Cultural Appropriation

It is a commonplace that when some of us look at works of contemporary art, whether music (John Cage comes to mind), dance (the work of Jerome Bel for example) or visual art (any of a number of abstract painters) the response often is ‘Anyone could do that’. The surprising thing then, is that not many actually do. There was the silence, the space between notes, the pile of old tee shirts, the pigments, just lying there, for centuries before Cage, Bel and Rothko came along. It is remarkably difficult to make anything. But that is the artist’s task. Most people choose to do something more rewarding of effort because the work of the artist is hard, thankless, not well remunerated and very badly understood.

While it is true that as a bharata natyam dancer no one has ever watched my performance, thinking it easy to reproduce, the audience still misses the main difficulty. It is not the technique, which of course requires years of rigorous study and practice, but it is the finding of something to express through the technique. The idea, or not even something so concrete as an idea, but the germ of an idea, a spark to which you can bring the dead, dry tinder of your technique in the hope that some fire will ignite, finding that is the hard part.

For my dance-theatre piece, Walking Naked, the spark came from reading a poem in ‘Speaking of Shiva’ A.K. Ramanujan’s brilliant translations into English of the poetry of the Virashaivite poet-saints. One of them, Mahadevi Akka, spoke using the tropes of the conventional love poetry that informed the bharata natyam expressional repertoire. She used a language with which I was familiar to express an entirely new meaning, a revolutionary and transformational, one that it had never occurred to me that bharata natyam could even begin to encompass.

I worked on the piece with Phillip Zarrilli, a white American, from a translation of Mahadevi Akka’s poetic history, the ‘Shunya Sampadane’ – ‘Coming to Nothingness’ by Judith Kroll, another white American.

I myself am brown, but without any ties to the Virashaivite tradition of Hinduism, either through religion or ethnicity. Phillip and I worked with theatrical and ritual motifs such as bunraku, kavadi and Tantric art, exactly as the piece needed, taking, incorporating into my body and the work whatever the work itself needed.

Creating and performing Walking Naked all over the world was one of the most satisfying, enriching and transformative experiences of my life. Through the work, I reached beyond myself, so that I was not like the artists Leonardo da Vinci condemned when he said, ‘How ridiculous are those painters who give their figures small heads because their own heads are small.’

Thank god I performed Walking Naked twenty years ago, because today it might well be stopped in its tracks by those who police culture, wanting everyone to stay within their own small heads. The charge – cultural appropriation –  would be entirely justified on the basis of the criteria they claim have merit: ethnicity, colour, privilege, access. Phillip, Judy and I are guilty of all that, and probably some more. The Virashaivaites, if they chose to do so, could claim that I wrongly interpreted Mahadevi Akka, and the way I did so is hurtful and not my right to do.

These are the criticisms leveled at Robert LePage, Betty Bonifassi  and Ariane Mnouchkine over their productions of Slåv and Kanata. They are world famous artists, so their productions and the subsequent haltings have become big news. This is the first time I’ve felt thankful to be an unknown artist working in obscurity. I hope that will allow me to continue to work in the way I always have, taking inspiration wherever I find it. I don’t want to have to practice the hyper-reflexivity and over-determination that the current climate mandates. That’s just not how art gets made.

Cultural appropriation puts two words together in such a way that the meaning of one nullifies the meaning of the other, like toy car – the first tells you not to expect the second to function in its usual way. So no actual appropriation happens when it’s cultural. Nothing is taken away. Someone has something they didn’t have before, but nothing has been subtracted from anyone who originally had it. Culture has that unique property that the word appropriation tries to deny, of addition and multiplication when it is taken, embodied, and reproduced. People in Korea heard the poetry of Mahadevi Akka, who might never have heard it if I hadn’t performed Walking Naked there. The well of human culture, from which we all drink, is increased, not diminished when we draw from it.  That surely is a good thing.

We shouldn’t fall into the trap of holding art to a higher standard than the other things we consume. Just as stopping the use of toy cars has no effect on pollution, the policing of cultural appropriation has no effect on actual appropriation – of land, water, time, money. Of course it is easier to condemn Robert Le Page with a sense of righteous indignation, but that’s just a distraction that has no meaningful effect on the lives of marginalized people all over the world.

When Mahadevi Akka tried to join the sangam of other Virashaivites of the time, Allama Prabhu, not convinced by the poetry itself, tested the authenticity of her experience of Shiva by putting his fingers in her vagina. Let us not now in this day and age subject artists to equally arbitrary tests of authenticity.