‘Undesirable Elements’ combines varied backgrounds

You have to wonder what common ground possibly could exist between a graduate student from Brazil and a Nepali woman raised in America. Or between a Chicano working as a student services coordinator at UW–Madison and the ninth cousin of George W. Bush? Surely their backgrounds and experiences are so diametrically opposed that they would have little to say to one another, should they ever meet in the first place.

Ping Chong, internationally renowned artist-in-residence at the university, plans to deconstruct such an easy, superficial assumption, bit by hoary bit.

His vehicle will be “Undesirable Elements,” a performance piece to be presented at UW–Madison March 22-23. The work brings to the theatrical table a critical but frequently ignored or disbelieved truth about the human experience: “Although we may not have the same struggles, we all struggle,” says David Douglas Smith, the “vanilla other” in “Undesirable Elements” and the Bush relation.

The presentation brings together six non-actors from divergent backgrounds and experiences. Chong has collaborated with each participant to create a script, highlighting personal and history telling points about social and/or political issues facing America.

The UW–Madison version will be the 17th incarnation of “Undesirable Elements,” which is different every time Chong presents it, due to the different participants. At the audition interviews held last semester, Chong looked for stories “having interesting things to say about cultural collisions, and the cultural assumptions people make about each other,” he says. “For example, if you’re from Brazil, you must wear a thong, right?”

Graduate student Claudia Tatinge Nascimento, who had been brought up in Brazil, has limited experience with thongs. However, while attending high school in Washington, D.C., she became intimately acquainted with the American view of fashion as shorthand for social status.

“My first day of American high school was like a fashion show: makeup, hairdo, fashionable clothes. It’s not hard to see which kids are poor and which are better-off. In Brazil, kids wear uniforms to school,” which plays down class differences, she says.

Indeed, Chong says the Madison version will take a special look at the way physical appearances and characteristics translate into often-erroneous assumptions about class.

For example, Smith recalls an incident when his family moved from Texas to Connecticut. In his new school, he says, “I found myself in the back of the class with the ‘slower kids.’ Because of my Texas accent, the Yankee teacher assumed I was slow.”

An accent also affects Tatinge Nascimento’s experiences. “It doesn’t matter that I was born in Los Angeles and have an American passport. The fact that I have an accent always makes me come across as a foreigner in this country,” Tatinge Nascimento observes.

Francisco Castelan, a services coordinator in the School of Education, says that hearing others’ histories and experiences “confirm the beauty in our differences.” At the same time, he says, working on the production has reaffirmed important aspects of his own self.

“Mainstream society often ignores my Chicano experience,” he says. “This rare opportunity is validating my heritage.”

Even the most casual observer quickly gets the picture: Members of one societal segment view another, at least initially, as stereotypes. And virtually all groups, even those in the mainstream, are both the viewers and the viewed, the assumers and the assumed-about.

That fact really starts to come together for the participants when they are exposed to one another’s scripts for the first time.

“The similarities you catch among our lives, from histories to personality traits to family, was amazing,” says Pabitra Benjamin, a UW–Madison sophomore raised in Nepal by a Nepali mother and American father. “It was interesting to go through the script the first time and be able to relate to each other so much.”

Says Smith, “Being gay is not that different from being some other kind of ‘other.’ What resonates for me is the common denominator of ‘otherness.'”

Kirsten Moore, stage manager for the presentation and a senior majoring in theatre and drama, looks upon all of this from the vantage point of being an integral part of the performances but not a direct participant.

“I have always considered myself a well-rounded, accepting person. But I realize now that being accepting doesn’t necessarily mean understanding what you accept,” Moore says. “Working on ‘Undesirable Elements’ has held my sheltered perspective out in front of me – passive acceptance is no different than ignorance. In order to become truly well-rounded you have to embrace others’ stories, let them actively impact you, not just pass over you.”

This is precisely Chong’s intent, one he has put into play everywhere from Holland to Japan. He says that the presentation’s setting influences the event as much as participants factor into the finished product. For example, the next stop for “Undesirable Elements” will be Charleston, S.C.

“I expect the location there will have a much greater impact on the presentation than Madison is having on this one,” he says. “It will be interesting to see how social and class issues play themselves out in the city where the American Civil War actually started.”

Tatinge Nascimento notes that Chong, who has woven the presentation together from each individual “element,” himself figures as an important if invisible participant. “What you’ll see in the piece are echoes of his own individual concerns, beliefs and experiences with difference,” she says. “To stage a story is to translate it to the audience, and all translations are never completely faithful to the original. But that’s the beauty of relationships: to know you’ll never fully understand and that you’ll never be fully known, but that the experience of being with another human makes these doomed attempts worth it.”

“Undesirable Elements” will be presented Thursday, March 22, and Friday, March 23, at 7:30 p.m. in the Margaret H’Doubler Performance Space in Lathrop Hall. Tickets, $8 general and $5 UW–Madison students, are available at the Wisconsin Union Theater, (608) 262-2201. For information about the presentation, or about Ping Chong’s residency through the UW–Madison Arts Institute, contact Ken Chraca, (608) 263-4086, kjchraca@facstaff.wisc.edu.