The State Department Returns to Dance/Shankar and Jenkins Keep Dancing

From 1954 until the Cold War waned in the 1980s, virtually every major American dance company traveled abroad under State Department sponsorship. These tours sent companies such as the New York City Ballet, Martha Graham Dance Company, and the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, among others, usually to Africa, Asia, and Latin America: sites seen as battlegrounds in the American–Soviet cultural standoffFootnote ³ The 2003 program, with five choreographers going to five countries, was the first sign of an extensive American investment in dance abroad in almost two decades. In Kolkata, India, Jenkins, with the help of assistant Mary Carbonara, remounted her work, The Gates (Far Away Near) (1993), on twenty-three Shankar dancers. Kwame Ross, formerly of Urban Bush Women, made a new work in Cairo, Egypt, at the Artistic Creativity Center. Loretta Livingston, professor at the University of California–Irvine, created a new piece in Istanbul, Turkey, in the Yildiz Technical University's Department of Music and Performing Arts. Wendy Rogers, a professor at the University of California–Riverside, restaged portions of her piece, Living Rooms (2003), in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, at the University Sains Malaysia School of the Arts. Former Paul Taylor dancer Ruth Andrien staged excerpts of Taylor's well-known Esplanade (1975) at the Maison de la Dance in Tunis, Tunisia. Of the five sites, only Tunis wanted a canonical piece, hence Andrien's placement there.Footnote ⁴

The educational settings connected the Americans to younger populations than ticketed dance performances might have and eased local administrative burdens, since the schools had studio space. Although early Cold War cultural diplomacy programs had targeted elites abroad since the late 1960s, arts diplomacy has often reached out to young audiences as well (Von Eschen Reference Von Eschen2004, 149). This outreach has remained key to recent cultural diplomacy efforts. For instance, the well-publicized State Department program, Radio Sawa, explicitly targets Middle Eastern youth with a mixed format of pop music and short news broadcasts (Schwoch Reference Schwoch2009, 159).

While the match of universities and visiting artists seemed a strategic and utilitarian choice, the program's timing—all but one residency overlapped with Ramadan—was less thoughtful. In July, choreographers were invited to participate. They conducted their residencies from September to November. The overlap with Ramadan, which fell from October 26 to November 25 that year, meant many Muslims were fasting from sunrise to sunset, severely limiting the program's reach into Muslim communities—the group explicitly sought out by policymakers.

The State Department tapped the national service organization Dance/USA to administer the program domestically; this was an example of a long tradition of public/private partnership in American government-funded arts support.Footnote ⁵ The State Department program seemed to have been imagined as an overseas version of the National College Choreography Initiative (NCCI), which had been administered by Dance/USA and sponsored choreographers to restage or create new works at American universities. The roster of artists already selected for NCCI through peer review provided the pool of potential choreographers to be sent abroad. From that list, Dance/USA executive director Andrea Snyder, National Endowment for the Arts dance director Douglas Sonntag, and Rebecca Rorke, also from Dance/USA, selected the choreographers, according to Snyder, mainly based on their previous experience working abroad.Footnote ⁶ The State Department generated the list of countries based on embassies' interest in the program. Choreographers then listed their preferences, mostly based on availability constraints rather than knowledge of any country or culture.

The program's quick timetable and selection process had limitations. The choreographers who were selected were relatively homogenous: four of the five were white women, and all five were from New York or California's largest cities. There was no attempt to match choreographer to locale, thus treating all the chosen countries as though they were interchangeable. The choreographers I interviewed cited lack of preparation time as contributing to their significant misperceptions about the countries they would visit. This situation, which was part logistical limitation and part choice, left the Americans open to the trap that theater practitioner and scholar Rustom Bharucha describes as all too familiar in intercultural work, synthesizing “underlying patterns of structure/process in differing performance traditions rather than confronting their individual histories” (1993, 3).

While abroad, the choreographers taught classes, staged and/or created work, and participated in panel discussions with local artists. In written evaluations submitted to Dance/USA, the choreographers describe a cultural collage, full of making new choreography, learning snippets of local dance from companies working in contemporary and classical forms, and exploring new cities. All the residences culminated with performances with local dancers in work restaged or created by the Americans.

Jenkins found her 2003 residency in Kolkata so generative that she later invited the Shankar dancers to join her company in Kochin, a city in Northern India, where all the dancers studied the Indian dance form Kuchipudi with master teacher Padma Menon. While this residency was not specifically for A Slipping Glimpse and did not have State Department support, it was the first step toward collaboration after the 2003 residency. After the Kochin workshop, Jenkins and Shankar felt that the work was too fruitful to abandon, so the two began brainstorming about how the companies could collaborate on a piece, despite the lack of funding.

The choreographers' enthusiasm led to years of work together, including a binational creative process and three sets of performance tours. The two companies exchanged e-mails and DVDs through FedEx to create most of A Slipping Glimpse, which premiered at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco in 2005. In 2006, the piece toured India, and then it toured the United States in 2007.

Shifting Perspectives: Analyzing A Slipping Glimpse

A Slipping Glimpse seems to be intentionally built from different, but conversant, elements. The cast and the audience must discern and then rediscover the piece's rules again and again. The cast, up to eleven Jenkins dancers and four Shankar dancers, performs inside a space, designed by Alex Nichols, dominated by eight platforms of varying heights. Jenkins and Shankar manipulated the choreography through the space such that the dancers could never see all of the dancing taking place at any given time. The audience, seated in blocks surrounding and throughout the dancing space, also always had a partial view. The sonic aspects of the piece, Paul Dresher's music and Michael Palmer's poetry, which were both created for A Slipping Glimpse, offer only slight clues to setting or story. Central to Dresher's composition is an instrument he built and called a “quadrachord,” which bellowed from an ensemble of percussion and strings with a sound—something like a cross between a xylophone and an industrial harp—that never fit harmonically into the larger sound, but yet always seemed central to the music's structure. Palmer's poetry, which began as a description of dancers working together, shifted from a straightforward narrative description of onstage events to magical realism as he began describing dancers' dreams in tones surreal and fantasmic.

Movement-wise, the work is a collage of vocabularies that meet and converge, but do not intermingle. The Jenkins and Shankar dancers retain their signature styles. Jenkins' work has a modernist formalism to it, indebted to her background with Merce Cunningham and the dancers' balletic backgrounds. The Shankar dancers also bring modern dance training to their performances—Tansuree Shankar teaches what she calls “New Dance” technique, which is heir to a variety of Indian modern dance techniques including that of her father-in-law Uday Shankar. The Shankar dancers also bring several classical Indian techniques to A Slipping Glimpse, including Kathakali and Kuchipudi. This influence most distinguished the Indians from the Americans in A Slipping Glimpse because of the Indians' eye movements and use of the mudras, the nine hand gestures of classical Indian dance. The Indians' hybrid technique made them seem much more grounded energetically than the Americans, and, in terms of shape, often meant the Indians worked closer to the floor, deep in plié.

The most notable aspect of the piece, which unfolds with no intermission across almost ninety minutes of solos, duets, trios, quartets, and a few large group moments, is that the two movement styles remain distinct, yet cohesive. The Indians never mimic the Americans nor vice versa. As Washington Post dance critic Sarah Kaufman wrote in her review of the piece, the “marvel” is that “Jenkins's spacey rush hour and the Indian dancers' pastoral serenity looked made for each other” (Reference Kaufman2007). Energy, most often marked by eye contact and spatial orientation, tied the two companies together, even when they moved differently and performed different steps. The always partial viewing for both performers and audience made these moments of connection even more charged, very noticeable—almost shocking in performance. Connection always seemed to emerge across difference, and rarely did a connection seem to make people more like one another.

That is not to say the piece's clear distinction between the Shankar and Jenkins dancers nullified American power in the piece, somehow presenting the two groups as total equals. Throughout the 2003 program and the Shankar–Jenkins collaboration, American artists retained power. In the 2003 program, the American artists enjoyed the luxury of mobility and paychecks. Most of the time, the American artists taught classes and choreographed on foreign dancers. As Jenkins and Shankar continued to work together, Jenkins, as she pointed out to me, retained the primary artistic role, making all the final choices and directing the process.Footnote ⁷ Performance programs described Jenkins as “artistic director” and Shankar as “artistic associate.” During the four years of making and touring A Slipping Glimpse, the American dancers traveled more and had more time to acclimate to working in India than the Indian dancers did in their first tours of the U.S. (The Indian dancers had much more time to acclimate to the United States on their second trip, the nationwide 2007 tour.) And finally, there were more American dancers in the cast, resulting in their having more stage time in the piece.

Cultural Diplomacy After 9/11

The 2003 dance program that eventually spawned A Slipping Glimpse emerged from a political landscape filled with Congressional debate over whether cultural diplomacy should center on U.S. image or encourage engagement between the United States and foreign partners. The outcome of these conversations was a heavy demand for new, better programs, particularly with Muslim communities, to be developed from limited funds.

Weeks after 9/11, the House Committee on International Relations discussed “The Role of Public Diplomacy in Support of the Antiterrorism Campaign.” One month later, the committee convened a second hearing, “The Message Is America: Rethinking American Public Diplomacy” (U.S. Congress, 2001b). Both hearings featured former American ambassadors, entertainment industry representatives, and State Department officials.

Titles like “The Message Is America” suggest a return to twentieth-century diplomacy strategy focused on exporting American ideals. Dance historian Naima Prevots has categorized the Cold War–era tours, which began in 1954 through Dwight Eisenhower's President's Emergency Fund for International Affairs, as “dance for export,” or cultural products sent abroad to showcase American dance as evidence of American innovation and democratic values (Prevots Reference Prevots1998, 11). These tours primarily revolved around concert dance presentations in theatrical settings. American dancers had some chance to interact with local people, but these interactions were more peripheral than the performances were and generally occurred in formal Embassy parties, rather than in studios or dance schools.Footnote ⁸

Much of the 2001 testimony called for more layers to cultural diplomacy than mere exportation. A comment from Edward Walker, Jr., former U.S. ambassador to Egypt, Israel, and the United Arab Emirates, calls for a re-envisioning of American global interactions, privileging listening over speaking, dialogue over “messaging.” Walker said:

Walker's vision of public diplomacy replaces diplomacy that reproduces or strengthens already existing power relationships with a new diplomacy that examines, even changes, these relationships.

Early Bush administration efforts, however, resembled corporate marketing strategies rather than sensitive policy. Charlotte Beers, the first Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy under Bush, came straight from Madison Avenue where she headed the large advertising company, J. Walther Thompson (Starr Reference Starr2001, 14). Beers's first public diplomacy campaign created inserts for Middle Eastern newspapers that gruesomely detailed the deaths and injuries from the 9/11 attacks in the U.S. Another infamous example of public diplomacy under Beers was a State Department Web site with a section called “Muslim Life in America,” featuring pictures of American mosques and smiling Muslim families (Starr Reference Starr2001, 14).Footnote ⁹

Meanwhile, numerous studies documented increasing international hostility toward the United States, even though support for the concept of democracy remained. According to multiple polls, these hostile sentiments only grew after the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and then the 2003 invasion of Iraq (Gallup 2002; Pew Global Attitudes Project 2003). The introduction to the Pew Research Center's 2003 Global Attitudes Project Report states, “[T]he postwar poll paints a mostly negative picture of the image of America, its people and policies, [but] the broader Pew Global Attitudes survey shows wide support for the fundamental economic and political values that the US has long promoted” (Pew 2003, 1). Many in Europe and even the Middle East hoped the invasion of Iraq might speed democratic reform in the region, but felt that U.S. intervention had been too aggressive and cavalier about civilian casualties (Pew 2003, 25). Respondents explicitly said they did not find democratic ideals associated with the United States unpalatable, but they characterized American modes of interaction with other nations as reprehensible (Pew 2003, 2). The problem was not one of American image, but was instead about the nature of American interactions with foreign nations and publics.

Addressing a problem of relationship, rather than presentation, requires a new cultural diplomacy strategy, which means rethinking the structure of programming. International relations scholars Geoffrey Cowan and Amelia Arsenault (2008) have defined three modes of communication that most often shape public diplomacy policy: monologue, dialogue, and collaboration. They define monologues as one-way, closed containers; dialogues as reciprocal and multidirectional exchanges of ideas and information; and collaborations—the direction both authors agree that American cultural diplomacy should move toward—as programs that allow people and/or institutions from multiple countries to work together to “complete a common project or achieve a common goal” (Cowan and Arsenault Reference Cowan and Arsenault2008, 11–8). Those familiar with the collaborative nature of contemporary American performance-making, particularly devised physical theater or collaboration-oriented postmodern dance where artists generate a performance together rather than drawing from a pre-existing text might see performance as a natural fit for a collaborative mode of cultural diplomacy. But like many policymakers, Cowan and Arsenault do not locate performance of any kind in the category of collaboration. They place all of the arts in the category of monologue, imagining performance as bringing an unmediated American message to foreign audiences (Cowan and Arsenault Reference Cowan and Arsenault2008, 18). Post-9/11 hearings' witnesses rarely included performing artists. The arts were really not part of the discussion, nor were they understood as an area with useful available collaborative models. Given this, the 2003 dance program is a surprising funding opportunity, likely fought for by longtime State Department employee Kathryn Wainscott, who also spurred the creation of the DanceMotion USA program.

Performance-making that functions, in Ric Knowles's description of the most ethical of approaches to intercultural work as “horizontal rather than vertical, dialogic rather than monologic” (Reference Knowles2009, 3), seems well suited to a cultural diplomacy strategy of sensitivity and understanding. The arts, however, cannot solve all problems. Every time an American program promotes “understanding” through cultural diplomacy, the question arises: Can the United States—the world's largest economic and military force—be in a “mutual” relationship with any other entity? As Jen Harvie and Dan Rebellato caution in their work on globalization and performance, it is important to avoid mistaking “cultural imperialism” for “cultural sharing” (Reference Harvie and Rebellato2006, 3). Bharucha describes the stakes of overwrought optimism about intercultural exchange as extremely high. He critiques ideas of mutuality, writing, “I believe that as much as one would like to accept the seeming openness of Euro-American interculturalists to other cultures, the larger economic and political domination of the West has clearly constrained, if not negated the possibilities of a genuine exchange” (Bharucha 1993, 2). To overlook the role of American power in intercultural collaboration is not just a matter of being overly optimistic; it is deeply misguided.

Political strategy and power always rest behind efforts funded by the American government. Collaboration might seem a more open model than “arts for export,” but the target group suggested for new programs, Muslim communities, is a reminder of the strategy behind all government endeavors. Concern about the lack of American diplomacy programs working with Muslim populations abroad echoed through government and nongovernment reports (9/11 Commission 2004, Center for Arts and Culture 2001, Council on Foreign Relations 2003). Congressional response to the 2002 and 2003 global opinion polls also seized on Muslim communities as the groups that the United States needed to reach most desperately.

All of these recommendations required funding. In March 2002, Representative Henry Hyde introduced the Freedom Promotion Act, which would expand the role of public diplomacy in the State Department (Center for Arts and Culture 2001, 23). Two months later, Senator Edward Kennedy introduced a similar bill, which would earmark $95 million over five years to enhance exchange programs with the “Islamic world” (Center 2001, 23). The former bill passed the House, but neither bill survived the Senate.Footnote ¹⁰

The 2003 program seems an obvious product of the Washington, DC, political landscape post-9/11, as well as a descendent of Cold War cultural diplomacy. The letter of invitation that each choreographer received listed the State Department's four program goals. Two sound much like Cold War exportation policy: “showcas[ing] the achievements of the arts in America” and “promot[ing] the role of culture in economic development and democracy-building.”Footnote ¹¹ The other two goals bespeak a new post-9/11 relational agenda: “provid[ing] the participating American and the foreign institution with a structure to facilitate a richer understanding of the field of contemporary dance” and “promot[ing] respect for cultural diversity and understanding.”Footnote ¹² Exportation and collaboration, together, are the dominant twin themes of the 2003 program and a mark of twenty-first century programs to come.

Long-Term Engagement: The Best Solution the Government Could not Fund

The evaluations that choreographers submitted to the State Department post-residency were generally positive. Jenkins called the program a “triumph,” but, like several others, she noted a need for more time—time to “be in conversation with dancers, to meet more working artists in the community, and to better understand the full range of artistic activity in the city.”Footnote ¹³ Particularly since pre-project preparation had been minimal, time together to do more than just digest and produce the next movement phrase could have been crucial. Such limitations are not uncommon for arts collaborations, but these limitations are of greater import in cultural diplomacy.

Over the next four years, Shankar and Jenkins worked together to do what the government could not: forge a low-cost, long-term artistic collaboration. Since the legislation that began the Fulbright exchanges, perhaps the best-known cultural diplomacy program, policy directives have promoted ongoing, sustained programming as the best form of cultural diplomacy (Weigenbaum Reference Weigenbaum2001, 9–10). Whereas the budget for Cold War–era Cultural Presentations programs often funded weeks of domestic rehearsal and then multiple months of long tours, today the budget for cultural diplomacy is miniscule.

To continue the collaboration in a low-cost manner, Jenkins e-mailed choreographic assignments to Shankar, who worked with her dancers to make material, and then Fed Ex-ed videos of that material to San Francisco. Then Jenkins and her dancers responded with movement and a new choreographic prompt.Footnote ¹⁴ The back and forth exchange continued through e-mail and FedEx for eight months. As the piece's larger structure developed, another San Francisco group, Janice Garrett and Dancers, sometimes stood in for the Indian dancers in MJDC rehearsals.Footnote ¹⁵

Eventually funding from co-commissions from San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center and the University of Maryland's Clarice Smith Center reunited the two groups. (MJDC also received two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts totaling $20,000.) Four Shankar dancers, two men and two women, arrived in San Francisco three weeks before A Slipping Glimpse premiered at Yerba Buena. The following January, the Jenkins company traveled to Kolkata, where the two companies performed the piece together. The next fall, four Shankar dancers returned to the United States for a two-month tour, performing in Florida, New York, Chicago, and College Park, Maryland (where I saw the piece twice). University and private presenters' funding helped do what State Department money often does not do: bring non-American artists to the United States.

Working together through the mail and e-mail was not ideal, but rather a compensation for liveness–being together in the studio. And while it extended the companies' relationship, it also facilitated the maintenance of American power. The companies turned to technology when they could not afford to be together. Jenkins describes the process's origins as pure logistics, saying, “We couldn't afford to be there as long as we needed to make the work, and they couldn't afford to be with us as long as it would take to make this complex work. So the only way to do it was to have them generate material that was in response to instructions that came from me based on the experiences we'd had together.”Footnote ¹⁶ Jenkins created all the prompts, and Shankar and her dancers responded to Jenkins' directions.

Technology's role is exciting because Jenkins and Shankar used relatively accessible, inexpensive technology with less American didacticism than State Department–financed projects. During the Bush administration, the State Department's use of technology in public diplomacy focused on bringing American messages to the world, not on building networks of exchange and cooperation.Footnote ¹⁷ In a 2006 speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, Karen Hughes, the last Bush appointee to the office of Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy, highlighted technology as an important, but largely underused aspect of public diplomacy. Hughes discussed the possibility of text messaging and MP3s as avenues for bringing information about U.S. policies and values to the world (Hughes quoted in Haas, Margolin, and Price Reference Haas, Margolin and Price2008, 171). The Council on Foreign Relations' report, “Finding America's Voice,” critiques efforts like those Hughes suggests as still thinking of technology as a “one-to-many broadcasting model,” rather than as a “more complex array of push-and-pull interactions” (Council 2003, 15). While policymakers still theorized technology-driven possibilities of relationship-building, two dance companies managed to experiment with how a long-term relationship mediated by technology might actually work.

The artists' experiment suggests that months of rehearsal on two continents produced a global awareness for each group, even though they were only in the studio with their usual colleagues. Varshaa Ghosh, a Shankar dancer, described rehearsals when the companies were apart. She said, “We [the Shankar dancers] would be in the studio and say to each other, ‘Ok, Steffany [one of the American dancers] is there. How do we go around her?’ I never thought of the other dancers as a completely different aspect. It's not like we're existing in two different worlds.”Footnote ¹⁸ As Ghosh told me this, all the dancers sitting around her, American and Indian, nodded enthusiastically. They too had been aware of the Indian dancers' bodies, even though those bodies rehearsed thousands of miles away. The Americans had replaced abstract ideas of Indian people with more specific knowledge of the Shankar dancers. Americans and Indians had to move through their daily jobs constantly thinking about where the bodies of other people were and how the movements of their own bodies would affect others.

Working together, in person and through various long-distance modes of communication, allowed the cast of A Slipping Glimpse more time to relish their differences and feelings of discomfort with the dancing, since they had months to create the piece and years to tour it. MJDC dancer Katie Moremen says the extended rehearsal time allowed the company to move away from just producing material and toward an understanding of why and how American and Indian dancers might work together. Moremen describes early rehearsals as not focusing on creating material for the piece, but instead as being a physical experience of multiple movement styles.Footnote ¹⁹ Extended time in rehearsal emphasized process, which Shankar describes as “these really beautiful two weeks of just really working together and creating certain motions.”Footnote ²⁰ People could really focus on one another and different ways of moving, not just on generating material to be performed.

Like much of the process, the possibilities were weighted toward the Jenkins dancers. The piece's premiere in San Francisco meant that the discomfort Moremen remembers was more extreme for the Indian dancers. Moremen could enjoy the disorientation of working in Kochin and learning a new style without the pressure of an imminent performance, whereas the Shankar dancers' initial time in the U.S. was more harried. They arrived in San Francisco three weeks before the premiere and had to insert themselves into the American-shaped frame—in daily and artistic life.

The multiple weeks the companies spent together in the studio and on stage spread over a period of four years seems to have made time for Pavis's “corporeal-cultural check-up” to unfold. Working with dancers trained in classical Indian forms and Indian modern dance led the Jenkins' dancers to re-imagine how their bodies fit together. As the MJDC dancers discussed working with the Shankar dancers, they frequently lifted their arms into the air, slowly twisting their wrists and fingers and squinting their eyes as they concentrated to remember the patterns of the mudras. MJDC dancer Steffany Ferroni says, “Gestural things have changed for me. I'm much more aware of my hands because of all of the mudras that were introduced.”Footnote ²¹ Moremen felt a shift in her practice of the classical Indian exercises after two weeks working in India. She remembers, “I started to feel like [the] style of movement was coming in through my fingers to my core, which was completely the opposite way I learned to dance in the first place.”Footnote ²² The new techniques led Moremen to recognize how she understood her body, considering how her movement style was shaped by moving from torso to periphery, the physical orientation of American modern and ballet, versus the periphery to core model of Indian forms.

Working with Indian-trained dancers also highlighted the limits of the Americans' techniques. MJDC dancer Ryan Smith said (and several Jenkins dancers agreed) that until working with the Shankar dancers, he prided himself on dancing with his entire body. Working with Indian dancers, he realized his full-bodied image of his dancing was inaccurate. Smith says:

Smith learned about himself—noticing what he could not do—as a direct result of his admiration for what the Indian dancers could do. Smith's refusal to mimic the Indian dancers—to do a “facial dance”—suggests that the companies' work together in the studio veered toward Pavis's productively disruptive check-up and less toward the long tradition Bharucha describes of Western interculturalists borrowing Indian movement traditions, from yoga to Kathakali, without historical context or cultural specificity (Bharucha Reference Bharucha1993, 4). Shankar, too, characterized the years of rehearsing as “sharing certain dialogues.”Footnote ²⁴ She said “They were not trying to imitate us, nor were we trying to imitate them. But there were certain areas where exchanging and sharing some of our postures created a balance.”Footnote ²⁵ Time, extended through technology and workshops, created space for a sharing of creativity that did not necessarily move toward appropriation.

There are no Solos: A Slipping Glimpse in Performance

In the theater, the politics of interculturalism seem more fraught, since audiences do not have lengthy amounts of time to experience and negotiate difference. I will argue that A Slipping Glimpse produced a sense of disorientation that called attention to the work's emergence from a cross-cultural conversation, rather than an appropriation of Indian dance and culture. In the space of the theater, A Slipping Glimpse challenges audience members to confront their relationship to a global world, locating them in the midst of the action, and sometimes pointing out the complicated issues of visibility and power that give intercultural diplomacy projects their greatest possibilities and their worst flaws.

Usually when the lights go out and I settle into my theater seat for a dance performance, I do not expect to move. I sit still as others dance for me. Watching A Slipping Glimpse at the University of Maryland in 2007, I realized that my usual stasis would not work. The piece inhabits a highly reorganized proscenium stage space. Four large platforms sit on the stage, as does half the audience. I sit in the center of the orchestra with three more platforms behind me. The audience seated onstage can see those platforms, but I cannot, unless I turn my body.

With so many possible audience angles, A Slipping Glimpse forces audience members to decide where to look and whom to watch. Twenty minutes into the performance, MJDC dancer Heidi Schweiker takes center stage, a yellow spotlight carving her out of the largely black space. Schweiker is a smooth dancer, easy in transitions. I relax into my seat as I watch her move, until her gaze confuses me. She makes eye contact, but not with the audience—with someone behind us. I turn in my seat to find Shankar dancers Varshaa Ghosh and Jaydip Guha dancing on the platform behind me. This is not a solo by an American dancer. This is a trio danced by Americans and Indians together, and I am sitting in the middle of it.

A Slipping Glimpse's set design and choreography allowed the dancers and audiences to rehearse a way of being together where bodies constantly move and shift, acknowledging and sometimes respecting how people physically share space, albeit not always with equal power (in the solo that first sparked my awareness of the piece's complexity, the Indian dancers were still peripheral, not center stage). As the Indian and American dancers performed together, they demonstrated for audiences what it looks like and feels like to move in space with people who experience the world in multiple ways. A Slipping Glimpse's cast tried to invite “productive discomfort”—a concept of social discomfort imagined by feminist theorist Sara Ahmed as thoughtfully disorienting (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2004, 148). In the creation of a larger public event, the dancers bring the individual interactions they had with one another to bear on the collective questioning of how Americans and non-Americans can coexist.

From the first moment Indian and American performers begin dancing together in A Slipping Glimpse, the ensemble presents a different way of relating than the predominant modes of international interactions suggested by the Bush administration. Instead of Americans only forwarding their way of dancing, something that might be the equivalent of the kind of monologic messaging that contemporary cultural diplomacy purports to avoid, the American and Indian dancers support one another's weight and work together. After Schweiker's solo, lights focus on a group tableaux center stage, atop the set's highest platform. The dancers begin lowering one another, one-by-one, from the elevated platform to the main dance floor below (see Photo 1).

To descend, the individual dancers need the group. It's too hard to get down alone. Once a dancer touches the ground, he or she looks upward, arms outstretched, ready to help the next person, creating a chain of images of Americans holding Indians and vice versa. In sharp contrast to other American physical interactions with non-Americans at the time of the performance I saw, namely two ongoing wars, here Americans are caring and supporting, but, also and most importantly, not always in control.

In such moments, A Slipping Glimpse comes close to achieving the status of the utopian performative—the term performance theorist Jill Dolan uses to describe moments in the theater where “performance calls the attention of the audience in a way that lifts everyone slightly above the present, into a hopeful feeling of what the world might be like if every moment of our lives were as emotionally voluminous, generous, aesthetically striking, and intersubjectively intense” (Dolan Reference Dolan2001, 5). Dolan mainly uses the utopian performative to describe exceptional spectatorial experiences, but I use it here to consider how the dancers of A Slipping Glimpse look and feel as they work together (see Photo 2).

Photo 2:

Tansuree Shankar Dance Company dancers Jaydip Guha, Debjit Burman, Rashmi Karmakar, Sulagna Sarkar in A Slipping Glimpse. Photo Credit: Bonnie Kamin

In Dolan's formulation, utopian performatives are not only marked by their heightened, non-normative affects, but also by their flexibility. She describes utopian performatives as “not stabilized by [their] own finished perfection, not coercive in [their] contained, self-reliant, self-determined system, but always in process, always only partially grasped” (2001, 6). A Slipping Glimpse's spatial design, constantly in flux on tour, made what was a fully choreographed (not improvised) work much more flexible and open than Jenkins's usual work. While most works with long production histories shift in response to cast changes or touring logistics, Nichol's set demanded the cast's flexibility. Before the Yerba Buena premiere, the dancers had eight days to rehearse with the completed set, time they spent negotiating how to get on and off platforms as tall as eight feet. Since then, the piece has not traveled to any theater capable of replicating Yerba Buena's circular layout. On tour, the dancers navigated the proscenium-style seating, first of theaters in Kolkata and then of three American university theaters. Danspace Project at St. Mark's Church in New York City is a space where, like Yerba Buena, spectators often sit on multiple sides of the performance space but in a rectangle rather than in the round.

This shifting structure required the dancers to re-orient themselves to the piece, the set, and one another at every location, which many saw as an artistic opportunity. MJDC dancer Ryan Smith says the most interesting facet for him was this: “This piece has had many lives and will continue to have many lives, due to the set constraints, due to the different spaces, due to different dancers. … It's a piece that always shifts based on what's around it and the world it's inhabiting.”Footnote ²⁶ Smith describes A Slipping Glimpse as more of a living organism than a previously created world the dancers inhabit. For the Indian dancers, who were accustomed to Kolkata's proscenium stages, working in a more rounded system was new. Ghosh says, “Whenever we perform in India, we are very frontal to the audience, so the great thing that we have learned over here … is [how] to be a part of the audience and to be among the audience.”Footnote ²⁷ All of the dancers had to reorient themselves due to the shifting set, but they approached the task from a variety of perspectives.

The cast needed one another to navigate the changing, platform-filled space. MJDC dancer Katie Moremen says that spacing for A Slipping Glimpse required incredible attention to other people:

In A Slipping Glimpse, the dancers had to constantly be aware of the entire social field in which they moved, including other dancers. Few points of spatial reference remained the same across theaters, so the dancers always needed multiple landmarks in space. To succeed, the dancers had to be aware of all the people and objects sharing the stage at any given moment. Working this way within an international collaboration highlights how people can and do share space, and also makes the kind of listening supposedly important to twenty-first century cultural diplomacy a necessity.

Sharing the Stage: A Possibility for Americans in the Twenty-First Century?

Although A Slipping Glimpse brought Indians and Americans together, the piece, onstage and in concept, was always primarily American. The artists shared the stage and performed for both Indian and American audiences, avoiding the extreme ethnocentricism critiqued by Pavis and Bharucha in artistic collaborations with Indian artists throughout the twentieth century, but Jenkins' retention of the final say in creative matters, the larger number of American dancers involved, and the longer time spent in the United States absolutely kept the American artists in a place of power and comfort relative to the Indian artists. In A Slipping Glimpse, the American dancers spend more time onstage than the Indian dancers. When the groups share the stage, the Americans outnumber the Indians. The process afforded the American dancers more opportunities for mobility than the Indians. Many of the Americans traveled to India more than once, whereas only the two male Indian dancers made more than one trip to the U.S., and, in total, only six Indian dancers, plus Shankar, ever made the trip. Jenkins admits that the piece was really her piece, and that the Indian artists worked inside her vision.Footnote ²⁹ Equalizing power within the collaboration would have required working from an entirely different vision, perhaps one in which the Jenkins dancers performed inside a frame generated by Shankar and her dancers.

While these power differences are clear and quantifiable in the work, its promise lies in its resistance to what Pavis calls intercultural work's tendency toward “European superstandardization” (Reference Pavis and Patrice1996, 15), or the tendency of collaboration to become so Western in production that it ceases to recognize cultural difference, except to use non-Western techniques as mere Orientalist ornaments. The movement vocabularies and stylistic differences in A Slipping Glimpse repeatedly mark difference and allow multiple training systems to live inside the work, inside the steps. Even in a step as simple as walking, difference resonates, but does not completely divide the performers. For instance, after all the dancers leave the center platform in the initial image, they walk slowly toward the audience. Even in the low blue light darkening the stage, each dancer's use of his or her feet distinguishes the Jenkins from the Shankar dancers. The Indians pick up each foot as one unit, keeping the foot parallel to the floor with each step, the knee initiating the step forward. The Americans, however, initiate the step with their foot or pelvis, pushing their insteps forward and up into a perpendicular relationship with the floor. The uniformity of the work through the feet among each of the companies suggests, not that each dancer moves his or her feet in a way somehow “natural,” but that different dance practices and techniques guide each step—a difference that then became legible to the audience.

The companies also bring different energetic sensation to movement, which means that even when the Indians and Americans dance in unison, the two training backgrounds remain visible.Footnote ³⁰ In opening portions of A Slipping Glimpse, the American dancers tend toward energetic choices that register force at the end of the movement. Imagine a step that ends with a splat, like a hand slapping a wall. As the piece progresses, the Americans incorporate more impulsive energy, emphasizing the body part where the movement begins, sending a looser, less focused energy into the space. In contrast, the Indian dancers have a more constant energy flow, emphasizing neither the beginning nor the ending of steps. In portions of the piece where the Americans and Indians dance together, these contrasting energies construct an image where the Indians' dancing appears smooth and controlled, and the Americans' seems almost spastic. As American elbows and hands punch the air, Indian arms and legs soothe and sculpt it.

Opposing energy and technique choices allow difference to resonate in the piece, but the spatial design and composition keep the two worlds from being entirely separate. Lighting (also designed by Nichols) underscores the degree to which the entire cast negotiates one another's presence in space. One section, early in the work, combines choreography and lighting to demonstrate the multiplicity of pathways through a place. The entire central floor appears red, and two strips of brighter red light bisect the stage, crossing each other to form an “X.” At first the entire ensemble lines up only on the bright lines, but as individual dancers move forward, they shift around one another, stepping into the stage's other spaces to pass their fellow dancers. The shifting and shading against the two stark lines produce the sense that two linear pathways are not enough; groups of people bleed and fall into more complex patterns. These co-minglings become, as Dolan writes of another utopian performative she witnessed, a reminder that “We live … not in separate worlds, but in adjacent ones that touch each other—and us—in unexpected ways” (2001, 70). That said, more could be done in future possible collaborations to continue toward the promise offered in Pavis's “cultural-corporeal check-up,” truly plumbing the degree to which engaging in a physical practice raises questions of politics and economics. This deepening of the work could be a key to actually unsettling some of the power relationships that A Slipping Glimpse may have marked, but did not entirely undo.