Worlds meet -- in theory, anyway

By bringing major artists from a number of countries and disciplines together for a summer of shared projects on the UCLA campus, the Asia Pacific Performance Exchange, which began in 1995 and concluded its latest edition over the weekend, can develop potent new fusions of international music or dance. But the final two showcase programs of APPEX 2006 demonstrated one peculiarity of this blueprint. They suggested that the process leading to a performance could be richer and more memorable than the performance itself.

Take one of the pieces offered Wednesday in the campus’ Glorya Kaufman Dance Theater: Sriyani Fitri of West Java and Waewdao Sirisook of Thailand in a collaborative masked ritual, “Saraga.” Together, the two women looked like priestesses in some mystic cult. Perfectly matched in impetus and style, they glided across a long ground-cloth or runner and later wound it about their waists, tying themselves to each other.

But the piece remained steadfastly small-scale and intimate, with its most fascinating element utterly unseen -- understood only if you knew that Fitri’s and Sirisook’s homelands are places so different in their cultures, languages and dance vocabularies that it took heroic acts of selflessness and dedication for the dancers to move as one on this stage.

Although the official theme of 2006 was “At Home in This World?,” other themes seemed to interest the participants more. On Friday, a speech in one piece about the need for a healing, transformative stillness was reflected in the freeze-frame poses and sudden pauses of two others: 17 artists from India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand and the U.S. working in different ways to explore the balm that moments of motionless quiet can provide in high-energy performances, relationships and societies.

Moreover, a number of the artists proved intent on creating tributes that might have been titled “At Home in This APPEX” -- including testaments to the friendships formed over their six-week UCLA residency that otherwise would have become another unseen element in the final performances.

On Wednesday and Friday, you could find musicians sitting around happily trading riffs in “Gathering of Friends” sequences, and their relaxed interplay spoke more eloquently about bridges between cultures than the relentlessly virtuosic musical ensembles that went on long enough to make you wonder if their participants were attempting to extend APPEX for another six weeks.

Metal bowls spinning and whirring on the floor introduced one of the most perfectly realized group pieces, “Sound of Motion” (Friday), featuring Fitri, Sirisook, Joseph Gonzales, Shoji Kameda, Anusha Kedhar, Andrew McGraw, Somnath Roy and Dedek Wahyudi. The idea was to find movement tasks that would generate their own accompaniment, bypassing all the familiar percussive dance idioms (tap, flamenco and forms of classical Indian dance, for example) to create new connections between moves and sonics.

Objects that dancers could drag along the floor or drop on it served as musical instruments; flat, fanlike drums that musicians waved in the air became the focus of movement spectacle -- with the imaginative lighting design of Eileen Cooley adding to the excitement. Suddenly, nearly everything we do or touch in our lives seemed transformed into a potential source of rhythmically sophisticated music and dance.

As APPEX director Judy Mitoma explained in introductions to both programs, the 16 collaborations on view were created in the previous two weeks and might well have been considered preliminary statements or works in progress.

Certainly, some of them offered powerful concepts but no satisfying structures -- including most of the satiric theater pieces. Or “The Story Teller” (Wednesday), in which ancient Javanese myths about Kala, “the Destroyer of the Earth,” initiated a depiction of the suffering caused by the cataclysmic tsunami of December 2004. Or “Gathering Leaves” (Friday), in which laments in four languages accompanied the depiction of sweeping an ancestor’s grave.

Still, whether they fully succeeded or not, certain achievements became indelible examples of APPEX excellence. David Cutler’s attempt in “Ardha/Half” (Friday) to adapt the most complex Indian percussive patterns for the piano may have failed (the instrument smears what an Indian treble drum leaves sharply distinct), but what a valiant clamor he generated. In the same piece and “Counting the Moon” (Wednesday), Kedhar tried to update and decontextualize classical Indian dance, freeing it for new expressive agendas -- with results at once incomplete and ennobling.

On both programs, just about anything sung by Grace Nono became an instant classic. And instrumentalist Kamrul Hussin could do so many things so superbly that he became the ultimate APPEX artist: brilliantly adept at the specialty he brought with him from home but releasing a constellation of other talents through collaboration.