Artist’s Statement for Capstone Portfolio: Existing “between”

My childhood combined conflict and lack of emotional communication - a fragmentation of cultural knowledge and experience. My mother's heritage was a gigantic question mark for me - an unknown, a blank. For years I explored a landscape of books and photographs authored by others. I searched outside of my mother's arms for what it meant to be Thai, for what it meant to be Asian American.

This portfolio represents the creative and critical facets of an exploration of my ancestry and ethnic identity - Thai-American.

These explorations were sparked by my first journey to Thailand through a study abroad exchange program in the spring semester of 2004. The body of critical writing I created during that time period, as part of Lexia International's Field Research Project (FRP), is now available here. The project became a 5-part essay (three parts including introduction and interlude) on such issues as culture shock and my experiences as a half-Thai woman in Thailand - being of both cultures yet identifying with neither - over five months.

After my program's end I had the opportunity to further my language studies in an intensive five-week program at the university. The most life-changing segment of my stay abroad was the four weeks I spent with my mother's sister, meeting other aunts, uncles and cousins in the Bangkok area for the first time, and learning to envelop them within the word "family." The experience overall made visible unknown variables I had struggled with for years. I was finally able to converse with my mother in her native tongue and understand that, while I was now able to answer some questions about my mother's past, the fragmentation that raised me could not be replaced by total unification or acceptance into one culture or the other.

Once I returned to campus in the fall of 2004 I was infused by renewed friendships with classmates and professors, and invigorated by an urge to synthesize my experiences through another channel. I had explored my time abroad and its repercussions critically, but what about creatively? I had allowed my FRP and my photographs to exist in a hypertext space, but the content was still analytical in nature. How could the creative form of my poetry be hybrid as well?

This portfolio also represents the synthesis of knowledge gained throughout my career at Hollins University - a representation of what I have learned and an arrow pointing toward the direction my creative work is bound to evolve in the future. It is due to this that my portfolio speaks strongly to interdisciplinary collaboration and is fed by interconnectedness between class work and discussion across my minors, English/Creative Writing and Dance.

Now I am authoring my own text about Thailand through essays and articles, through photographs and through the experience and memory my body carries with it. My identity, in terms of both ethnicity, sexuality and as an artist, has never been a narrative, has never unfolded in any linear sense. My writing unfolds in images; as a dancer I unfold through a release into movement. What I thought to be a household of distant and angry parents and a close and quiet brother was the product of certain cultural values instilled. How my mother taught me to react and interact socially is still to this day deeply rooted, while the conflicting voice of my father remains a humanizing balance. Whatever successions or sequences created are broken down further and assembled once more.

For me this is the essence of hybrid. My engagement as an artist requires the interrogation of established form, be it narrative, expectation, normativity, homogeneity, hierarchy, commodification, capitalism, imperialism or entertainment. An interrogation of form requires the deconstruction and fragmentation of society's culturally constructed values and then reconstructing work that is hybrid - that is neither one nor the other but exists in the sometimes uncomfortable, provocative and transversal space "between." In Thailand I existed in the sometimes uncomfortable, provocative and transversal space between cultures. The personal becomes political; the body becomes political. There is no other way to discuss or communicate the fragmentation and hybridity that exists within my own self than by allowing my work to fragment and hybridize.



Notes on the other Components of the Capstone Portfolio

• 20-page chapbook
Entitled teakwood & coal, this chapbook grew out of collaborations with Professor TJ Anderson throughout the fall of 2004 in working to create a body of poems, and much of the work was written during this time. teakwood & coal begins with conception and birth into a hybrid family environment, but presents the challenge of owning that hybrid identity and harnessing it for creative change. The chapbook was sent out to the Vincent Chin Memorial Prize for Asian American poets but was not selected as a finalist.

• Performance Poetry CD
Having evolved throughout the year, the final version of the poetry CD contains the poems in the teakwood & coal chapbook, which I recorded myself, plus two other writings created in Professor TJ Anderson’s creative writing workshop, a traditional Thai song, and my final project for Sound Design, a class I took in the Fall of 2004 with Ben Pranger. The use of my poetry as sound and as moveable sound became an integral element in thinking about a performance event or installation.

• 70-page manuscript
Using the knowledge I gained in my independent study with Professor TJ Anderson in the fall of 2004, I decided to expand my chapbook into a larger, complete manuscript, encompassing all my creative work from 1999 to present. I see it as a retrospective including many older poems written throughout my career at Hollins, and also even older works that I think are integral to my current identity as a poet and artist.

• Chapbook in form of map
The idea of maps has been present with me this year. I wanted to publish the teakwood & coal chapbook on my own by creating something that could be folded and that would break away from the linearity of page turning. With maps from the library courtesy Maryke Barber, I was able to construct pasted and patch-worked maps with the text physically hugging the landscape. It has brought my performance work back to the page, where landmarks in the sound text and the highways of bodies become part of a physical map as well.

• Webpage for Dance senior seminar
In creating my own web identity I have included this artist’s statement, my FRP, and notes concerning the Spring Dance poetry map installation.

• Spring Dance installation performance
The following are my thoughts and explorations regarding my performances and showings as extensions of the written work.

During the fall of 2004 I began to experiment with the use of both Thai and English language in my poems, previously uncharted territory. This process gave voice to my ethnic half-Thai identity, giving it a body and allowing me to own, internalize and reconstruct it again and again. I found that my hybrid identity, instead of being explained, emerged as hybrid text. My poetry urged me to speak to my ancestors, to communicate to them by recreating their bodies. By allowing my ancestors to speak through my body - through my poetry - both continued to co-evolve by way of this new knowledge and new task. I began to extend my poetry into sound and space and explore the idea of performance, bringing in dance and the body as instruments for sound.

With the help of professor TJ Anderson I created a poetry chapbook to send out to a prize especially for Asian American poets. He suggested I make a CD of my work, so with the new knowledge I had accrued in Sound Design I began to record. Listening to my poetry through sound revealed threads previously unseen and allowed me to make connections across poems via image or word.

In the beginning of Fall 2004 I was working with a particular piece that I saw as a map with landmarks. I workshopped the piece in creative writing and also read it at dance department showings. Those who viewed my reading in showings remarked at how much attention they paid to my feet as I stood up and read in the space. The idea of typography as topography was strong and I envisioned a map on the floor whose paths were traced in words and paint. I imagined people walking over top of the words and that characters like "mother" and "grandmother" could become landmarks or inhabit certain areas of the map that could be returned to.

After recording my poems to CD I played them in the dance studio space. I found that with certain words I would return to a gesture, but that I also did a lot of walking around. I took these word threads and wrote them on both sides of red cardboard in order to make my landmarks. During a showing on December 3, 2004 I asked the dancers to lie down on the floor, with eyes open or closed and listen to a compilation CD of a few poems and songs I had recorded. I walked and traced the paths of their bodies with my feet, at times stood still and also listened myself. I received other’s experiences: some were transported via the incense I burned, describing it as lucid in nature. Others felt that the bodies became the words of my poems as they are laid on the page. Wearing the sarong my mother gave to me was a conscious taking-on of family, history, culture and ancestry. I envisioned the bodies as earth, as map, as path and many people did sense gravity and weight as they viewed and/or experienced it. I tucked the word circles on red cardboard (seven total) in my sarong at my waist as I walked and then placed them at random on the floor or searched for specific ones to place, pick up and turn over during the course of the event.

At this particular time concepts we were bringing up in Jen Boyle's Queer Writing/Lesbian Literature course were right on with what I was thinking about and exploring in my writing. For my final project for this class I recorded more of my work and expanded it into a 22-minute score. After listening to it I realized that I wanted to play with silence and pauses during or in between poetry tracks, which is something I had not allowed for previously. This time I also played with speaking larger parts of poems and intercepting the recorded sound with a live speaking of the poems. This experiment/project brought up things for me like "word as flesh" and using language as a way of embodying or giving a body to something that previously did not have one. I think that in the poems I embody my half-Thai identity, my sexuality and my birth in relationship to my mother and my mother’s mother. Surprisingly, several people found the poetry, though at times violent, at times grappling and disembodied, was healing – which brought me back to poetry as medicine. Feedback the second time centered around layers – layers of memory in the space of the studio, but also layers of poetry on sound, sound design, spoken word and movement. One dancer felt that she became the earth and a part of something larger. In reference to future performances of this piece, another dancer said that she would be able to stay focused for 3 hours as long as she could adjust and take walks. For others I created another world that was totally enrapturing and captured them, my own space.

I would like to see it performed both indoors and outdoors. Ben Pranger, my professor for Sound Design, thought it might be interesting if I took the minidisk into the space and walked around in order to record my poems, so that the pitch and layering of my own voice would fade in and out and also be mobile.

Reflections after Spring Dance Performance

On Friday April 22 before the show I had planned to do my poetry map installation. Originally I saw the map outdoors on the chapel lawn with a large sound system to blast my poetry across campus. After a while I realized that the sound system would be too mechanical and obstructive in nature - not at all what I wanted. I decided to use portable boom boxes instead, and several at at time to allow for mobile sound that could be moved around.

That Friday it rained so I brought my participants onto the theatre stage at about 7:45 pm and told them to lie down in any way they felt most comfortable. Media Services provided two boom boxes and I started two copies of my poetry chapbook CD from different tracks and had them play simultaneously. I placed the sound at points in the space - at times they were facing each other as if in battle, at other times they inhabited opposite ends of the space. I placed my landmarks and used the motion of walking around the bodies as a repetitive and performative meditation. I also unraveled string to act as connective tissue or highways on the map, connecting the bodies with each other.

The most unexpected experience for me was how I was able to use portable sound. I carried the large boom boxes against my stomach and felt the vibrations in my belly. I carried the weight in my arms, hefting years of conditioning and upbringing, hefting my poems and my ancestry over my head. The act of moving the sound became an act of weaving. I wove the bodies together into a map through my walking - I wove into the map string, cardboard landmarks and also sound - these threads interchanging with one another as the words traced themselves from vibrations to skin. Some of the participants noticed that they could feel the vibrations of my voice by lying down on the stage. I made eye contact with the participants that kept their eyes open, others kept their eyes closed.

I was surprised by the action of weaving sound - and by the way that the two boom boxes answered each other. There would be overlap and then a pause between tracks or sections where what was happening on the other CD compilation would stream through. I was very interested in how each participant would experience it just by where they were lying down - that what they could hear would be radically different depending on where they were on the map - being that the sound was always mobile - two strands of sound weaving against each other into the map.

Thanks to my most recent map: TJ, Alli, Mara, Kyla, Alex, Selene, Natalie, Sara, Jessica, Ever, Rachel and Berg. I love you all.

Thoughts on working with other dancers

I was able to work with Isabel Lewis in a cast of Scriptura, a work she choreographed when she was a student here. I love the movement and love embodying the movement. Thank you so much Isabel and thanks to Ryan for being drunken masters together and breathing together. :)

I worked with Becca Hamil on sound for her solo, which was a really enjoyable process - finding sound and text/texture that could be the edges she pushed up against - working to find a hypersensitivity of sight and sense. sprawl. hit. be. I cut up an existing text into squares that were shuffled to created a chance score of single words and sound patterns. I loved it best improvised outdoors. Thank you for chocolate chip cookies and open collaboration.

I was a Rotating Head as well. The unfolding of the lives of the heads was difficult for me, and the discomfort was something I could learn from, the disguise something to hide behind and which took a while to take off. Thank you Danielle for giving me an opportunity to scare some people, and scare myself.