Where? Amherst, Mass? You mean, there is life past Worcester?  Intellectual life?  You don't say!  A theatre conference?  A world theatre conference?  In Amherst -- past Boston, past Route 128, past Worcester, past believing? There's a world out there? Whew!  Will wonders never cease!

Yes, Virginia, there is world out there in rural Massachusetts, and there is a world theatre as well, full of sound and fury and signifying something named New WORLD Theatre at the University of Massachusetts.

And from September 26 to 29, practitioners from South Korea and the South Bronx, from Nigeria and Nashville, from Calcutta and Cambridge gathered to cross-pollinate at Intersection II, hosted by New WORLD Theatre (NWT) and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and a slew of other academic and foundational money-pots. Intersection II was the follow-up to a similar conference two years ago at NWT, which brought together 300 theatre professionals from around the world to share styles, practices, confrontations, victories, and prophecies.

Robert Uno, NWT Artistic Director, opened the conference with an both explanation and manifesto rolled into one.  "In 1979, when we started New WORLD Theatre, we were the people who were never meant to be here," she stated, "because we had a vision of theatre that was not about integration but desegregation."  She went on to explain that NWT was not just out to expand people's ideas about theatre; they were out to capture the means of production so that artists of color, confined to the margins, would no longer have to howl from the deserts to make themselves heard.

And this is explicity NWT's purpose: to transgress boundaries in order to negate the boundaries, to subvert colonialism, whether political or artistic, and let the cleared mindscape be re-colonized by fresh vegetative ideas and practices.  Uno called the artists supported by NWT "intersticial artists," what one participant later called "the artists who move in and around the stitches that hold the social fabrics together." "We are boundary-crossers," she declared, "going where we are not supposed to go."

The three-and-a-half days of the conference were, in essence, a Baedeker of crossed and changing boundaries in the "non-mainstream" theatre (or as one participant described it, the "no-profit" theatre).  Daylight hours were divided up into case studies (where artists presented works-in-progress for responses from the discussants) and roundtable discussions (where artists led free-ranging riffs on a galaxy of topics), while participants got two performances each evening (one featuring a major artist, the other "late-night" with a cash bar). Peppered throughout were organizational meetings with invited guests as part of a longer outreach by NWT to such players as the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, the New England Foundation for the Arts, and Theatre Communications Group. The invitees were also encouraged to taste all the other activities and mix with the conference participants.

Thus, three-and-a-half days of high velocity category-bending and barbed and gaudy gauntlets hurled with wild enthusiasm and considerable wisdom and patience.

On the evening of Tuesday, September 26, the Peruvian-based group Yuyachkani (which, in Quechua, means roughly, "the act of making memory") presented Antigona in Spanish. Performance artist Teresa Ralli did all the characters, using a simple clap of her hands and the draping of a large rectangle of rough cloth to transform herself from character to character.  But Yuyachkani did not simply re-tell the tale. Given the current political situation in Peru as well as that country's long conflicted history around ethnicity and culture, Antigona becomes a play about opposing dictatorship by not allowing the rulers to destroy and devour memories. When Antigone can finally honor her dead brother, she does not just complete a ritual; she lays the basis for her society to remember why it must meet the depredations of power with the shield of justice forged in a collective memory of the truth.

Other major evening performances included Everett Dance Theatre's Somewhere In The Dream and Ratan Thiyam's Uttar-Priyardarshi: The Final Beatitude. Everett presented an eclectic mediation on race and the American dream which included race-reversed scenes from Giselle and Othello, parodies of the "race dialogue" so touted by politicians these days, and the difficulties for those on the margins not only to move to the center but to re-form the center so that is has no more margins to where people can be banished.  A striking part of the performance was Everett's use of three mobile fences made from pipes and cyclone mesh.  At first set up to divide, the fences gradually took on a life of their own, forcing people to climb over and under and around them until what had once been zones of exclusion were now all blendered into full mulatto truth. High energy, using children and teenagers, grounded in both hip-hop and ballet, Somewhere In The Dream showed, for a brief moment, what is good about that all-American "can-do" attitude when it becomes allied with social justice and pure fun.

Thiyam's Uttar was a completely different theatrical animal, based on the story of Ashoka, the second-century B.C. king of northern Indian who, appalled by the violence he had to use unite India, became a promoter of Buddhism throughout India. Uttar is clearly grounded in a theatre aesthetic and practice almost completely unfamiliar to Western audiences (what is called, simplistically, the "theatre of roots").  Thiyam uses both actual and invented chant, a chorus of drums and bells, and choreographed movements that both draw from and mimic folk dances and religious rituals to tell his story.

But even though intensely "presentational," the core of Uttar could not be any more immediate and relevant.  As Thiyam explained in the talk-back session on Uttar, Ashoka is a power-hungry man who, "like any modern man, has difficulty controlling himself." Guided by what he believes are the unavoidable political necessities of conquest, he cannot see the hell that he (and, by extension, any imperialist) creates among the people. Only when he is in the literal midst of that hell and sees the dark flowers of his violence do his senses "become awakened" and his brutalized soul restored to its original face.

The late-night performances offered a completely different menu, more tongue-in-cheek, more hip, more serrated, higher-octaned.  Split Britches' Salad of the Bad Café opened the set, a self-defined "post-modern cabaret" that mixed upper-level verbal vaudeville with fizzy meditations on gender-bending, Carson McCullers, Tennesee Williams, Suzy Wong, and Elvis. Like so much pomo work, it wasn't so much to be understood but as simply experienced.

On Wednesday, September 27, Universes performed Slanguage. Universes is a hybrid hydra of five artists New York who create, through what they call "spoken word/poetry/hip-hop/funk/vocal music theatre," an investigation into the priorities and perversities of urban life outside of 96th Street.  Think of Universes as slam poetry taken to the next level, where jazz riffs and ripped chords blend into elided narratives that, syringe-like, become subdermal, subcortical, subjunctive, subversive (as in "sub-verses").

The following night, Carl Hancock Rux, in a piece called No Male Black Show done with three other performers, used many of the same verbal pyrotechniques as Universes, along with multi-percussion and digital sampling, to give a heart-wrenching rendition of the icon/anthropography of the black male in our society. Powerful because personal, but also expandable to look at anyone whom the dominant society deems, at the same time, useful, dangerous, worthless, fungible.

The case studies usually presented two artists working on similar ideas and/or in similar ways where they would present their work (in whatever stage they had it), then open up the floor for questions and comments.  Some examples of the artists' work included an investigation into violence against women (looking at the practices of "suttee" in India and female genital mutilation in Nigeria), cross-bordering/border crossing (in terms of gender, culture, ethnicity, race, history, immigration, and even the notion of what constitutes a "border"), decolonizing the colonialized mind and history, the fate of Amer-Asian children and interned American-Japanese citizens -- in short, work looking at how the structures that determine identity can be questioned, blasted, remolded, occupied, and re-viewed by those who have been kept away from power and excluded from historical memory.

At the final address on the last day of the conference, a group of artists were asked to offer their observations about the conference. Daniel Banks, from New York University's Tisch School, saw the work of NWT as "remarginating the center," that is, giving voice and weight to the wisdoms and scars owned by those kept on the outskirts.  Chris Millado, of the National Theatre of the Philippines, observed how in his country, intersection often means "a place for collisions," and that he saw in the conference ways that theatre could be made where the collisions are not fatal but drawn from the power of people in their everyday lives.  Jorge Cortiñas, a fiction writer, saw the work of the artists at the conference as the work of trying to understand the "indecipherable present" by creating a politics and aesthetics of affinity, not using identity to divide but to give passports to all so that all can travel free of the fear of being INS'd by one institution or another. Alice Tuan, resident playwright at the Los Angeles Theatre Center, agreed with Cortiñas about moving toward affinity, and observed that we needed to keep in our archives not just documentable knowledge but "instinctual knowledge," of the kind that comes down through orality and movement and not just writing.

Final word went to Roberta Uno, who reconfirmed the purpose of Intersection II and the core principles of NWT: not only to subvert the forms but to create new ones that match the migrant, fluid world in which we all live; create spaces that welcome rather than frighten; and continue to be where you are not supposed to be, reporting back on what you find.

With a straight-to-the-solar-plexus demonstration of drumming by Ratan Thiyam's corps of drummers and dancers, the conference ended on a wild and thrumming note.  People left connected by a thick web of their own intersections -- email addresses exchanged, future meetings calendared, projects floated and traded, carrying back out to their own margins the fizz and force of "being where you are not supposed to be" and feeling right at home on such floating islands.

© 2000 Michael Bettencourt ALL RIGHTS RESERVED