The performance spans questions that were not raised in the dialogue on stage and yet still cast a light on such processes of interweaving between cultures: e.g. the medium of communication, the language in which this dialogue is taking place. Neither of the two performers is speaking in his native tongue – they meet in the language of globalization: English.
Is this not also a side-effect of today’s festival culture, of global “tours” of performances and dance events and of English as the language of international conferences in the humanities and the sciences? This makes it all the more evident how difficult and complex the ties between the local (in the history of the body and dance traditions) and the global (in language, in dance techniques, in lifestyles) are.
Another critical question concerns the framework of the performance, which carries the title Pichet Klunchun and Myself. Does this title not show a dialogical asymmetry? Does the ostensible modesty of the European in putting himself in the second place, as represented by the (reflexive) personal pronoun, not reveal the position of the author? It should also be possible to read the title Pichet Klunchun and Myself to include me along with every other member of the audience. In that case, the title and the entire course of the performance seems to invite every spectator to see themselves as a partner in this dialogue on the experiences and the history of their own encounters with (inter)cultural performances. Yet, the question of the setting of this dialogue remains: The performance-conversation and “lecture demonstration” is an artistic format of the Western avant-garde and postmodernist “concept dance.” Here the question once again arises in what way the contrast between traditional and experimental dance is relevant to the aesthetics and experience of cultural difference. In my opinion, the performance itself and the encounter of Pichet Klunchun and Jérôme Bel shows that tradition and experiment are not fixed values. The dialogue between the dancers does not mark positions and statements in their discourse on modernism. Rather, it becomes clear that the concepts of tradition and experiment themselves are loaded with eminently historical traits that take on different profiles in different cultures. Experimental art, too, has its own forked tradition; and the understanding and evaluation of tradition, especially in the work of Pichet Klunchun, in turn displays elements of a resistance towards those aspects of globalization and a culture of the spectacle that Jérôme Bel, albeit in a different manner, also critically reflects in his model of concept dance. Seen from this angle, tradition and experiment are not mutually exclusive categories – on the contrary. As this performance, too, illustrates, the point is to test different possibilities of a productive “as-well-as” scenario. Pichet Klunchun even says at one point he would like to have both: he would like to restore the popularity of traditional Khon dance in his own country, and he would also like to find his own individual type of performance – “like I can design my life.” Individualism, whether in relation to lifestyle or art, is a product of modern society and culture – and yet both kinds of it exist as a feeling somewhere between the acceptance of biographical individuality and artistic individuality.
“Pichet Klunchun and Myself” (2005) © association R.B.
What questions or clues can we glean from this dialogue between dance forms and dancers from Thailand and Europe – what generalizations can we draw for our discussion? Allow me to summarize a few brief points against this artistic background and in view of the current debate on economic globalization.
A recent paper for the Management International Consulting Group on the principle of “glocality” (a monstrous hybrid coined by combining the words “globality” and “locality”) concluded that there were four paradoxes which must be overcome: companies had to (1) be both globally organized and locally focused (re: growth); (2) apply international standards in acquiring and training staff, while at the same time promoting ties at the local level; (3) distill from their knowledge management both sector-specific and general global trends, while at the same time identifying local market peculiarities; and, finally, (4) face up to the challenge of combining a globally uniform presence with a locally oriented co-operation with customers based on personal trust.
Such paradoxes undoubtedly constitute a challenge. Yet, the dialogue between Pichet Klunchun and Jérôme Bel teaches us that the open questions are more complex and less easy to reduce to a simple opposition between local and global. Isn’t this the same challenge and task faced by scholarly research and critical theories of dance studies? Their work should consist in showing how the complexity of art (and not the reduction of complexity) can serve as a productive resource for society and science; and in what way the experience of difference within the global, cultural processes of interweaving are an enrichment, albeit a difficult one. If so, we might deduce from this the following points for discussion:
1. Differences and shifts in differences are valuable: The encounters that produce amazement, confusion, and perhaps also projected expectations can change the way we see others and ourselves. Theatre and dance provide a model for such processes of differentiation and change – they do not necessarily lead to a global homogenization. It is not a matter of overcoming differences, but of seeing the potential inherent in a close reading and respectful perception of them, for example as we have seen in this performance, in the mutual display of and playing with prejudices.
2. Once again: Dialogue. – I hope it is now clear that this is not meant as a naive metaphor for interculturality, for exchanges and encounters with the Other in a wholesale sense. What is needed – both before and during communication – is a multiform culture of relating to others in respectful encounters. Another important point is: what language? What languages? For a dialogue not only involves multilingual transfers and translations; body, space and imagination form a dense weave in the languages of a dialogue.18 Appreciating their contribution can teach us to perform in the way mentioned here: to set up a situation of transference!
3. Against Interpretation. – I am quoting this issue from the famous essay by Susan Sontag19 from the 1970s in order to return to a point within the performance of Pichet Klunchun and Jérôme Bel that was remarkably simple and yet incredibly important: a questioning, answering, and showing that did not lead to a fixed interpretation by the other. Susan Sontag’s text is a pamphlet against the practice of hermeneutics and the violence done to texts and art forms by the rigid tradition of interpretation and its methods. Her plea is for an encounter with art and (alien) cultures in which sensuous perception, openness and pleasure or eroticism (in the sense of Barthes’ “pleasure of the text”20) can have a liberating effect. Of course, this was part of a critical theory in the 1970s, and hermeneutics – in the tradition of Schelling, Wilhelm Dilthey and Hans-Georg Gadamer – still play an important role in the humanities. But what if we rethought Susan Sontag’s manifesto? This would give rise to an understanding that would also respect the failure of understanding, the limits of what can be interpreted, the fact of misunderstanding, and recognize them as productive. – Admittedly this also requires sensitivity, attentiveness, a mobility and flexibility of thinking, and a consideration for others – a dia-logical feat that dance-performance art can show us.
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See also the article “Movement of dance: Space, time, motion and emotion” by the Gabriele Brandstetter.