Afro-Asian Dialogue

David Khang performed his piece "Phalogocentrix" presented by Fado at at The Music Gallery/St.George-the-Martyr Anglican Church.

Intimate Distances
Dearly Beloved, we are gathered here tonight to bear witness…to share in the performative trace and impression of cross cultural and thus human and universal re-making. We are here to share in intimate distances. We are called to bear witness to a performative otherness that requires we think our encounter with such otherness differently every time. In this encounter the performing body transforms both us and itself to reveal or rather to provoke in us the scripting and sculpting of the body, its legibility, its intelligibility, in many languages. This body will perform for us tonight both its re-writing and its writing, its interpellation, its refusal and its re-statement. This body will offer up as sacrifice, sacrament and history of scaring the scripting of and thus the writing of modes of reading that disturb and disrupt but do not close down nor inhibit conversation. Rather conversational kinetic proliferation will be provoked. This body will….

The kinetic of the Brazilian martial arts and dance form caperaria has resonances with many Asian martial arts. The cross-resonances caperaria and Asians martial arts might at first glance act as an appetizer into a full menu of black and Asian cross-cultural resonances and historical sharing. But it would be as easy to pinpoint the martial art dances of both cultures as the ground of common and thus shared cultural understandings, histories and even meanings. The seduction of similarity, even familiarity makes cultural sharing a canard of cross-cultural identification. Instead we might look for something else. What that something else might be is a legibility, a scripting of cross-cultural resonances which collapse, indeed morph into secrete bodily effusions which in turn script and write narratives of togetherness and desire. Bodily excretions, which bind and unite. “Blood is thicker than water” but blood and water remain sources of immense cultural identification and disidentification. Blood and water are but tropes towards the ritual of life-everyday and fantastic, religious and profane.

David Khang offers us the body as script, his body as a script. A script that writes and unwrites the self in and on his writing body, his excreting body. His that makes intelligible the deep resonances of things that work to create intimate distances. These intimate distances are not the markers and signs of otherness but rather the mirrored reflections of self-merging into self. For the viewer the looking becomes a deformed mirror, cracked and piece together as yet another and different language. The fluid and liquid traces and impressions of blood, water, ink – marks left begging for language, for resaying and rewriting. These fluids do not offer the promise and the prospect of mimetic representation, but instead those fluids bind us in difference, yet uttering desire for coming together. The blood of this body…

Bodies, other bodies, can spectacularize histories in their performance. The spectacularized black phallus makes sense in light of the missing Asian penis. While phallus and penis are not always the same for other racialized bodies, the non-relation of their relation provokes conversation. It is in fact the space in-between, the space between the move and its pause, the break but not the separation in which the trace and the impression, the cross-cultural resonances, the production of language(s) and the communion of Afro-Asian dialogue begins. It begins not as antagonisms, as a looking over the shoulder but a s mutual desire to live beyond the too easy intelligibilities and legibilities of narrative being written - languages spoken and muted - bodies marked and unmarked and the too easy assertions of recognizable similarity and familiarity.

David Khang remakes and rewrites, Khang opens up the space of his body to allow for the utterance of common feeling, scripted or written as the intimate distance of human and cross-cultural resonances made unfamiliarly strangely familiar.

Blessed.




All images and text is copyrighted by Abdi Osman and Rinaldo Walcott unless otherwise specified.