blood run performance

Here is the footage of blood run from my performance at Highways in June 2016!

password: "bloodline"

The Chinese Animal Zodiac for Aborigines

As part of the WGS Assemblages symposium (see my earlier post), I also will be doing a performative interaction with the audience over the course of an hour and 15 minutes.  There will be many things happening in the room, so I anticipate an ebb and flow of people.  I thought I would use the opportunity to try out a performance experiment idea I've had for awhile, based on Walis Nokan's poem, "Chinese Animal Zodiac for Aborigines."

My performative idea is to be a "fortune-teller."  Ideally I would have a semi-enclosed space, but probably the set-up will be two chairs with a small table in between.  I would interact with one person at a time.  I'll ask the audience what their zodiac sign is (I thought I'd put one of those cheesy Chinese restaurant place-mats down in case people don't know), then read them the section of Nokan's poem that corresponds to their sign.   I'm imagining sitting in front of a pile of rocks, with little scrolls for each section of the poem labeled "rat," "sheep," "dragon," etc sticking out of the rocks.  I would unfurl each scroll and read that part of the poem to the person.  I would end by giving them a little card or flyer, kind of like Christian proselytizers give out.  On one side there would be the relevant section of Nokan's poem, along with a bio, and on the other side, I would put one of my letters to a lost aboriginal ancestor (or excerpts thereof) and a bio that explains my mixed heritage and gives a little insight into the colonial history, but from a personal standpoint.  I would like to include Nokan's entire poem, but I think it would be too long.

Here is Nokan's poem:

Here's an example of a restaurant placemat I might use:

Questions:

(1) Should I have a sign announcing my fortune-telling?  If so, what should it say?  I was thinking of something like: "FORTUNE-TELLING: Chinese Animal Zodiac for Aborigines."

(2) Should I white-out or redact (black-out) the fortunes that are already on the placemat?

(3) How should I read the poem?  Should I read it from the position of an indigenous person, as it is written, from the position of a colonizer who is surprised and/or offended at what the fortune says, in the mode of an exotic Orientalist new age fortune-teller and/or charlatan?  Should my tone be sincere, theatrical/performative, flat, etc?  Should I try a mixture of performative styles corresponding to the various identities and stereotypes being invoked?  

(4) Along similar lines to (3), what should I wear?  Something "neutral" (ie western androgynous), something "Chinese," something "indigenous," something hippie-like?  A friend suggested having a different hat or head-covering for each character.  Would that be too much?

(5) I'm thinking of slightly rewriting parts of the translation to make it work better as English poetry.  However, I don't quite understand the "Dragon" section.  What do you think the "myth" refers to?   The "hand that unravels"?  In the "Rabbit" section, what do you think the "ripples that attempt to flee" mean?

blood run: Letters to a Lost Aboriginal Ancestor

These letters are the result of a daily writing practice in which I write a letter to my imagined female indigenous ancestor each morning.

FEEDBACK QUESTIONS:
(1) What ideas, images, or specific phrases resonate with you?
(2) Are there any parts that you find confusing and would like clarification on?  Anything you find problematic?
(3) How might you imagine these being used in performance, installation, or other public sharing of art?  How might they relate to or be integrated with the other blood run material?
(4) Other thoughts?

21 June 2015

Dear Ancestor,

Hi.  你好。 I don't know what language to greet you in, phonemes racing trolling lazily in my blood cells, the pulse and undertow of the Pacific.  I speak to you like dolphins, sonar, vibrations of oceanic language in our bones, your bones long disappeared, turned to dust, wreathed with kelp.  I imagine you, brown skin, lined face, joyful wrinkles around your eyes, unbound feet.  Strong capable hands that till the soil, a child on your hip, taro and sweet potato at your feet, ordering the men around. 

But maybe that is wrong.  Maybe you are young, a young woman with deep-set eyes and a long nose and sea-black waves of hair.  Maybe you saw the dark silhouettes of approaching ships, the masses of men who streamed onto your island like long-queued rats storming the fertile western plains, with horror.  With wonder.  With fear.  With love.

So many generations, an ocean and several languages later, your mixed blood daughter writes you in English.  The history books say we are extinct, your language and people are extinct.  The history books were not written by our people.  I doubt my motives but I want to know you, I take bitter rice wine into my mouth, temples clench squeeze from the harsh alcohol, spew and retch in a would-be blessing.  I kneel at the Pacific, half a world and four hundred years later, and touch the water, waiting hoping to hear you.

Love,
Cynthia

22 June 2015

Dear Ancestor,

Hi again.  It's me, your mixed lost daughter of the future.  Yesterday, I walked along the Pacific, saltwater swirling sand around ankles and calves, and thought about another coast, craggy rocky waves crashing the sailors praying to Mazu for protection as they crossed the black water from Fujian.  What did you think and feel as they crashed headlong into your shores and lives?  What does it mean to think about my origin point as a story of colonization?  What would you think of me?  Would you look at me, scornfully, and tell me I am not one of your own?  Would you look at me as the greatest mistake in the history of your people, to love and trust a foreigner?  Would you regard me with loving abhorrence, the offspring, perhaps, of a forced encounter by the field one night?  Would your heart be sad, betrayed, understanding of the layers of assimilation, of all the lost and imposed cultures and histories that run through my ancestral and dancing body?  What have I inherited, what have I chosen?  Is it possible, dear ancestor, that I inherited my love of border-crossing and cultural difference from you?  Or is that wishful thinking, colonial guilt?  In the end this is the unanswerable question: was your "marriage" to that Han man -- my ancestor, a 李 -- a choice, a survival tactic, an act of violence?

With love and wonder,
Cynthia 李怡欣

June 23, 2015

Dear Ancestor,

Like a little girl or an almost illiterate ABC, I have been practicing handwriting.  Writing Pingpu family names over and over -- or rather the Chinese surnames you were forced to take on -- or which you chose to take on as a tactic to avoid discrimination.  It reminds me that my parents took on Anglo names when they first moved here, my dad's name a strange echo of a Confederate general, Robert Lee, the same name on an FBI no-fly list, the routine interrogations at LAX when he returns from Taiwan.  Wooden prow replaced by metal bird: how we have chosen to leave, now and then.  Someone said that immigration is giving up on one's homeland.  We came in the 70s, before martial law was lifted, when Nixon decided, oops, Taiwan isn't China, China is China, and we thought, the Communists are coming!  the Communists are coming! -- a threat which is true even now.  I don't know what prompted that earlier migration, that other moment of complicity with a settler-colonial project that ended up with me as your descendant.  Years of drought, maybe, like this bone-dry California Gabrielino-Tongva land that I love.  Financial incentives by the Dutch, who could not persuade you to till your land for their profit.  Or arriving with the Manchurian Qing, who managed the indigenous people and the Han settlers by pitting us against each other, as even now we are pitted against each other in my heart, ventricles gasping, blood cells fighting each other for oxygen, as even now we are pitted against each other in Taiwan, the DPP wanting to use aboriginal identity for its own political purposes, you call us pai lang in our language, you call us mother-fuckers in yours.

What's in a name?  What's hidden in a name?  Even as your people took on Chinese names, they were still different than ours. 哀, Ai, sorrow.  猴, Hou, monkey.  毒, Du, poison.  Were the names phonetic translations, like those weird Chinese transliterations of foreign names: Mary becomes 瑪麗 (Ma Li).  Or are there traces of meaning -- red, baby chick, poetry  -- that connect to your lost names, our lost names.  Did you agree, in the end, to take the name 李, wood radical Lee, to enter a Han patriarchal lineage, a woman lost in the branches of men, the native roots and brambles of your matrilineal ancestry disappeared from the naming, the graves, the altars, the books, the family genealogy.  I cannot offer incense to you.  I can only speak, haltingly, these names in colonial translation: Yue (月), Hong (紅), Li (力).  Moon.  Red.  Power.

Love,

Cynthia
李怡欣

24 June 2015

Dear Ancestor,

I wish I knew your name.  Your face.  I wish I had a picture.  A marking on a gravestone in the tall grass, worn by monsoon and time.  A mention of your laughter in a long-ago diary.  A song.  Something to hold onto and let me know that you are real.  Today the scholars tell me you are not real: the geneticists and anthropologists argue, waving their righteous flags, funded by government institutions. 

I remember going to get my hair cut with my mother in Taipei, and the hairdresser saying, Is she part American?  Her eyes look different.  My mother was angry and said I was a hundred percent Taiwanese, raised in the U.S..  At the time I thought, bemused and a little hurt, that my foreign clothes and way of being in my body must have shifted her perception, made her see me as part white, since of course that's what American means in Taiwan.  Now I wonder whether she was really seeing your eyes in my face: deep-set and round with the epicanthal fold.  Mistaking one set of barbarians for another.

I've been rethinking Confucianism.  Seeing its tightness.  What was once framed as the oh-so-predictable rebellion of the white-washed second generation American now presents itself as a decolonial act, as working to undo hundreds of years of assimilation to Han culture.  Queering Confucianism.  Family is a fist, squeezing tight as water runs and dribbles out, instead of gently cupping the water, holding it.  Family is a set of lungs shared between conjoined twins: we cannot breathe without each other.  Family is tightly woven silk, the strength of warp and weft: if you cut one thread, the whole thing unravels.  But what was family to you?  I read Jolan Hsieh's ethnography of Pingpu people, and it looks a lot like love marriage: noseflutes playing, young men and women dancing at harvest, an easy approach and retreat, following the ebb and flow of one's desire.  Did my Han ancestor slip into one of these dances?  Did you feel him beside you and take his hand in yours, smiling?  The collision course of history in one simple gesture?  Did he move to your family home, working hard as all immigrants do, to make sure his clothes wouldn't be hung outside the front door, to win your family's approval?  Did you know that he could come or go, that you need only stay together as long as you wished, that divorce and remarriage would be easy and without stigma, that you could come together and drift apart like duckweed floating on the pond's surface, that you could take for granted, as I never have, the right to choose who to love?

Love,
Cynthia

June 25, 2015

Dear Ancestor,

I imagine you wild-eyed dancing

I imagine you with millet and daikon and dirt under your nails

I imagine you with your mother and an earthbellied pot

I imagine you pouring sweet rice wine laughing fullbodied

I imagine your hands reaching into a steaming communal pot

            sweet potato and wild boar cooked together underground

I imagine you diving, a flying fish

            silverslipping in and out of waves

...my imagination stumbles, comes up empty. 

How can I imagine you when I know nothing about you?

A handful of dirt, salt, water.

Speak to me, please.

Cynthia

July 23, 2015

Dear Ancestor,

Many days, as scholars argue in my head, stroking their long beards and waving their green flags, I wonder if you really exist, if you ever existed.  I feel you frowning, shaking your head at your daughter's doubt, at yet another erasure.  This is how genocide works.  So I continue writing and creating around the possibility of your existence -- hints -- detective work -- signs from a dream world -- delving headlong, shaking, into a bloody history that is far bigger than my own blood lineage.

I've been thinking about rainbows.  Somewhere over the.  Longing.  Pot of gold.  Queer leprechauns.  Oxumare dreams sky, snakes his androgynous spine as raindrops spill and shimmer, the jangle of cowry.  Genderqueer child of Oxum and Oxossi.  Birds fly why oh why can't I cross the rainbow bridge to meet you, to meet my lost ancestors.  It's true, my imagination refracts through a blockbuster film, Warriors of the Rainbow.  And yet what hands calloused torn from weaving.  What blood on my hands gripping machete.  What sacrifice do you require for us to be together?  Must I kill the Han in me?  The Seediq say that across the rainbow bridge in the heavenly hunting grounds, your enemy and you are at peace, the conflict forgiven. Would I have to split my head from my body in one clean stroke, to sacrifice myself to you to mend my warring selves, to heal?  But this is not a Pingpu tradition.  It is a headhunter spirituality from a patriarchal society that allowed the Seediq and the Atayal to violently, valiantly resist their Japanese colonizers.  Seediq Bale.  To kill is to become fully human.  And I doubt this was our way, our matrilocal plains people who married the enemy, loved them, maybe.

Rainbows remind me of Hawai'i, where they appear, spontaneously, in mist and light, my father, bigbellied full of mana, so happy at home there.  The possibility of you around every corner.  Maybe I should've suspected we were Pacific Islanders then.  Rainbows lit up my Facebook feed last month, suddenly everyone was queer, Queer Nation, the Supreme Court legalizing same-sex marriage while my radical queer friends protested.  I know marriage is not liberation, but I am tired of critical queers, of negativity and gatekeeping and exclusion and hopelessness.  I want a world lit up by rainbows, rainbows without blood, pirates without pillaging, where the only blood sacrifice is to cut out the internalized colonizer within.

Love,

Cynthia

Open Round 2: Embodying Ethnography

Here is a movement study that I did for "blood run":


Qing Imperial Tribute Illustrations from Cynthia Ling Lee on Vimeo.
password: "ethnographic"

FEEDBACK QUESTIONS
1. What emotions, visceral responses, and/or meaning does the movement evoke for you?
2. What might you like to see as accompanying sound, if anything?*
3. What do you think about the current arc of the study?  Are there sections that you might like to reorder?  Are there moments you would like to see further fleshed out?**
4. Do you see any connections to other "blood run" material?  How might you imagine this movement living with the other material?
5. Other thoughts or suggestions?

CONTEXT
This movement was developed from some of the visual iconography of the Qing Imperial Tribute Illustrations (1751), which Emma Jinhua Teng discusses in her chapter on "Picturing Savagery" from her book, Taiwan's Imagined Geography.  According to Teng, this work, which took over a decade to complete, was an ambitious project to catalog various non-Han "barbarians" by the Qing.  Over two thirds of the illustrations were of non-Han ethnic minorities living within the empire, including Taiwanese indigenous peoples, though it also included people from other Asian countries and Europeans (163).  They are depicted in pairs of male and female like representative "specimens."  I attempted to embody the different energies, bodily positions, actions conveyed by the illustrations, and to move into and through the different characters with a somatic awareness.

*Some ideas I had for sound included (a) voicing my internal imagery -- "heavy silk," "floating feather," "daikon offering," "chin forward,", (b) visual projection or voiceover of the characters as listed in the original illustrations -- "Korean gentleman," "raw savage of Zhanghua county," (3) music that references the places these characters are from.

**I just realized that I forgot one pair of characters ("Cooked Savages of Fengshan County"), who appear to be the most "refined" of the Taiwanese indigenes represented, so I can add them in if you think it would be interesting.

Open Round 1: To Ask Pardon

This study continues my investigations of my indigenous and Han colonizer heritages, this time using a text written by PingPu (plains indigenous) people, "Declaration of the PingPu Peoples of Taiwan," which I found in Jolan Hsieh's book, Collective Rights of Indigenous Peoples: Identity-Based Movement of Plains Indigenous in Taiwan.  My other studies, "blood run" and "colonial mapping," have used my own writings and travel writings by Qing-era Chinese colonizers, respectively.

Version 1:

To Ask Pardon (Mandarin) from Post Natyam Collective on Vimeo.
password "pingpu"


Version 2

To Ask Pardon from Cynthia Ling Lee on Vimeo.
password: "pingpu"

FEEDBACK QUESTIONS:
(1) What intrigues or draws you in about this study politically, emotionally, aesthetically or intellectually?  What does not?
(2) How might you imagine any of this content being used in performance?  Do you want a more embodied approach, and if so, what would you suggest?  (My original vision for this text was to either find original audio of the declaration or to record the original text in Mandarin as a voice-over.  My performance would consist of attempting to translate -- eyes closed and with difficulty -- the voice-over into English, with the same messing of we/you pronouns that I do here.  Since I just got the Chinese text, I haven't had time to do a recording.)
(3) CONTEXT: This declaration was ultimately not successful, and while PingPu (plains aborigine) peoples are recognized by the UN as an indigenous tribe, they are not recognized by the government of Taiwan.  My father informs me that the PingPu search for official recognition by the government of Taiwan is very controversial and opposed by most other Taiwanese indigenous tribes.  This is because (a) the PingPu people were historically coerced into killing other indigenous tribes and (b) indigenous nations in Taiwan are given special privileges and resources (such as a certain quota of Legislative Yuan -- Taiwan's equivalent of Congress -- representation).  Since many PingPu peoples have been deeply assimilated into Han Chinese culture for generations, they (we?) don't necessarily suffer from the same systemic social disadvantages as other indigenous tribes.  Originally, alongside this declaration the PingPu people stated that they sought only recognition in name without any of these special privileges, but this has not proved to be true over time.  My dad also mentioned that a hematologist did a study in which he found that an incredibly high percentage (90%?) of Hoklo Taiwanese, which is the largest ethno-linguistic group in Taiwan and the one that my family belongs to, has aboriginal blood.  How does this information change your reception of the study, if at all?  Do you want more of this information, and if so, how could I share it in performance without being overly didactic?
(4) What do you make of my costume choices?
(5) Any other thoughts, suggestions, or useful connections to my previous studies?

Queering Abhinaya Assignment 7: Colonial Mapping

For this cycle of queering abhinaya, I was paired with Shyamala.  She helped me brainstorm ways to bring performative life to the Chinese colonial travel accounts of Taiwan from "triple-weave."


colonial mapping I (in-progress study) from Cynthia Ling Lee on Vimeo.
password "confucian"

FEEDBACK QUESTIONS:
1) What draws you in; what do you find compelling?  Are there parts where you're bored, confused, or otherwise not engaged?
2) I'm thinking of giving the Chinese language a greater presence in the piece.  I can do this by adding Chinese to the labels and/or possibly finding the original travelogue texts and getting a native Mandarin speaker to read them before the English translations (this will be much more work).  Are you interested in this possibility, and if so, how much Chinese would you like to be present?
3) How might you imagine this being translated into live performance?
4) What relationship do you see with "blood-run"?
5) Other thoughts?

BACKGROUND/CONTEXT:
I've been continuing to read Emma Jinhua Teng's Taiwan's Imagined Geography, which has shed some light on the nuances of the particular colonial writings excerpted in triple-weave.  According to Teng, there are two main colonial perspectives on Taiwan during this era of Qing expansionism: (a) a "rhetoric of privation" that constructs the Taiwanese aborigine as a brutish savage and (b) a "rhetoric of primitivism" that romanticizes the aborigine as a sort of "noble savage" (62).  The rhetoric of privation is deeply informed by classical Confucian texts, while the rhetoric of primitivism is very much the product of Taoist philosophy and imagery.  This study draws more on the texts written from the "rhetoric of privation" perspective.

Teng also describes the changing cartography in the Ming (the Han Chinese dynasty preceding the Qing dynasty) and Qing dynasties.  Whereas Ming maps portray China as a naturally bounded territory (Taiwan being a terra incognita far away beyond the seas), Qing maps include Taiwan as a peripheral part of China at the very edge of the world/map.  I was particularly fascinated that some maps were not drawn from a bird's eye view, but instead as if standing on the south-eastern coast of China in the Fujian province looking across the roiling waves at Taiwan.  This perspective positions Taiwan as separate from the Qing empire and informs the camera angle that I used in my study.  Many of the labels on the rocks (country of women, dogs, two-bodied people, hairy people, etc.) are from actual maps from the late Ming period (40).

I was planning to create two more approaches to mapping: one reflecting the Taoist-primitivist-bird's eye view map, and one highlighting Taiwan as part of Austronesia, but did not manage for this round.

REFERENCES
Teng, Emma Jinhua.  2004.  Taiwan's Imagined Geography: Chinese Colonial Travel Writing and Pictures, 1683-1895.  Harvard East Asian Monographs: Cambridge.

Queering Abhinaya Assignment 6: blood-run

For this cycle of queering abhinaya, I was paired with Meena.  We identified common theoretical-artistic interests in further investigating the queer desiring female gaze in a way that positions the camera as performer and the person on camera as a viewer.  We also talked about simultaneously occupying the position of colonized and colonizer.  She expressed interest in continuing to work on her blueberry piece, while I was interested in bringing some performative aspect to the ideas in my writing, "triple-weave."

I did a little more reading from Taiwan's Imagined Geography, and I ended up making a video called "blood-run," which Meena shot for me.  Below are two versions of the video: one with text and one without.  The password for both is "aborigine".


blood-run (no text) from Cynthia Ling Lee on Vimeo.


blood-run (with text) from Post Natyam Collective on Vimeo.

After Shy's feedback, I did a quick re-edit with slightly less text -- most of it cut from the end.

blood-run (less text) from Cynthia Ling Lee on Vimeo.

 FEEDBACK QUESTIONS:
(1) How does the two different videos affect you differently?  Do you prefer one or the other, and why?  Would you prefer less text?  If so, what would you recommend cutting, and what would you like to keep?  Other thoughts about sound?
(2) Any imagery that you find particularly striking?  Any parts where you are less interested?
(3) How might you imagine any aspect of this video and/or the original text being brought into live performance?

I'm also sharing the abstract for the paper that I'm writing about Queering Abhinaya.  I wrote it while thinking about the blueberry piece, the Maud Allan video, the Sher-Gil writings, and triple-weave when reading it.  I welcome any feedback or theory/reading recommendations that you might have.

Rerouting the Gaze: the Post Natyam Collective’s

Choreographies of Queer Affect

Cynthia Ling Lee

This performative paper looks at emergent choreographies of queer affect by analyzing selected aspects of Queering Abhinaya, an ongoing collaboration of the Post Natyam Collective.  The Post Natyam Collective is a transnational, web-based coalition of women dance artists critically and creatively interrogating South Asian dance.  Queering Abhinaya engages in praxis-based research on queering, queerness, and abhinaya through an open-ended, dialogical, and collective process mediated by internet technologies.  We examine notions of queering beyond the borders of North American identity politics to include German notions of quer (“oblique,” or going against the grain) and South Asian embodiments of gender fluidity and erotic possibility that are distinct from performing western LGBT identities.  As our primary aesthetic technique, we draw on an expanded notion of abhinaya, usually associated with Indian classical dancers interpreting love poetry through gesture and facial expression.  

The raw, in-progress studies emerging from the Queering Abhinaya process reimagine classical Indian affective techniques of embodied performance while rerouting dominant colonial, male, and heterosexual mechanisms of the gaze through dance, video, and poetic text.  They ask: how can racialized, hybrid, (post)colonial female subjects gaze back at the masculinist and Orientalizing gaze of the colonizer?  How do the colonizer and colonized live together inside one body?  How might we choreograph an emergent queer female gaze that overturns the western camera’s male gaze and the hetero-patriarchal narratives of love and desire that inform Indian abhinaya viewing conventions?  How might we perform from the position of a postcolonial, queer, desiring female viewer of color?

Cyn's Assignment #3: triple weave

For my assignment, I decided to do a textual choreography that investigates (my) Taiwanese aboriginal and Chinese colonizer heritage and histories.   The piece uses three streams of text: the left column is by Atayal (泰雅/Taiya) poet Walis Nokan, the middle column are personal musings/memories written by myself, and the right column consists of Qing Dynasty colonial travel writings from the 1600s, sourced from Emma Teng's Taiwan's Imagined Geography: Chinese Colonial Travel Writing and Pictures, 1683-1895.  For ease of reading, click on each page for a larger image.