Transnational Chinese Theatres

Intercultural Performance Networks in East Asia

Rossella Ferrari

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030372729
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030372736
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

This 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and discourse analysis of an extensive corpus of hitherto untapped sources, including unreleased video materials and unpublished scripts, production notes, and archival documentation.

© The Author(s) 2020

R. FerrariTransnational Chinese TheatresTransnational Theatre Historieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37273-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: A Tale of Multiple Cities—Setting the Stage for Transnational Chinese Theatres

Rossella Ferrari¹

(1)

SOAS, University of London, London, UK

Rossella Ferrari

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

The history of modern Chinese theatre begins with a journey. In 1906, a group of art students who had relocated from China to Japan to study oil painting initiated the Spring Willow Society (Chunliu she) in Tokyo with the ambition of producing new dramas in Chinese. One of the founders, Li Shutong, was an associate of Tsubouchi Shōyō’s Literary Society, known for its seminal role in the formation of modern Japanese theatre. Another Spring Willow member, Lu Jingruo, trained with shingeki (new drama) pioneer Osanai Kaoru and with shinpa (new school drama) star Fujisawa Asajirō before travelling back to China to become a theatre personality in Shanghai. Fujisawa also instructed the cast of Spring Willow’s inaugural production of a one-act version of La Dame aux Camélias in February 1907. In June 1907, the group premiered Black Slave’s Cry to Heaven (Heinu yutian lu), a five-act dramatization of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) which is commonly held as the foundational text of modern Chinese drama. Black Slave was adapted from an American novel, staged in a well-known shinpa theatre in Tokyo, and performed by a troupe of Chinese, Japanese, and Indian students. Its sets were of Chinese design and Japanese construction, and its style was a hybrid of Chinese, Japanese, and European aesthetics.¹

The purpose of restating the sanctioned genealogy of spoken drama (huaju) in China is not to fix a point of origin, but rather to trace a dynamic confluence of transnational imaginations and mobile connections that have shaped the configuration of Sinophone performance cultures since the so-called modern period as ‘inherently and perpetually intercultural’.² While actively seeking for national forms, the forerunners of modern huaju were arguably engaging in an embryonic manifestation of the contemporary phenomenon that this study defines as transnational Chinese theatres. The first Chinese modern play was, effectively, an intercultural collaboration resulting from the convergence of multiple itineraries of inter-Asian movement across multiple locations into a focal time-space—or chronotope—of production and circulation. It was born as a transnational phenomenon, through travel.

Theatre constituted a productive site of early twentieth-century inter-Asian exchange. The experiences of transregional mobility of Asian students and intellectuals in Japan were vital to the establishment of modern East Asia’s ‘artistic contact nebulae’ and to the emergence of new theatrical forms not only in China but also in Taiwan and Korea.³ Furthermore, as early twentieth-century Japanese models and Chinese huaju developments affected developments in other areas of Sinophone cultural production and stimulated the unfolding of theatrical relations across the Sinosphere in later decades, one may imagine ‘Tokyo, 1907’ as the irradiating point of a composite assemblage of performance cultures—‘a network of transversals, of crisscrossing diagonal paths’.⁴

While the temporal framework of this study sits firmly in the contemporary period, as it surveys intercultural performance networks that have surfaced across East Asia’s Chinese-speaking communities since the 1980s, the received narrative of those seminal inter-Asian journeys teases out some of its key conceptual and thematic nodes—all of which inhabit the foundational chronotope, ‘Tokyo, 1907’. This early spatiotemporal juncture forestalls a vision of East Asian theatrical cultures since the twentieth century as networked formations forged by the transfer of ideas and bodies across the borders of the region’s (post-)colonial nation-states. It forms a landscape of conceptual archipelagos, rather than islands, hence this volume’s insistence on the plural—theatres—to accentuate a state of interconnected multiplicity.

The late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century connections that will unfold in the ensuing chapters are, therefore, better seen in the light of prolonged historical interactions rather than as a new contemporary phenomenon. In other words, the notion of transnational Chinese theatres that this study introduces for the purpose of conceptualizing the dynamics of intercultural performance networks in the East Asian Sinosphere should be situated within an integrative system of continuities that extend beyond the chronotopic latitudes of this specific analysis. It is one of this study’s objectives that the method it proposes may help chart rhizomatic relations taking place further afield in time—such as those unfolding in the early decades of the twentieth century—and space, for instance, within the equally fertile sites of Sinophone cultural production of Southeast Asia.

Transnational Chinese Theatres: Definitions

The intensification of inter-Asian contacts—including those among Asia’s Sinophone communities—has caused a surge in transborder collaboration since the late twentieth century as a result of the partial dissolution of political barriers and strengthening of economic relations between Asian nation-states in the post-Cold War order. The contemporary proliferation of transnational networks has enabled theatremakers of diverse nationalities and creative backgrounds to come together to scrutinize shared identities, intersecting histories, and potentially intertwined futures, while also exposing the wounds of the territorial and affective fractures that have unsettled the region’s geopolitics for decades.

The transnational turn has reconfigured the ways in which performance is conceived, created, and circulated within the contemporary Sinosphere. On the one hand, it has revealed the limits of nation-bounded approaches and ‘methodological nationalism’⁵; on the other hand, it has stressed the demand for alternate paradigms that are more suited to capture the relational quality of performative connections across borders.⁶ The individual work of some of the contributors to these transnational collaborations has been studied, and cases of triangular (liang’an sandi) or quadrilateral (liang’an sidi) interactions in Chinese-language (huawen or huayu) and Sinophone (huayu yuxi) theatres have been surveyed. However, a systematic model to rationalize the networks per se has yet to be formulated.⁷ Hence, this project introduces transnational Chinese theatres as a praxis, theory, and method defined by transborder collaboration, which seeks to enhance the mobility, plurality, and interconnectedness of contemporary performance cultures across the Asian Sinosphere.

What are, then, transnational Chinese theatres? This phrase defines, first, a specific mode of theatremaking. It designates types of collaborative performance that radiate from networks of Sinophone cultural production, namely, work that partakes in dynamics of mobility and interculturality and that is jointly conceived and circulated—within Asia and globally—by practitioners from different Chinese-speaking localities in mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, and Sinitic-language communities worldwide. Additionally, transnational Chinese theatres denote a critical matrix, or method, to conceptualize this kind of praxis. As such, the concept elucidates a rhizomatic model of intercultural theatre—and theory—predicated upon interactional contexts of transb...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 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
• Back Matter