Abstract
This book, in the theoretical translocality, illuminates contemporary intercultural theater, Asian performanceâHakka, dance, Chinese musical, and Asian film (including the two 2017 Golden Horse Awards winners). More than fourteen case studies are explored, including CLTâs A Midsummer Nightâs Dream (2016), Yukio Ninagawaâs Hamlet (2015), To Send Away Under Escort (2015), Hakka musical My Daughterâs Wedding (2007), Hakka TV drama The Ninth Sister of Yang (2009), the film My Native Land (1980), Neo-Classic Dance Companyâs âThe Drifting Fate of Hakkaâ (2014), the music concert (2015), the Chinese musical Mulan (2011), Jolin and Paoâs PK (2015), Hakka musical Xiangsi Nostalgia (2016), the musical Mountains and Seas (restaged 2017), the black-and-white film The Great Buddha+ (2017), and the film The Bold, The Corrupt, and The Beautiful (2017).
In the perspective of translocal performance, this book covers contemporary intercultural theater, Peking opera innovation , Japanese performance, Taiwan literature theater, Chinese performance, Hakka opera, Hakka TV drama, Hakka film , Hakka dance , Hakka musical , Chinese musical theater, and Asian films, (including the two 2017 Golden Horse Awards winners), staged and produced in Taiwan. In an innovative way, it explores the minorityâs ethnicity story, such as through Hakka opera, Hakka musical , Hakka TV drama, and Hakka film , which were previously unknown or neglected. In the Asian theater scholarâs perspective, based on the Republic of Formosa, the beautiful treasure island in the Pacific Ocean, I examine the theater performing arts and film in terms of aesthetics, gender studies, and identity politics while facing the tremendous changes in the e-era driven by advanced technology, such as the introduction of robots and artificial intelligence. By writing about recent representative artistic works, this book endeavors to retain the irresistible value of human accomplishments in theater and film.
Theatricalizing Translation: Literature, Performance, and Film
In the twenty-first century , as the boundaries within and between nation-states shift, we may link the transnational and the translocal so that the dimensions of human beingsâ experiences can be more sufficiently conveyed. The rapid socioeconomic changes in this centuryâincluding the pervasiveness of digital technologies, migrations, climate change, the economic recession, the potential shift in world economic power from Europe and the US toward, quite possibly, China, a range of post-9/11 issues, ISIS, anti-terrorism, North Koreaâs nuclear bomb, extreme climate, and so onâare transforming and unsettling our understanding of geopolitical time and space, and of the use of the theatrical and the literary in glocalization empowered by swift information exchange through social media and global news. Therefore, we need new perspectives that chart these emerging mobile geographies and new methodologies of interpreting the performance in Asian theater and film.
This book Translocal Performance in Asian Theater and Film has the trajectory from postcolonial history to the postmodern information e-era. In the theoretical perspective of translocality , I explore the nuances and complexity of several Asian performances and three Asian films. Aside from the Introduction and Conclusion, there are ten main chapters in this book.
Chapter 2
Arjun Appaduraiâs concept of diaspora and âscapes â contributes to the creation of translocal theory. Similarly, in the critical anthology Land/Scape/Theater co-edited with Elinor Fuchs, Una Chaudhuriâs notion of geopathology âin translocal social actionâ (2002, p. 8) also links scape and land in relation to theater.
While we must not deflate the importance of the translocal phenomenon, it should remind us how we are embedded in the world and the discourses within which we examine the translocal performance histories. Responses are embedded in translocal movements across places, time, and people as constructing dynamic cultural flows. In this book, translocality is utilized in the production of cultural practices, particularly contemporary Taiwanese, Chinese, and Japanese intercultural theater, Chinese musical theater, and Asian film.
In terms of the translocal , Chinese modernities can be explored in Asian diaspora and transnational relocation. In diaspora, Chinese modernity can be achieved through translocal experiences. In transnational capitalism, Asian theater, was originally imagined as the Other. Some stereotypes might be mobilized through media, as in musical theater and film . Exoticism, ideology, and cosmopolitanism play on the visual images while we conceptualize the nature of Asian identity and modernity in those major cities in the world manifested in the translocal performance and film.
New perspectives of the âtranslocal â help broaden our theoretical and spatial understanding of Asian performances and films to elaborate our expressions of interpreting the significations. To apply the theories to each individual performance and film that is simultaneously and already embodied, intercultural , and translocal.
Chapter 3
It is argued that the live performance of Shakespeareâs A Midsummer Nightâs Dream in Taipei in 2016, by the Contemporary Legend Theatre (CLT), displays the Asian dream and local cultural imagination, in an eclectic reception. This CLT version of the play, starring actor Wu Hsing-kuo and actress Wei Hai-Min, was intended to interpret the Bard in terms of Asian intercultural Shakespearean performance. The tradition upheld in Chinese Peking opera has often undergone modern innovations.
Shakespeareâs plays have been extensively adapted in Asian theater. As Arjun Appadurai in Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization points out, media and migration, as the two elements embodying modern subjectivity, explore the work of imagination. In Appaduraiâs view the mobile images and the de-territorialized spectators come to confront each other. These images create the public sphere of the diaspora . In diasporic hybridity , one feels, tradition and modernity blend the synchronic and diachronic relationships between human beings and places.
The trans-boundary images in the local Taiwan performance complement the global Shakespearean idiom. The binary opposition between the specific and the universal gradually disappear in the contemporary translocal parlance. It is argued that the live performance of CLTâs A Midsummer Nightâs Dream, after the script adaptation and theater representation in cross-country and cross-racial terms, displays the Asian dream and local cultural imagination. A global, cultural mobility appeals to an imaginative community in both a virtual and a real theater space. All of the images, media dynamics and information, manifest a synthesis of Shakespeareâs influence and the Chinese Peking operaâs heritage in a modern performance statement.
Chapter 4
Across the local boundary, some Japanese directors have been invited to stage their works in Taiwanâthe translocal performance imbued with the intercultural meanings. Representing Japanâs indelible scenes in the Meiji period, director Yukio Ninagawa (1935â2016) staged Hamlet in the National Theater of Taiwan (premiere, March 26, 2015, Taipei). It was performed in Japanese with Chinese subtitles. Faithfully presenting every line of the original play by Shakespeare , Ninagawaâs adaptation opens with a stage set designed by Setsu Asakura to project the formerâs idea of the setting being the Meiji period. This pays tribute to the era when Hamlet was first acted on stage in Japan. I explore this Japanese performance along with other Asian and Western intertextual antecedents of production.
In the three layers of the play-within-the-play-within-the-play, Ninagawa represents âthe Mouse Trapâ scene through a double murderâone in mime (without arousing Claudiusâ attention as he flirts with Gertrude) and ...
