A more flexible ‘ethnic’

HIP-HOP. Solo performance. Traditional masterpieces. Multimedia, musicals and more. This is the face of Asian American theater, which isn’t just stories about angst from a racial point of view anymore.

As demographics change, so do artistic forms and cultural taste. Nowhere is this more evident than in the variety of work being created by new immigrant groups and established Asian American theater companies nationwide.

To celebrate this expanding community, more than 200 theater professionals, educators and artists will be meeting in Los Angeles today through Tuesday for “Next Big Bang: The Explosion of Asian American Theatre,” a national conference designed to look at the current state and future of Asian American theater. Showcase performances featuring Asian American theater from across the country will be held each evening at the Aratani/Japan America Theatre.

Three years ago, the Theatre Communications Group, which supports professional not-for-profit American theater, convened a meeting of about 20 theaters of color to talk about various issues. Representatives of the six Asian American theaters present decided there was a need for a national conference of their own.

“As artists, our issues aren’t necessarily covered at theater conferences,” says Tim Dang, producing artistic director of East West Players, and the organizing force behind “Next Big Bang.” “Other conferences that talk about Asian American issues don’t necessarily talk about issues of interest to artists. We want to create the next big bang, where we have all these types of communities and generations of people together to expand the voice of Asian Americans in theater.”

Dang says conference participants are planning the nation’s first Asian American Theatre Festival, which will be held in New York next year, another event designed to call attention to the growth of Asian American theater.

Roberta Uno, an Asian American theater director and program officer for arts and culture at the Ford Foundation, says shifting cultural demographics in the United States have greatly affected the genre, ushering in a variety of forms from solo performances to sketch comedy.

“The sea change that’s happening is that people of color will become the majority in the country by 2050,” says Uno, who will give a keynote address on the topic at the conference. “That tipping point has already happened in Los Angeles, where the new terminology is ‘minority majority,’ and the mainstream may be many streams. The monolithic category of Asian American is a political-social construct that’s constantly changing. Our stories have been largely invisible, and the need to tell them is there.”

According to 2005 U.S. Census data, Asian Americans make up 13.5 million or 5% of the nation’s total population, up from 4.4% in 2002, and 4% in 1999.

“Most if not all of us got organized because we were protesting how we are perceived as Asian Americans in this country,” says Mia Katigbak, the artistic producing director and co-founder of the National Asian American Theatre Company in New York. “What we’re trying to say with our different work is we have different cultures.

“My mission was to do the classics, with all Asian American casts. The point was to get away from how we’re always cast as geishas, gangsters and gooks. My next project is by a Latino playwright whose work does not have an Asian theme, but it will be done with an all Asian American cast. Today, we’re all such a hybrid that the term Asian American is harder and harder to pinpoint.”

How is this reflected in what constitutes Asian American theater? It depends on whom you ask.

For Tisa Chang, artistic producing director of the Pan Asian Repertory Theatre in New York, the definition centers on work that advances an Asian American viewpoint. “To me, the work is about where you came from,” Chang says. “I think Asian American theater has to be practiced by artists who intimately know the Asian world.”

Artists in the community note that as demographics change, what falls under the category of “Asian” also changes. Where the majority of plays and musicals once revolved around Chinese American or Japanese American stories, today’s productions have become more diverse, with new voices from Korea, India, Laos, Cambodia, the Middle East and other countries.

“There needs to be a greater voice for South Asians and the Hmong, who have been here for the last 20 years,” says Meena Natarajian, a playwright and the executive and literary director of Pangea World Theater in Minneapolis.

“I am for the broadest definition of Asian American theater. I see it as work created by Asians, whether it’s Asian-themed or otherwise,” she says. “In Minneapolis, we have an Asian theater working with a Latino theater on a work dealing with the Japanese in Peru. So it is a shared diversity of voices.”

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Change over the decades

DANG believes the definition of Asian American theater has a cyclical nature that moves back and forth between an emphasis on Asian cultural identity and assimilation into American culture.

“At first, when East West Players was established in 1965, with civil rights, it was all about Asian identity,” Dang says. “In the mid-’70s to mid-’80s, it was assimilation, wanting to be part of the mainstream. In the late ‘80s to ‘90s, it went back to cultural identity. Now, I see it going back to assimilation. That’s why you have Asian American youth investigating hip-hop and spoken word -- because they want to assimilate and be part of the world without labels.”

Gayle Isa, founder and executive director of the Asian Arts Initiative in Philadelphia, lobbied to include the voices of the young on the conference agenda. “The youth groups coming to the conference believe all of us are affected by race and the issue of racism, which is why we identify ourselves as Asian American artists,” Isa says.

At the same time, younger Asian American performers don’t want to be identified solely by their race. Andy Luo, one of 12 dancers with the Sick Step Hip Hop and Bboy Dance Crew, based in Los Angeles, says all but one of its members are Asian American.

“We bring a bit of our culture to the team, but there’s nothing overtly Asian about what we do,” says Luo, a senior at USC studying aerospace engineering. “We’re about the fusion of freestyling and choreography. Nobody thinks of Asian Americans as the No. 1 dancers, and we want to show people that Asian boys can dance. To me, I don’t think Asian American theater is any different from the theater of any ethnicity. What’s to stop us from doing mainstream themes? There’s nothing to limit us.”

Playwright Philip Kan Gotanda, who is teaching Asian American drama at UC Davis, says young Asian Americans have stories to tell that older generations may not immediately relate to.

“They’re international stories,” says Gotanda, whose work chronicles the Japanese American experience. “The boundaries are more fluid for these first- and second-generation kids, who may be bilingual or trilingual. The country of origin is America, but the stories are about the world now.

“I have two Hmong students telling me that the idea of having multiple wives still exists in one of their communities, and what that means in their family,” he says. “I have one student who is three-quarters gosei [fifth-generation Japanese American] and one-quarter Mexican, who grew up in an African American community, and is into spoken word. How these young people look at the world is fluid, and I think the term Asian American theater has to be fluid, too.”