Doin’ The Robot: Anxieties of the Racial Futures

Scholar-Choreographer’s Statement:

            This paper attempts to re-present the Robot in several instances. First, I will use the choreographic attributes of the Robot as a format for written composition. Thematized, linear descriptive sections will flow across the body of this paper with phasic elements connoting the paths of movement geared along particular trajectories. These movements embody a selective, partial travel-ogue, conceptualized as “longer” in terms of “proper” measurements of duration and distance (visual, literal, and such). In this format, “stops” (as in “Dime stops” or “Robot Stops”) interrupt the linear and temporal segments. “Stops” punctuate the discursive topographies entitled “embodied knowledge,” thereby jumping from normative orders of time.            Secondly, I will present movement description of two forms of the Robot, robot packers and automaton packages, as they appear in “Assembly Line.” By choosing this type of composition I aim to mimic the fragmentation techniques of the Robot dance, thereby reproducing for the reader a parallel between viewing/doing the Robot and reading the Robot. In so doing, I attempt to re-map popular dance as a potential source for choreographic strategies while throwing a wrench in the “natural” ways Dance, History, and Filipino scholarship is usually programmed to run.

 

 

Introduction

The recent proliferation of reality-based, television hip-hop dance competitions have compelled a re-thinking of recent “hip-hop is dead” debates. At the same time, the high visibility of Pilipino participants in these cultural texts provokes an interrogation of the previous claims by Pilipino American scholars of Pilipino “invisibility” in U.S. “mainstream” culture. Widening our timelines, fellow scholars like Carolina San Juan and Mark Villegas have deftly highlighted the longstanding and contemporary relations between Blacks and Filipinos. Likewise, my research analyzes Filipinos’ “inclusion” into “mainstream” U.S. culture and what it means for this emergence to occur through Hip-hop dance, by centering dance in Pilipino Cultural Nights as one of many cultural institutions which enabled the time, space, and community within which Pilipinos could develop their crafts.[i]

Pilipino Cultural Nights (PCNs) seek to bring the Pilipino community together in celebration of cultural heritage and ethnic identity. Produced and performed by mostly middle and working class Pilipino Americans, PCNs represent the culmination of a year-long process into a two- or three-hour theatrical production which incorporates dance, music, costume and song from a standardized repertoire. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, narratives and skit elements were added to express Pilipino American experiences and/or facilitate transitions between the established dance suite-PCN structure. Also in the 1990s, increasingly sophisticated PCNs became phenomena, which came under attack by academics and community veterans for a wide variety of reasons not limited to content, format, and productivity.^[ii] The critiques mainly addressed PCN issues on essentialism, authenticity, the static portrayal of culture, orientalism, and the negative effects of time and energy toward participants’ academic success.^[iii] During the 1990s and shaped by Prop 209’s removal of race-based public university admissions, some Pilipinos took these critiques on the politics of representation to the stage and began radically playing with PCN form and content.

            In April 2000, UC Berkeley’s Pilipino community presented Home, which departed from a standard PCN formula, by removing “traditional” PCN dances, music, and linear narrative script. Home approached PCN as a space to revise history, rather than reconstruct it, and it did this in part by incorporating movements from U.S. popular dance. For example, Filipino dancing bodies performed The Robot as assembly line workers while also packing similarly robotic “traditional” Philippine dancers in Balikbayan boxes. This dance entitled “Assembly Line” aimed to metaphorically expose the nuts and bolts of mechanically re-producing Cultural Nights. I fixate on “Assembly Lines”, one of many dance performances in Home, to exemplify its choreographic strategy through the popular dance, the Robot.

            Centralizing its choreographic strategies, I argue this performance enables three things. First, “Assembly Line” enables an embodiment of commentary by Filipino scholars and veterans regarding PCNs ideological and practical limitations or the mechanical re-presentation of “culture-in-a-box.” Faced with the irrationality and irrelevance of re-presenting a romanticized, static Philippine past on stage in front of PCN veterans and resident Pilipino scholar, Theodore Gonzalves, Home participants choreographed innovative dances based on Filipino American history. Home participants chose not to reconstruct “standardized” folkloric dances. Author of a critical essay on PCNs, Gonzalves lectured at UC Berkeley’s Ethnic Studies Department in 1999-2000, the year of Home’s production, and mentored organizers of Berkeley’s PCN. Secondly, “Assembly Line” enables critiques against de-personalizing and estranging conditions in part shaped by post-Affirmative Action, multiculturalist collegiate racial politics and the lack of Filipino and Filipino American resources. I cite literature on cultural studies of androids, Western Modern dance, and Philippine dance in order to suggest that the choreography, staging, lighting, music and costumes of the Assembly line’s robot and automaton signify multiple binds of Filipino cultural representation. Thirdly, “Assembly Line” enables choreography of the (mal)functions of intra-racial privilege (stateside vs. Philippine). Through literature on balikbayan boxes, crucial props of the piece, I demonstrate “Assembly Line” choreography’s significance in terms shaped by the cultural logic of globalization. Finally, “Assembly Line” aids Home in signifying alternative meanings for diasporic “home” as neither geopolitical constructs, nor pre-Hispanic indigenous imaginaries. I cross-read spoken word lyrics from Home with Asian American cultural theorists in order to demonstrate the vexations of Filipino diasporic affects of belonging.

            Home participants charted a more productive engagement with their unique cultural politics rather than reinforce a loyalty to some abstract concept or a bound, demarcated geo-political territory and its resources known as “nation” (as “properly” educated Filipino Americans may have been taught). Home configures “home” in terms of multiple senses of belonging, localized, diasporic, familiar relations and modes of expression. In our case, Home draws a correlation between the “proper” PCN Filipino dancing subject and a failure of normativized sites and methods of knowledge production (educational institutions, classrooms, folklore dance, PCN formula).^[iv]

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PCN Historical debates

 

Crucial to seeing popular dance as a “strategy” and practice for working out issues of multiculturalism and PCN is an understanding of the academic critiques on PCN. Unpacking a collective process that embodies Pilipino and Pilipino American pasts, presents, and imagined futures, dancing bodies in PCNs form one of the dominant modes of formal U.S.-situated Pilipino cultural production. Because of this, previous scholars have undergone extensive and peripheral analyses of the “PCN genre”, establishing foundational understandings for the types of ideological and practical work such productions can accomplish.^[v] Pilipino American scholar, Theo Gonzalves, recounts the main criticism shared by veterans in the community over what he describes as the “culture-in-a-box” PCN formula:

 

…indispensable characteristics in the essentialist logic of the PCN. These are (a) the opening of the show with both the Philippine and the U.S. American national anthems, (b) the use of Tagalog in the programs, (c) the marking of bodies through Philippine costumes, (d) the standard (required) inventory of Philippine dance styles, and (e) the narrative within the show as a vehicle for historicizing the Pilipino American experience.

 

Targeted here is the mechanic, expected (re)production of standardized folk dance repertoire (and later narratives), which statically, yet spectacularly portrays Philippine culture/Pilipino-ness consolidated within a one-night show. Within these elements, PCN forerunners sought to work out the double binds of modern minority performance; one that requires a return to “tradition” on one hand, and a distancing from that very tradition, or a proof of modernity.[vi] These standardized PCN dance suites, as Gonzalves and other scholars have illuminated, can be drawn within a genealogy linked to Bayanihan Philippine Dance Company and its development amidst specifically post-WWII, national and international contexts. As cultural historian Renato Constantino has critiqued, cultural nationalists unwittingly “froze” cultural Others in a performative past in order to enable their own global self-presentation as modern national subjects. The double bind to represent the Philippines as a Commonwealth/nation, that was both historically rich in diverse, cultural practices and modern in aesthetics placed a burden on cultural performance to be more “authentic”.^[vii] To borrow from performance scholar, Joseph Roach, PCN producers often surrogate the issues of authenticity and representation that educators and elites in Manila underwent in the first half of the 20^th century when defining Philippine dance, music, and costume.[viii] Whereas Gonsalvez recounts how “traditional” Philippine folk dances were employed in public schools to effectively maintain state power through art and cultural performance, I am more interested in how dances themselves can reflect and critique these genealogies of dance history and power relations. Hyper-staged dance performances codified “authentic” Filipino subjecthoods while creating ideological, cultural, and dance hierarchies within which “fake” Filipinos/dance could have a place.^[ix] In this context, Filipino dancing bodies become the contested sites of the “right” way to bend one’s arm, setting Filipino history “straight” or the ethnocentricity in the nation-state’s co-opting of sacred rituals, games, and ceremonies. At the same time, such bodies draw attention to the particular conditions mutually related to cultural values ascribed to particular bodily movement.

 

Berkeley PCN contexts

 

What makes Home so productively different for understanding cultural performance? First produced in 1976, Berkeley PCN is the longest-running PCN existing and has been seen by other Pilipino communities as a model for excellence. Home complicates critiques on PCN because Home queries the centricity of the folk dance forms, by removing the constant reconstruction of Bayanihan repertoire--such as Tinikling, Singkil, and Lumagen--constructing new forms built around Pilipino American history, but maintaining familiar markers of PCN and Philippine culture (bamboo sticks, etc.). Home also lacks the conventional opening national anthems. In addition to a series of varied, original pieces (spoken word, vignettes, dialogues, monologues, and skits) engaging with the Pilipino American themes, Home utilized innovative choreography, the Africanist aesthetic of call and response, and digital technology in constructing narratives of Pilipino American experiences. In response to the inabilities of essentialism to successfully represent, to borrow from Marta Savigliano, Home participants turned from PCN’s conventions of reconstruction and auto-exotification, in exchange for critique, revision, and choreographic strategies of abstraction.^[x] But what types of racial politics informed this turn from “traditional” and arguably modern forms of representation?

For Berkeley’s Pilipino community, two related developments must be taken into account: 1) the proliferation and compartmentalization of Pilipino organizations (for students/by students resources) tied to U.S. Civil Rights and other social movements of the late 1960s^[xi] 2) the passing of Proposition 209 in 1997 which removed Affirmative Action in the face of declining Pilipino acceptance and admission rates relative to other ethnic/racial groups.^[xii]

Social Psychologist Dierdre Bowlen conducted a study that found that there are more reports of overt racism occasions and internal/external stigma in U.S. states that ban race-based admissions, like California, than those that do not ban such policies.[xiii] Whereas drafters of Prop. 209 hoped to see “beyond” race, their actions prompted a socio-structural dimensional shift in Berkeley’s student population’s race consciousness, in effect placing a higher burden on PCN and culture to bear the weight of explaining, proving, and evidencing the importance of Pilipino’s lived racial difference and race consciousness. At the same time Prop. 209, marked newly entering Pilipinos as those who were ostensibly accepted based upon their “own merit.” These institutional attempts to restore the pre-1960’s racial regime and reinforce the hegemony of race neutrality and color/race blindness, prompted Berkeley’s students to turn from state-oriented versions of raciality and toward what racial theorist and sociologist Howard Winant calls, creative-action versions of racial agency (radical acts, self-reflected action, situated creativity in the moment of crisis).[xiv]

Pilipinos at Berkeley acted within the context of limited exposure to occasional adjunct lecturers courses on Pilipino American Studies, years of establishing and developing student-facilitated undergraduate courses (Pilipino American Student Orientation Class, Contemporary Issues Class, and PCN Class) and increasingly costly, elaborate PCN productions. Considering the transitory nature of college communities and the limited resources available at this public university for a “minority” student, these developments highlighted the dire need for institutionalized, permanent vehicles to access knowledge about Filipino culture and community.

These formations shaped Filipino identity in terms of policy, race, and ethnicity, while placing a high value on belonging to a social group. The ensuing diversification of Filipino social groups attempted to synthesize old and new solutions. Filipinos adapted to infrequent and inadequate institutional resources, by incorporating multiple dimensions of Filipino identity. The effect was such that one’s time and energy to the Pilipino community was directly constructive and beneficial to their professional, academic, artistic, or religious identity. Ultimately, this resulted in an increasing compartmentalization and sophistication of the community’s social dynamics such that PCN was/is widely respected as the sole project capable of linking a large number of Filipino students from a wide range of organizations, majors, classes, and interests.^[xv]

         Although PCN production is usually directed by an officer in Pilipino American Alliance (PAA cultural chair), other organizations and their members are naturally vital to the process and formation of the cast. In addition to organizations, student-facilitated courses were sponsored by PASS (Pilipino Academic Student Services) and PAA, and administered through the Education and Ethnic Studies Departments, respectively. These became vital make-shift sites for raising monetary funds, satisfying university requirements, developing shared Pilipino identities, learning about historical and contemporary issues, and maintaining the local campus traditions. Moreover, the South and Southeast Asian Studies Department offers four courses of tagalog offered per year, each with curriculum involving culture, history, and skit performances. In part, the daily interaction with Pilipino-ness helped sustain a sense of community and practiced culture, while the development of skits and acting skills attributed in part to dramatic skills seen during PCN. The resulting well-built network of Pilipino Americans provided the incubatory environment for Home.

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Robot History

Before going in depth about the Robot in this particular performance, it might be useful to detour in order to provide a brief historical context for the Robot and automata. I choose to fixate on the movement of the “Robot” primarily because as a cultural representation robots are complex, intriguing, material and concrete, prevalent in popular culture, frequent and accessible, yet subtle and misconstrued. “Robot” was first coined by Karel Capek in his 1921 play R.U.R. in which artificial humans, a race of slaves, rebelled against their masters. The word “robot” originates from the Czech word “rab,” meaning slave, and derivative of the Czech word for “work,” robota. Philosopher Eric G. Wilson recaps the historical and psychological significance of the robot as a type of android, or synthetic human being, tracing the representations of androids as far back as the early 1800s and romantic age. Today, a plethora of social anxieties are read through the android from Terminators to Wall-Es, but most tend to deal with ontology, existential definitions, and the dual panic that humans will be replaced by machines or that humans are machines. For folks growing up with Go-bots, Tranformers, Voltron, and the Matrix a popular icons, the android is as much a childhood friend as it is an enemy. Wilson argues that humans create androids for two reasons. First, humans project of their own melancholia about the fall of Man onto androids. Secondly, humans create androids with the hope of “the possibility that human beings might be able to transcend their self-centered fears and desires and return, egoless, to Eden.” (Wilson 2)

         Of interest for my project is the idea of melancholia that Wilson offers for the connections between android and android-maker. Wilson suggests that the machine is either a projection of unconscious desires (dark, irrational, unseemly, monstrous) embodied by the humanoid but functioning to show the seams of the Self. Alternatively, the android can be a projection of the maker’s conscious ideals (perfection and transcendence) and functions as an object of idolatry. For android-makers to imitate the android then might mean the embodiment of either one’s unconscious desire to descend or ascend from the ego. Notably absent from Wilson’s discussion, however, is any racial critique. Can the robot signify a coupled projection of colorblindness ideals and racialized id?

         To see how race operates in Wilson’s android melancholia Asian American scholar, Anne Anlin Cheng in The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief strives to recuperate the useful links between psychoanalysis and race studies to address how some grapple with racialization in America in the terms of “curing” racism. Cheng suggests that instead of thinking about how we should “get over” it, we should instead think about “what it means, for social, political, and subjective beings to grieve”.[xvi] Cheng argues that the normative model of grievance, its vocabulary and logic, detract from grappling with the immaterial, unquantifiable grief of racially marginalized subjects. Citing the ruling of Brown v. B.O.E. and the decisive factor of immaterial damages, Cheng links the material and psychic as she suggests that this grief has come to constitute both “minority” subjectivity and the US nation. As for Cheng and PCN subjects, at stake is the ability to counter the reductionist notions of “inferiority complex,” “white preference,” and assimilationist paradigms with a better understanding of the negotiation that minority subjectivity must psychically perform amidst institutional racism. This further suggests the potential for my project to contribute to the ongoing history of relations between racialized bodies and machine.

         Sarita See, offers a third type, colonial melancholia, informing our discussion here on how Filipinos doing the Robot would be able to inform these two takes on melancholia, as Fall of Man and as minority racialization.[xvii] See highlights two components of Freud’s melancholia in order to map it onto projects of decolonization, cultural expression, and political critique: unconscious nature and decrease in self-esteem. By highlighting the frequency in “fragmented” and broken bodies, See offers yet another theory for the counter-normative will to abstract. See’s selection of texts, like Manuel Ocampo’s paintings, depict “fragmentations” of corpses as “disenfranchised grief.” For “Assembly Line,” Filipinos embody humanoids by fragmenting the “proper” Filipino dancing subject, one kinesthetically constructed by fluid arms signifying folk joie da vivre, musicality connoting Spanish hospitality, stares signifying Moro stoicism, and hypersexualized masculinity evoked by untamed flapping loincloths.

         These three theoretical strands lead us to these questions: Does leaving the self-conscious ego or Freudian-brand of subjectivity necessitate a de-racialization process or an act of racial denial?[xviii] What does an act of race consciousness and the Robot look like? How does “robot” shift from originally signifying political rebellion to a representation of containment? For this project, the proliferation of robotic, or humanoid cultural representations in tandem with the rise of media technologies during the mid-20^th century helped spawn unprecedented kinesthetic forms as dancers attempted to replicate and rescript the characters and movement qualities that circulated the public. These replications drew from or worked against a variety of racial agencies and affects, but commonly presented a space for looking at the intersections of abstraction, technology, and selfhood. Let’s take a look at the piece, “Assembly Line” in order to see how Home participants flesh out these issues.

 

“Assembly Lines” Robot Movement description

 

         We hear Nine Inch Nails track “Closer” echo through the 2,000 seater, Zellerbach Auditorium at UC Berkeley’s Pilipino American Alliance’s 24^th Annual Pilipino Culture Night, Home. A group of nine Filipinos,wear simple, black, semi-shiny aprons while “doin’ the Robot” in an “Assembly Line” as the drum machine of the Nine Inch Nails track “Closer” pulsates forward. On one hand, we might draw the origins and initial popularity of the popular dance, the Robot, to the 1970s dance club scene, to Charles Washington "Charles Robot” and Bill "Slim The Robot" Williams and their ties to the forefather of Lockin’, Don Campbell.^[xix] Instead, the Robot traced in this paper is a very different genealogy linked to post-1965 second-generation Filipino immigrant students tasked with performing Filipino culture on stage. In terms of popular dance, “Assembly Line” favors a different archive of “folk” dance and migrates away from the “traditional” folk dance repertoire of “Rural” or Barrio Suites as they exist in Bayanihan or PCN paradigms.

         In its own terms, the fact that popular dances like the Robot are neither well-documented or cited reiterates the lack of popular dance, Filipino American, and Philippine history in “modern” U.S. educational institutions, publications, and archives. Attending to these popular dances serves as a choreographic strategy for reclaiming and embodying these “absent” archives and counters their exclusion from PCN, cultural history, and dance “proper”. Their enrollment also stamps a tardy and overdue evaluation onto the structural and cultural dynamics that threaten lively cultural dancing-bodies with extinction via “preservation.”

         The traditional folk past and PCN paradigm stand in direct contrast to the imagined futures that robots generally gesture toward. The characteristic “dime stops”, stiff postures, and blank stares serve as “raw” materials for doing the Robot. For “Assembly Line” these movements work in collaboration with synthesized backbeats and lighting effects to attempt to manufacture the vacated interiority, an emotionless, bound, and mechanical dance. The affective result is a cold, de-personalized feeling of a factory that directly contrasts with “traditional” Philippine dance settings like festive “rural” gatherings (tinikling) or regal, Muslim presence (singkil). After simulating the choreographic repertoire of the robotic automatons, the concept of a factory assembly line completes with the imitation of product-assembly.

 

 

Embodied Knowledge: Assembly Line Robot

            To dance the robot, I use an internal monitor, an automated program that tells me what bodily distinguishes “natural” human movement from robotic movement. Hence, the robot bodily logic premises an always-already “human” subject that continually confronts its own “humanity” by masking its allegedly innate, fluid lines and curves with punctuated stops and starts, or locks. I generate the movement. As I pull from the wrist to abduct its forearm transversely across my upright body, I consciously await to capitalize on a backbeat with the contraction originating from a muscle group surrounding my radius and ulna. This movement happens in four beats and inadvertently makes my loose fingers tremble for a half-beat after.

         At the same time much of doing the robot is about restraint and holding back. I restrain my body from relaxing its rigid posture for too long. I hold back from flexing more than a localized group of muscle tissue. I clench my jaw but leave my cheeks relaxed, mouth slightly open. “Closer” is such a familiar song that it feels like I’m on top of the beat. I make the time feel slow as I lay out my torso in a wave originating from my pelvis and catch one beat with my right shoulder poppin’. My tall height and thin frame are put to good use in creating illusions of linearity. We generate the movement and meaning. We don’t cover much ground though. Traveling is neither a priority or privilege. I can only tell this after performing, by holding the short distance I cover on the ground in direct contrast to the dance’s duration. 5:26. We slide back to look downstage at the unpacked box in front of us.

 

Automaton Movement Description

            Robots push eight Alpha Cargo Balikbayan boxes onstage and place them in varying formations. From the “traditional” PCN dance repertoire, a persona, or automaton, stands in each box. The personas are distinguishable by their costumes and movements in Spanish, Muslim, Barrio, and Mountain dances. At the same time, automatons perform robotic movements, adding a heterogeneity and multiplicity to The Robot as choreographic strategy. Whereas the “packers” hold a uniform facial expression devoid of emotion, the “packages” hold their “proper” personalities. For example, the automaton in the tinikling costume wears a plain white t-shirt, colorful flood-water pants, handkerchief tied around the neck, and mandatory smile. For both the packers and packaged, we see bodily movement intent on distinguishing “natural” human movement from robotic movement. Whereas robots usually signal a futurism, these “packaged” robots signal a past and present of PCN re-productions. In so doing, the assembly process figuratively draws them in line with factory workers, maquiladoras, and diasporic “servants of globalization.” ^[xx] The implicit hierarchy set up by balikbayan boxes is that we would rather be the miming “packers” than those “packed” statues eerily moving of their own volition. ^[xxi] Pushed into varying formations the assembly line proceeds in a choreography of packing and unpacking.

 

            Embodied Knowledge: “Packages”

 

My eyes resist wandering peripherally, squinting, and even blinking. I restrain from moving this plastic, fixed smile on my painted face. More importantly I restrain from any gradations of emotion, especially laughing or else the earnestness of my performance is not taken in its own terms. I must remain monotone or else my skill and technique is relegated to the “uncool” robot found in social circles—often employed for purposes of mocking dance in general. This comical type of the robot is often used in constructing debates of “who has rhythm and who doesn’t”. I am restraining from being cast as comical, lowbrow, white. I move whole lengths of my body, but I divide them in segments. I use gravity and abdominals to periodize the four “counts” as they approach, retracting and protracting in terms of an arc based on a torso-length radius.^[xxii]

 

In this context, I am automaton, yes, but not made in imitation of a “human” being, some telos of “unmarked” white liberal subjectivity. Instead, in the context of this dance, I am a metaphorical conveyor belt of markings, post-colonial, diasporic, ethnic, class and such. I am a strobe light of identity-in-motion or becomings that creates a metonym between viewing (act of blinking) and dancing. I own this box and musical beat. It is my throne. I am it’s red light flashing, pulsing; the quantum-mechanical definition of duality, both wave and particle. While doing the robot, I own time. Much like tinikling clappers, I direct the speed and pace of the dance. I “keep” time in terms of physical, spatial, and musical relations. I objectify myself. I become the bamboo poles catching and closing out durations of time with flexes and muscle contractions.

 

Multiculturalism

            Productive for understanding what Doin the Robot signifies is a discussion of what critical race scholar Devon Carbado presents as three inter-related, commonly oppositional (though not wholly) racial dynamics: 1) racial preference vs. race neutrality 2) colorblindness vs. color consciousness 3) multiculturalism vs. assimilation. Similarly, Social Psychologist Miguel Urzueta refers to colorblindness as the tenet that “We’re all the same inside, we should get over our differences” and Multiculturalism as “We’re all different, live up to your difference, and that’s harmony.”[xxiii] In invoking these frameworks (or their limitations), I will be assuming that dance and particularly Doin the Robot shapes the way we experience race, racial identity and difference. In this sense, one of the effects of the Robot is how it situates us vis-a-vis our position of racial identity, opening up the possibilities of employing race conscious agency to contest the hegemonic social regime. What is at stake for the Robot is the loss of our abilities to talk about race emerging from an effacement of race from dancing bodies.

            Okay now let’s situate this choreography on the level of its diasporic and multiculturalist contexts. As we saw, the automata have a contained, managed, “life of their own.” As robots go through motions of stamping, taping, and pausing to look at imaginary wristwatches, they exhibit an absence of touching or direct force onto the automata. The lack of contact adds both to the air of estrangement and to the notion of cultural hegemony as indirect force. “Packages” rise up and perform the variety of “traditional” dancing bodies not as a menagerie but as an ironic simulacrum, thereby embodying an “It’s a small world” mechanics of multiculturalism. The mechanical archetypes of folklore dancing bodies move like propertied Disneyland attractions to bow to their ethnographic origins and blankly smile at their facsimile. The tinikling dancer takes what would previously be the dynamic, sweeping, curved arm, and breaks the sequence into flattened segments, each with its own tickin’ endpoints. Another dancer manipulates the malo around her head, not with its “proper” fluid quality, but with a fixed rigidity. The differing suites and “traditionally” wide array of movement qualities are collapsed into the automata’s uniform quality—a mechanistic kinesthetic self-vocoder-like-operation that theorizes critiques of their previous “evenness” of presentation in “traditional” PCN. In so doing, automata critique a brand of multiculturalism that might be described as tolerance-but-not-acceptance. In the institutional domain this type of mulitculituralsm reduces individual “cultures” (including uneven histories of slavery, colonialism, patriarchy, genocide) to celebratory moments that are apportioned discrete time and space (i.e. PCN and Filipino History Month). This is limitedly liberating in providing space for representation, but risks uncritical celebration of difference, “diversity fatigue”, and balkanization without seriously grappling the issues each cultural group prioritizes.

 

Balikbayan box

            In “Assembly Line,” what is being critiqued is the robotic packaging of “culture in a box.” ^[xxiv]Balikbayan boxes are appropriate in this piece for multiple reasons. Literally naming those who are returning to the Philippines, balikbayan translates from Filipino to English as “return nation” or “homecoming”, Balikbayan is used to name Filipinos going to the Philippines for vacation or for retirement. The moniker is also used when talking about the large cardboard boxes, or Balikbayan boxes, returners use to pack souvenirs, gifts, clothes, candies and supplies for friends and relatives in the Philippines. Usually the contents are canned goods, candies, undergarments, instant coffee and items thought to be either unobtainable or difficult to purchase in the Philippines. But with increasing globalization and access to American products in the Philippines, Balikbayan boxes have been critiqued as having little economic logic and no real use for their recipients. Yet, they persist as markers of wealth indirectly used to remind the sender and recipients of the Balikbayan’s social capital in America. First, these cardboard boxes represent the confining PCN paradigm, for which PCN participants are tasked with the duty of unpacking the cultural “traditions” expected to be choreographed, performed, and embodied by older generations, social networks, and non-Filipino audiences. Secondly, Balikbayan boxes represent the Suite-narrative-structures containing “traditional” ethnocentric cultural repertoire and vocabularies inherited for the heavy task of unpacking. Dancing the Robot as a portrayal of “traditional” packing critiques the real use of their products(PCNs) for their recipients (community, family, audiences). Like American products sent over by returners, this enactment itself is a marker of wealth, privilege, and transnational social capital.

            By choosing balikbayan boxes as the structures of containment, Home’s producers also comment on the intra-racial dynamics between returnees (balikbayan) and their relatives in the Philippines. The Assembly Line “packers” construct themselves as PCN participants arranging the standardized repertoire of “traditional” Filipino dancing bodies into bound, stale, rigid formations, read: Suites. At the same time the “packers” construct PCN participants at large as returners, figuratively returning to a “home”; thereby appropriating the notion that PCN is primarily used as an attempt to search for one’s roots and mapping the concept of “home’ onto dance repertoire. In this sense, Home refigures scholarly critiques of “traditional” PCN participants-as-returners engaging in relationships with a romanticized, multiculturalist Philippines, frozen in its past. Drawing a connection between the candies, SPAM, and underwear usually packed in Balikbayan boxes and the standardized dance repertoire, these automata are “packaged” and prepared for delivery, to U.S. audiences. For Home, robotic movement directs the spectators to see PCNs, or the mechanical commodification of Philippine “traditional” culture, as likened to the processes of Filipinos returning to the Philippines for vacation.

 

Re-locating “Home”

But what makes this place home is not the land, this is not our land. We were never supposed to be here. What makes this home is not where we are, but who we are. It is the relationships we build, the connections we make. It is these connections that give us our sense of belonging. For we do not belong here. And although at times we feel as though we do, history has proven otherwise. We do not belong here...we belong to ourselves and we belong to each other. So for this reason we are beginning, we are beginning a new beginning. A new beginning that is not built on stone or rock, but on people and connections.

 

This quote is significant because it to clarifies Home’s collective message: Filipino identity is constituted not out of affiliation to some discrete geographic entity, but emerges from the historical exclusion/inclusion and ongoing negotiation of multiple spatial, temporal, and social formations. Here, a vexed position between material and historical exclusion warrants a rejection and recuperation of a narrative element (beginning). The turn is not to the abstract, cohesive entity, nationhood, but to the “real” relations between “people”. Thus, senses of belonging are tethered to home-signified-as-Filipino identity, not as a concrete place or time, but as something more amorphous. Visually linking this notion of social relations as “home,” a slide show of family photographs from cast members was projected onscreen as these words were spoken. Spoken by Home’s coordinator and PAA cultural chair, Rani De Leon, this message critiques previous constructs of Filipino cultural identity and bourgeois nationalism. Taken in the context of the Assembly Line, the spoken words implicitly suggest the malfunctions of both assimilation and nativism.^[xxv]

            In order to situate de Leon’s message, Assembly Line and Home PCN, within a more global arena, I turn to Arjun Appadurai’s prognosis of globalization. Appadurai qualifies that in a global arena, agency carries a slippage of meaning, new politicized meanings which flow in multiple directions (positive or negative) vis-a-vis their “homeland”.^[xxvi] This system of flow counters the views of a narrowly homogenized or heterogenized global era that misses out on processes of indigenization and critiques of homeland hegemonies. De Leon aims to unsettle previous and ongoing constructions of Filipino cultural identity suggesting their mere reproduction of exclusivist narratives. By stating, “history has proven otherwise”, De Leon resonates with the work of Asian American scholar, Lisa Lowe. For Lowe, immigrant histories of material exclusion and differentiation evidence the U.S. contradictions of economic inclusivity required by global capitalism for Asian labor and the simultaneous exclusivity toward Asians on the planes of culture, race-based immigration law, and citizenship. In the context of dis-locating “tradition”, Home converges with Lowe’s emergence of immigrant acts of agency, or as she puts it, “the acts of labor, resistance, memory, and survival, as well as the politicized cultural work that emerges from dislocation and disidentification.” (Lowe 9)

            But for Home, multiple “homeland” cultures expand upon the processes of Appadurai-brand flow and Lowe-brand immigrant acts. Simultaneously throwing a nod at settler colonial critiques, forced migration, and ongoing land ownership struggles for Indigenous People, De Leon states, “this is not our land. We were never supposed to be here.”^[xxvii] Morevover, by recognizing the privileging of history in the Philippines over Filipino American history in PCNs, Home participants interrogate what types of subjecthoods have come to be valued in PCN. Linking these constructed subjecthoods to the maintenance of various power hiearchies (settler colonial over indigenous, Filipino over Filipino American, historical over contemporary, exotic over domestic) strategically recuperates their essentialism and critiques racial and multiculturalist hegemonies as institutionalized in late 20^th century UC Berkeley campus. Again, the idea here is not to see PCN as an inherently counterhegemonic activity, but to understand that in seeing PCN’s roles in subordinated person’s struggles for hegemony. These struggles for hegemony deny reduction of the lived experiences of Filipino dancing bodies to false dichotomies of assimilation/indigenous, Filipino/non-Filipino, authentic/innovative, in exchange for a focus on what agendas such binaries are mobilized. As the assembly line workers implicitly critique the deindustrialization of First World nations that led to demands for cheap immigrant labor to fill service sector jobs, their robotic movements also map multiple power struggles involved in positing an absence of “humanity” in the “post-“ era.

 

Robots and Colorblindness

            But should the Robot be taken as a critique of the privileges of particular diasporic mobility (transnational, social, economic) or “vacationing?” Should it be seen as another sort of vacation in its own terms; a postethnic, postnationalist, pseudo-colorblind bodily script that allows Filipinos a way out of authenticity and exotification debates? To address these questions it is helpful to turn to what Howard Winant speaks of as a repertoire of racial agencies that help describe how we inhabit our racial identities: denial, state-oriented, and creative/radical practice/situated action. Whereas the Robot in other settings or performances might be read as a denial of racial identity, Home participants seem to be operating through radical creative action in order to recognize their racial situatedness. By selecting the Robot (a U.S.-situated popular dance) as Filipino American dance (vis-a-vis “traditional” dances), Home includes what “other” sources and texts previous shows excluded. One hypothesis for why Filipinos chose to foreground the similarities between themselves and Blacks would be to distance the Filipino subject from the scripts that mark them as historical victims of foreign-ness, thereby relying on the black social dance as domestic in order to be legible as agents of reform, resistance, or revolt (at least more so than Jose Rizal or Andres Bonifacio).

            For “Assembly Line,” by converging choreography of the Robot with that of the balikbayan “packer”, Home participants reference the constraints of processes of selecting “what goes inside” PCN and the meanings of such choices. On the other hand, by converging choreography of the Robot with balikbayan box “packages” they reference the constraints of being the package, or auto-exoticism. Finally, by selecting the Robot and popular dance over Philippine “traditional” dance, participants reject notions that they do so as a “vacation” or out of a choice to be post-. Rather, robotic dancers signal the nation-state, “Filipino”, race and ethnicity, and colorblindness and multiculturalism as terms and paradigms that fail to appropriately address the intersectionality of their lived experiences as Filipino dancing bodies.

 

Movement Description: Back to the Assembly Line

            The “packers” are seen rising from the depths of their respective boxes and rotating their glazed gazes left and right across the audience, but never stepping out of their containers. By the end of the song, the robots are not able to contain the personas in the boxes, which now appear across the stage in line. The dancers stand in the boxes, performing their respective folklore dance moves mechanically, while the other dancers rotate their containers, spelling out “CULTURE”, “FILIPINO”, and finally, “PILIPINO” from lettering on the sides. The literal signification of Pilipino culture and Pilipino-ness on the boxes attempts to physically turn a phrase. The performers direct statements about resisting/attempting to be packaged, static, and contained. Through this performative industrialization metaphor for the traditional PCN process, the performers are suggesting that the ways Pilipinos name, re-assemble, and negotiate identity are continuing to change. Filipino robotic moving bodies embody a theoretical stance not about identity-in-motion, but critique of identity-going-through-the-motions.

 

Showing some loob / interiority

            When describing Africanist dance as non-linear and non-narrative, Brenda Dixon Gottschild provides insights on corporeality and narrative that may prove informative for both the Robot as globalization critique and as black popular dance in terms of interiority. Gottschild configures an interior/exterior dialectic that defines “abstraction” as a term and condition of Africanist dance and black dancing bodies. Gottschild’s “abstract” signifies choreography which uses “emblems from natural practice but is dependent on creating a life of its own, generated by and through a motivating idea or thesis,” rather than a “closed-circuit” of linear, concrete evocation.^[xxviii]

            For “Assembly Line,” technique and artifice are figured through a de-personalized personality enacted by the collective. In this case, the Robot (as black dance) also serves NOT as a linear, concrete signifier of a real Robot, but all that its embodiment might point to. The “Assembly Line” “packers” and “packages” choreograph a robotic vacated interiority that un-equals the interiority of “proper” modern dance subjects.^[xxix] The dis-location between embodied robotic movements and the more traditional “human” Filipino choreography (“condescending glares”, “happy-go-lucky leaps”, “flirtatious curtsies”, or “running amok”) indicates how Philippine folk dances rely on the modernist notion of interiority and signature-subjecthood. Moreover, as a collective performance, the enactment is a synchronic, collective effort of co-embodiment that works to emphasize the re-location of “senses of belonging” from traditional affects aimed at allegedly unified, bound nation-states, and onto “the relationships we build”. On one hand, this co-embodiment is a throwback to pre-Hispanic cultural practices of utang na loob, loob/labas, and pakikisama. On the other hand, the co-corporeal basis for ontology cites ongoing U.S. indigenous land struggles and mutually informs concepts of land ownership and one’s relationship to land; “we belong to ourselves and we belong to each other” to redirect primordialist and cultural nationalist pitfalls.

            But to recuperate Philippine indigenous constructions for other-than-primordial purposes, one might further problematize the concepts of Robotic interiority in “Assembly Line” in relation to the concept of loob/labas. Martin Manalansan denounces claims by previous scholars that doubly bind Filipino subjects as tradition-less (and naturally imitative) and/or configured in rigid interpretations of Filipino ontological concepts, loob/labas (inside/outside).^[xxx] I deploy Manalansan’s approach to Filipino subject formation as both processual and necessarily tied to power struggles in order to problematize the dichotomous interior/exterior terms of both black dance and the Robot.^[xxxi] Thus, Filipino bodies should not be seen as shallow American copycats nor as empty containers in which indigenous values and truths are cultivated inside (loob) only to be expressed in the social body (labas).^[xxxii]

         Ironically, the artificially-intelligent, nameless robotic machines help map PCN into more of a “lived culture” than the continual commodification of traditionally “lively”, “human”, “soulful” folk dancers. Whereas the robots execute a seemingly forced labor, they also lay bare the drudgery of previous PCN’s full of personality and “folk” life. In this sense, they implicitly critique these PCN’s reinscription of Cartesian mind over body divisions between the psychic and material conditions of Filipino diaspora.^[xxxiii]

            As robots, Filipinos theorize an “authentic” transnational heterogeneity and de-naturalize the boundaries of Filipino dancing bodies. For Dance scholar, Susan Leigh Foster, “to dance itself is to theorize, dancing bodies means bodies that are thinking, commenting, critiquing, and investigating.[xxxiv] Whereas Philippine folk dancers in previous PCNs thought, commented, critiqued, and embodied investigations to physically bring them closer to their “roots”, the Robot embodies and compels bodies to rethink these previously stable categories of knowledge (Philippine folk dance). Robot dancers deconstruct the fluid lines of sweeping suites and theorize a denaturalization of tinikling and singkil, while slipping into problematics of using “new” dances as vehicles for expressing issues of Filipino identity.

            In conclusion, Home participants charts a more productive engagement with their unique cultural politics rather than reinforce a loyalty to some abstract concept or a bound, demarcated geo-political territory and its resources known as “nation” (as “properly” educated Filipino Americans may have been taught). Home embodies the culture-in-a-box critiques by Filipino scholars, embodies the de-personalizing and estranging conditions in part shaped by post-Affirmative Action, multi-culturalist collegiate racial politics and the lack of Filipino and Filipino American resources, and choreographs of the (mal)functions of intra-racial privilege (stateside vs. Philippine) shaped by the cultural logic of globalization. Dancers configure “home” in terms of multiple senses of belonging, localized, diasporic, familiar relations and modes of expression. In our case, Home draws a correlation between the “proper” PCN Filipino dancing subject and a failure of normativized sites and automata-like mechanics of knowledge production-- educational institutions, classrooms, folklore dance, and the PCN formula—and simultaneously making some elbow room for robot sentience and possible rebellion.