Sunday, August 4, 1996
Five-week workshop strives to bridge ethnic boundaries through
musicBy Michele Nguyen
Summer Bruin Contributor
A Jakarta-born dancer may not seem to have a lot in common with
an American composer, aside from their respective love for their
craft.
But this passion for their art allows them to exchange ideas and
create new performances together.
In fact, it brings a group of extraordinary artists from Asia
together with their American counterparts in a five-week workshop
at UCLA, aimed at producing collaborative performances and unlikely
combinations of music and dance. Four UCLA students are also
working closely with the artists.
The workshop is part of a three-year project, the Asian Pacific
Performance Exchange (APPEX), whose goal is to bridge ethnic
boundaries between artists around the world. The workshop kicks off
the first year of this project, funded by the Ford Foundation and
organized by the UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures.
APPEX is the brainchild of Judy Mitoma, the chair of UCLA’s
department of World Arts and Cultures. She wanted to see "what
would happen if you bring this diverse a group of people together
 how much common ground can they find, how many differences
will they be able to realize, appreciate, how can this work make
them into more intelligent, sensitive, thoughtful and productive
artists?"
The project aims to discover what happens when different kinds
of artists come together.
"Within these five weeks, you have a whole process in the studio
of people exchanging information, of people exchanging their art
form, then building into a kind of working together, creating
improvisations and building a relationship," Rachel Cooper, the
associate director of the project, says. "The process is as
important as the product."
"In other words," Mitoma adds, "some people work very fast and
do improvisations. Other people work more in tradition and with a
strong sense of form. What happens when you put those together? The
wonderful thing that we’ve discovered is that there is tremendous
respect across these lines."
The artists, from Vietnam, Indonesia, India, Bangladesh, the
Philippines, China and the United States, have all been working
together in different combinations.
So far, their cultural differences have provided inspiration for
their work instead of frustration.
Eve Beglarian, an American composer, did not have any problems
while collaborating with Hartati, a Jakarta-born dancer.
"It was very natural, and the fact of our being from different
cultures didn’t seem to come into it hardly at all," Beglarian
says.
Any fears the artists may have had about working together seemed
to have been laid to rest.
"When I came here and joined with my other artist fellows, I
became a little bit worried (about) how we would work together the
first time," M. Fazlur Rahman, an actor and musician from
Bangladesh, says.
"But now, I feel very good and excited that when we do work in a
project like this, I feel we are not from different countries. We
all are artists. We are together. We can do everything together in
any artistic view, any artistic work."
The project will have public forums next year to bring together
artists from different communities. Next summer, the public will
have an opportunity to join the project by learning from artists
during a four-week program of cultural exchange.
For more info. on APPEX and its performances, call (310)
206-1342. For info. on other programs, call the UCLA Arts Line at
(310) 825-2278.
Keremane Shivanand Hedge is a participant of the APPEX
workshop.
APPEX student and artist participants, left to right:
Nguyen Thi Hong Ngat, Anuradha Kishore, Sophiline Shapiro, Xu
Ying, Sen Hea Ha, Nathan Nguyen, Vu Thuy Ten and Zhou Jing-Qiu
(kneeling).