Pangea World Theater: Vibrant Voice of Immigrants and Exiles

Pangea World Theater's Mission Statement: "Pangea World Theater is committed to international works, styles and traditions that illuminate the human condition, end divisiveness and celebrate differences. We strive to bring communities across the world together through theater productions, workshops, and speakers. We view the stage as a powerful international forum and podium for discussion. Throughout our work we employ a cross-ethnic vision of tolerance and human rights through excellence in the arts."

Pangea is the name given to the single landmass that existed on earth before the continents separated.

Dipankar Mukherjee and Meena Natarajan. Photo by Jim Clifford

Across the U.S., many theaters promote and fulfill missions specific to concerns of marginalized communities. African-American, Chicano, disabled citizens and glbt communities, among others, are represented by skilled companies. Performers, playwrights, designers and directors who reflect such communities have enriched American culture in general. Moreover, this has resulted in voices and experience being heard despite a reactionary political climate and a widening gap between the haves and have-nots.

However, as the current immigration controversy reminds us, America is a mosaic of widely varied colors and shades. People of color, relegated to neat, stifling columns dubbed "African-American," "Native American," "Hispanic" and "Asian" rightly demand they be understood as people who hail from different countries, regions and circumstances. For instance, the descendants of slaves in the Antebellum South have a totally different legacy from Africans more recently relocated to the U.S. toward the end of the Cold War and since then. Moreover, the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa and the massive swathe of land from Eastern Europe to the Philippines have multiple racial and community identities that too often are not represented in the complex terms they merit.

However, one theater group has been putting its efforts where its mouth is for the past decade. Minneapolis' Pangea World Theater has taken on the responsibility of representing not only those in the major "minority" categories but also peoples of various cultures living in the Twin Cities area. Helmed by Artistic Director Dipankar Mukherjee and co-founder and associate Meena Natarajan, whose personal backgrounds are rooted in both Indian and American cultures, Pangea has evolved from being a group that began presenting imaginative interpretations of plays and adaptations of other literary forms to a stunningly experimental one that successfully integrates various talents across cultural boundaries for innovative new work that reflects the post-9/11, post-Katrina reality – something most theaters have barely begun to acknowledge.

But it has been a struggle. There are no templates in the library or the files of a foundation to describe the journey Pangea has been pioneering. Nonetheless, as Mukherjee's former teacher, Athol Fugard, said: If you're saying no to something, you've got to say yes to something else.

Responding to the Times We Live In

Mukherjee and Natarajan, therefore, envisioned Pangea as a forum, in Mukherjee's words, "to bring people of different backgrounds and ethnicities together through the work. To dialogue together. How do we respond to the times we live in?"

Because of the level of Pangea's tenacity and commitment to such a simple but profound idea, even state legislators came to see their work with the Hmong community. They have also hosted guest artist performances, like "Catalpa" by Dublin's Donal O'Kelly. In addition, they regularly present community events like the "Global Indigenous Summit: A Dialogue on Land, State and Empire," a panel dialogue with local and international activist leaders in February 2006, and post-performance conversations like last fall's "Balance and Bias: Framing Productive Questions on the Middle East" and "The War on Terror: from Israel-Palestine to Iraq and Guantanamo: Victims, Victors and the Question of Balance." Pangea received a Special Recognition Award from the Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights in 2005, honoring its work to promote human rights through the arts, and Dipankar Mukherjee has received a Bush Foundation Leadership Fellowship to study methodologies of peace and nonviolent negotiations in South Africa, India and Switzerland. The fellowship program aims to help individuals at midcareer prepare for greater leadership responsibilities and enhanced contributions to their communities.

"Entrances and Exits" April 2006. Photo by Ann Marsden

In addition to these achievements, Pangea arguably draws the most ethnically diverse audience in the upper Midwest. This is notable because some troupes that focus on a particular community are criticized for either attracting only the people of the given group, hence, preaching to the choir, or attracting more white people than minorities. Granted, the final Saturday night performance on Natarajan's newest text collaboration, the fascinating "Entrances and Exits," with its superb multi-ethnic cast, was attended a mostly white audience. And frankly, there's nothing wrong with that. But if you caught their "Patriot Acts" and "Cactus in the Desert" earlier this year, it was astonishingly mixed in its ethno-racial composition.

Pangea has steadily increased outreach to other communities through an approach that blends good will, hard work and rich artistry with genuine interest in the deeper concerns of communities who haven't had much of a place at the table.

But, Mukherjee warns, "It takes time." He elaborates:

In order for a space to be called a neighborhood, you connect with people around you. And in order to build a relationship, you go deeper and, even with a stranger, you give it a period of time. And then if we want others to be interested in what our lives are about, we have to be interested in what others' lives are about.

Starting from the Center of Your Soul

Mukherjee maintains that

the metaphor of creating communities starts from the center of your own soul. Your desire to be connected, not to be lonely. Your desire to be part of a larger cosmology. And your desire to stand when somebody else needs support, so that when you need support, they are there.

This outreach to a broader community has always been integral to Pangea. Pre-9/11, the work reflected that in a standard multicultural way. The first production in 1996 was Natarajan's adaptation of a classic epic, "Conference of the Birds," which maps out the journey of the human spirit in its quest for truth. She recalls, "I read many translations and then adapted them and also worked with an Iranian from the University of Minnesota to help me with some of the subtler translations from Farsi to English."

Luu Pham in "Conference of the Birds." Photo by Charissa Uemur

Two years later, more contemporary issues were aired in U Sam Ouer's poems about the killing fields of Cambodia, entitled "Freedom Songs." Natarajan notes,

We invited a number of artists – both actors like Luu Pham and Barbara Ryan and artists like Susana Di Palma and Seitu Jones. They made these wooden lynching kites which depicted the suffering of the past but which were also symbols of freedom. Susana, who is such a wonderful innovator, used the kites as a starting point for a dance about freedom. U Sam, who lives in Minneapolis, also sang his poetry in Khmer. "Freedom Songs" was the beginning of point for projects that were about collaboration and some of our work with the Voices of Exile series.

In 1999, "Bearing Witness," written by Luu Pham and Natarajan, was produced in the latter's words

immediately after Kosovo, so it's a very dark piece. The play is set in the future. Two characters, Ahn (which means "peace" in Vietnamese) and Asle (which means "truth" in Turkish) appear searching for meaning. A guide appears who has them meet women and children affected by war, including a poet who is seeking to remember the names of the people of his bombed-out city and a general. They finally try to make sense of the reality of war. The murals on the walls were painted by a young Argentinean-American muralist – paintings of pregnant women, soldiers whose hands turn into rifles, absolutely brilliant.

Obviously, even at the end of the century Pangea was not approaching theater differently from most community and professional theaters, or even from other minority-centered theaters. However, the artists didn't pat themselves on the back for these unique theatrical efforts. They would always check themselves to make sure they were addressing current needs and concerns. Complacency doesn't seem to be a word in their vocabulary.

After 9/11: What Is Needed?

Mukherjee says,

Pangea's contextualization of work is really the time that we live in. The space that we inhabit. And walking our talk. And what needs to be done to impact the time and space that we live in. Just to give you a context beyond the present season. We had a whole season planned in 2000 for the following year. Our whole season was planned already. But when Sept. 11 happened, our individual lives just changed. For people who looked like me, their lives were just not the same. So when we came back to the drawing board about the next season, we just – with any integrity – could not get back to just doing our regular season. And our regular season is pretty political. But we just had to clear that whole table and say, you know, "What is needed?"

Alberto Panelli and Amirali Raissnia in "Osiris." Photo by Marc Norberg

So Mukherjee reflected once again on his teacher:

Athol Fugard used to say that racism and apartheid isn't happening between De Klerk and Mandela. It is happening between you and me right now. This six-inch difference that we have between us is the presence or the absence of community. Is the presence or the absence of apartheid. Is the presence or absence of solidarity. I have come to the stage now, personally and as an artist, that I am not expecting zilch from politicians. We are our media. We are our leaders. We are our community. Because how long should we just sit back and watch them? And then agree or disagree in our own important way about how to create community. So therefore, our community stems from political consciousness. Then it works through literature because that's what we do.

For instance, when (Patrick) Buchanan ran for President, they needed a new targeted enemy. In the last Presidential election, the immigrant was the targeted enemy. So we connected with Minnesota Advocates of Human Rights and created this project called Building Immigrant Awareness and Support (BIAS). We did this play with over 24 people from the community. We engaged in the conversation with immigrant politics. When we did it with a Native American audience, the whole conversation just shifted. Who is an immigrant when you're doing something on Native soil? How politics shift, depending on the context of the community. The context of the community is everything.

Then we connected with the Nigerian community with Chinua Achebe's "No Longer at Ease." Then we connected with the Greek community when we did Sophocles' "Ajax." So all the community relationships have happened through work and that's how our relationships have been built.

Tammy Anderson in" I Don’t Wanna Play House," part of the Indigenous Voices series. Photo provided by the artist

Mukherjee has concluded that "community relationships cannot be gotten on a project basis. There has to be a deeper relationship." For instance, the annual Un-Thanksgiving event and a Native American theater program. Juanita Espinosa, executive director of the Native Arts Circle, says Pangea is

truly the only theater in town that has ever approached us to create a mutual agenda. They have a very strong approach to their development of stories and how they are told. They (Dipankar and Meena) are from the East and we from the West, and yet as indigenous peoples, we have a similar commitment to how we tell our stories. Western thought says that the story carries us to these places through a select process. Whereas, we say that you are a participant in the story and you make it come to life in how you react and believe in its message.

Breaking Structural Ground

However, another remarkable component is not just the success of bringing divergent communities together, it's also in the artistry itself. And in this area, Pangea is pioneering as well. They're not just breaking ground thematically, but structurally as well. Or some might say "anti-structurally." After all, shouldn't we question the structured forms through which we have been taught to view art? Might they not be a subliminal part of what keeps intact the fixed ways of thinking within the apolitical masses at large, as well as the political right and even the political left, which is often assumed to be open-minded?

But "Cactus in the Desert" and "Patriot Act" brought together exceptional artists – dancers, ritualists, comedians, actors, spoken word artists, musicians, multimedia artists – to collaborate quasi-improvisationally on loose-knit themes of oppression, identity and cultural exclusion. There were rehearsals and a few performances. The results were wonderfully strange and qualify as triumphs of individual artists examining their own ego boundaries as they strove to coalesce with one another in a coherent artistic whole. Moreover, these two productions were also attended by large was audiences that were amazingly diverse in ethnicity and age. In addition, the big turnout occurred not on the weekend, but early in the week, Monday through Wednesday nights – outside the way most people structure their theatergoing time. Hence, not only was the concept of what we expected to see on stage being reconfigured, but so was the audience itself.

Bridges gathering, February 2003. Photo by Meena Natarajan

These two performance works fell under the rubric of the Bridges program: passageways across art forms, cultures, aesthetics, borders and traditions. Bridges curator J. Otis Powell asserts "a goal of this program is to facilitate a process that fosters and encourages artists to achieve an 'authenticity of being' in the progression of their art. This authenticity of being is essential to new ways of telling."

Now, in its fourth year, another luminous Pangea series, Voices of Exile, focuses on artistic expression and experience of displaced communities, examining and deconstructing their struggles, adjustments and quests for self-determination.

Complications: Vendettas, Culture Wars and Sex Hysteria

But don't think Pangea hasn't hit snags. They've yet to raise funds for an Arab-American project. Natarajan laments:

Some individuals from the Indian community pulled their support after we worked on a panel and an exhibition that concerned the genocide of members of the Muslim community in Gujarat. But I think they are coming back slowly. Communities are fragmented along religious and communal lines.

This, of course, points to a core complexity of the constant flow of immigrants into any country: They often bring with them rivalries, conflicts and vendettas from their countries or regions of origin.

But even more challenging than financial breakdowns sprung from stateside ethnic divisions is reduction of public funding to the arts here in the U.S. Natarajan says,

Pangea, like all theaters, has been affected, especially in terms of individual funding. Our individual funding went down considerably after 9/11. One of our strategies has been to begin an annual benefit the following year and we have slowly built up our individual funding again, but nowhere to what it was originally. We have had to actively look outside the Twin Cities as well. The foundations that have funded us locally have continued funding us at their same level or slightly lower and in a couple of cases have gone up in the last year. We have also looked for national funding and that came in at the right time for larger projects of wider scope.

The ongoing Culture War that right-wing Republicans and conservative Democrats have waged against artists who don't toe the political line generated another blow to theater funding. The National Endowment for the Arts has been under fire for almost two decades because of this mentality.

In Minnesota, there's an added rub, given that Republican Governor Tim Pawlenty and Republicans in the state legislature have pressed for police officers to become immigration officers, even though they're not trained for it. Moreover, Pawlenty exploited a gruesome, tragic case wherein a young white woman was raped and murdered near the North Dakota border. Long before her body was found, a Hispanic ex-convict child molester was charged on circumstantial evidence and what many feel was hearsay and hysteria. However, it served Pawlenty and the Christian right wing of the Minnesota Republican Party to rev up bogeyman fears of immigrants and sex hysteria for political gain. And it also deflected concerns about the burgeoning Jesus Camp controversy in North Dakota that holds immigrants and other minorities as innately inferior to white primacy. Even liberal Fargo, North Dakota, talk-show host Ed Schultz has shied away from addressing these concerns.

All this being said, Pangea, as Mukherjee has stated, will not let funding worries and intimidation devolve into neuroses and fixation. Because he and Natarajan have their thumbs on the collective pulse, they've tapped into issues the public wants to learn about and will pay to see. As the most recent Oscar nominations showed us, there's public thirst for substance beyond what the corporate media offers.

Ismail Khalidi in "Truth Serum Blues," October 2005. Photo by Marc Norberg

In 2005, a held-over, sold-out, standing-room-only run of "Truth Serum Blues," a solo performance by Ismail Khalidi, which he co-wrote with Bassam Jarbawi, audaciously reflected the humiliation and degradation of Muslim men who are U. S. citizens, spirited away to secret compounds in the War on Terror. On its way to play in other parts of the country, the Mukherjee-directed piece is an unflinching, searing account of a "regular guy" targeted by Homeland Security in a turn one would expect from a totalitarian regime. Not in a Democracy.

Khalidi's performance is magnificent and penetrating. Courageous in the way it plumbs the dark night of the soul. Although about 20 minutes could be trimmed and one still wants the piece to reveal something of the homoeroticism implicit in white male domination of nonwhite males, it is still a great work.

But that said, when Mukherjee directed an adaptation of Ovid's "Metamorphoses" a few years ago, in one section he shaped a marvelous homoerotic dynamic through movement and phobias surrounding touch to convey the mystery of desire and of myth.

Myth can be a force for good or ill. Myth is the prism through which different people can derive common values. It's the mythic that Pangea ultimately draws from. The mythic is what connects all of us. And if you can find a way to make that connection evident to a large audience, you've created a new vocabulary of imagery and communication that can reach across multiple divisions. And Pangea seems to be forging ahead toward such new ways of telling stories. They have a unique and multifaceted way of getting us all on the same page.

John Townsend is a Minneapolis writer, KFAI radio performing-arts commentator and former president of Minnesota Association of Community Theatres. He has written for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Lavender Magazine and the Ruminator Review.

To find out more about Pangea World Theater, visit its Web site at http://www.pangeaworldtheater.org.

Original CAN/API publication: May 2006