Project Titles: Under Western Eyes
Recipient Organization: Thick Description
Lead Artist: Francis Wong
Genre and Date Awarded: Performing Arts, July 1998
Premiered: December 5, 1999

Jazz composer Francis Wong collaborated with theatre ensemble Thick Description to create an original score for Karen Amano’s Asian American adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes. The play’s world premiere coincided with the December 1999 opening of Thick Description’s 85-seat theater, the Thick House, on Potrero Hill in San Francisco. The musical score took the form of recorded music by Wong’s ensemble Gathering of Ancestors as well as pre-show and intermission music.

Amano’s Under Western Eyes moved Conrad’s story from tsarist Russia and democratic Geneva to New York and San Francisco, in a future time of unrest, characterized by the temporary suspension of the civil rights of Asian Americans. In Amano’s play, a right-wing Asian American politician is assassinated, to the approval of many progressive activists. Conrad’s Razumov becomes the philosophy graduate student Razuo, thrust into the action when the assassin, a fellow student named Victor Honda, takes refuge in his apartment. Fearing the loss of his university fellowship, Razuo turns him into the police, leading to the Honda’s death. Mistaking Razuo for Honda’s accomplice, the radical activist community welcomes him into the fold and gives him a sense of belonging he has never known before. Razuo must decide which identity to assume and who he really is, FBI informant or comrade-in-arms.

Thick Description sought a sound for Under Western Eyes that was American but had a relationship to Asian cultures and reflected a sense of history and political and cultural strife. Francis Wong’s jazz was the perfect fit. Wong wrote, “I have been engaged in the cultural synthesis that is the process of Asian American identity for the past 23 years, beginning with my entrance into political activism in the 1970s…. Out of this experience I began a career as a jazz musician and composer….” At the project’s conclusion Wong wrote that the most meaningful aspect of the collaboration was being able to create music “…that represents the period of time that I came of age as a socially conscious Asian American.”

In keeping with Thick Description’s ensemble method, Wong was brought into the project as more than a composer—participating fully in the play development process. Wong wrote at the project’s conclusion:

Rather than writing the score only after the script was done, I created a series of works based on the scenario/synopsis and submitted them to the creative team. These works helped shape the final script in terms of inspiration and structure but also in terms of the eventual theater direction.

Composer Francis Wong was a co-founder of Asian Improv aRts in 1987, a production and recording company dedicated to promoting the work of Asian American jazz musicians. He had extensive prior experience with collaboration, working with the San Francisco Mime Troupe, Asian American Dance Performances, poet and playwright Genny Lim, filmmaker Steven Okazaki, and others.

Thick Description is run by the ensemble Karen Amano, Tony Kelly, and Rick Martin. Among them they share the duties of a traditional artistic director, producing original adaptations of old plays and visionary new theater works. They seek to combine the technical advances of visual theater with detailed attention to text and acting. Thick Description’s goal is to define a truly American dramaturgy; and to that end all of its productions are cast multi-racially.

Amano, Kelly, Martin, and David Yezzi founded the company in New York in 1988 and it moved to San Francisco in 1989. The name comes from anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s The Interpretation of Cultures. Originally coined by Gilbert Ryle, the term refers to the inevitable interpretive quality of an anthropologist’s thorough description of any event, or, for that matter, of any person’s comprehension of any event. “For us theater is our thick description of the world around us.” Thick Description has described that world through production of works by Hang Ong, Octavio Solis, Suzan-Lori Parks, Sung J. Rno, Erik Ehn, Thomas Disch, and others.

LEAD ARTIST

Francis Wong

RESUME HIGHLIGHTS

Music Ensembles

• Founder, Ming Trio
• Founder, Desert Flower Ensemble (ten-member ensemble)

Major Performances

• San Francisco, Seattle, Vancouver, Denver, Phoenix, Chicago, Minneapolis, New York, El Paso, Los Angeles, San Diego, Tijuana, Hong Kong, Berlin, Freiburg, Verona

Major Collaborations

• Legends and Legacies (1996), with poet Lawson Inada
• La Chine Africaine (1994) with poet Genny Lim
• Offshore (1993) with the San Francisco Mime Troupe

Film

• San Francisco Chinatown, Felicia Lowe, Director
• American Sons, Steve Okazaki, Director
• Notes on a Scale, Kenn Kashima, Director

Awards

• New Resident Artist, Meet the Composer (2000-03)
• Next Generation Leader, Rockefeller Foundation (2000-01)
• California Arts Council Touring Roster (1996-98)
• Recipient, California Arts Council Artist in Communities Grants (1992-95; 1996-98)
• “Outstanding Local Discovery” (“GOLDIE”) Award, San Francisco Bay Guardian (1996)

Commissions

• Take Me to the Tenderloin, Now!, Pearl Ubungen Dancers and Musicians (1997)
• Rice: The Ultimate Expression of Life, Asian American Dance Performances (1998)

Teaching

• Lecturer, San Francisco State University Music Department (1996- )
• Lecturer, American Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz (1996- )

Discography

As a Leader

• The Lament of Absalom, with Kavee and Roper, Asian Improv (1998)
• Devotee, Asian Improv (1997)
• Pilgrimage, Music & Arts (1997)
• Duets, with Elliot Humberto Kavee, Asian Improv (1996)
• Urban Reception, South Port (1996)
• Chicago Time Code, Asian Improv (1995)
• Ming, Asian Improv (1995)
• Great Wall, Asian Improv (1993)

As a Sideman

• Elegy for Sarajevo, Glenn Horiuchi, Asian Improv (1998)
• Dew Drop, Glenn Horiuchi, Asian Improv (1998)
• Winds Shifting, Jeff Chan, Asian Improv (1998)
• Mercy, Glenn Horiuchi, Music & Arts (1997)
• Island: Immigrant Suite, Jon Jang, Soul Note (1996)
• Bamboo Women, Pearl Ubungen Dancers and Musicians, PUDM (1996)
• Calling is it and now, Glenn Horiuchi (1995)
• Kenzo’s Vision, Glenn Horiuchi, Asian Improv (1995)
• Underground Railroad to my Heart, Fred Ho, Soul Note (1994)
• Arkaeology, Genny Lim, Asian Improv (1993)
• Tiananmen!, Jon Jang, Soul Note (Italy) (1993)
• Self-Defense!, Jon Jang, Soul Note (Italy) (1992)
• Oxnard Beet, Glenn Horiuchi, Soul Note (Italy) (1992)
• Never Give Up!, Jon Jang, Asian Improv (1990)
• President’s Breakfast, President’s Breakfast, DiscLexia (1989)
• Live in San Jose, Eddie Gale, Rooftop (1988)
• Next Step, Glenn Horiuchi, Asian Improv (1988)
• The Ballad or the Bullet?, Jon Jang, Asian Improv (1987)
• Bamboo that Snaps Back, Fred Ho, Atlantic/Finnadar (1985)
• Are You Chinese or Charlie Chan?, Jon Jang, RPM Records (1984)

OTHER COLLABORATING ARTISTS

Karen Amano

Thick Description founding member Karen Amano is a writer, director, actor, and dramaturg. She was Artistic Director of the Asian American Theater Company and Dramaturgy Associate at Berkeley Repertory Theatre. Her stage adaptations include: Yuri Olesha’s short story, “Love,” (Ceres Gallery, New York); Orestes (Noh Space, San Francisco); King Lear (Brava! Studio, San Francisco); Timon of Athens (Noh Space, San Francisco); Elektra (Noh Space, San Francisco), all for Thick Description. Other credits include: The Tempest for the San Francisco Shakespeare Festival’s school tour, and Troilus and Cressida for the California Shakespeare Festival’s apprentice production.

For Asian American Theater Company, Amano directed the world premiere of Sung J. Rno’s Gravity Falls from Trees, and her production of S.A.M. I Am was honored with the 1996 Media Access Award for Theater from the Governor’s Commission on the Employment of Disabled Persons. For Berkeley Repertory Theater, she assisted director Sharon Ott on Anna Deavere Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, and she was dramaturg for Tony Kushner’s Slavs!, Philip Kan Gotanda’s The Ballad of Yachioyo, and Deborah Rogin’s The Woman Warrior. As an actor and/or dramaturg, she has participated in all of Thick Description’s productions, including Octavio Solis’s Santos & Santos, Han Ong’s Bachelor Rat, Erik Ehn’s Wieland, and Oliver Mayer’s Blade to the Heat.