Asian Theatre

Edited and compiled by: Richard Gough Translated by: Richard Fowler with the exception of'Nostalgia' (pp. 165-170) translated by: Katie Dvmoke All articles not attributed to a particular author are collaborations berween Eugenio Barba and Nicola Savarese. First published ...

DESCRIPTION
Transnational Chinese Theatres is the first systematic study of networks of performance collaboration in the contemporary Chinese-speaking world and of their interactions with the artistic communities of the wider East Asian region. It investigates the aesthetics and politics of collaboration to propose a new transnational model for the analysis of Sinophone theatre cultures and to foreground the mobility and relationality of intercultural performance in East Asia. The research draws on extensive fieldwork, interviews with practitioners, and direct observation of performances, rehearsals, and festivals in Asia and Europe. It offers provocative close readings and discourse analysis of an extensive corpus of hitherto untapped sources, including unreleased video materials and unpublished scripts, production notes, and archival documentation.

CONTENTS
1. Introduction: A Tale of Multiple Cities—Setting the Stage for Transnational Chinese Theatres
2. Rhizomes, Radicants, and Journeys: Transnational Chinese Theatres as Networks of Intercultural Collaboration
3. Hong Kong Transfers: Transmedial Travels in the Theatre of Relations
4. Performing the 38th Parallel Across the Taiwan Strait: Territorial Divides and Theatrical Dialogues in East Asia
5. Trans-Asian Spectropoetics: Conjuring War and Violence on the Haunted Stage of History
6. Epilogue: Out of Asia—Transnational Chinese Theatres’ Global Itineraries

One of the most important figures in the post-independence theatre movement in Bengal is Utpal Dutt (1929-1993). Dutt started his career with the English theatre in Calcutta, India (now Kolkata). However, he soon took up the cause of the Communist movement in India and launched a theatre movement that was an outcry against what he called the 'petty-bourgeois' government. Dutt believed that theatre was the strongest tool for propaganda and felt the need to carry the message of the Communist revolution to the masses. His plays spoke allegorically about the injustice of the ruling classes against the masses. His shows were performed to packed houses in Calcutta and elsewhere. Besides the regular proscenium performances Dutt also used popular/folk forms like jatra and created plays meant for performance at street corners. These were attended by thousands of people, mainly from the working classes. The government was forced to take notice of this theatre movement that was gaining a widespread mass appeal and support. They jailed Dutt for a while in 1964-65 and tried disrupting performances of his plays time and again.
My paper would like to study the work of this playwright/actor/director especially during the mid-sixties when radical Communist politics was beginning to gain significant ground in Bengal. I would like to examine his concept of the 'revolutionary theatre' and the ideas that went behind its formulations. I would also like to study his role after the split in the Communist Party of India, towards the development of a leftist radical theatre in the absence of a central political organization. The difficult relationship that Dutt came to share with the various Communist parties in the state of Bengal and the variety of attitudes that they all had to the erstwhile Cultural Front of the Communist Party of India (CPI) is another area that I would like to explore as part of this paper.

Study of the Hispanic Conquest’s Dramas as well as the Moros y Cristianos’ fiesta in Spain, with special focus on the most important celebration nowadays performed in the city of Alcoy. We will describe the elements of the festivities and its theatrical features as well as the ideological motive regarding the battles between Muslims and Christians. From this background, the aim of the study will be to identify cultural trends in the formation of the Komedya in the Philippines and the moro-morista tradition, as a specific creation within the Asian environment.

Within the nō theatre repertoire, there exists a significant number of dramas concerning the nature and deeds of animals. Most of the nonhuman heroes are supernatural beings, the representative example might be the mythological lion shishi – the hero of the play
"Shakkyō" (The Stone Bridge) by an unknown author. While the shishi has some realistic counterpart in the body of an actual lion, some other beasts seem to be purely fantastic, the example might be the chimaera like a fearsome, creature called nue – the hero of the play "Nue" (Monster Nue) by Zeami (1363?-1443?). The author of the paper shall examine the anthrozoological discourse that exists within the nō theatre. A close look will be taken at the acting techniques (kata), costumes, masks and wigs used by the shite actors in the process of creating the animal heroes onstage. Part of the author’s insights into nō is his own performing activities and fieldwork conducted in cooperation with no actors and troupes, including Tessenkai Nō Theater.

Key words: nō theater, real animals, supernatural animals, anthrozoology, kata
論文概要
「能における実在のそして超自然の動物」
能において、自然や動物の行為を扱う曲目は非常に多く見られる。非人間のヒーロー達のほとんどは超自然的な存在であり、その代表的な例としては作者不詳の『石橋』の主人公である神話的な獅子が挙げられるだろう。獅子が実際のライオンの体を写実的に模倣している要素がある一方で、完全に空想上の動物のような、例えばキメラのような恐ろし
い姿の鵺 – 世阿弥(1363?-1443?) による『鵺』の主人公なども現れる。
筆者は能に見られる人類動物学的側面を調査する。特に役者の演ずる技術（型）やシテ方によって用いられる装束、能面、冠り物など、舞台上に動物のヒーロー達を創り出すプロセスに着目する。筆者の考察の一部は、実際に彼自身の上演活動や、能役者や銕仙会をはじめとする団体との協力による実地調査に基づいている。

キーワード：能、実在する動物、超自然的な動物、人類動物学、型

Organized as Vice President of the Association for Asian Performance. The AAP was founded in 1987 as a California Public Benefit Corporation. It is also an affiliate of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. (ATHE). The Asian Theatre Journal is the official scholarly publication of the organization and the Association newsletter is the principal internal means of communication.

The chapter takes an expansive approach to the notion of Trans-Asia to explore the potential of "trans-Asian theatricalities" to comprise intercultural contacts taking place both within and outside the confines of geopolitical Asia. It investigates the nexus of the trans-Asian and the transpacific along the Sino-Hispanophone geolinguistic axis through an analysis of the first production of a contemporary Chinese play in Latin America. The chapter presents a relational study of the Chinese and Peruvian performances of "The Crowd", a dramatization of the Chongqing armed fights of 1967/68 written by Shanghai-based author Nick Rongjun Yu and premiered at the Hong Kong Arts Festival in 2015 in the aftermath of the Umbrella Movement of 2014. The analysis of the transculturation of narratives and imageries of the Chinese Cultural Revolution takes into account both the realm of theatrical production and the performative reproduction of political behaviour in the appropriation of Maoist ideology in Peru.

This paper is introducing the conceptual, political and aesthetic paradigms relating to the emerging area of research, Women in Asian Theatre. This essay is the introduction to the Asian Theatre Journal special issue on Women in Asian theatre that I edited.

A MONOLOGUE AND MONO DRAMA: AN ALTERNATIVE APPROACH
FOR ISLAMIC PERFORMANCE
This debut paper is a part of research that ongoing titled "Islamic Theatre Performance." One of the issues is the ethic during a performance that may contrast to the Islamic disciplines and principles. The ethic here, including of business behind the stage, acting approach and the content of the performance itself. Islam is taking seriously towards the interaction between men and women that not mahram, either in acting or in the process to prepare the actress and actor to the stage. Therefore, this study will focus on the alternative acting and performance approach that may give a choice of both performers, production crew and audience of the production they prefer. One of the forms is a monologue and monodrama that only involved one person to appear on the stage. This paper will explain the scenario of the monologue and monodrama production in Malaysia, to understand the practices and reaction among the Muslim theatre society about this ethics matter.

This paper draws on scholarship in performance history, art history, cognitive humanities, and the anthropology of urbanization and markets to argue that theatrical conventions like “fourth wall” illusion and asides first developed in China’s Song-Yuan period and matured in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries under the special influence of new demands of city life, commerce, and print culture. As anthropologists argue that participation in markets requires temporary, imaginative suspension of other roles and identities, so suspension of disbelief in mimetic portrayals (as opposed to storytelling evocations) of fictional characters with fictional minds requires “leaving one’s identity at the theater door.” Song-Yuan Chinese theater, like Japanese Noh of the Muromachi and later periods, accomplished this in a mediated fashion by including star characters to focus on and “spectators’ representative” characters to identify with. Drawing inspiration from the protean, promiscuous space and punning humor of printed miscellanies and annotated vernacular fiction, the late Ming comedy Ge dai xiao 歌代嘯 (A song for a laugh) “flattens” the “asymmetric” (mediated) structure of the traditional Yuan form it takes for its model by stringing together a series of loosely related vignettes featuring buffoonish “side” characters in a generic town setting.

Le lkhon khol est une pratique théâtrale du Cambodge qui relève des arts de cour et qui, sous sa forme rituelle, est traditionnellement mise en scène dans un village des environs de Phnom Penh, dans le cadre de cultes aux esprits tutélaires d’un territoire délimité. Géré par des autorités locales (chef de la troupe et monastère bouddhique), le théâtre est également lié à une forme d’autorité supérieure (la cour royale jusqu’aux années 1970 puis le ministère de la Culture à partir des années 1980). La troupe et sa pratique du théâtre ont connu de nombreux changements au cours des xxe et xxie siècles qui, sans altérer le caractère rituel des représentations locales, ont engagé la population villageoise et les instances dirigeantes en lien avec cette troupe dans une dynamique de redéfinition du théâtre rural en tant que patrimoine culturel. Cet article propose de suivre les reconfigurations conceptuelles (religieuses, socioéconomiques et politiques) mise en place dans le cadre de cette pratique théâtrale localisée afin de discuter de l’articulation des différentes sphères territoriales, patrimoniales et d’autorité qui se superposent dans son exercice.
********** (English)**********
The lkhon khol is a Cambodian theatre that belongs to court arts and that is, in its ritual form, traditionally staged in a village in the surroundings of Phnom Penh, as part of the worship of tutelary spirits of a delimited territory. Managed by local authorities (troupe chief and Buddhist monastery), the theatre is also linked to a broader authority (the royal court until the 1970’s, then the ministry of Culture from the 1980’s onwards). The troupe and its practice of theatre have gone through many changes during the 20th and 21st centuries which, without altering the ritual character of local performances, engaged the rural population and administrative or religious authority figures related to this troupe in a dynamic of redefinition of rural theater as a cultural patrimony. This article offers to follow the conceptual reconfigurations (religious, socio-economical and political) encountered by this local theatre in order to discuss the articulation of territorial, patrimonial and authoritative spheres that infuse the theatre’s practice.

Asian directors leverage Shakespeare’s own propensity to undermine dominant ideologies of gender—notably through the Ophelia figure—in their effort to renew Asian performance traditions. How do Shakespeare and modern directors talk to each other across cultural and historical divides? How does Ophelia become “unbound” through supralinguistic structures of spectacle and music? With case studies of three Hamlet films: Haider (India, 2004), The King and the Clown (South Korea, 2005), and Prince of the Himalayas (Tibet, 2006), this article examines how Asian films negotiate with Asian cultural norms, ideas of Ophelia as an iconic victim, and the image of Hamlet as a brooding male intellectual. Outside their country of origin, these films attract audiences who are enthralled by the performance of the exotic, whether it’s Shakespearean or Asian motifs. Within their local market, the name brand of an editorialized Anglophone Shakespeare helps to boost their production value. Filmmakers see the co-presence of Shakespearean and Asian motifs as an asset, as “double kisses.” They use selective elements, such as conventionalized Bollywood dance and Chinese martial arts sequences, as common denominators and bonding agents between different periods and cultures.

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    Comment de nouvelles images d’Ophélie émergent-elles des scripts et discours narratifs modernes ? Certains metteurs en scène asiatiques ont choisi de tirer parti de la propension de Shakespeare à saper l'idéologie dominante sur le rôle des femmes, notamment à travers le personnage d’Ophélie, afin de renouveler la tradition théâtrale asiatique. Quel dialogue existe-t-il entre Shakespeare et les metteurs en scène contemporains au-delà des fossés historiques et culturels ? Avec l’analyse de trois adaptations d’Hamlet (Haider, Bollywood, 2004; Le roi et le clown, Corée, 2005; et Prince de l’Himalaya, Tibet, 2006), cet article se propose d'examiner l'approche que prennent ces productions sur l’image d’Ophélie comme victime emblématique ainsi que sur les normes culturelles asiatiques. En dehors de leur pays d'origine, ces films attirent un public fasciné par un certain exotisme, qu’il soit shakespearien, de motif asiatique, ou une combinaison des deux. Au sein de leur marché local, l’image de marque d'un contenu shakespearien d'origine anglophone renforce une valeur ajoutée prestigieuse. L’utilisation par ces metteurs en scène de conventions cinématographiques spécifiques, tels que la danse bollywoodienne, ou encore les séquences d'arts martiaux chinois, sert de dénominateur commun et de liant entre différentes périodes pour aboutir à une double identité culturelle.

Popular at the turn of the 20 th century but in serious decline since the early 1980s, the little-known traditional genre of mendu theatre in the Natuna archipelago (also performed in the neighbouring Anambas archipelago) staged episodes of the mythical Dewa Mendu story as in the literary epic Hikayat Dewa Mandu (Story of Dewa Mandu). Natuna regency is located in Indonesia's far north between the Malay Peninsula in the west and the Malaysian state of Serawak in the east at the southern edge of the South China Sea. Performing arts' groups in the Mempawah region of West Kalimantan also performed mendu theatre, however its history, form, style and function differ significantly from that of Natuna (and Anambas). My ethnographic video recordings of four mendu performances I attended in 1984 held in one of Natuna's main centres of the traditional arts (Ceruk and Teluk Selahang villages (kampung) near the capital Ranai) on Bunguran island, inform this study. To my knowledge these are the only recordings of the traditional Ranai-style form in existence as it was known in 1984. Mendu songs were integral to every performance, and actors structured their lyrics 1 The original field research on mendu theatre conducted on Natuna's Bunguran island in 1984, formed the basis of my BA Honours thesis (1986), written jointly at Monash University and the University of California under the careful supervision of the late professors Cyril Skinner and Amin Sweeney respectively, both of whom introduced me to Malay literary and oral traditions. This study would not have been possible without, firstly, the generous assistance of Bp Idrus M.T., senior high school teacher, and Bp Syamsuddin from the office of the District Head in Ranai, who organised the four mendu performances we recorded, and secondly the directors and the many actors, musicians and assistants, in particular Bp Bujang Ahmad, who made these performances possible. I am grateful to my interlocutors the late Bp Ahmadiah Zulman, Ibu Sulfarini, Ibu Erlina SH, and Bp Jafri Dusai among others, who kindly and patiently shared their deep knowledge with me, and the researchers and theatre directors of mendu theatre, namely the late Bp Asmui Bakar, Bp Syafaruddin, and Bp S. Ismail, who documented four of the six sets of lyrics included in part 2 of this study. My thanks to the late Bp Tenas Effendy, well known author and guardian of Malay culture from Pekanbaru, ethnomusicologist Ashley Turner with whom I travelled to Natuna in 1984, to the then Monash Music Department for the loan of a video recorder, and to the Monash University Music Archives for the loan of photographic and recording equipment to record a mendu performance in 2013. My thanks to Professor Stuart Robson for his criticisms and useful suggestions for this article; Professor Harry Aveling for his encouragement and expertise in Indonesian-Malay translation of song-lyrics-any errors are my own; Dr Gijs Koster for his insights in the Hikayat Dewa Mandu among other hikayat; Jesse Kartomi Thomas for helping with editing earlier drafts of this article; and the editors of IJIS Yacinta Kurniasih and Matthew Piscioneri for their kind editorial assistance at every step of the way.

Figure puppet performance or Hun was among the most popular forms of entertainment in the central part of Thailand. However, with the introduction of new forms of entertainment and the changing Thai society, its popularity went into decline until almost disappearing from Thai consciousness. It is only in recent years that we began to witness a new surge of interest in Hun and the emergence of new performance idioms. This paper seeks to provide a survey of contemporary Hun practices and of the efforts that the practitioners have put into the preservation of the performance form. First, it will elucidate the socio-historical background of the form and the challenging issues that the practitioners have to face in contemporary Thai socioeconomic climate. Next, it will then focus on aesthetic and practical concepts employed by contemporary practitioners in their search for new performance idioms and reinterpretation of the tradition. At one end of the spectrum, practitioners with a background in traditional Thai arts like Charkrabhand Posayakrit, Somporn Kaetkaew and the members of Joe Louis Theatre have chosen to develop their practices within the framework of conventional forms such as Hun Krabok and Hun Lakorn Lek. At the other end, practitioners coming from other educational backgrounds have chosen to look into other cultures and incorporate new idioms and techniques into the elements that they drawn from traditional Thai forms.

The purpose of this study was to discover the possibilities of professionally staging a Filipino play in London – a feat that has never been done before. This essay details the current status of Asian Theatre and illustrates the presence of Philippine Theatre here in the United Kingdom (UK). It then discusses the challenges and issues involved in staging foreign work in London, before discussing possible solutions to overcome them. The study explores and analyses the experiences of both the director and the performers during the process, correlating these with audience feedback in order to better understand why there is a dearth of Asian and specifically Filipino theatre produced in the UK. It uses a practice as research approach, culminating with a staged reading of the first act of 'Fake', an award winning Filipino Play in English written by Floy Quintos. The project found that there was no fundamental difficulty or difference in staging a Filipino play that it cannot be appreciated by audiences here in the UK. The findings of this research further supports works by Daboo (2018), Dadswell (2009), King (2000), Ley (2011), and Nagata (2010), which concede that there is a need for greater presence and support of Asian arts here in the UK. The next phase of this project is to produce a similar work on a greater scale to verify the sustainability of introducing foreign work to the UK Theatre landscape, and to see if a relatively unknown form will be appeal to theatre makers and encourage interest in investing into emerging material.

MAN OF LA MANCHA. Book by Dale Wasserman.
Music by Mitch Leigh. Lyrics by Joe
Darion. Directed by Koshiroh Matsumoto
(based upon Albert Marre). Choreographed
by Moritsune Morita. Imperial Theatre, Tokyo.
October 24, 2015.

MAN OF LA MANCHA. Book by Dale Wasserman.
Music by Mitch Leigh. Lyrics by
Joe Darion. Directed and choreographed
by David Swan. D Cube Art Center, Seoul.
October 31, 2015.

Farley Richmond is the pioneering figure in Indian theatre scholarship in the United States. He has taught and headed departments at University of Michigan and SUNY Stony Brook, and is presently teaching at the University of Georgia. He is trained in Kutiyattam, one of India's oldest classical theatre forms, and is a key figure in bringing it to world attention.

La Dame aux Camélias is Suzuki Tadashi’s first collaboration with Taiwan’s National Theatre. Interlacing the well-known love story with Taiwanese popular music, Suzuki’s Camélias should be read with his previous works as well as Taiwan’s social and politi- cal context in which the production took place. This article examines the complexity brought by extratextual narrative in Suzuki’s selection of popular songs and discusses how Suzuki turned the love story into an allegory of Taiwan’s contested postcoloniality.

The Republic of Korea has been protecting the ephemeral performative artistic and cultural phenomena collectively labeled intangible cultural heritage since Korea passed the Cultural Property Protection Law in 1962. The long history of performance protection in Korea has positioned Korea as an example for efforts around the world to protect intangible cultural heritage. The focus of Korean protection efforts is performance and transmission; this paper addresses the transmission occurring through intensive camps. Participant-observation based ethnographic research was conducted at two sites, the mask dance drama Kosŏng Ogwangdae and the farmer's drumming and dancing group Imshil P'ilbong Nongak to determine the effectiveness of the camps in transmitting performing arts knowledge. The young people who enroll in these camps represent the future of the Korean traditional performing arts; some are bound for professional performance or membership in the groups. The camps employ the performers and also create a pool of audience members and arts advocates. The students of the camps build community while they time travel to a liminal space where every day is the day before or the day of the big festival; their positive experience of Korean tradition leaves them connected to and supportive of the traditional arts.

LEARNING GOALS: This course, open to all students, is designed to offer a thorough and critical insight into four performance traditions of Asia from a queer perspective. You will learn:
Queer Theory, a preliminary survey of queer theory and how it is different from other critical perspectives.
The Queer in Asian Culture, what is queer Asia and how is it different from queerness as we know it?
Colonialism and Queer Asia: the effect of colonialism and post colonialism on expressions and experiences of queerness in Asia.
About queer(ing) Asian performance: female impersonation in Asian performance, female impersonators and the idea of the “ideal” feminine, indeterminate sexuality of “male” artists in Asian performance, and about encounters between the West and Asian queerness.

Abstract:

Ritual Theater Performance as a Medium for Preservation and Transmission of the Past in Rural Cambodia
This article explores the processes according to which the collective memory of a village community is expressed in relation to its ritual practice of theater. Such practice includes the broader local population and occurs within a performing space held as a “site of memory”. There, the past of the community is transmitted through formal and informal narratives. These are reiterated and reproduced during, around, and about the theatrical performance. Analysis suggests that narratives’ content and their circulation maintain elements from the community’s oral history and link these elements to the community’s contemporary social and religious organization.

[FRANÇAIS]
Cet article examine les modalités d’expression de la mémoire collective d’une communauté villageoise en lien avec sa pratique rituelle du théâtre. Celle-ci inclut l’ensemble de la population locale et se déroule au sein d’un espace de représentation érigé en « lieu de mémoire ». Le passé de la communauté y est transmis à travers des énoncés formels et informels. Ceux-ci sont réitérés et réactualisés pendant, autour et à propos de la mise en scène théâtrale. Il apparaît alors que le contenu et la circulation de ces énoncés permettent de véhiculer des éléments relevant d’une histoire orale de la communauté et les relient à son agencement socioreligieux contemporain.

InlanDimensions International Art Festival, 24 września – 19 października 2021 na platformie VOD, Bridges Foundation
Gra snów (Alice Theatre Laboratory, reżyseria Andrew Chan)
Still human (4 Degrees Dance Laboratory & Huen Tin Yeung)
Labirynt traw (reżyseria Haike Hiroshi)
Notatki tokijskie (reżyseria Hirata Oriza)
Igraszki duchów (reżyseria Sato Makoto)

Mary Parham Chin
Present theories of performance are limited and inadequate to describe, define or analyze much of today's performance activity because of the fundamental perception of performance as either "imitation" or "art." Ancient Indians thought differently: Ancient Indian performance theory encompasses two concerns: 1) the skeletal structure constituting performance (eleven items,) and 2) the system of experiencing psychological states which leads to the performance experience itself (rasa.) Neither imitation nor art, performance is a dual experience between the performer and the spectator. Over time in India, differing interpretations of this dual performance experience came to be formulated by four major "schools of thought." In her book, Dr. Parham Chin introduces the eleven structural parts of performance. She then explains the meaning of rasa as interpreted by the four major "schools" and offers her own interpretation of what she calls the " performance experience " (rasa.) Furthermore, Ancient Indians gave much advice and instruction relative to performance practice and training. The precise responsibility of the performer and two aspects of the performer's preparation of the body and voice are also addressed.