Worlds Meet to Percussive Drumbeat

Locked shoulder to shoulder in a kneeling communal hug that stretches across the forestage of the Watercourt in California Plaza, 18 performers from the UCLA summer Asia Pacific Performance Exchange program share a vocabulary of rippling fingers and clapping hands while 10 colleagues upstage accompany them on a battery of multicultural percussion instruments.

The hug itself may look uncomfortably close to the cute corporate “People” logo that greets you when you sign on to America Online, but so many of the artists come from cultures that forbid even this degree of public intimacy that the lineup becomes an emblem of the solidarity-in-diversity and risk-in-collaboration that APPEX implements.

Earlier in this Saturday showcase, the musicians test one another’s appetite for new horizons with an ensemble workout that asks them not only to make room for radically different kinds of percussive virtuosity but to build bridges between national idioms. The extremes include Kenny Endo’s fierce Japanese-style attacks on a huge horizontal drum; the manipulation of a rich palette of tones (sometimes sounding like partially filled water-jars) by Sein Kyaw Naing on the Burmese circle-drum; the metallic overtones and dramatic force of gamelan-style percussion led by I Dewa Putu Berata of Bali; and steady, intricate treble-drumming from India performed by Lenny Seidman and C. Jason Koontz.

Do such quick-change explorations promote the trivialization of ancient traditions--or foster the notion that the end product of centuries of painstaking artistic development might be merely a hit Asian-fusion CD or an MTV music video showing Michael Jackson flitting between dancers of India and Thailand? Too soon to tell: With its emphasis on collaborative process, APPEX seems after bigger game than just handing the music industry another exotic flavor-of-the-month. But treating world culture as a kind of menu has a built-in potential for corruption.

Indeed, Minh Tran’s remarkably fluid dance solo “Revisit” begins in glib multiculturalism--with plenty of ballet influences on view--but grows progressively purer in style and more powerfully monocultural as it focuses on the calligraphic manipulation of his flowing, floor-length sleeves. The singing of Zhang YiJuan adds a high, beckoning sweetness to the sense of Tran finding his way back from a wrong turn in the road.

An untitled duet for Joan Pangilinan-Taylor and Emiko Saraswati Susilo investigates points of contact between traditional Philippine and Balinese dance, with the performers closely matched in barefoot sidling steps and supple arm-wrist-hand rotations but often quite different in deployments of weight and the effect certain positions achieve when executed with bare arms (Susilo) versus long sleeves (Taylor).

Other dance segments include a charming Thai classical solo for Pichet Klunchuen about a bashful demon and an elegant Javanese court solo for Eko Supriyanto celebrating warrior prowess. Tashi Dhondup and Sonam Phutsok add soulful Tibetan singing and musicianship to the event, with Ricardo Trimillos and Dan Kwong also lending their artistry to the instrumental ensemble.