Session 9: Creativity, Culture and Performance

Session 9: Creativity, Culture & Performance
Chair: Diane Powell

The Ownership of Cultural Hybrids
Lau Chek Wai
National University of Singapore, Singapore

Many who have viewed Akira Kurosawaâ’s films would realize that he had created a new genre works which have a strong blend of Japanese and Western elements but which are not reducible to either culture.  There are some who however claim such intercultural products as belonging solely to their native cultures, thus giving rise to what Charles Taylor calls non-recognition not giving due credit to other cultures and races. To address this aspect of monoculturalism, I suggest it is important to view intercultural exchanges as periods of revolutions.  Like in periods of scientific revolutions, intercultural exchanges involve a change of world view, a change of meaning and a change of the repertoire of questions.  Intercultural exchanges cannot be properly conceived as an accumulation of past cultural experiences but the hybrids must be regarded as new entities, belonging to neither culture.  The implication is that it is harder to pigeonhole new cultural products. Zen Buddhism (Indian Buddhism-Chinese influences), for example, cannot be recognized as an extension of Chinese culture, unless as a shorthand.  Neither is the Renaissance (Greek, Medieval and Islamic influences) a continuation of medieval culture. The facts that the propagators of a new cultural product belong predominantly to a race or that the culture thrives mainly in a certain country are not proofs of entitlement.  The former will marginalize the effort of the minority who contributes to the new hybrid while the latter is building on the fallacy of the former, i.e., the country of origin supersedes the contribution of the minority. With globalization, intercultural exchanges will take place on a wider scale and the politics of recognition will escalate. Once we recognize that no one culture can legitimately claim ownership over intercultural hybrids, we can deal a heavy blow to monoculturalism.

Download Full Conference Paper –

How Interculturalism Performs: Performativity and Performability of Interculturalism
Fiona Sze
Department of Performance Studies, New York University, NY, USA

My paper does not advocate interculturalism in art as a resolution of tension between the Eastern aesthetics and the Western artistry. On the contrary, it refuses to deny the existence of an “East” and its opposite “West.” At the same time, however, it speaks aloud an opposing voice, “Someone’s ‘Otherness’ is not always mine.”
Interculturalism is not a prenational, utopian stage of cultural homogeneity and human unity. Its definition does not escape from the construction of two “otherneses”: interculturalism is a meeting of two fabrications of otherness from varying moments in history within the structure of an artistic media, be it a music recording, a theatrical production or simply an oil painting. Interculturalism is a self-definition that artists create at the expense of their confrontation with particular social contexts, histories and realities in both eastern and western cultures.
The body of my paper will be an examination of how various artists explore interculturalism as a means of asserting their ownership of cultural property rights. Such artists include Yo-yo Ma & the Silk Road Ensemble, the Chinese-born American composers Chen Yi and Zhou Long, the architect Maya Lin, as well as avant-garde theatre directors such as the Japanese Tadashi Suzuki and the Singaporean Ong Keng Sen. My paper hopes to see in their works an attempt to assert cultural self-sufficiency, an assertion that arises ironically as a counter-discourse to their own cultural resources. Their various artistic endeavours create a new narrative that necessitates shared histories and responsibilities. To do so, such artists need to justify their legitimacy for decontextualizing other cultures, owning or borrowing authenticities and conventions. Such a process does not emerge through translation and transportation of cultures across continents, but as a negotiation of respect for cultural self-sufficiencies within a so-called “global village.” Vis-à-vis their works, I also hope to open a discussion about whether it is possible to consider the bios of an artist aside from his ethos, when one considers that particular artist as intercultural in his artistic approach and aesthetic philosophy.
On a personal note, I come from an island that is two oceans away, Singapore. I have the privilege of scattering my growing-up years in London , Shanghai and Paris before settling in New York for the past five years. I am neither from the East nor from the West, but I cannot deny an Eastern personality, nor ignore the Western voice within me. I learn to negotiate, not to resolve the tension between the two polarities in order to escape an identity crisis. Rather, I learn to negotiate so that I can be who I am. I need to create a platform for myself. In so doing, I ask for licensing from both of my Eastern and the Western influences. The term “interculturalism” thus speaks to me on a personal level. I hope that in sharing my paper, I can identify within myself, as a performing artist and a scholar, the first step towards an effort to address interculturalism as an unmeditated but necessary transformation of existing narratives today.

Creative Contexts
Simone Griesmayr
University of Linz, Austria

If we inquire the way interactions between people, groups or networks function, we can find numerous theories on the subject, different ones environmentally focused, evolutionary, anthropological, philosophical, mathematical, economic or from sociological perspectives, etc. However, common to all of them is, that along with more or less countless factors, which are quantifiable or measurable in some form or other, there is one influential variable, which contributes a great deal to the functioning of the environments or networks but can scarcely be conceptualized. In order to declare this diffuse “something,” which appears to refuse reconstruction, concepts like culture, common values, and synergy or “the whole going beyond its individual parts” are utilized.
With the term “creative contexts” I want to focus on the cultural dimension within the process of innovation and change. But the cultural influence is not progressive a priori. Culture, in the sense of strong common values or high synergies can suppress innovation and change. Likewise a strictly traditional oriented culture uses innovation to promote already well-established structures of power, a so-called innovation through tradition.
This ambivalent character of culture can be found for example in Pierre Bourdieu´s concept of “cultural capital” and culture as a means of distinctions, or implicitly in Clifford Geertz´s concept of “the orders of differences”. From this perspective culture is not a unifying one. Action, from this perspective, is characterised by manoeuvres between contrasts, competing sides, opposition and rivals. The question I want to pose is: to what extent the process of innovation can be described as an intercultural one, as interaction between cultural differences or distinctive cultures?