|
|
ARTICLES:
Arts & Culture
High
Yellow "Chink" By Hemmy W. So December 2003/January 2004 Visit Kate Rigg's Web site at www.katerigg.com “Birth of aNasian” begins with a familiar anecdote prompted by the ever-dreaded question, “So, what are you?” Delightfully intrigued by the sultry voice recounting a story marked by striking sarcasm, the audience eagerly awaits her entrance onstage. The coolness ringing in her timbre, the intelligence marking her dialogue, the social commentary infiltrating her personal recollection—these elements suggest the introduction of a sassy modern woman ready to fulminate. But when she makes her first appearance, she fails to fit the picture the audience has painted in its collective head—this woman is frantically running around the stage dressed in a gown stolen from the closet of Glenda the Good Witch, giggling and panting with eyes wide open, a three year-old in a twenty-nine year-old’s body. This opening sequence clearly expresses the overarching theme of Kate Rigg’s work, that society’s assumptions about people frequently fail to render truth. “Birth of aNasian” relays this message differently than Rigg’s other, more popular show, “Kate’s Chink-o-Rama.” Unlike “Chink-o-Rama”, a fast-paced six-person amalgam of song parody, comedic skits and fly-girl dance fever, “Birth of aNasian” is a two-woman show whose slower pace displays more introspection and focus. “It’s more risky [than “Chink-o-Rama”] because it’s not funny. It’s more theatrical, more personal,” Rigg explained. Rigg’s
personal experiences have clearly influenced and inspired her original
work, which also includes spoken word and musical endeavors by Slanty
Eyed Mama, a duo she completes with friend and neo-violinist Lyris
Hung. “Australia is whitest freakin’ country ever, and the minority is Asians,” explained Rigg. “If I were there, I would be ‘the first Asian ever’ to do this or that...If I were to go to [the National Institute of Dramatic Arts] and get good classical training, what the hell? Every time I get a role, I’d be ‘the first Asian ever.’” Hoping to escape the color-coding that stifled her in Australia, Rigg moved to New York City, a place that offered a fighting chance of performing in public theater productions without being an anomaly by virtue of her ethnic background. But rather than fade, Rigg’s interest in identity issues increased. Her experiences in Canada, Australia and New York led her to seriously contemplate how society shaped people’s identities through representations in mass media. As acting is an exercise in representations, Rigg used her talents to examine and deconstruct what mass media had promulgated. The result was “Kate’s Chink-o-Rama”. The creative process behind “Chink-o-Rama” began in 2000, two years after Rigg graduated from The Julliard School. The ear-popping title pays homage to John Leguizamo’s “Spic-o-rama,” but also neatly sums up the show’s personal and political messages. That is, “chink” is a semantic manifestation of the racist notion that all Asians are the same. Calling someone “chink” is an act of dehumanization because the speaker summarizes a human being with one evil word, irrespective of that person’s race, ethnicity or personal background. “It’s called ‘Chink-o-Rama’ because ‘chink’ is about racism and that’s the racism leveled at me. I’m a person of mixed race, but I’m called a ‘chink.’ … I’m not called ‘honky’ because I don’t look white, I look Asian,” Rigg explained. “So if someone calls me a chink, that’s their pick. Because guess what, I’m not Chinese, I’m not even all Asian. When you call me that, I don’t even know what that means. That’s why it’s called “Kate’s Chink-o-Rama.” Rigg doesn’t limit her semantic subversion to the title of the show, however. The whole performance is rife with word play, and each dancer in the show has a chink nickname. High Yellow Chink is a quarter Korean, and Afro Chink is half black and half Asian (by pure ironic coincidence, there is no Chink Chink). Rigg’s sidekick in “Chink-o-Rama,” played by David Jung, bears the moniker “MC Chinkdaddy.” True to the playful and satiric nature of the show, MC Chinkdaddy dons a full black Afro wig and old-school Run D.M.C.-style chains and medallions. Rigg wanted his image to controvert Asian male emasculation in media, an Asian-American cultural wound that has only recently started to heal. But the meat and potatoes of “Chink-o-Rama” lie in hilarious song parodies performed by Rigg and her cast. Rigg chose iconic songs for the project, ones that have become staples of American pop culture. The tunes are familiar, but the lyrics are not: (Sung to Vanilla Ice’s “Ice, Ice Baby.”) Who
do you see when you pay for your laundry? Rigg proudly admitted her usurpation of these works from the cultural mainstream: “It’s like I’m cutting out the face of the white person singing the song and sticking an Asian face in it, and it’s asserting the place of Asian-Americans in pop culture. What would it be like if I sang ‘Funkytown?’ What would it be like if we did ‘Devil Goes Down to Georgia?’ The subliminal message of the movement is that there’s no reason why an Asian person can’t be part of disco or rock ‘n’ roll.” Despite a strong association and understanding of the Asian-American—indeed, the titles “Chink-o-Rama” and “Birth of aNasian” alone seem to betray these feelings—Rigg insisted that her work speaks more about self-identification. “Birth of aNasian,” which Rigg created after “Chink-o-Rama,” more successfully expresses this theme through original songs, spoken word pieces and character monologues. In portraying different characters, Rigg took her inspiration from Whoopi Goldberg’s 1984 Broadway show of character sketches. “She did a valley girl character, and she did an Asian character, and a couple of other things. The valley girl character especially, was to me all about she was black, she was a black woman, and she’s doing this valley girl which we think of a white voice. And she didn’t have to say anything about it, it was just a radical thing to see that character and hear that voice, and her doing it so well was basically just a ‘Fuck you why can’t I talk like this, if I grew up in California, why do I have to talk like, yo whassup?’ She doesn’t have to. The concept is that what’s inside you, what your life or your experience is, is different from what people might assign to you,” Rigg said. But
Rigg admitted that she became a character comedian in part because
of her Eurasian background. She explained that people of mixed race
are too often questioned on who and what they are; as a result,
they wonder what face they will present to the world. A character
comedian can easily make that choice, transforming herself with
a few strokes of the makeup brush. Rigg’s fascination with the subversion of racial representations is an analog to her strong appreciation of drag shows. Rigg enjoys the simple act of a man dressing up as a woman because it is something society does not expect. For her, that experience is real. It also bears a close resemblance to being biracial—like a mixed race person, a drag queen has more than one channel of identification. These similarities may have fostered the large queer following that Rigg has attracted (she hosted the Gay Pride Rally this year), but rather than ruminate on the reasons why, she has embraced the community. Though she is not a lesbian, Rigg explained that she identified with gays and lesbians because they suffer from marginalization, an affliction she also experienced as a person of mixed race. Sometimes lost in the fury of Rigg’s powerful demands for self-definition is that the corollary to self-definition is acceptance. Rigg certainly understands this on a personal level. “Whatever people say they are, I just accept it,” Rigg remarked. “If a big gay guy tells me he’s straight, I’m like, all right, he’s straight. You know what I mean? Because that’s who he is, that’s who he feels like, that’s what he is...The fact that that’s who he defines himself as, that’s fine. Because we as biracial people have to see and understand that choice.” Rigg’s mission to make self-definition and acceptance the norm corresponds to the further pursuit of her acting career. She plans to continue her tour of colleges and universities with “Kate’s Chink-o-Rama,” “Birth of aNasian,” and Slanty Eyed Mama. Her main crusade right now, however, is to create a character on television whose biracial or multiracial background is open, accepted and normal. “My goal as a mixed race person is humanitarian—a world vision that it doesn’t matter what race, gender, sexuality, color you are. Everyone should have a home and feel like that they have a home. Nobody should feel like an alien and that everyone is in on a big secret and they’re not.” Looking to the next horizon in Hollywood, Kate Rigg steps closer to her goal. Ironic that she’ll be using mass media to attain her world vision? Hardly. So far, she’s proven that wielding society’s sword against it can be mighty powerful. About
the Author
|
Articles
|
|