (A.L. Basham), China, its History and Culture (W. Scott Morton), The Tale of Genji (Murasaki Shikibu), A House in Bali (Colin McPhee), Zen in the Art of Archery (Eugen Herrigel), The Tao of Pooh (Benjamin Hoff), and Embrace Tiger, Return to Mountain: the Essence of Tai Ji (Chungliang Al Huang).
Films from fall quarter included “The Last Emperor,” “To Live!,” “Wayang Golek,” Satyajit Ray’s “The Song of the Road,” “Bali: Masterpiece of the Gods,” “India: Empire of the Spirit,” “The Seven Samurai,” and videos of Chinese opera and Indian dance performances. In winter, the texts included Studies in Kabuki (Brandon, Malm and Shively), Shakuntala (Kalidasa), The Mahabharata (Chakravarthi V. Narasimhan), Chinese Theater from its Origins to the Present Day (Colin Mackerras), Javanese Shadow Puppets (Ward Keeler), and several photocopied handouts. Winter films included “Farewell My Concubine” and extensive videos of many of the performing arts from the four countries. A lecture/demonstration on North Indian classical music by University of Washington faculty Dr. Ramesh Gangolli gave the students an opportunity to experience the music first-hand.
Spring quarter texts included The Guide (R. K. Narayan), The Inner Courtyard (Lakshmi Homstrom, ed.), The Joy Luck Club (Amy Tan), Raise the Red Lantern (Su Tong), Some Prefer Nettles (Junichiro Tanizaki), Masks (Fumiko Enchi), and five short stories from Indonesia (“The Transaction” by Umar Nur Zain, “Considering the Kurawas” by Seno Gumira Adjidarma, “Sun” by Ajip Rosidi, “The Season of Rambutan Fruit” by Titie Said, and “The Hired Men” by Mochtar Lubis). Students also attended several performances during each quarter. Program faculty included Dr. Ratna Roy, Dr. Rose Jang, and Dr. Sean Williams, with Cao Chen, a master performer from the Beijing Opera school, and Chapala Mishra from India, serving as adjunct faculty.
The structure of the program was as follows: each week comprised several components, including lectures, workshops that built performance skills in either Chinese opera, Orissi dance, or Indonesian music, a language workshop in either Mandarin, Hindi, or Bahasa Indonesia, a seminar, and (in fall quarter) a writing workshop. Some of the fall quarter lectures included “Tantric Buddhism in India” (by Ratna Roy), “Taoism and Confucianism” (by Rose Jang), and “East Asian Confucian Music” (by Sean Williams). Winter quarter lectures, focusing on the performing arts, included “Indian Classical Music and Dance” (Ratna Roy), “Chinese Theater” (Rose Jang), and “Indonesian Music: Central Java and Bali” (Sean Williams).
During spring quarter, students continued doing seminars, language study, and watching films, but the remainder of the time was given over to rehearsals for the final performance. In fall and winter quarters, students received direct instruction in the philosophy and practice of tai-chi by Rose Jang twice a week. In spring quarter, they practiced jaipongan, a martial-arts-based Indonesian social dance form, taught by Sean Williams. One of the program’s primarily goals was the blending of theory and practice; in order to achieve that goal, students were required to study the background theory of everything they worked on in the performance and tai-chi segments of the program. Furthermore, students in the performance workshops were required to study the language appropriate to the area (e.g., Mandarin for Chinese opera).
Each student developed one of three performance skills in each quarter: classical Indian dance of Orissa, Chinese opera, or Indonesian gamelan. In most cases, students had no prior experience in the skill. In fall quarter, the Indonesian gamelan workshop led students through the fundamentals of performing on all the instruments of the Sundanese gamelan degung ensemble, a bronze gong-and-xylophone orchestra of West Java. Students learned about the appropriate setting for performances, proper behavior within the ensemble, and how to listen to each other while playing their own instruments. Each student developed facility on the go’ong and jenglong (gong set), panerus and peking (xylophones), bonang (gong-chime), and kendang (set of drums), and they learned to sing one song, “Soropongan.”
The Orissi dance workshop concentrated on the grammar (technique), based on the Sanskrit treatise Abhinaya Darpana, which included in the first quarter two stances (chauka and tribhangi), with exercises in each, 26 foot positions, arm and wrist movements, 9 head movements, 28 single hand gestures, and one of the major rhythmic patterns. It culminated with the synthesis of the skills in a segment of a pure dance, the “Vasanta Pallavi” (Dance of Spring). The students were required to study the texts Odissi Dance and The Odissi Dance Pathfinder (by D.N. Patnaik), learn the Sanskrit names to all of the positions and movements, write a journal, and take two exams.
The Chinese opera workshop was led by both the Artist-in-Residence Cao Chen (a professional actor from the Beijing Opera Institute) and Faculty member Rose Jang. Cao Chen guided all the workshop students through the systematic training of Chinese Opera performance, which included free-style warm-up stretching exercises, Chinese bar-stretching exercises, five kicking sequences, and basic Chinese Opera movement sequences.
In winter quarter, the Indonesian gamelan students built on some of the basic knowledge that had been developed in fall quarter to prepare for more advanced work. Within the first several weeks of winter quarter, the students had already mastered several of the intermediate-level pieces, and by the end of the quarter they had begun working on various advanced pieces. They also learned a new song, “Sekar Manis,” which is accompanied by zithers and flute, rather than by the gamelan ensemble. In the eighth week of class each of the three gamelan practice groups publicly performed two selections for the Asian Performing Arts class.
In winter quarter the beginning Orissi dance workshop concentrated on the study of the history, philosophy, and theory of Orissi dance through lectures, discussions, and videos. The workshop also focused on the synthesis of the practical skills through the perfecting of the first segment of the “Vasanta Pallavi” (Dance of Spring), that students had begun learning in fall quarter. Participants were required to reread D.N. Patnaik’s Odissi Dance and also study the Abhinayadarpanam (The Mirror of Gesture), write a take-home final, and complete two practical tests.
The Chinese Opera workshop continued to develop the students’ strength and stability in performing the highly physical style of the genre. Every workshop included stretching on the floor, leg-stretching on the bar, and five basic kicking exercises. Students also learned more complicated movement routines involving jumping and kicking, which were built on the movements and skills that they had acquired from fall quarter. They also started to learn the basic sword maneurver and work with partners in simple sword fights, which prepared them for the fighting performances in the spring quarter production. Students also had the option — in winter and spring quarters — of enrolling in a technical theater and scenic design workshop, which was set up to teach basic skills in scenic and costuming design and then to design the spring production for the class.
The group did extensive visual research into the three different cultures of China, India, and Indonesia, and then used the research to design the architectural elements of the production. The design incorporated an Indonesian pavilion to house the gamelan, a Chinese pavilion to house the Chinese Opera musicians, and an Orissi temple. The design also included mountains, a bamboo forest, a three-dimensional water buffalo, chariots, and clouds, which were painted in Chinese-influenced Indonesian batik style. In fall quarter, students received specialized training in the fundamentals of writing from campus writing coordinator Tom Maddox.
Throughout the quarter, students developed three different types of college-level writing: based on independent research, on the issue or theme of the week, and on their personal responses to our work. The main essay of fall quarter dealt with an important cultural issue in a particular Asian country; the average length of these essays was five to seven pages. Faculty asked the students to submit revised versions of these essays, so that the students could gain some experience in rewriting, expanding and prioritizing their ideas on paper. At the end of the term, students presented the final results of their research in brief lectures to the entire program. In addition to the essays, students received a set of study questions each week all year to ponder as they went through their readings, and they brought in a brief response paper to each seminar meeting.
Students created the beginnings of a portfolio and journal for their academic and personal reactions to our work, intended as the beginnings of skill development in critical analysis. In winter, students continued the same types of writing, completing eight seminar response papers and creating another research essay specifically about an Asian performing art (rather than about just any cultural issue). Students continued their portfolio work, and also presented the results of their research to the entire class during the final two weeks of winter quarter. In the final week of spring quarter, the Asian Performing Arts and Culture faculty and students put on an original performance blending their three disciplines. They spent a great deal of time outside of class helping to construct the set, build costumes, work on publicity, and do hundreds of myriad tasks involved in developing a successful performance.
In the first portion of the final performance, each workshop performed samples of the work they had developed independently of each other. The gamelan ensemble performed a group of challenging pieces from the classical repertoire. The Orissi dance group performed the beginning level “Vasanta Pallavi” (a decorative pure dance elaboration on the theme of a particular raga), “Glani Samhar” (an acting dance recounting six of the ten incarnations of Lord Vishnu), and an intermediate/advanced level “Vasanta Pallavi” that they learned in the Orissi dance class taught by visiting faculty Chapala Mishra. The Chinese opera group performed “The Water Battle” from the Chinese epic of The White Snake.
The second half was a blend of the three disciplines: it began with a short segment from the Hindu epic Ramayana, in which the evil king Rahwana, close to death, begs forgiveness from his wife Banondari for having kidnapped Sita, the wife of Rama. Using the classical Sundanese music of kacapi-suling, the selection featured Orissi dance for the characters of Sita and Banondari, and Chinese opera for the characters of Rama and Rahwana. The next selection was derived from the Mahabharata, the other major Hindu epic which is well-known throughout South and Southeast Asia. The piece began with a battle preparation, then a brief segment in which Lord Krishna explains to Arjuna why he must fight. There followed a series of battles, alternating between Orissi dancers and Chinese opera fighters, performed to the music of gamelan and angklung buncis (tuned bamboo rattles and large drums), culminating in the death of Karna. The last selection was a short piece of Sundanese social dance (jaipongan), performed by everyone to recorded music.
In spring quarter, selected students also performed at the Northwest Folklife Festival, Evergreen’s Super Saturday festival, on KAOS radio, at Seattle’s Museum of History and Industry, and at various other locations. The students continued their work in technical theater as they prepared for the final production. The technical theater portion, led by Jill Carter, focused on three major aspects: costuming, construction, and scenic painting and craft. The costumes for “Soul of Asia” were primarily developed from traditional costumes in stock, or were rented. There were a few elements (such as all of the twenty costumes for the angklung buncis musicians) that needed to be built, and the students on the costuming crew did an impressive amount of hand stitching work in order to make the pieces they built as elaborate as the traditional Orissi and Chinese Opera costumes.
The set for “Soul of Asia” consisted of an elaboratedly sculpted Orissi Temple, an Indonesian pavilion complete with a grass roof, and a Chinese pavilion with a two-tiered roof with fluted corners. The pavilions were framed with painted and stylized clouds and bamboo. The carpentry team spent four hours each week working in the scene shop, learning safe and proper use of the woodworking tools in theatrical construction, how to read construction drawing, and how to build theatrical scenery. The set was not a straightforward construction project, and the entire construction team came out of the experience with skills in creative theatrical construction and problem solving as well as comprehensive experience in working with power tools.
Lastly, the paint and craft team spent four hours a week working in the scene shop sculpting clay figurines and architectural elements, and then casting the clay sculptures in paper maché. They then attached and painted these forms to the temple to resemble an elaborately carved stone temple from Orissa. They also worked on making and painting the intricate tiled Chinese pavilion roof. The tiles were shaped out of cardboard and then painted; the end result was an impressive facsimile of a Chinese pavilion. The Indonesian pavilion roof was made of paper, cut to resemble grass. The paint crew learned how to lay out, detail, and paint backdrops. The crew also worked on the more mundane but necessary tasks of setting up the stage and seating risers. All of these tasks were rather tedious, but the students in the program created a beautiful environment for the final production, and gained basic skills in painting, set construction, and costume sewing, cutting, and fitting.