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August 06, 2005

Asians in the Arts -- Convention Report

Yesterday I was on a panel at the McCormick Center in Chicago on Asians in the Arts. It was well enough attended, with about fifty people in the audience, business people who secretly want to be artists. Great co-panelists and a good discussion; we covered a lot of useful ground. But at the same time, I found the entire experience a little frustrating. For one thing, fifty people isn't so many, in the context of the entire convention. Clearly, there's still a lot of resistance in the Asian-American community to the arts, both in creating art and in attending/enjoying artistic events. And worse, there was perhaps one South Asian in the entire audience -- we're the worst of the bunch.

I was at another such event recently, and the panelists agreed that it's tremendously frustrating, trying to build a South Asian audience -- whether you're working with literature, theatre, dance, whatever. It's bewildering too, since there is such a strong two thousand-year-old artistic tradition in Asia itself. But somehow, when the immigrants come to America, they have other concerns -- getting established, making new lives for themselves. Does art get left behind when they cross that ocean?

When I was a little girl, I remember there was often traditional singing late at night, at the parties my parents went to. But that seems a different world. How do we persuade the older generation to come and participate in what we few South Asian-American artists are creating? I think the work we're doing is tremendously exciting -- how do we convince them of that?

(If you perceive a little bit of anxiety in this post about our upcoming Chicago Kriti festival and audience attendance, you probably aren't wrong. We have close to a hundred people pre-registered, and I'm not actually all that worried at this point about getting enough audience to have a successful festival; I'm quite sure we will. But I still fret about whether we're actually going to manage to reach all of the people who *would* enjoy the festival if they only knew about it, and were willing to come into the city to experience it, especially of the older generations.)

Posted by Mary Anne Mohanraj at August 6, 2005 08:35 AM

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