Asian City Crossings

Pathways of Performance through Hong Kong and Singapore

Rossella Ferrari, Ashley Thorpe, Rossella Ferrari, Ashley Thorpe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000381207
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Artes escénicas

Asian City Crossings is the first volume to examine the relationship between the city and performance from an Asian perspective.

This collection introduces "city as method" as a new conceptual framework for the investigation of practices of city-based performing arts collaboration and city-to-city performance networks across East- and Southeast Asia and beyond. The shared and yet divergent histories of the global cities of Hong Kong and Singapore as postcolonial, multiethnic, multicultural, and multilingual sites, are taken as points of departure to demonstrate how "city as method" facilitates a comparative analytical space that foregrounds in-betweenness and fluid positionalities. It situates inter-Asian relationality and inter-city referencing as centrally significant dynamics in the exploration of the material and ideological conditions of contemporary performance and performance exchange in Asia. This study captures creative dialogue that travels city-based pathways along the Hong Kong-Singapore route, as well as between Hong Kong and Singapore and other cities, through scholarly analyses and practitioner reflections drawn from the fields of theatre, performance, and music.

This book combines essays by scholars of Asian studies, theatre studies, ethnomusicology, and human geography with reflective accounts by Hong Kong and Singapore-based performing arts practitioners to highlight the diversity, vibrancy, and complexity of creative projects that destabilise notions of identity, belonging, and nationhood through strategies of collaborative conviviality and transnational mobility across multi-sited networks of cities in Asia. In doing so, this volume fills a considerable gap in global scholarly discourse on performance and the city and on the production and circulation of the performing arts in Asia.

1
Introduction

Mapping the terrain: Hong Kong, Singapore, and the city as method

Rossella Ferrari and Ashley Thorpe

In 1960, the Japanese sinologist Takeuchi Yoshimi proposed a methodology that no longer engaged with Asia as a simple object of (Western-centric) analysis. Rather, in a move to overcome the automatic impulse to compare Asia with Europe or the US, he sought to encourage comparisons between countries that were in closer proximity (specifically, China and Japan, but also India), to recognise the impact of dynamic flows of power, economy, and culture on trajectories of modernisation within and across Asia as the basis for analysis. ‘Asia as method’, wherein ‘method’ is defined “as the process of the subject’s self-formation”,¹ was thus conceived to reengage Asia as an autonomous epistemological site and “a more complex framework than that of simple binary oppositions”,² redefining the actual terms through which the object of analysis was viewed. Since Takeuchi’s pioneering proposal, the ‘method’ approach has been applied widely in relational studies of Asian cultural connections. These include Chen Kuan-hsing’s influential reiteration of Takeuchi’s paradigm-shifting concept for the purposes of “decolonization, deimperialization, and de-cold war[ing]” of knowledge production in and about Asia,³ notions of “inter-Asia referencing”⁴ and “trans-(East) Asia as method”,⁵ and more specific formulations of “Asian theatre as method”⁶ and “Hong Kong as method”, among others.⁷

In this volume, we propose the notion of ‘city as method’, with Hong Kong and Singapore as key referents in establishing a conceptual framework for city-to-city contacts in Asian theatre and performance research. Hong Kong and Singapore have been chosen as the focal points for this inquiry because of their status as prominent cultural hubs in Asia and their potential for relational comparison, as prime examples of dynamic urban societies and transnational sites of multicultural, multi-ethnic, and multilingual cultural production. Hong Kong and Singapore are of similar size and geographic conformation as islands and port cities; have comparable—if divergent—histories of multiple colonisation (British and Japanese imperialism); and experiences of migration, rapid modernisation, industrialisation, and technological innovation. Both are global financial centres; hubs of Asian commerce; and are typified as cities of corporations, cosmopolitanism, and consumption (the ‘mall city’). But they are also homelands to political authoritarianism, ethnic prejudice, social exclusion, violent neoliberal economies, and unequal access to public space and resources.⁸ Hong Kong and Singapore have been described as both intrinsically global and distinctively Asian and presented as models for one another and for other cities. Sociologist Saskia Sassen, the first to theorise the concept of the global city, has named them as two of the most important global cities,⁹ though the Singapore administration had already categorised the Southeast Asian island-nation as such in 1972, long before the term gained universal currency.¹⁰ The place branding records of both cities reveal strenuous efforts to promote world-class metropolitan images: a government policy paper named Singapore as “Asia’s Global City (for the Arts)” in 1992,¹¹ and former chief executive Tung Chee-hwa described Hong Kong as “Asia’s World City” in 1999.¹² Hong Kong and Singapore have often been framed as rivals with competing interests in various sectors—a scenario that may be revived in light of their present standing as important maritime nodes for China’s Belt and Road Initiative.¹³ Nonetheless, their parallel colonial histories since the 19th century have given way to divergent political systems and markedly “contrasting fates” in the post-war era, with Singapore celebrating 50 years of national independence in 2015 just two years before the 20th anniversary of Hong Kong’s handover from the United Kingdom to the People’s Republic of China (PRC).¹⁴

Comparisons between Hong Kong and Singapore have been undertaken in numerous fields, ranging from studies of the two cities’ economic and governance structures to analyses of their literary production and film industries.¹⁵ The regional and transnational circulation of Chinese-language media and popular culture—traditional xiqu operas and folk arts, pop music, television dramas, video games, social platforms—through production and distribution networks encompassing these two epicentres is also widely documented.¹⁶ Yet the long-standing relationship between the two cities in the realm of the contemporary performing arts has not yet been sufficiently explored. At the symposium from which this volume originated, “Hong Kong in Transition: Asian City-To-City Collaboration and Performing Arts Exchange 1997–2017”, held in London in September 2017, the main focus of the discussions was on the status of the performing arts in Hong Kong 20 years since the handover. But Singapore was often cited for the purposes of comparison and became the echo chamber for certain experiences occurring in Hong Kong, with many participants—several of whom are contributors to this volume—emphasising significant points of contact between the two cities.

Particularly since the 1980s, as economic and cultural ties among Sino-phone societies intensified amid momentous political changes, Hong Kong and Singapore have played a seminal role in shaping performing arts connections within the Sinosphere and across the Asian region. Through the efforts of pioneers such as Danny Yung Ning-tsun, Augustine Mok Chiu-yu, Kuo Pao Kun, and others, Hong Kong and Singapore—as cities in perpetual transition and transformation—have established themselves as fundamental spaces of relations: cultural, artistic, and political relations and relations between Sinophone and Anglophone cultures (partly arising from their histories of British colonialism), and thus, by extension, between Asia, Europe, and the US. Their shared standing yet differentiated contexts as postcolonial, multicultural, and multilingual sites offer unique vantage points from which to consider questions of identity, belonging, nationalism, statehood, collaborative conviviality, and the material conditions of performance and performance exchange across and beyond Asia.

Unlike major existing studies of theatre, performance, and the city,¹⁷ this volume marks a shift in focus towards studying performance and the city from an Asian perspective. It postulates that the centres of urban performance production are no longer exclusively located in Western cultural capitals such as New York and London, but in the global cities of Asia. Thus, our approach echoes Aihwa Ong’s observation that “[t]oday, Asian cities are fertile sites, not for following an established pathway or master blueprint, but for a plethora of situated experiments that reinvent what urban norms can count as ‘global’”.¹⁸ It is for this reason that the focus of investigation here is not what happens in the cities of Europe and North America, as in most current scholarship, but what happens in between (namely, ‘inter-’) multi-sited networks of cities in Asia. This is not to deny the legacy of Western (European) colonialism but to assert a postcolonial perspective that moves beyond the West as reference point. The shift in focus towards the ‘inter-’—from the international and intercultural to the inter-Asian inter-city—sheds light on hitherto neglected connections ‘in between’ these (g)local spaces. It disrupts simplistic national essentialisms and places inter-Asian referencing as a centrally significant dynamic.

In mapping the terrain of ‘Asian city crossings’, this volume conceptual-ises Asia as a polysemic body signifying not only a heterogeneous geographic entity or a site of identity politics but also, and primarily, a methodology and “open episteme”,¹⁹ which performs different meanings for different individuals and communities across the region. An equally dynamic framework should apply to definitions of Chineseness and ‘Sinophone’ articulations, which we draw attention to in the context of our inquiry since several contributors to this volume invoke these notions to interrogate performance works that either are initiated by or involve practitioners of predominantly Chinese cultures, languages, and ethnicities. Shu-mei Shih’s paradigm of the Sinophone as denotative of “Sinitic-language cultures on the margins of geopolitical nation-states and their hegemonic productions”²⁰ (see How Wee Ng’s discussion in Chapter 4 and Shzr Ee Tan’s in Chapter 10) is particularly significant for our purposes, for this interpretation encapsulates the dialectical relationship of Hong Kong and Singapore to both British colonial rule and mainland Chinese politics—including the politics of “fictive kinship” (biological, ideological) that is often associated with the notion of Chineseness.²¹

At the same time, it is worth noting one of the great ironies of intercultural collaboration, from which the Asia-focused work scrutinised in this volume is not entirely immune: namely, the enduring hegemony of English as the prevalent operational language—and sometimes also performance language—of intercultural performance. Imperial linguistic inheritances still largely shape professional interactions in the rehearsal rooms and performance spaces of Asia’s global cities. In Chapter 5, Mok Chiu-yu offers a practitioner’s perspective on this subject, as does the analysis of Mok’s ‘third way’ approach to Hong Kong’s identity double bind that Jessica Yeung presents in Chapter 6. The opening sentence of Liu Xiaoyi’s chapter (“I wrote this essay in Chinese and translated it into English”) is also revealing in this respect, as it implicitly extends the colonial assumptions of the language of interculturality from the realm of creative practice to that of scholarship and criticism—indeed also implicating our own linguistic choices, as editors of this volume. Nevertheless, to take the Asian city as a reference point dilutes the dominance of the nation, of culture—and of Western culture, in particular—as the primary frame of reference in Anglophone studies of performance. At the same time, it is also vital to avoid methodological parochialism and replacing one type of geocultural essentialism with another. For this reason, we seek to expand the empirical and epistemological possibilities of considering the relationship between city, theatre, and performance.

This volume seeks to capture creative dialogue along the Hong Kong-Singapore route as well as through crossings between Hong Kong and Singapore and other cities to highlight the vibrancy, complexity, and diversity of practices that travel pathways of city-based performance and city-to-city performance networks. Hong ...