Transnational Chinese Theatres: Intercultural Performance Networks in East Asia 3030372758, 9783030372750

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements
Contents
List of Figures
1 Introduction: A Tale of Multiple Cities—Setting the Stage for Transnational Chinese Theatres
Transnational Chinese Theatres: Definitions
Trans-(National)
Trans-/Inter-: Relations
Chinese/Asian
Theatre(s)
Chapters Map: Significant Chronotopes
Bibliography
2 Rhizomes, Radicants, and Journeys: Transnational Chinese Theatres as Networks of Intercultural Collaboration
Dislocating the West from Intercultural Collaboration: Beyond Centres and Straight Lines
Intercultural Collaboration in Trans-Asia
Rhizomes and Radicants as Models of Intercultural Collaboration
Mobile Networks of Performance in Journey-Form
Performing the Nomadic Rhizome: Poisonous Weeds
Bibliography
3 Hong Kong Transfers: Transmedial Travels in the Theatre of Relations
Journey to the East: A Paradigm of Networked Performance
Departures: Transmedial Crossings in the Colonial City
Cross-Strait and Trans-Pacific Itineraries
Remapping the Sinosphere: Journey to the East 1997
Trans-Asian Travels: Journey to the East 1998
Transnationalism as Transmediality: Journey 99
Re-routing Exchange: Journey 2000 1T2C and the Festival of Vision
Global Itineraries: Closing the (Video) Circle
Terminus: Tropes and Trajectories of Travel
Bibliography
4 Performing the 38th Parallel Across the Taiwan Strait: Territorial Divides and Theatrical Dialogues in East Asia
Meeting at the Madang: Asian People’s Theatre Networks in South Korea
Parallel Stages: The Korean Peninsula and the Taiwan Strait
The Division System in Performance: 38th Parallel Still Play
Staging the Cross-Strait System: 38th Parallel in Taipei
Trans-Asian Rhizomes of Collaboration: Asia Meets Asia
Bibliography
5 Trans-Asian Spectropoetics: Conjuring War and Violence on the Haunted Stage of History
Sinophone Connections in Singapore
The Spirits Play and the Violence of Inter-Asian Modernity
Tribute (To the Spirit of Kuo Pao Kun)
Settling the Ghosts of the Sino-Japanese War: The Spirits Play on the Kun-Nō Stage
Comparative Violence and Cross-Strait Spectralities: The Mother Hen Next Door
Bibliography
6 Epilogue: Out of Asia—Transnational Chinese Theatres’ Global Itineraries
References
Index

Citation preview

TRANSNATIONAL THEATRE HISTORIES

Transnational Chinese Theatres Intercultural Performance Networks in East Asia Rossella Ferrari

Transnational Theatre Histories

Series Editors Christopher B. Balme Institut für Theaterwissenschaft Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich, Bayern, Germany Tracy C. Davis Northwestern University Evanston, IL, USA Catherine M. Cole College of Arts and Sciences University of Washington Seattle, WA, USA

Transnational Theatre Histories illuminates vectors of cultural exchange, migration, appropriation, and circulation that long predate the more recent trends of neoliberal globalization. Books in the series document and theorize the emergence of theatre, opera, dance, and performance against backgrounds such as imperial expansion, technological development, modernity, industrialization, colonization, diplomacy, and cultural self-determination. Proposals are invited on topics such as: theatrical trade routes; public spheres through cross-cultural contact; the role of multi-ethnic metropolitan centers and port cities; modernization and modernity experienced in transnational contexts; new materialism: objects moving across borders and regions; migration and recombination of aesthetics and forms; colonization and decolonization as transnational projects; performance histories of cross- or inter-cultural contact; festivals, exchanges, partnerships, collaborations, and co-productions; diplomacy, state and extra-governmental involvement, support, or subversion; historical perspectives on capital, finance, and administration; processes of linguistic and institutional translation; translocality, glocality, transregional and omnilocal vectors; developing new forms of collaborative authorship. Series Editors Christopher B. Balme (LMU Munich) Catherine M. Cole (University of Washington) Tracy C. Davis (Northwestern) Editorial Board Leo Cabranes-Grant (UC Santa Barbara, USA) Khalid Amine (Abdelmalek Essaadi University, Tétouan, Morocco) Laurence Senelick (Tufts University, USA) Rustom Bharucha (JNU, New Delhi, India) Margaret Werry (University of Minnesota, USA) Maria Helena Werneck (Federal University of Rio de Janiero, Brazil) Catherine Yeh (Boston University, USA/ University of Heidelberg, Germany) Marlis Schweitzer (York University; Canada)

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14397

Rossella Ferrari

Transnational Chinese Theatres Intercultural Performance Networks in East Asia

Rossella Ferrari SOAS, University of London London, UK

Transnational Theatre Histories ISBN 978-3-030-37272-9 ISBN 978-3-030-37273-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37273-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: Courtesy of The Theatre Practice LTD This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To Tristan, For the most significant journey.

Acknowledgements

This book is made of the matter that constitutes its subject: networks, connections, relations, and journeys. By the time it is published, a decade will have passed since my first in-depth excursion—over three months spent in Hong Kong in 2009—into the archives of Zuni Icosahedron, whose practice provided the first case study for this project, and since my visit to the Tate Triennial 2009 in London, curated by Nicolas Bourriaud, which informed some of its theoretical propositions. Long-term undertakings of this kind are never entirely the accomplishment of a single individual. More often, they are the outcome of generative encounters, collective dialogues, and countless conversations. As befitting a study of transnational collaboration, the production of this book has been—to an extent—a cooperative effort, which has benefited immensely from the intellectual, emotional, and practical assistance of a global community of colleagues, friends, and family. I owe the greatest debt of gratitude to the artists and arts organizations which, over many years, have graciously complied with numerous requests for information, interviews, and materials and granted permission to use some of those resources in this volume: Zhao Chuan (Grass Stage, Shanghai), Tom Tong Sze-hong (Asia Meets Asia/Clash Theatre Group, Hong Kong), Bernice Chan (International Association of Theatre Critics, Hong Kong), Marble Leung (Hong Kong Repertory Theatre), Tang Shu-wing (Tang Shu-wing Theatre Studio, Hong Kong), Yu Rongjun (Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre), Meng Jinghui and Guo Qi

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(Meng Jinghui Theatre Studio, Beijing), Guo Xiong and Cell Tono Lim (The Theatre Practice, Singapore), Kok Heng Leun (Drama Box, Singapore), Hung Chit-wah (Singapore/Hong Kong), Hung Pei-ching (Performosa Theatre Company, Taipei), Sat¯o Makoto (Za-Koenji Public Theatre, Tokyo), Ke Jun (Jiangsu Performing Arts Group, Nanjing), and the members of Zuni Icosahedron in Hong Kong—especially Wong Yuewai, Doris Kan, and Cedric Chan, who have helped me in so many ways. My heartfelt thanks go to Zuni’s co-artistic directors, Danny Yung and Mathias Woo, who motivated this research with their groundbreaking practice and greatly assisted its development with their continued support. I am indebted to Professor Ying Chan of the Journalism and Media Studies Centre of the University of Hong Kong for generously hosting me during a sabbatical period in 2009, and to Professor Lia Wen-ching Liang of National Taiwan Normal University for facilitating a research visit to Taipei in 2017, funded by the Taiwan Ministry of Science and Technology. Early incarnations of arguments elaborated in this volume were first outlined in two contributions to special issues of the Journal of Chinese Cinemas (2.1, 2008, on the ‘transnational’, edited by Chris Berry and Laikwan Pang) and Postcolonial Studies (13.4, 2010, on “Contemporary East Asia, in Theory”, edited by Margaret Hillenbrand). I thank the editors for the opportunity to test some preliminary thoughts, and the audiences and discussants at several academic gatherings in Asia, Europe, and North America where parts of this study were subsequently presented and further refined. I am also much obliged to the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful and constructive feedback. For providing contacts, materials, hospitality, mentorship, encouragement, and inspiration at various stages of the research, I thank Katherine Hui-ling Chou, Claire Conceison, Natascha Gentz, Margaret Hillenbrand, Michel Hockx, Alexa Alice Joubin, Karima Laachir, Barbara Leonesi, Li Ruru, Corrado Neri, How Wee Ng, Francesca Orsini, Wenchin Ouyang, Sy Ren Quah, Barbara Pizziconi, Luke Robinson, Mirjam Tröster, Sebastian Veg, Jessica W. Y. Yeung, David Der-wei Wang, and others whose names I may have overlooked but whose contributions have been no less valuable. I am most grateful to the editors of the Transnational Theatre Histories series for endorsing this project and to the editorial staff at Palgrave Macmillan for their guidance and competence in steering it to timely completion.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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For lasting friendship, wise counsel, and emotional support during some exceptionally testing periods, I thank Linda Badan, Elena Baglioni, Alessandra Cecolin, Melanie Cheng, Eliza Lam, Emanuele Lugli, Alessandra Mezzadri, Federica Rossi, and Francesca Sorgato. I thank my parents, Mauro Ferrari and Roberta Guatteri, to whom I owe who I am, and my cousins, Camilla and Cristiana Conti, for being like sisters to me. Finally, my deepest gratitude goes to my husband Adrian Szczech, for always being there for me along this journey, and to our son Tristan Alexander—who was born halfway through it—for making the journey all the more interesting.

Note on Romanization In accordance with the scholarly convention in English-language scholarship, this volume adopts the Hanyu Pinyin romanization system—which is standard in mainland China and most international library catalogues— but also retains the different conventions in use in other Sinophone regions, such as Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. For personal names, the preferred or most common transcription in English-language publications is provided, with Pinyin or alternate transcriptions added in parentheses at first mention, wherever necessary to avoid ambiguity, e.g. Danny Yung (Yung Ning-tsun; Rong Nianzeng). Likewise, in the notes and bibliography, names of authors of Chineselanguage sources are generally given in Pinyin. However, when authors have published in both Chinese and English under different transcriptions of their names, these are also cross-referenced in brackets, e.g. Kuo Pao Kun [Guo Baokun]. The index lists names in their different forms. Chinese, Japanese, and Korean names follow the native convention of providing family names first, followed by given names (e.g. ZHAO ¯ Makoto, PAIK Nak-chung), unless a person customarily Chuan, SATO follows the Western convention of using their given name first or chooses to reorder their names in English-language publications. All translations from Chinese and other languages are by the author, unless otherwise stated.

Contents

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2

3

4

5

6

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

1

Rhizomes, Radicants, and Journeys: Transnational Chinese Theatres as Networks of Intercultural Collaboration

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Hong Kong Transfers: Transmedial Travels in the Theatre of Relations

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Performing the 38th Parallel Across the Taiwan Strait: Territorial Divides and Theatrical Dialogues in East Asia

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Trans-Asian Spectropoetics: Conjuring War and Violence on the Haunted Stage of History

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Epilogue: Out of Asia—Transnational Chinese Theatres’ Global Itineraries

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Index

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List of Figures

Fig. 3.1

Fig. 3.2

Fig. 3.3

Fig. 3.4

Fig. 3.5

Fig. 4.1

Fig. 4.2

A train of tables is formed along the Tsim Sha Tsui East Promenade in Zuni Icosahedron’s Journey to the East, Part Eight: Here Here There There (1994) (Courtesy of Zuni Icosahedron) Danny Yung’s installation, The Star, provides a background to Zuni Icosahedron’s itinerant performance, Journey to the East, Part Eight: Here Here There There (1994) (Courtesy of Zuni Icosahedron) Actor Jimmy Kwok impersonates Hong Kong’s former Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa in This is a Chair, Danny Yung’s contribution to Journey to the East ’97 (Courtesy of Zuni Icosahedron) Astad Deboo (left) and Cedric Chan (right) interact with the One Table Two Chairs relational framework in Serenity Steps. Turmoil Steps. Togetherness (2000) (Courtesy of Zuni Icosahedron) South Korean dancer Deresa Choi performs inside the Video Circle installation at the Festival of Vision (2000) (Courtesy of Zuni Icosahedron) Grass Stage during a performance of 38th Parallel Still Play at the Asian Madang Theatre Festival in Gwangju, South Korea, in May 2005 (Courtesy of Grass Stage) Final water scene in the Grass Stage production of 38th Parallel Still Play (Photo by Chen You-wei. Courtesy of Grass Stage)

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LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 4.3

Fig. 4.4 Fig. 5.1

Fig. 5.2

Fig. 5.3

Fig. 5.4

Fig. 5.5

Fig. 5.6

A scene of ritual offerings from the South Korean performances of 38th Parallel Still Play is reconstructed in the 2005 production of 38th Parallel in Taipei (Photo by Xu Bin. Courtesy of Grass Stage) A performance of Lu Xun 2008 by Asia Meets Asia in Shanghai (Photo by Tang Ting. Courtesy of Grass Stage) From left, kunqu actor Sun Jing (the Man), jingju actor Zhang Chunxiang (the Poet), contemporary theatre actor Fueda Uichiro (the General), and n¯ o actor Shimizu Kanji (the Mother) in the first part of The Spirits Play (2011 version), codirected by Sat¯ o Makoto and Danny Yung (Courtesy of Zuni Icosahedron) Repurposed kunqu gowns function as material catalysts of spectrality in the second part of The Spirits Play (2012 version), codirected by Sat¯ o Makoto and Danny Yung (Courtesy of The Theatre Practice LTD) A Two Tables Four Chairs (2T4C) stage set materializes as the spectral double of One Table Two Chairs (1T2C) in the finale of The Spirits Play (2011 version), codirected by Sat¯ o Makoto and Danny Yung (Courtesy of Zuni Icosahedron) The Mother (Hung Chit-wah, left) and the Reporter (Hung Pei-ching, right) wait for the train to the afterlife in The Mother Hen Next Door (2010) (Courtesy of Performosa Theatre) Battered suitcases represent traumatic past memories in The Mother Hen Next Door: A Tribute (2012) (Courtesy of Performosa Theatre) An empty picture frame serves as a memorial device against the spectralization of violent national histories in The Mother Hen Next Door: A Tribute (2012) (Courtesy of Performosa Theatre)

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CHAPTER 1

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

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 Sh¯ oy¯o’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 Asajir¯ o 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 © The Author(s) 2020 R. Ferrari, Transnational Chinese Theatres, Transnational Theatre Histories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37273-6_1

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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

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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

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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 transborder production and transmission. Performance makers of heterogeneous cultural, linguistic, and disciplinary backgrounds converge via these mobile networks to explore specific texts, themes, concepts, or curatorial frameworks and to collectively renegotiate identitarian politics and shared cultural concerns. Often, the outcomes of these networks are series of interlinked performances or transmedial artworks that implement a set of predefined production parameters across genres and formats to reproduce the interactivity and transborder dialogism which define the collaborative relationship. By definition, these relational clusters are invested in the process of journeying in both its material and metaphorical connotations. They mobilize notions of border, transiting, and crossing not only in terms of concrete logistics and geopolitics but also conceptually and methodologically. They consistently engage the semantics of mobility to renegotiate intercultural encounters and transnational relations. Mobile imageries and itinerant geographies are thematized and dramatized to articulate a new poetics of travel through performance. This project draws on Nicolas Bourriaud’s notion of the ‘journey-form’ to posit transnational Chinese theatres as a mode of performance in journey-form, namely, performance that is produced, adapted, and disseminated through travelling networks and nomadic connections, often taking the journey as a core theme and structural trope.8 Transnational Chinese theatres build on the growing interest in ‘Asian transnationalisms’9 and trans-Asian methodologies to elucidate the vastly untapped territory of contemporary Sinophone performance collaboration from an Asian intercultural perspective. The relational dynamics of transnational Chinese theatres will be investigated through a cross-examination of performances, installations, and intermedial works produced since the last two decades of the twentieth century. The analysis will focus primarily on performance articulations arising within the Sinophone geolinguistic sphere, that is, works that are written, produced, and performed predominantly in Sinitic languages by collaborators of Chinese cultures and ethnicities. Nonetheless, the

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conceptual geography of transnational Chinese theatres is equally applicable to farther-reaching—and not necessarily Sinophone—trans-Asian networks, which one may consequently designate by the more inclusive transnational Asian theatres . Indeed, the rhizomatic paradigm proposed in earlier formulations of this research with a trilateral emphasis on mobile practices of collaboration between the creative clusters of mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong has grown sizeable ramifications across North- and Southeast Asia.10 Several performance works scrutinized in this volume engage Sinophone collaborators from Singapore and non-Sinophone partners from Japan, South Korea and, occasionally, South Asia and the Asian communities worldwide, which justifies a degree of conceptual fluidity. These wider-ranging collaborations may be seen as belonging to an extended ‘transnational Asian’ type of intercultural network, which both contains and expands the latitudes of ‘transnational Chinese’. The rationale for a twofold modelling is, essentially, to capture the tensional co-relations and overlaps that exist between the two categories. This applies not only to the conceptualization of the polymorphic typologies of networked collaboration that transnational Chinese and Asian theatres can comprise but—not unlike identitarian (self-)descriptions of ‘Chinese’ and ‘Asian’—also to the collaborators’ strategies of flexible identification with either one and/or the other designation. Transnational Asian theatres are both a geolinguistic and conceptual expansion of transnational Chinese theatres. These two notions are not exclusive but locked in a dialogic relationship. Ultimately, this project seeks to propose a methodology for the investigation of networks and practices of intercultural collaboration that is both rooted in trans-Asian epistemologies and potentially applicable beyond the Sinosphere, in an effort to link hitherto unrelated discourses and elicit new connections, including those taking place beyond the geographic and temporal boundaries of the present inquiry.

Trans-(National) This study takes transnationalism as a manner of engagement with transborder movement that exceeds national discourses and nationalistic divisions to valorize human networks and performance interactions that unfold below and beyond the remit of the nation-state. Transnational Chinese theatres reflect the multilayered topology of ‘transnationalism as

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social morphology, as type of consciousness, as mode of cultural reproduction, as avenue of capital, as site of political engagement, and as (re)construction of “place” or locality’.11 Yet, since they tend to be invested in intercultural crossings that question hegemonic cultures and institutions, transnational Chinese theatres may be described, more distinctly, as performative inflections of the critical strategy that Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih conceptualize as ‘minor transnationalism’.12 Transnationalism in the minor mode does not treasure but transcends boundaries, seeking to intervene in the micropolitics of the local while also attending to macroscopic global phenomena at ‘the intersection of multiple spatiotemporal (dis)orders’.13 It subsists as the fluid temporality and horizontal site of heterogeneous, nonhierarchical encounters— a smooth time-space. The production and dissemination modalities of transnational Chinese theatres hinge on ‘transversal movements of culture’14 that tend to sidestep the routes and politics of an implicit ‘major’, or dominant, centre: nation-state structures, mainstream institutions, and foreign intermediaries that are (too) often colonial, white, and ‘Western’. Grassroots alliances, practitioner-led exchanges, and non-governmental initiatives frequently assist such connections. They frequently operate through informal linkages that circumvent nation-to-nation relations and interstate channels of cultural diplomacy and economics to harness the strategic advantages of translocal city-to-city, or place-to-place, affiliations. Namely, they rely on the power of certain infranational spaces to trigger and catalyse encounters across borders. Cities, places, and regions, rather than nations, are the privileged units of discourse within the transnational network of collaboration, stops and stations on the transnational journey. The centrality of cities and networks of cities in the global political economies have been highlighted repeatedly, along with their role in the deterritorialization of cultures as ‘frontier zones’ for new strategic alignments.15 Cities are key intermediaries of global capital and essential coordinates in the cartographies of cultural flows that demarcate the morphology of the contemporary ‘network society’.16 Interchanges between cities as privileged spaces of transnational connectivity have been crucial to the construction and circulation of embodied representations across the trans-Asian theatrescapes. Cities are constitutive of both the processes and products intrinsic to the performance clusters under scrutiny; they are key components in the transvergent poetics of relations that these often synchronic and intersecting networks propagate.

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Cities undergird the realization of the collaborative production, for the mediators between the various actors in the transnational network17 tend to be located in nation-cities, infra-nations, or contested national entities such as Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. In other words, these networks operate across spaces that assist the clustering of multiple agents of ‘transgressive imagiNation’18 and can negotiate the discourse of the nation and national(istic) enunciations of Chinese and Asian identities. The global city is a fluid, unbounded site of hybridity and ethnocultural diversity; it is ‘a transnational formation par excellence’.19 Each of the analytical chapters in this volume thus converges on a specific axis of collaboration that spans across various cities and on one or more key mediators (artists, art collectives) in these cities. This study will look at people, the enablers of the networks, at performances, their outcomes, but also at collaborative platforms that revolve around specific cities. City stages—the stages of cities but also the cities as stages—have been prime locations for city-based inter-Asian theatrical alliances such as BeSeTo (Beijing–Seoul–Tokyo) Theatre Festival, the Chinese Drama Festival (Huawen xiju jie), and the Little Asia Theatre/Dance Exchange Network (1997–2002), among others. The kind of creative clustering around subnational urban sites that typifies the cross-city forums and festivals surveyed in this study illuminates a dynamic constellation of cities as vital connectors within the acentred (or polycentric) multiplicity which constitutes the Asian theatrical transnation. It follows that the tapestry of transnational Chinese theatres is spun by a tale of multiple cities.20 Cities are, moreover, inherent to the core themes and performance representations arising from the networks under scrutiny. As detailed below, the works that have been selected for analysis impart choral responses to foundational events occurred in certain cities at crucial temporal junctures, thus framing transnationalism as both spatially and historically situated across multiple times and localities. The dialectics of latent transgression that informs the imaginative dimensions of the transnational is cast into relief by performative encounters with traumatic archives of national histories, which these networks seek to unseal and re-enact collectively, through collaborative practice. Faced with the spectres of violent inheritances left behind by nations—for which nations have been questioned, and found wanting—the transnational intervenes in a push to ‘unimagine’,21 or transgressively reimagine, the nation. Nonetheless, while attempting to transcend national borders and nation-bounded epistemologies through the exploration of alternate

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dimensions of collaboration, these transnational networks also draw attention to the endurance of borders and the power of nations. It is widely accepted that the transnational both contains and exceeds the scope of the national and of nation-states, for ‘one of the central aspects of transnationalism as a critical discourse is its dialectical engagement with—rather than simple rejection of—ideas of the national’.22 Accordingly, the narratives outlined in this volume unveil the persistent traces of the national in the performances of the transnational.23 National politics, economies, and histories linger in the enactments of the ‘trans-nation’ as ‘a nation in transformation’, which inhabits ‘an alternative time opened up in its “trans-” and firmly engaging spheres of the realpolitik in its “-nation”’.24 This observation rings particularly true for the Sinophone articulations that rest at the heart of this study, since claims to the national with respect to both political sovereignty (claims to the status of legitimate ‘Chinese’ nation-state) and cultural authenticity (claims to the role of genuine depositary of ‘Chinese’ heritage) have been variously disputed in the region’s transnational interactions in contemporary times.

Trans-/Inter-: Relations In addition to foregrounding the connections and collisions of the nation and/in the transnation, hence the value of appraising their tensional overlaps, the expanded horizon of transnational Chinese theatres illuminates the spectrum of connotations that ‘trans-’ can signify within the networks under scrutiny. The semantics of trans- do not simply denote transfers across the geopolitical borders of nation-states but also conjure a host of phenomenological, ontological, and metaphysical borderlands which are traversed, transgressed, and transcended by multiple kinds of transactors. (To) trans- is no longer simply a prefix, but an action. The agentive capacity of trans-ing inflects the transperformance of the Sinophone Asian transnation to the extent that ‘transperforming’, as ‘a combination of “transforming” and “performing”’,25 hints at the possibility of embodying Asia’s shifting realities through forms that elicit the constitutive relationality of the ‘trans-’ dimension.26 This study categorizes such networked modes of transborder performance as simultaneously transnational and intercultural since they combine Chinese and Asian practices with global inspirations. Clearly, a performance work that is co-created by collaborators from colonial or postcolonial Hong Kong, post-Martial Law Taiwan, postsocialist China,

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and Sinophone Southeast Asia is hardly monocultural. Hence, this definition assumes that the ‘extra-’ and ‘intra-’ topographies of the ‘inter-’ are themselves far from stable and homogenous.27 Likewise, intra- and extraregional factors such as imperialistic legacies and interactions with colonial and foreign powers determine the domain of the ‘inter-Asian’ in equal measure. The prefixes trans- (as in transnational, trans-Asian) and inter- (as in intercultural, inter-Asian) are not exchangeable. Rather, they illuminate distinct scopes of intervention both in the collaborative process and in the work that the collaboration engenders. Trans- evokes breadth, boundlessness, crossing, decentring, deconstruction, extension, expansion. It captures the semantics of transversals (transvergence, transversality)28 —of trespassing, transgressing, and transcending boundaries, distinctions, and ethnic particularities. Inter- foregrounds ‘a poetics of networking’29 that engages its constitutive nodes—bodies, texts, cultures, and media—in a state of perpetual becoming.30 It highlights communication, connection, friction, interstitial contact, layering, and trading of positions. Within this palimpsestic overlaying of prefixes, interculturalism and transnationalism are engaged as relational paradigms that can apprehend the mechanics of intercultural collaboration in circumstances of transnational mobility and capture performance articulations that privilege embodied over symbolic contact, politics over aesthetics, and collective creation over auteurism. The relational matrix of transnational Chinese theatres shuns hierarchy, binarism, and linearity in favour of heterogeneity, multiplicity, and acentredness. Hence, it reflects networked imaginings such as those entreated by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s rhizomes, Nicolas Bourriaud’s radicants, and Marcos Novak’s transvergent formations.31 Concurrently, and consistent with the intentions of minor transnationalism, transnational Chinese theatres retrace the geometries and geographies of intercultural creativity in an attempt to bring not only East–East but also East–South and South–South interactions into sharper relief. The concept’s theoretical foundations thus also resonate with Naoki Sakai’s call for ‘the dislocation of the West ’ in the shift from area to transnational studies and with the discourse of Asia (or trans-East Asia) ‘as method’— as advanced by Chen Kuan-hsing, Koichi Iwabuchi, and others—in pursuing a counterhegemonic re-orientation of theory towards Asia.32 The integration of a critical approach to transnationalism in the minor mode with relational, ‘dislocational’, and trans-Asian methodologies assists the

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affirmation of transnational Chinese theatres as a matrix for intercultural production and criticism that takes (trans-)Asia not simply as its privileged locus of investigation but also as its method. Namely, it favours projects that are situated in Asia and capture the distinctive conditions of Asian collaborative performance. The formulation of transnational Chinese and Asian theatres thus harnesses the potential of inter-Asian collaboration (in the realm of practice) and ‘inter-Asian referencing’33 (in the sphere of theory) to intervene in the critical deterritorialization—or, in Chen Kuanhsing’s terms, ‘decolonization, deimperialization, and de-cold war’34 —of the discourse surrounding non-Western performance cultures. As Chen postulates, ‘Asia as method ceases to consider Asia as the object of analysis and becomes a means of transforming knowledge production’.35 The decolonial redirection of theory beyond Western-centric epistemologies does neither mean to reject ‘Western theory’ nor to relinquish the theoretical propositions of the ‘West’ in the study of Asian cultures, but to strategically reposition Asia—and Asian theatres—as active producers of original epistemologies rather than merely as providers of ethnographies and derivative adaptations. Equally, with respect to praxis, an Asia-focused approach does not automatically guarantee the production of ethical, horizontal, and nonhegemonic collaborations. To ‘deWest’—namely, to dislocate and deconstruct Western-centric paradigms— does not prevent the imperialistic attributes of the construct ‘West’ from manifesting elsewhere under different guises. Intercultural processes that unfold in the ‘non-West’ are not necessarily innocent when it comes to power dynamics. Hence, it is not just Western epistemological and economic privilege that demands scrutiny but also the political economies and financial mechanisms whereby inter-Asian hierarchies of empire and capitalistic domination can become manifest. Ultimately, the assertion of ‘Asia as method’ as the underlying method of this study responds to the call for decolonial methodologies that Walter Mignolo submits in a proposal to forsake the ‘ontology of essence’ in favour of a ‘relational ontology’. It is a project that aims at ‘relating instead of comparing ’, by foregrounding ‘the sites of entanglements’36 — the nodes in the network, the knots in the rhizome, and the crossroads in the journey—instead of an endless separation of essential differences.

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Chinese/Asian In the spirit of Mignolo’s ‘decolonial scholars’, who are perceptive to the ‘sociogenetic’ positionality of the epistemologies they produce vis-àvis structures of hegemonic knowledge formation,37 this project seeks to engage notions of Chinese(ness) and Asian(ness) dialectically and dialogically. Namely, it does so with cognizance of the complexities and contestations that surround their practice and definition.38 Chinese(ness) and Asian(ness) are invoked as epistemological anchoring points and protean signifiers which are more often suggestive of politically conflicted sites than of bounded ethno-territorial formations.39 Most networks surveyed in this volume, as its title suggests, are situated within the borders of geopolitical East Asia, plus Singapore. Hence, interactions between the East Asian Sinosphere, South Korea, and Japan take prominence. It is, nonetheless, essential to reiterate that, conceptually, ‘Asia’ and ‘East Asia’ are far from orderly precincts on a map. As Margaret Hillenbrand indicates, ‘the idea of “Asia” is less a zone of politics and culture than an open episteme’40 which means differently to different Asia(n)s. The qualifiers ‘Asian’ and ‘Chinese’ are suggestive of a dialogic imagination that is spatiotemporally contingent and always agentive, to the extent that any commitment to identity and belonging is discretionary, negotiable, elective rather than prescriptive, and able to accommodate multiple subjectivities.41 Equally, ‘Chinese’ and ‘Asian’ theatres hinge on a perception of identity as performance—one that is always intrinsically political and takes Chineseness/Asianness as a customized repertoire of assorted scenarios, voluntary enactments, and controlled improvisations. Accordingly, the producers of transnational Chinese and Asian theatres can assume multiple strategic positions within the network of relations. They can either contest or embrace what Ien Ang calls ‘the imposition of fictive kinship’42 and deliberately style themselves sometimes as Chinese/Asian, and sometimes simply as artists, or individuals. The next chapter will elucidate how rhizomatic, radicant, and transvergent figurations can positively inform the discourse of identity through a critique of the conceptual botany that is entangled in the definition of Chineseness and its recourse to arborescent metaphors of (genealogical) trees and (sought) roots. In the specific ecology of the theatrical Sinosphere that concerns this study, the term ‘Sinophone’ is mostly employed denotatively. To some degree, it overlaps with ‘Chinese-language’ or, more specifically, with

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‘Chinese-speaking’ (huayu) or ‘written in Chinese’ (huawen). Namely, in such phrases as Sinophone theatres, Sinophone performances, or Sinophone performance cultures, it does not describe, as per Shu-mei Shih’s formulation of the Sinophone, ‘a network of places of cultural production outside China and on the margins of China and Chineseness’.43 It serves, more literally, to designate a corpus of performances that derive from ‘Sinitic-language cultures and communities’44 (which, for the purposes of this study, include mainland China) and are devised and delivered primarily in Sinitic languages—although the networks under scrutiny also encompass multilingual productions interweaving Mandarin, Cantonese, Taiwanese, Japanese, and Korean sounds and scripts as exemplars of the more expansive category of transnational Asian theatres elucidated above. The term is, furthermore, engaged in recognition of the heteroglossic dissonance of minor articulations that characterizes the performances of the Sinophone as a theoretical concept and as a reminder of the ex-centric connotations encoded in its definition. Here, I am referring to an indispensable critical engagement with what Shih terms ‘the hegemonic call of Chineseness’,45 and to the Sinophone’s heterogeneic resistance to the monotheistic rhetoric of China-centrism and ‘China consciousness’ that underlies the very notion of transnational Chinese theatres as a rhizomatic intercultural articulation. As with Shih’s Sinophone, the decolonial approach of transnational Chinese theatres ‘addresses the intersection of multiple empires’, taking ‘inter-imperiality’ as a critical target.46 Inter-imperiality, in this instance, does not simply designate the entangled legacies of intraregional domination and external aggression that characterize Asia’s modern histories, which the collaborations surveyed in this volume expose to close scrutiny, but also the fraught practice of ‘theoretical imperialism’47 that distinguishes some comparative and intercultural studies of Asia’s modern theatres. The Sinophone’s challenge to (historical and conceptual) colonialism and China-centrism echoes the goals of transnational Chinese theatres as an ex-centric and networked approach to interculturalism. The Sinophone is a paradigm of transnational thinking because it decentres the discourse of the nation-state on the strength of a disassociation of ethnicity, language, culture, and nationality.48 Yet the range of transnational Chinese theatres is not limited to sound and script. Transnational Chinese theatres encompass material installations, media productions, physical performances, and nonverbal manifestations of ‘Sinocorporealities’49 that intermesh text, voice, bodies, media, virtual realities, and digital technologies.

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Theatre(s) This study conceives performance as a broadly defined practice. While focusing mostly on theatrical performance, participants in the collaborative projects under investigation traverse genre and media boundaries to embark on alternate journeys outside their usual creative territories. Transmediality, transtextuality, and translingualism are supplementary keywords in the demarcation of transnational Chinese theatres as an interdisciplinary platform that draws ontological sustenance from a condition of polysemic transborderness. The diversity of performative articulations subsumed under the notion of transnational Chinese theatres mandates its inflection in the plural, with the final ‘s’ as a marker of constitutive heterogeneity. As Chris Berry and Laikwan Pang assert in the comparable domain of transnational Chinese cinemas, ‘beyond this “s” lie the many senses of the “transnational”’.50 The plural ‘s’ is a perpetual reminder of the expansive spectrum of linguistic, ethnic, political, and aesthetic differentiations subsumed under the rubric of the trans-. Instead of thinking, monolithically, of Chinese or Asian ‘theatre’ in the singular, one should rather envisage a variegated multiplicity that reflects the plurality of practices and performativity of identities—of embodiments of Chineseness and Asianness—within the geopolitical assemblages that are conventionally identified as China(s) and Asia(s). This volume will trace multiple itineraries of transnational Chinese theatres by integrating textual, performance, and discourse analyses of a varied corpus of hitherto untapped sources. These comprise playscripts, production records, fieldwork notes, interviews, and archival documentation across a range of genres and media: drama, physical theatre, installation, video, and experiments with indigenous styles of performance— frequently hybridized to forge new paths of relational aesthetics. A networked approach to this interdisciplinary work illuminates cultural, political, and identitarian issues that would not be exposed so vividly by simply looking at an individual artist, performance piece, region, or medium alone. This is because the functionality of a network (in this case, literally, its performance) rests on the network’s integral properties of ‘connectedness ’ and ‘consistency’.51 Namely, it depends on its capacity to enable relations and conjoin communities of interest with coherent poetics and converging politics. This is especially resonant when considering the often-contentious historical subjects that these transnational

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practices tend to engage—collaboratively and comparatively. Certainly, collaboration cannot dissolve all traces of individual singularities and it is also somewhat of a truism that all performance practices are collaborative, to begin with. But it is equally reasonable to assume that the constitutive relationality of the collaboration and the intention to partake in a collaborative process cannot but affect the collaborator’s own positionality within the ensemble, hence the nature of the outcome—that is, the performance itself. Drawing on Shih’s method of relational comparison, the ensuing chapters incorporate close readings of select collaborative productions— namely, of artistic representations—with contextual examinations of the processes that enable their realization. The purpose is both to present the distinctiveness of each performance text and to pinpoint the recurrence of principles and practices that testify to their ‘interconnectedness in history’52 and are therefore symptomatic of broader relational phenomena. Shih’s designation, via Glissant, of an archipelagic methodology that ‘can start in any place’53 echoes the rhizomatic approach and openended attitude of this project; for the rhizome, as the figuration of an organic network, inhabits the conjunctions ‘between things, interbeing, intermezzo’.54 It follows that the organization of this volume is not chronological, but chronotopic. Each section revolves around one or more ‘chronotopic coordinate’55 that triggers the performative responses scrutinized therein. Most works surveyed in the next chapters resonate with momentous historical events that have impinged on the geopolitical and affective configurations of East Asia since the second half of the twentieth century—often in violent, disruptive, and traumatic ways. The mapping of each network’s distinctive journeys across these pivotal time-spaces of trans-Asian memory will reveal different modes of engagement with questions of ideology, authority, identity, and nationalism—among other themes—from the perspective of Deleuzian nomadic multiplicities, whose independent yet interconnected identities are transformed qualitatively as their constituent quantities shift in nature and number.56 The internal logic of a nomadic multiplicity, which is one and simultaneously manifold, is the logic of the rhizome: ‘it spreads over an unlimited and undivided space as a metamorphic flux; it constitutes a qualitative multiplicity with an identity that is irreducibly plural and affective; and it forms a rhizome, without center or hierarchy, in which each element is in virtual contiguity and connection with every other element’.57

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Additionally, the rhizomatic approach assists a reflection on the implications of transnational collaboration not only in the realm of theory but also with respect to historiography. The contemporary increase in collaborative practices has laid the groundwork for a new networked ecology of Sinophone theatres. This networked ecology is redefining the ways in which practitioners conceive and create performance as well as, inevitably, how scholars and historians are bound to asses these practices in the future. The transformative effects that the theatres of the region have wielded onto one another in the period under consideration attests to a generative pattern of inter-Chinese and inter-Asian allogamy that unsettles monological narratives of distinct national traditions to illuminate, instead, a rhizomatic horizon of transnational theatricalities. The relational practices charted in this study thus gesture at the formulation of alternate historiographies that can substitute or, at the very least, supplement hitherto largely detached territorial singularities with palimpsestic accounts of simultaneous transversal networks and transvergent nodes of transmission. Hence, they provide fertile ground for a rethinking of the history of Sinophone theatres as plural and intersecting histories. It is, however, not the task of this project to deliver a complete chronological account or, even less so, a teleologically ordered elaboration of such histories. This study rather attempts to formulate a method for mapping and travelling through their junctions and ‘transpositions’, that is, through a series of criss-crossing chronotopic movements that albeit disjunctural, fragmented, and told ‘by leaps and bounds, […] are not deprived of their logic, or coherence’.58 It is not a description, but an exploration. It does not submit a finished narrative but identifies an ongoing state of becoming. It traces some trajectories and locates a few points on a map with a view to encouraging different investigations of further trajectories, and further connections between different points on the global theatre maps. It wants to capture a series of snapshots, of performance images, and call attention to some recurrent patterns, connective nodes, and significant glimpses in time(space) that can help interlock a chain of coeval narratives, simultaneous incidents, and parallel histories into a rhizomatic history of networks.

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Chapters Map: Significant Chronotopes As this introductory chapter has taken off from a foundational timespace of Chinese theatrical production, ‘Tokyo, 1907’, the cartography of this volume likewise unfolds through a succession of founding moments in the political and cultural histories of East Asian modernity. Echoing Michael Berry’s influential analysis of narratives of atrocity in modern Chinese literature and film, this study engages the Bakhtinian concept of the chronotope to designate these evocative time-spaces as significant chronotopes.59 It does so to foreground ‘the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships’60 as conveyed through artistic representations and concrete stage images, and to assess the capacity of transnational collaboration to re-enact contentious pasts and present concerns. Following on a largely theoretical chapter, each of the remaining chapters elicits the significance of specific geo-temporal sites in the collective reimagining and cross-referencing of East Asian traumatic histories. Collaborative revisitations of unsettled memories expose the haunted materiality of their spectral and, frequently, suppressed remains in contemporary transnational politics. Most of the works selected for examination react to transformative shifts in the geopolitical configurations of the region, including the Korean division and the China–Taiwan conflict, or retrace contested narratives that span through Japanese military atrocities in China and Singapore during World War II, the after-effects of the Cold War, the Martial Law era in Taiwan, and democracy movements in China and South Korea. Clearly, other moments could have been selected in this sequence of founding moments, and other performances could have been surveyed. What follows is simply a trace of some meaningful sites in time and space, which indicates a way of unravelling myriad others. The rationale for selecting a corpus of historically resonant productions as representative cases of transnational Chinese theatres is, one the one hand, to enable a relational analysis of artistic responses to past events whose controversial legacies continue to affect institutional and individual relations in the present—including relations between ‘national’ arts and cultures in transnational Asia. On the other hand, it is to scrutinize the ways in which those legacies have been addressed collectively and comparatively through intercultural performance production.

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These milestones of trans-Asian imagination are not merely ‘symbolic’ but ‘symptomatic’ sites of lasting geo- and chrono-pathological anxieties— to rework Una Chaudhuri’s description of geopathology as the fraught relationship with (time)space.61 Consistent with the Bakhtinian formulation of the artistic chronotope as an ‘intersection of axes and fusion of [temporal and spatial] indicators’,62 one performance may overlay several convergent chronotopes, for ‘history, like trauma, is never simply one’s own, […] history is precisely the way we are implicated in each other’s traumas’.63 Furthermore, as Berry proposes, each chronotope may be the locus of both ‘centripetal’ and ‘centrifugal trauma’. Namely, each may catalyse an incident or a chain of incidents that ensue from both external intervention—for instance, Japanese militarism in China and colonial subjugation in Singapore—and internal powers within the nation-state, such as the endogenous ‘Chinese-on-Chinese’ brutality perpetrated by the Communist regime in Beijing against the pro-democracy demonstrators at Tiananmen Square on 4 June 1989.64 Resonating with the central aspects of transnationalism and transnational Chinese theatres is also the emphasis that Berry places on movement—deportations, dispersals, dislocations, and diasporas—and on the role of centripetal and centrifugal forces in, respectively, cementing and dismantling feelings of nation and nationalism, hence in bolstering new transnational aspirations in consequence of the miscarriage of national ideals.65 Transnational Chinese theatres engage history deconstructively, to the extent that it traverses its seminal time-spaces not simply by travelling across various chronotopic latitudes but also by eliciting the archaic meaning of ‘traversing’ as opposing, debating, or disputing.66 To invoke the double connotation of ‘traversing transnationalism’ as both crossing and contesting means to bear in mind ‘how transnationalism’s focus on circulations and crossings among different spaces, different scales—subnational, national, outernational, and global—and different temporalities, including pre- and postnational, does not occur for its own sake, but enables the critical interrogation of these spatio-temporal coordinates, for which the transnational serves as a substitute’.67 To this effect, the analysis below foregrounds the multiple manners in which those momentous historical (dis-)junctures have been revisited performatively through artistically reconstructed imaginaries to resonate with wider social processes of informal reconciliation, collective healing, and social justice. In asserting the testimonial capacities of performance

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and the restorative potential of partaking, prosthetically, in those histories as a collective of artists and audiences in theatres, galleries, and other public spaces, this study supports Annette Kuhn’s affirmation of ‘the significance of narrative [and, in this instance, of embodied representations] in cultural memory—in the sense not just of the (continuously negotiated) contents of shared/collective memory-stories, but also of the activity of recounting or telling memory-stories, in both private and public contexts—in other words, of performances of memory’.68 Chapter 2, ‘Rhizomes, Radicants, and Journeys: Transnational Chinese Theatres as Networks of Intercultural Collaboration’, revisits the foundations of intercultural theory from the perspective of trans-Asian collaboration. It critiques the Western-centric bias of conventional methods of intercultural analysis and questions the ability of existing models to comprehend the polymorphic formations shaped by relational praxes of transnational Chinese theatres. It sets out to ‘dislocate the West’69 from the transnational discourse of Asian interculturalism and to explore alternate morphologies of intercultural collaboration through the networked prisms of rhizomes and radicants. The distinctive practices, politics, and identities of transnational Chinese and Asian theatres are elucidated in the light of Deleuze’s and Bourriaud’s definitions and in conversation with Asia-oriented methods and transvergent epistemologies. Additionally, the analysis probes the concept of performance in journey-form as a dynamic process of production and circulation defined by transfers, crossings, and patterns of intrinsic mobility that inform the geopolitical trajectories of intercultural collaboration along with its semantics and methodologies. The chapter concludes with an examination of Poisonous Weeds (Da ducao, 2002)—a performative installation which Hong Kong-based multi-artist Danny Yung set up remotely, in the mainland Chinese city of Chengdu—to illustrate the conceptual features of rhizomatic and radicant performances in journey-form. Chapter 3, ‘Hong Kong Transfers: Transmedial Travels in the Theatre of Relations’, converges onto the significant chronotope, ‘Hong Kong, 1997’, which marks the former British colony’s handover to the People’s Republic of China. The long-term series of collaborative stage productions, art installations, and critical forums, Journey to the East ( Zhongguo lücheng), is scrutinized as a paradigm of trans-Asian networked performance whose inherent tropes of travel and mobility resonate with the concept of artwork in journey-form. Curated by Danny Yung with the Hong Kong transmedial collective, Zuni Icosahedron, the Journey series

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pinpoints a constellation of choral yet distinct responses by theatremakers, filmmakers, choreographers, videographers, and visual artists to a predefined curatorial framework inspired by the set design of xiqu (Chinese indigenous theatre, or ‘Chinese opera’): One Table Two Chairs (1T2C). These comprise contributions by leading Sinophone theatremakers Edward Lam, Wei Ying-chuan, Stan Lai, Lee Kuo-hsiu, Lin Zhaohua, Meng Jinghui, and Ong Keng Sen, and intermedial stage experiments by prominent filmmakers including Edward Yang, Tsai Ming-liang, Wu Wenguang, and Stanley Kwan. The chapter spans a period between the early 1980s to the turn of the millennium, during which Journey came to encompass a multiplicity of localities and its central trope of travel was mobilized to elicit resistant counter-cartographies of post-1997 interChinese geopolitics. The interdisciplinary work of Zuni as a path-breaking facilitator of transnational networks since the 1980s occupies a prominent place in this study. Zuni’s collaborative projects and exchange platforms are foregrounded as seminal to the constitution of rhizomes of intercultural collaboration in the performing and visual arts—frequently, in association with other key mediators in the networks charted throughout this volume, such as Taiwan’s Wang Molin, Singapore’s Kuo Pao Kun, and Japan’s Sat¯o Makoto. The actual notion of transnational Chinese theatres was, in fact, inspired by Zuni’s trailblazing practice. Still today, their collaborative work is quite exceptional across the region in terms of complexity and scope. The investigation of Zuni’s creative associations with theatremakers, film directors, and visual artists via the 1T2C framework and its inherently dialogic conformation sheds light on Hong Kong’s role as a strategic contact zone for inter-Asian relations. The original connotation of ‘one table, two chairs’ as a political allegory of ‘one country, two systems’ was mitigated in the post-millennial editions of Journey, so that the shared format came to signify a trans-Asian poetics of relations. The transmedial reverberations of the series as a model of performance in journey-form are tracked further afield in time and space through a discussion of the Festival of Vision (2000)—a pioneering exchange between Hong Kong and Berlin—and of upshot projects such as the performance-cum-video installation, Video Circle (Luxiang quan, 1996–2003). Chapter 4, ‘Performing the 38th Parallel Across the Taiwan Strait: Territorial Divides and Theatrical Dialogues in East Asia’, details the activities of two intersecting networks, the East Asia People’s Theatre Network and

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Asia Meets Asia, which have involved people’s theatre practitioners from Hong Kong, Taipei, Shanghai, Tokyo, Seoul, and other cities. The analysis focuses on a performance diptych comprising of 38th Parallel Still Play ( Sanbaxian youxi) and 38th Parallel in Taipei ( Taibei 38 duxian), which the Shanghai-based collective Grass Stage co-devised in 2005 with associates from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and South Korea. Performed in Gwangju, Shanghai, and Taipei, the plays revisit the Korean division and the China-Taiwan conflict comparatively to investigate inter-Asian relations during and after the Cold War. Their production, circulation, and surrounding intellectual discourse chart the ramifications of transnational Chinese theatres across some significant political and performance communities of ‘minjian East Asia’,70 while also illuminating questions of authoritarianism and national atrocity through transnational comparison. These and other performative re-enactments of inter-Asian relationality are assessed in the context of contemporary debates on critical regionalism, and grassroots advocacy. The analysis draws on Asian-focused epistemologies such as Takeuchi Yoshimi’s and Chen Kuan-hsing’s formulations of ‘Asia as Method’, alongside exploratory applications of Paik Nak-chung’s ‘Overcoming the Division System’ paradigm to the realities—and performances—of the China-Taiwan conflict.71 38th Parallel connects the Seoul-Pyongyang axis under the regime of partition of the Korean Peninsula that resulted from the Korean War of 1950–1953 with Beijing–Taipei diplomatic relations in the aftermath of the Chinese Civil War of 1945–1949. On the one hand, the series cross-references the ideological and affective consequences of the Korean Division System, as per Paik’s formulation, and of its Sino-Taiwanese equivalent, the ‘cross-strait system’ proposed by Chen Kuan-hsing.72 On the other hand, it interlaces metaphors and memorials of foundational episodes of intra-ethnic brutality such as the February 28 (2/28) Incident of 1947 and the White Terror persecutions in Taiwan under Martial Law, the South Korean Democratization Movement (aka the Gwangju Uprising) of 1980, and the bloody repression of the 1989 Tiananmen Square democracy movement. The plays traverse an assemblage of converging chronotopes spanning through the vector ‘Beijing-Taipei, 1945’ (the origin of the Sino-Taiwanese cross-strait crisis), ‘Panmunjom, 1953’ (the site of the Korean Armistice Agreement that enabled the coming into existence of the Korean Demilitarized Zone at the 38th parallel north, hence the perpetuation of the division system), and three traumatic sites of institutional abuse: ‘Taipei, 1947’, ‘Gwangju, 1980’, and ‘Beijing, 1989’.

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The performances reflect on the lasting consequences of the Korean War as Asia’s ‘forgotten war’, and on Taiwan’s perceived anxiety over being equally ‘forgotten’ and made insignificant in consequence of China’s exponential economic growth and augmented negotiating power with the international community. Questions of forgetting, invisibility, and amnesia are dramatized as affective matters and cause of enduring emotional pain through the exploration of themes of geopathology, displacement, and forced separation. Additionally, the second instalment underscores fears of endogenous obliteration as it engages identitarian politics and minority discourse not only from the perspective of crossstrait relations but also with regard to Taiwan’s multiethnic society and the marginalization of minor languages within a still largely Han- and Mandarin-centric cultural sphere. Chapter 5, ‘Trans-Asian Spectropoetics: Conjuring War and Violence on the Haunted Stage of History’, scrutinizes two adaptations of Kuo Pao Kun’s The Spirits Play (Lingxi, 1998) through the prism of hauntology and memoropolitics. It argues that the spectropoetics of these twenty-first-century versions of Kuo’s contemporary classic affirm a spectropolitical critique of imperialistic and interethnic violence by way of intertextuality and collaborative intercultural adaptation. Kuo’s symbolist allegory condemns Japan’s military atrocities during the Japanese Occupation of Singapore (1942–1945), yet is also sympathetic to the riven positionality of the Japanese as both perpetrators and victims. The original text and its trans-Asian revisitations invoke the paradoxical cypher of the ghost as a dramaturgical expedient to interweave a spectropoetics of violence with a spectropolitics of spiritual redemption and quest for justice. The chapter traces the origins of this trans-Asian theatre of memory to the Sinophone networks that Kuo helped establish through a series of Chinese Drama Camps in 1980s Singapore. Those historic meetings connected the foremost personalities in the theatre scenes of the Chinese-speaking region at the time. It then follows with a hauntological examination of The Spirits Play: Rituals to Soothe the Unsettled Spirits (Lingxi – fuwei wanghun de jidian), a Sino-Japanese cross-genre version co-directed by Sat¯o Makoto and Danny Yung with a mixed ensemble of Japanese n¯ o actors and contemporary theatre and dance performers from Tokyo and kunqu (Kun opera) actors from Nanjing. Staged in Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Singapore in 2011 and 2012, the kun-n¯ o adaptation summons the unsettled spectres of the Nanjing Massacre of 1937 and of the Tiananmen Square atrocities of 1989 to critique Sino-Japanese

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politics, history, and contemporary social dynamics along with the anxiety of spectralization of indigenous performance traditions. The Cantonese-Mandarin production of The Mother Hen Next Door (Geli ge da muji, 2010) and its updated version, The Mother Hen Next Door: A Tribute (Geli ge da muji – shinian ji, 2012), presented at the Kuo Pao Kun Festival 2012 in Singapore, offer an additional illustration of comparative critiques of violent national histories through trans-Asian spectrotheatrics . The plays, which Hung Chit-wah, from Hong Kong, and Hung Pei-ching, from Taipei, devised in Singapore, intersect the significant chronotopes of ‘Taipei, 1947’ and ‘Beijing, 1989’. Tropes of spectrality, amnesia, and traumatic displacement are engaged to interlock the narratives of suffering of the victims of Japanese wartime militarism with the fraught memories of the bloody repression of 2/28 and the White Terror era in Martial Law Taiwan, and the carnage at Tiananmen Square in 1989. The brief epilogue (Chapter 6), ‘Out of Asia: Transnational Chinese Theatres’ Global Itineraries’, retraces the volume’s key arguments and concepts—transnationalism, interculturalism, collaboration, networks, journeys, rhizomes—to reassert the definition of transnational Chinese theatres as a rhizomatic model of intercultural collaboration grounded in mobility and relationality, and to identify patterns of continuity across the networks and narratives outlined in the preceding chapters. A concise discussion of emergent notions of transcontinental and transpacific (trans-)Asian theatricalities adds to the significance of itinerant platforms and transvergent connections in the realization of Asia as method in performance. In so doing, the end station of this project’s conceptual journey gestures at potential new avenues for future inquiry into embryonic Sinophone intercultural transversalities beyond the boundaries of geopolitical Asia—across the Pacific and in the Global South.

Notes 1. Siyuan Liu, Performing Hybridity in Colonial-Modern China (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 38–53. 2. Siyuan Liu, Kevin J. Wetmore Jr., and Erin B. Mee, Modern Asian Theatre and Performance 1900–2000 (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 266. 3. Karen Laura Thornber, Empire of Texts in Motion: Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese Transculturations of Japanese Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 2. Thornber’s study of early modern East Asian ‘literary contact nebulae’ under the Japanese Empire (1895–1945)

1

4. 5. 6.

7.

8.

9. 10.

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mentions intersections of Chinese, Taiwanese, Korean, and Japanese theatres, including China–Japan interactions (31, 48–49), Korean and Taiwanese experiences with Chinese and Japanese theatremakers in Tokyo (55–56, 68), Koreans in China and Japanese troupes in China, Korea, and Taiwan (71–73), and translations, adaptations, and intertextual exchanges across the East Asian theatrical contact zone (136, 145, 247–48). Siyuan Liu (Performing Hybridity) has made crucial contributions to the understanding of Sino-Japanese theatrical transculturation in the early twentieth century. Ronald Bogue, Deleuze’s Way: Essays in Transverse Ethics and Aesthetics (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 1. Daniel Chernilo, “Social Theory’s Methodological Nationalism: Myth and Reality,” European Journal of Social Theory 9, no. 1 (2006): 5–22. The notion of transnational Chinese theatres builds on the critique of the limitations of the national model in Chinese film studies articulated in Sheldon Hsiao-peng Lu, ed., Transnational Chinese Cinemas: Identity, Nationhood, Gender (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1997). In earlier work, I coined this construct as ‘transnational Chinese theatre(s)’ with a final parenthetic ‘s’ to reflect debates that were unfolding at the time about the use of the singular versus plural form to denote cultural production in the Chinese-speaking region (i.e. Chinese ‘culture’ vs. ‘cultures’ or ‘cinema’ vs. ‘cinemas’). Years later, the benefits of the plural seem to have been firmly asserted; yet one can still encounter singular descriptions of ‘Chinese theatre’, hence this volume’s emphasis on the plural form. Liang ’an sandi (‘the three places on the two shores’) refers to the three main Chinese-speaking territories on the two sides of the Taiwan Strait: mainland China (People’s Republic of China [PRC]), Taiwan (Republic of China [ROC]), and the former British colony of Hong Kong (Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the PRC, since 1997). Liang ’an sidi (‘the four places on the two shores’) also includes the former Portuguese colony of Macau (Macau Special Administrative Region of the PRC, since 1999). Nicolas Bourriaud, The Radicant, trans. James Gussen and Lili Porten (New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2009). See also Bourriaud, ed., Altermodern (London: Tate, 2009). Amanda Rogers, Performing Asian Transnationalisms: Theatre, Identity, and the Geographies of Performance (London: Routledge, 2014). See Rossella Ferrari, “Transnation/Transmedia/Transtext: BorderCrossing from Screen to Stage in Greater China,” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 2, no. 1 (2008): 53–65, and “Journey(s) to the East—Travels, Trajectories, and Transnational Chinese Theatre(s),” Postcolonial Studies 13, no. 4 (2010): 351–66.

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11. Steven Vertovec, Transnationalism (London: Routledge, 2009), 4. 12. Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih, “Introduction: Thinking through the Minor, Transnationally,” in Minor Transnationalism, ed. Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). 13. Saskia Sassen, “Spatialities and Temporalities of the Global: Elements for a Theorization,” Public Culture 12, no. 1 (2000): 221. 14. Lionnet and Shih, “Introduction,” 8. 15. Saskia Sassen, “When the Center No Longer Holds: Cities as Frontier Zones,” Cities 34 (2013): 67–70. See also Sassen, “The City: Its Return as a Lens for Social Theory,” City, Culture and Society 1 (2010): 3–11. 16. Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, 2nd ed. (Oxford: WileyBlackwell, 2010 [1996]). 17. On actors, networks, and mediators, see Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 18. Peter Hitchcock, Imaginary States: Studies in Cultural Transnationalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 9. 19. Ien Ang, On Not Speaking Chinese: Living between Asia and the West (London: Routledge, 2001), 89. 20. On the role of cities in the ‘geographies of performance’, see Amanda Rogers, “Geographies of the Performing Arts: Landscapes, Places and Cities,” Geography Compass 6, no. 2 (2012): 60–75. 21. Michael Berry, A History of Pain: Trauma in Modern Chinese Literature and Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 5. 22. Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden, eds., Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader (London: Routledge, 2006), 13. 23. Several scholars of transnationalism make this point. See Ulf Hannerz, Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places (London: Routledge, 1996), 6; Katie Willis, Brenda S. A. Yeoh, and S. M. Abdul Khader Fakhri, “Introduction: Transnationalism as a Challenge to the Nation,” in State/Nation/Transnation: Perspectives on Transnationalism in the AsiaPacific, ed. Katie Willis and Brenda S. A. Yeoh (London: Routledge, 2004), 1. 24. Haiping Yan, “Other Transnationals, an Introductory Essay,” Modern Drama 48, no. 2 (2005), 241. 25. Asian Performing Arts Forum, “Ajia butai geijutsusai 2006 Taipei — daiyonkai Ajia butai geijutsusai h¯ okokusho/Asian Performing Arts Festival 2006 Taipei: The 4th Asian Performing Arts Festival Report,” APAF Asian Performing Arts Forum, accessed November 29, 2017, http:// butai.asia/wp-content/themes/apaf/pdf/asia04.pdf. 26. On the multiple meanings of trans- and trans-ing see Ferrari, “Transnation”, and “Journey(s)”, on which sections of this introduction are based. For a discussion in the field of performance studies see Amelia Jones,

1

27.

28.

29. 30. 31.

32.

33.

34. 35. 36.

37. 38.

39. 40.

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“Introduction: Trans-ing Performance,” Performance Research 21, no. 5 (2016): 1–11. For a definition of interculturalism as comprising of intra- and extracultural practices, see Jacqueline Lo and Helen Gilbert, “Toward a Topography of Cross-Cultural Theatre Praxis,” TDR: The Drama Review 46, no. 3 (2002): 31–53. On transversals, see Bogue, Deleuze’s Way. On transvergence see Marcos Novak, “Speciation, Transvergence, Allogenesis: Notes on the Production of the Alien,” Architectural Design 72, no. 3 (2002): 64–71. On transversality, see Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997 [1990]). Leo Cabranes-Grant, “From Scenarios to Networks: Performing the Intercultural in Colonial Mexico,” Theatre Journal 63, no. 4 (2011): 511. Ibid., 501. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987 [1980]), 3–25; Bourriaud, Radicant; and Novak, “Speciation”. Naoki Sakai, “From Area Studies toward Transnational Studies,” InterAsia Cultural Studies 11, no. 2 (2010): 273; Chen Kuan-hsing, Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Koichi Iwabuchi, “Trans-East Asia as Method,” in Routledge Handbook of East Asian Popular Culture, ed. Koichi Iwabuchi, Eva Tsai, and Chris Berry (London: Routledge, 2017), 276–84. Koichi Iwabuchi “De-Westernisation, Inter-Asian Referencing, and Beyond,” European Journal of Cultural Studies 17, no. 1 (2014): 44– 57. Chen, Asia as Method, xii. Ibid., 216. Walter D. Mignolo, “On Comparison: Who Is Comparing What and Why?” in Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses, ed. Rita Felski and Susan Stanford Friedman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 112, 117. Ibid., 116. For critiques of Chineseness, see Ang, On Not Speaking Chinese; Rey Chow, “Introduction: On Chineseness as a Theoretical Problem,” boundary 2 25, no. 3 (1998): 1–24; and Allen Chun, “Fuck Chineseness: On the Ambiguities of Ethnicity as Culture as Identity,” boundary 2 23, no. 2 (1996): 111–38. Chen (Asia As Method, 212) postulates ‘Asia as an imaginary anchoring point’. Margaret Hillenbrand, “Communitarianism, or, How to Build East Asian Theory,” Postcolonial Studies 13, no. 4 (2010): 329.

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41. Ang (On Not Speaking Chinese, 35, 40) defines Chineseness as a negotiable/negotiated ‘open signifier’ and ‘discursive construct’. 42. Ibid., 84. 43. Shu-mei Shih, Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 4. 44. Shu-mei Shih, “Introduction: What Is Sinophone Studies?” in Sinophone Studies: A Critical Reader, ed. Shu-mei Shih, Chien-hsin Tsai, and Brian Bernards (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 7. 45. Shu-mei Shih, “The Concept of the Sinophone,” PMLA 126, no. 3 (2011), 717. 46. Shu-mei Shih, “Empires of the Sinophone,” abstract, Sinophone Studies: New Directions, Harvard University, October 14–15, 2016, accessed July 10, 2018, http://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/ 09/Sinophone-Studies-ABSTRACTS.pdf. 47. Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei, “Countering ‘Theoretical Imperialism’: Some Possibilities from Japan,” Theatre Research International 32, no. 3 (2007): 312–24. 48. Shih, Visuality, 30. 49. Yatin Lin, Sino-Corporealities: Contemporary Choreographies from Taipei, Hong Kong and New York (Taipei: Taipei National University of the Arts, 2015). 50. Chris Berry and Laikwan Pang, “Introduction, Or, What’s in an ‘s’?” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 2, no. 1 (2008): 3. 51. Castells, Network Society, 187. 52. Shu-mei Shih, “Comparison as Relation,” in Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses, ed. Rita Felski and Susan Stanford Friedman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 84, 96. 53. Ibid., 85. 54. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 25. 55. Berry, History of Pain, 14. 56. Bogue, Deleuze’s Way, 126. 57. Ibid., 127. 58. Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 5. 59. Each chapter in Berry’s History of Pain focuses on ‘a particular chronotopic coordinate’ of violent history. Berry defines these ‘chronotopes of pain’ as ‘a series of historical atrocities in modern China that have been traditionally each tied to a specific time and place’ (14). 60. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes toward a Historical Poetics,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 84.

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61. Una Chaudhuri, Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 76. 62. Bakhtin, “Forms,” 84. 63. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 24. 64. Berry, History of Pain, 4–6. 65. Ibid., 15–16, 383. 66. Pier Paolo Frassinelli, Ronit Frenkel, and David Watson, “Traversing Transnationalism,” in Traversing Transnationalism: The Horizons of Literary and Cultural Studies, ed. Pier Paolo Frassinelli, Ronit Frenkel, and David Watson (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011), 3. 67. Ibid. 68. Annette Kuhn, “Memory Texts and Memory Work: Performances of Memory in and with Visual Media,” Memory Studies 3, no. 4 (2010): 298. 69. Naoki Sakai, “Dislocation of the West and the Status of the Humanities,” Traces: A Multilingual Journal of Cultural Theory and Translation 1 (2001): 71–94. 70. Chen Kuan-hsing, Hu Chin-ya, and Wang Chih-ming, “Minjian East Asia Forum: Feelings and Imaginations,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 14, no. 2 (2013): 327–33. 71. Takeuchi Yoshimi, “Asia as Method,” in What Is Modernity? Writings of Takeuchi Yoshimi, ed. and trans. Richard F. Calichman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 149–65; Paik Nak-chung, “South Korean Democracy and Korea’s Division System,” trans. Susan Hwang, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 14, no. 1 (2013): 156–69. 72. Chen Guangxing [Chen Kuan-hsing], “Bai Yueqing de ‘chaoke “fenduan tizhi”’ lun: canzhao lianghan sixiang liang’an,” Taiwan shehui yanjiu jikan 74 (2009): 3–47.

Bibliography Ang, Ien. On Not Speaking Chinese: Living between Asia and the West. London: Routledge, 2001. Asian Performing Arts Forum. “Ajia butai geijutsusai 2006 Taipei — daiyonkai Ajia butai geijutsusai h¯ okokusho/Asian Performing Arts Festival 2006 Taipei: The 4th Asian Performing Arts Festival Report.” APAF Asian Performing Arts Forum. Accessed November 29, 2017. http://butai.asia/wp-content/ themes/apaf/pdf/asia04.pdf. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes toward a Historical Poetics.” In The Dialogic Imagination: Four

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Essays, edited by Michael Holquist, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, 84–258. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Berry, Chris, and Laikwan Pang. “Introduction, Or, What’s in an ‘s’?” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 2, no. 1 (2008): 3–8. Berry, Michael. A History of Pain: Trauma in Modern Chinese Literature and Film. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. Bogue, Ronald. Deleuze’s Way: Essays in Transverse Ethics and Aesthetics. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. Bourriaud, Nicolas, ed. Altermodern. London: Tate, 2009. ———. The Radicant. Translated by James Gussen and Lili Porten. New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2009. Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. 2nd ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Cabranes-Grant, Leo. “From Scenarios to Networks: Performing the Intercultural in Colonial Mexico.” Theatre Journal 63, no. 4 (2011): 499–520. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Castells, Manuel. The Rise of the Network Society. 2nd ed. Oxford: WileyBlackwell, 2010 [1996]. Chaudhuri, Una. Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995. Chen Kuan-hsing [Chen Guangxing]. Asia As Method: Toward Deimperialization. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. ———. “Bai Yueqing de ‘chaoke “fenduan tizhi”’ lun: canzhao lianghan sixiang liang’an.” Taiwan shehui yanjiu jikan 74 (2009): 3–47. Chen Kuan-hsing, Hu Chin-ya, and Wang Chih-ming. “Minjian East Asia Forum: Feelings and Imaginations.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 14, no. 2 (2013): 327–33. Chernilo, Daniel. “Social Theory’s Methodological Nationalism: Myth and Reality.” European Journal of Social Theory 9, no. 1 (2006): 5–22. Chow, Rey. “Introduction: On Chineseness as a Theoretical Problem.” boundary 2 25, no. 3 (1998): 1–24. Chun, Allen. “Fuck Chineseness: On the Ambiguities of Ethnicity as Culture as Identity.” boundary 2 23, no. 2 (1996): 111–38. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987 [1980]. Ezra, Elizabeth, and Terry Rowden, eds. Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader. London: Routledge, 2006. Ferrari, Rossella. “Journey(s) to the East—Travels, Trajectories, and Transnational Chinese Theatre(s).” Postcolonial Studies 13, no. 4 (2010): 351–66.

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———. “Transnation/Transmedia/Transtext: Border-Crossing from Screen to Stage in Greater China.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 2, no. 1 (2008): 53–65. Frassinelli, Pier Paolo, Ronit Frenkel, and David Watson. “Traversing Transnationalism.” In Traversing Transnationalism: The Horizons of Literary and Cultural Studies, edited by Pier Paolo Frassinelli, Ronit Frenkel, and David Watson, 1–11. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011. Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997 [1990]. Hannerz, Ulf. Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places. London: Routledge, 1996. Hillenbrand, Margaret. “Communitarianism, or, How to Build East Asian Theory.” Postcolonial Studies 13, no. 4 (2010): 317–34. Hitchcock, Peter. Imaginary States: Studies in Cultural Transnationalism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003. Iwabuchi, Koichi. “De-Westernisation, Inter-Asian Referencing, and Beyond.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 17, no. 1 (2014): 44–57. ———. “Trans-East Asia as Method.” In Routledge Handbook of East Asian Popular Culture, edited by Koichi Iwabuchi, Eva Tsai, and Chris Berry, 276–84. London: Routledge, 2017. Jones, Amelia. “Introduction: Trans-ing Performance.” Performance Research 21, no. 5 (2016): 1–11. Kuhn, Annette. “Memory Texts and Memory Work: Performances of Memory in and with Visual Media.” Memory Studies 3, no. 4 (2010): 298–313. Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-NetworkTheory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Lin, Yatin. Sino-Corporealities: Contemporary Choreographies from Taipei, Hong Kong and New York. Taipei: Taipei National University of the Arts, 2015. Lionnet, Françoise, and Shu-mei Shih. “Introduction: Thinking through the Minor, Transnationally.” In Minor Transnationalism, edited by Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih, 1–23. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. Liu, Siyuan. Performing Hybridity in Colonial-Modern China. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Liu, Siyuan, Kevin J. Wetmore Jr., and Erin B. Mee. Modern Asian Theatre and Performance 1900–2000. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Lo, Jacqueline, and Helen Gilbert. “Toward a Topography of Cross-Cultural Theatre Praxis.” TDR: The Drama Review 46, no. 3 (2002): 31–53. Lu, Sheldon Hsiao-peng, ed. Transnational Chinese Cinemas: Identity, Nationhood, Gender. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1997. Mignolo, Walter D. “On Comparison: Who Is Comparing What and Why?” In Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses, edited by Rita Felski and Susan Stanford Friedman, 99–119. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013.

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Novak, Marcos. “Speciation, Transvergence, Allogenesis: Notes on the Production of the Alien.” Architectural Design 72, no. 3 (2002): 64–71. Paik Nak-chung. “South Korean Democracy and Korea’s Division System.” Translated by Susan Hwang. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 14, no. 1 (2013): 156–69. Rogers, Amanda. “Geographies of the Performing Arts: Landscapes, Places and Cities.” Geography Compass 6, no. 2 (2012): 60–75. ———. Performing Asian Transnationalisms: Theatre, Identity, and the Geographies of Performance. London: Routledge, 2014. Sakai, Naoki. “Dislocation of the West and the Status of the Humanities.” Traces: A Multilingual Journal of Cultural Theory and Translation 1 (2001): 71–94. ———. “From Area Studies toward Transnational Studies.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 11, no. 2 (2010): 265–74. Sassen, Saskia. “Spatialities and Temporalities of the Global: Elements for a Theorization.” Public Culture 12, no. 1 (2000): 215–32. ———. “The City: Its Return as a Lens for Social Theory.” City, Culture and Society 1 (2010): 3–11. ———. “When the Center No Longer Holds: Cities as Frontier Zones.” Cities 34 (2013): 67–70. Shih, Shu-mei. “Comparison as Relation.” In Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses, edited by Rita Felski and Susan Stanford Friedman, 79–98. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. ———. “Empires of the Sinophone.” Abstract. Sinophone Studies: New Directions, Harvard University, October 14–15, 2016. Accessed July 10, 2018. http://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/SinophoneStudies-ABSTRACTS.pdf. ———. “Introduction: What Is Sinophone Studies?” In Sinophone Studies: A Critical Reader, edited by Shu-mei Shih, Chien-hsin Tsai, and Brian Bernards, 1–16. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. ———. “The Concept of the Sinophone.” PMLA 126, no. 3 (2011): 709–18. ———. Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Sorgenfrei, Carol Fisher. “Countering ‘Theoretical Imperialism’: Some Possibilities from Japan.” Theatre Research International 32, no. 3 (2007): 312–24. Takeuchi Yoshimi. “Asia as Method.” In What Is Modernity? Writings of Takeuchi Yoshimi, edited and translated by Richard F. Calichman, 149–65. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Thornber, Karen Laura. Empire of Texts in Motion: Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese Transculturations of Japanese Literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. Vertovec, Steven. Transnationalism. London: Routledge, 2009.

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Willis, Katie, Brenda S. A. Yeoh, and S. M. Abdul Khader Fakhri. “Introduction: Transnationalism as a Challenge to the Nation.” In State/Nation/Transnation: Perspectives on Transnationalism in the Asia-Pacific, edited by Katie Willis and Brenda S. A. Yeoh, 1–15. London: Routledge, 2004. Yan, Haiping. “Other Transnationals, an Introductory Essay.” Modern Drama 48, no. 2 (2005): 225–48.

CHAPTER 2

Rhizomes, Radicants, and Journeys: Transnational Chinese Theatres as Networks of Intercultural Collaboration

The conceptual journey of transnational Chinese theatres begins with a reconnaissance of the landmarks of intercultural theory from the perspective of trans-Asian collaboration. Conventional methods of intercultural analysis display a sustained tendency to foreground rectilinear transfers that unfold along West-East or North-South trajectories. Typically, the so-called West/North intervenes in this kind of modelling not only as a mandatory partaker in the exchange but also as the dominant variable in the intercultural equation. The hegemony of ‘the West as method’1 in theorizing intercultural relations has obfuscated the significance of lateral alignments and ‘minor-to-minor networks’ which are not routed via a naturalized or dominant centre and has persistently overlooked transversal East-East, South-South, and East-South interactions.2 The Western-centric bias has, furthermore, resulted in the formulation of epistemological frameworks that present relatively ordered patterns of interaction between endogenous and exogenous components from discrete cultural systems. It has contributed to affirming exceedingly linear patterns of knowledge production and transmission, which fail to comprehend the composite patterns of embodied dialogism that are intrinsic to the process of intercultural collaboration. The fluid morphologies and diffuse spatialities of transnational Chinese theatres as networks of intercultural collaboration demand, therefore, a revised conceptual agenda that can both ‘dislocate the West’3 from intercultural theory and negotiate the polymorphic manners of relational © The Author(s) 2020 R. Ferrari, Transnational Chinese Theatres, Transnational Theatre Histories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37273-6_2

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engagement that unfold through its transborder practices. Expanding on previous applications of Deleuzian philosophy in the examination of intercultural performance, I categorize this alternate conceptual regime as rhizomatic interculturalism. Rhizomatic theory attends to transnationalism and interculturalism as networked formations that engage relationality as both a cognitive mechanism and a dissolvent of binaries. A reappraisal of the conceptual geometries (shapes and dimensions) and geographies (spaces and directions) of intercultural collaboration through the prism of rhizomatic networks reveals a spectrum of transvergent dynamics that elude static intercultural models and exceptionalist comparisons while also contesting hegemonic perceptions of the ‘roots and routes’4 of transnational creativity.

Dislocating the West from Intercultural Collaboration: Beyond Centres and Straight Lines Interculturalism has been a generative site of theorization since at least the 1980s and has played an important role in placing nonWestern performance cultures on the global theatre maps. It is, however, widely acknowledged in the scholarly debate that early intercultural practices were conceived and, consequently, conceptualized as largely Western-centric, with little or no involvement of thinkers and theatremakers from the so-called global Easts and Souths (i.e. from outside Europe and North America).5 Historic productions such as Peter Brook’s The Mahabharata (1985) and Ariane Mnouchkine’s L’Indiade (1987) were deemed as orientalist and culturally predatory, and their creators oblivious of the ethical implications of such seemingly dialogic yet markedly one-sided intercultural operations.6 Politically, the phenomenon that one might categorize as classic or canonical interculturalism has been chastised for its ‘breezy utopian universalism’7 and indiscriminating alignment with neocolonial power matrixes. Aesthetically, it has been reproved for constructing essentialist taxonomies and spectacular displays of exotica for the viewing pleasures of global metropolitan elites.8 Such ideologically disengaged experiments have often been guilty of context-blind appropriations of superficial ethnic markers divested of historical genealogy and circumstantial raison d’être. Though not necessarily manipulative by design, assimilationist inflections of interculturalism-as-cosmetic-mimicry—or ‘fancy-dress

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pretence’9 —have implicitly partaken in processes of simplification, objectification, and neutering of complex cultural systems. At the same time, it has also been noted that the divide between an invariably exploitative West/North and a perpetually victimized East/South has been overstated, with some defending the now-accepted view that intercultural transfers are bidirectional pathways rather than one-way streets, and that the East/South has appropriated foreign forms as consistently and strategically as the West/North.10 In any event, both positions— no matter whether critical or celebratory—share a structural inability to comprehend intercultural formations that transcend straight-lined East-West/North-South conceptual alignments. The face and fortunes of interculturalism have not necessarily taken a turn for the better in this age of enhanced globalization of economic, cultural, and human capital. The ethnographic ‘museum theater’11 of classic interculturalism has sometimes morphed into hyper-aestheticized exhibitions of (re-)invented traditions for the fast consumption of ‘Instant Asia’.12 Hence, scholars have invoked corrective models for ‘a critical interculturalism’13 that can productively deconstruct the politics surrounding such practices. Equivalent considerations pertain to the geopolitics of global cultural capital that structure the cognitive mapping of creative innovation across borders. In this context, theorizations of interculturalism have intersected with debates on the avant-garde to the extent that the two have sometimes overlapped.14 The nexus of interculturalism and avantgardism is integral to the critique of Western-centric intercultural epistemologies on several accounts—not least because the performance work surveyed in this study may be regarded as ‘avant-garde’ in its context of production. As with intercultural theory, theories of the avant-garde have shaped normative perceptions of the transnational routes of knowledge production and transmission of creative capital between the global East/South (Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Australasia, Latin America) and the West/North (Europe and North America). Conversely, avantgarde theory has informed the appraisal of global intercultural experiments. Entrenched (mis)conceptions of theatrical innovations originating beyond the parameters of a naturalized Euro-American norm have partaken in the formulation of reductionist models that echo the Eurocentric exceptionalism of conventional comparative methods.15 Both have nurtured mislaid assumptions on the achievements of the (non-Western)

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‘peripheries’ as belated derivatives of those of the (Western) ‘centre’. Furthermore, the privilege to determine the genetic lineage of the avantgarde—namely, of who or what can be subsumed into its ranks—has been situated firmly within the precincts of Euro-America, hence divesting its perceived peripheries of articulatory agency and creative ownership. Erika Fischer-Lichte has critiqued the resilient legacy of hermeneutical prejudice that informs the canonical Western-centric discourse of interculturalism,16 while Carol Sorgenfrei has objected to the practice of ‘theoretical imperialism’ in Asian theatre scholarship. Sorgenfrei challenges the prevalent theoretical separation between ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ Asian genres, locating its roots in a tendency to either enforce universal (Western) epistemologies onto indigenous cultures or, conversely, to essentialize indigeneity by stressing its ‘ancient’ attributes.17 Her critique of the conventional distinction between studies of ‘modern’ (i.e. Westernized) Japanese theatre and of native forms such as kabuki and n¯ o resonates with the disciplinary split between huaju (spoken drama) and xiqu (indigenous theatre, or ‘Chinese opera’) studies in the Sinophone context. In reality, such divides are routinely defied by performance work that resists generic compartmentalization and blurs the boundaries between so-called modern and traditional, avant-garde and conventional, ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’. Siyuan Liu has made a compelling case for the hybrid genre of wenming xi (civilized drama) in early twentieth-century China.18 Of the cases surveyed in this volume, suffice it to mention the refashioning of xiqu conventions in Zuni Icosahedron’s Journey to the East, and Danny Yung (Yung Ning-tsun; Rong Nianzeng)’s and Sat¯o Makoto’s deconstructive experiments with kunqu and n¯ o in their adaptation of Kuo Pao Kun’s The Spirits Play (Lingxi, 1998). The persistent recognition of the West/North as the cradle of modernity and newness and, conversely, the reduction of the East/South to the stronghold of antiquity, tradition, and deferred innovation tends to privilege temporality—a distinct moment in the developmental trajectory of global modernity—over spatiality—the place of origin of a specific localized practice. The substitution of the spatial with the temporal has consolidated a hierarchical teleology of aesthetic evolution while begetting deterministic assumptions of creative innovation as uniquely located within a singular chronotope of modernity that proceeds along universal transmission routes. As with classic interculturalism, classic avant-garde theory is invested in patterns of transfer, circulation, and mobility, as evidenced by the

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sustained use of critical terminology that harnesses concepts of ‘directionality’, (avant-)positioning, and forward(-looking) progression to trace the genealogy of a presumed (and universalized) creative-aesthetic ‘avant-’.19 It is thus productive to rethink the interculturalism debate in the light of critiques of the avant-garde which reconstitute the latter ‘as a transnational phenomenon’—one that captures ‘both the processes of global hegemony and the practice of counterhegemonic resistance’ that are intrinsic to the notion of transnationalism.20 Understanding interculturalism and the avant-garde as ‘culturally diffuse’ and transnationally located at the intersection of multiple simultaneous nodes rather than within a single nucleus helps deemphasize the undue (Western-centric) linearity of the chronotopic semantics that are routinely attached to their description.21 A recognition of avant-gardism, interculturalism, and transnationalism’s mutual entanglements disputes the evolutionary bias of straight-lined, ‘center-to-edge/edge-to-center’ models, as James Harding posits, to foreground, instead, an acentred assemblage of polymorphic ‘rough edges’.22 This scenario makes it possible, as well as imperative, to deprovincialize normative intercultural cartographies and chart a polymorphic landscape where dynamic connections supersede dominant centres. Ultimately, the shift in focus of transnational Chinese theatres from a separation of ontological singularities (nation, theatre) to a diffuse network of rhizomatic multiplicities (transnation, theatres) fulfils the project of dislocating the West in that it produces a dispersal of centres, hence a deterritorialization of epistemological authority. In the context of this analysis, the ‘dislocation of the West’23 equals to a decentring of the West/North’s hegemonic position in directing the discourse and determining the directions of comparison, connection, and collision between performance cultures.

Intercultural Collaboration in Trans-Asia This project brings into relief a multiplicity of polycentric and polymorphic networks of collaboration that have emerged with increasing regularity across the East Asian theatrical constituencies in contemporary times. A distinctive characteristic of these trans-Asian clusters is that they either elude the West/North entirely or no longer regard it as a privileged model

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or interlocutor. The networked modes of creation, circulation, and criticism that they sustain bear evidence to a rhizomatic mode of intercultural mapping of hitherto neglected relations and routes. Helen Gilbert and Jacqueline Lo have examined collaborations between Asian and aboriginal practitioners in Australia that circumvent colonial mediation and ‘white brokerage’.24 Similarly, Ric Knowles has drawn attention to ‘a kind of co-operative urban interculturalism-frombelow’ involving aboriginal and diaspora communities in Canada which defy national schemes of ‘internal globalisation’.25 But the minor-tominor networks forged through trans-Asian collaboration have not yet been given appropriate consideration. Writing on inter-Asian relations in postwar Japanese theatre, Yasushi Nagata notes that most theatremakers turned to Euro-American models for intercultural inspiration, except for a minority of ‘Asia-oriented’ practitioners such as Sat¯ o Makoto’s Black Tent Theatre 68/71 (Kokushoku Tento 68/71, aka Kuro Tento, est. 1969). Since the late twentieth century, however, Japanese theatre—as with others in the region—has been looking back at Asia. Accordingly, Nagata suggests engaging with these transversal alliances in ‘specific, local ways’ that eschew ‘a globalizing idea of Asian-ness’.26 While one can envision distinctive parameters for an Asia-oriented approach to interculturalism on grounds of cultural affinity and shared histories, the political tensions and economic disparities that affect both institutional and people-based interactions among Asian societies should not be overlooked. Evidently, Asian cultures and ethnicities are heterogeneous both within and across national borders; thus, the dynamics of transnational collaboration should exceed essentialist comparisons of similarities and differences to emphasize, instead, the relations and disjunctions that are intrinsic to these encounters. The goal of the Asia-inflected approach that these networks typify is neither to replace the universalistic matrix of classic interculturalism with reductionist assertions of pan-Asianism nor to rectify Westerncentrism with exceptionalist appeals to ‘cultural insiderism’.27 Such adverse/reverse reactions would do nothing but propagate epistemological binaries instead of striving for a generative decentering of both discourse and praxis. ‘Inter-Asian referencing is significant as it makes concepts and theories derived from Asian experiences translocally relevant and shared’, Koichi Iwabuchi clarifies, as long as it does not translate into ‘parochial regionalism’.28

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Writing of Water Moon Mirror Flower (Shuiyue jinghua, 1996), a collaboration between Zuni Icosahedron and the Tokyo-based dance ensemble, Pappa Tarahumara, Tadashi Uchino argues that the production bears evidence to a notion of collaboration as an opportunity for reciprocal mediation and self-scrutiny. At the time of the performances, director Danny Yung equated the collaborative process to a mirror; the spectre of cultural reductionism can only be deflected when the mirror fulfils the dual function of self-inspection and transformative cross-comparison. The intercultural mirror, Uchino notes, exposes ‘the basic assumptions and aesthetics of the participating parties, the sameness and the difference, without a forced effort either to erase that difference or to affirm that sameness’.29 Sameness and difference are not static but negotiated relationships which shift, clash, and transmute throughout the collaborative interaction. Yung’s vision of intercultural collaboration as a mirror is reflected in the stage design of the 2017 iteration of Zuni’s signature collaborative framework, One Table Two Chairs (1T2C), at the Hong Kong Belt Road City-to-City Cultural Exchange Conference. Collaborators from Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and the Americas performed a series of short pieces inside a deep black-box stage/space surrounded by mirror walls on all sides so that boundless refractions of endlessly reproduced bodies and objects proliferated within an infinitely expanding perimeter. The mirroring device enabled a relational interchange of positions between performers and observers, for they, too, could see their own reflections as they sat on the four sides of the mirrored box with a bird’s eye view on the performance space. The four-mirrored stage also translates the idea of cultural exchange as a reverberation of similarities (the performance site, the multiplication effect), differences (each artist’s individual engagement with the space and the format) and, ultimately, relational dialogisms through concrete performance images. Uchino’s intervention in the debate on Asian interculturalism is meaningful because of his assessment of the creative outcomes of the region’s ‘collaborative intercultural performative space’30 not merely as individual case studies but as crucial interventions in the ‘interculturalization of Asian theatre practices in the age of globalization’.31 Uchino registers a ‘drastic increase in the number of collaborative projects between Asian theatre practitioners’32 since the 1990s and lists several distinctive features that set these apart from traditional intercultural practices. The type of trans-Asian connections he considers, like those surveyed in

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this study, are embodied, dialogic, and voluntary.33 They traverse and transform the crossways of intercultural collaboration through extended person-to-person relationships. They are not ‘inspired’ by an-Other performance system whose agentive capacity is compromised by physical and cultural distance or one-sided appropriation, but are intrinsic to the contact zone wherein they are conceived.34 The collaborators’ cultural proximity and the constitutive hybridity of the production contexts of many of these projects are instrumental in forging long-term connections and valorizing processual models of collaboration. As John Russell Brown observes, ‘[t]he most thoroughly integrated intercultural theatre’ emerges more easily in environments ‘where audience and actors have already been conditioned by imports that other processes have brought into their everyday lives’.35 It is no accident that seminal trans-Asian networks such as those that Zuni and Kuo Pao Kun’s ensemble, The Theatre Practice (TTP, Shijian juchang), have championed since the 1980s originated in such hybrid intercultural contexts as Hong Kong and Singapore. However, since the hybrid constitution of this kind of contact zones often stems from a coercive colonial matrix, hybridity tends to occur in performance not as a homogeneous pan-ethnic amalgam but as a dialogic assemblage of interchanging positions within a ‘politicized’ and ‘contestatory’ sphere of Bakhtinian ‘intentional hybridity’.36 While acknowledging the strategic advantages of such spaces as key mediators of transnational Chinese and Asian theatres, it is equally imperative to keep in mind the historical legacy of colonization and enforced multilingualism that has compelled hybrid sites such as Hong Kong and Singapore—like many others in the postcolonial world—to become the heteroglossic intercultural nodes that they are today. Put differently, one should not forget that hybridity has been forced upon certain societies during the modernization and globalization processes of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, respectively, and that interculturalism did materialize in those contexts first and foremost as cultural imperialism. Hence, one should never underestimate the latent violence of intercultural exchange and respond to the ethical imperative of monitoring its politics rigorously and decolonizing its practices along with its theorizations. This point highlights another essential distinction between traditional manifestations of intercultural theatre and the collaborative networks under analysis. Whereas the former type has often tackled issues of power and politics ‘almost as an after-thought’,37 the latter has routinely

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engaged questions of authority and reflected on postcolonial and postwar tensions, imperialistic legacies, and experiences of dislocation in developing economies and conflict zones. Additionally, networked models of collaborative performance tend to disregard what Uchino calls the ‘signatures of the individual’,38 namely, the emphasis on auteurism and international star directors which characterizes the phenomenon that Daphne Lei describes as ‘Hegemonic Intercultural Theatre (HIT)’.39 HIT productions can be easily undercut by economic inequality, imbalances in creative authority, and inadequate cultural awareness. Conversely, transnational Chinese theatres as defined in this study are often the outcome of interactional contexts of joint creativity in which ensembles of performance makers (directors, dramatists, actors, adaptors) share in the conception and realization of the work. The politics of territory and translation—namely, where the collaboration takes place, and in what language—can be a defining factor in valorizing multiple articulatory capacities instead of a single predefined vision. Unfamiliarity with the cultural and linguistic codes of one’s collaborators can sometimes contribute to equalizing the interaction, as the foreign director is pushed into a zone ‘of hermeneutic uncertainties’ that productively unsettle the ‘omniscience and authority embodied in His Master’s Voice’.40 Obviously, this heteroglossic scenario presupposes one’s ethical self-positioning within a horizontal assemblage interceded by multilingual mediators that impose neither a normative language nor a conceptual blueprint. Uchino brings the example of a collaborative Singaporean-Japanese version of The Spirits Play directed by Ong Keng Sen in 2000. While critics of the Singaporean director have described his several trans-Asian projects as visually enticing yet ethically ambiguous spectacles for global consumption,41 Uchino maintains that, in this instance, Ong relinquished the functions of ‘an overpowering director/dictator’ to take on the role of a ‘moderator’ within a dialectical space that enabled collaborators to negotiate power positions vis-à-vis the performance project-in-progress.42 The relational self-positioning of Zuni’s Artistic Director, Danny Yung, as a facilitator, bridge-builder, and intercultural border-crosser provides another case in point. An unswerving advocate of city-to-city exchanges and participant-led collaborations across regions and disciplines, Yung has been a forerunner of transnational Chinese theatres since the 1980s. A pivotal figure in Hong Kong and recognized internationally for his contributions to cultural exchange, Yung has been a key figure in the

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formation of non-governmental organizations devoted to research, development, and cooperation in the performing arts and the creative industries and in the areas of public policy, education, heritage, and community art. Yung’s public persona presents a paradigm for a transnational mediator: one that enables connections, coordinates operations and delivers communal structures—shared creative formats, production parameters, curatorial concepts—that steer the collaboration without forcing a predefined authorial vision on the network of collaborators. Bruno Latour’s actor-network-theory helps elucidate the essential role of mediators in transnational collaboration. Latour classifies different types of actors and connectors that intervene in social aggregates. Networks can be interceded by intermediaries or by mediators. While intermediaries assist transfers through the network without modifying the transferred content, mediators can ‘transform, translate, distort, and modify the meaning or the elements they are supposed to carry’, hence inflecting the quality of the transmission process and of the entity that is transmitted or translated.43 Similar to the context of a collaborative production which enlists a variety of performers (actors, literally), the actors in the network are neither passive receptors nor ‘characters’ that play no more than an ephemeral role in a script devised by others.44 Paraphrasing Latour, performance networks are ‘made of concatenations of mediators where each point can be said to fully act’,45 and stem from ‘translations between mediators that may generate traceable associations ’.46 All actors are translators to the extent that they can transport and transform meaning. Actors convey ‘transformations’47 rather than merely ‘effects’, as they generate new processes, new events, and new acts of translation through and across the network.48 A networked approach to intercultural collaboration enables a shift in emphasis from the discrete personalities that forge the connections to the connections per se, for it foregrounds multiple intersections and interactions in place of isolated singularities. The networks scrutinized in this volume present distinct morphologies and models of collaboration: from the ensemble performances of the East Asia People Theatre’s Network, Asia Meets Asia, and the Mother Hen two-woman project to the curatorial blueprints of Zuni’s Journey to the East and Video Circle. Whereas the former are more obviously horizontal, as they feature either collectives of directors-mediators within a network of actors-creators or authors doubling up as directors-performers, the latter retain a core mediator figure

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in the person of Yung, who transmits and translates (in the Latourian sense) the collaborative tools (e.g. the 1T2C framework). Arguably, whoever is invested with the role of coordinator, curator, facilitator, or host retains a degree of authority as a selector, relation weaver, and boundary marker within a group. The choice of a collaborator over another itself implies a gatekeeping gesture of sorts. There should be no illusion that the collaborative format inevitably guarantees egalitarianism and ethical compliance. Economic disparities, divergent politics, and subjective idiosyncrasies can affect the dynamics of collaboration as with any other form of social interaction. The production and, indeed, reception of transnational Chinese and Asian theatres as paradigms of ‘relational aesthetics’49 do not preclude scenarios of ‘relational antagonism’50 simply because the network is unmediated by a West/Northcentric power matrix. As Bharucha reminds us, one should still ‘question very stringently the framing of inter-Asia cultural production within the inequities of global capital in Asia itself’.51 While the methodological decentering of the West/North generates a productive reordering of ‘strategic positionalities’52 in favour of the East/South, this does not mean that, politically, a constituent of the latter cannot assume a hegemonic role within the network of power relations. Since the West/North is, fundamentally, an ideological construct that serves as an indicator of power positions, ‘the dislocation of the West ’ does not necessarily equate to its disappearance as a theoretical centre and symbolic arbiter of power.53 Its dominant functions can simply shift elsewhere. Accordingly, transnational Chinese theatres as both a critical discourse and a creative practice are neither disingenuous nor naïve, and do not seek to promote an uncomplicated vision of complacent togetherness and ‘apolitical cosmopolitan neo-communitarianism’.54 Transnational Chinese theatres are rather a proposal to chart out alternate (counter-)cartographies to decolonize the critical territory of hegemonic interculturalism and re-orient the discourse towards less trodden routes. With these caveats in mind, one should recognize that inter-Asian collaboration has contributed to equalizing entrenched disparities in the enunciative capacities of the region’s creative communities through implementing alternate modes of cultural governance and collective articulations of civil society. Transnational Chinese theatres have consistently privileged expandable structures of communication, fluid negotiations in a perpetual state of becoming, and transversal connections that arise from circumstances of human engagement and embodied interaction. As an

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intercultural framework, transnational Chinese theatres can neither be apprehended through the static lens of appropriation nor comprised by obsolete binary distinctions between source and target, familiar and foreign, own and other. To put it with Latour, associative groupings of the networked kind are ‘trace[s] left behind by some moving agent’,55 which should be captured performatively. Likewise, transnational Chinese theatres should be understood as ‘the object of […] a performative definition’56 that is contingent on continuous reassembling and renegotiation.

Rhizomes and Radicants as Models of Intercultural Collaboration A critical review of the symbolic configurations that have been proposed to visualize the dynamics of intercultural transmission is essential to appreciate the distinctive purposes, politics, and scopes of intervention of transnational Chinese theatres. Furthermore, it helps outline its constitutive geometries and geographies—namely, the patterns and paths of interaction across the network of collaboration. The structural geometry of Patrice Pavis’ renowned ‘hourglass of cultures’, whereby the grains of a ‘source culture’ move down from the upper bowl to blend with the ‘target culture’ in the lower bowl,57 has been critiqued for lacking in diversity and cultural specificity, since it only enables vertical and unidirectional movement. Its hierarchical constitution prevents fluid power dynamics and cannot comprehend ‘collaborative’ formations, hence ‘is unable to account for interculturalism as a process of political negotiation’.58 ‘The teleology of the hourglass model’, Jacqueline Lo and Helen Gilbert maintain, ‘ultimately reduces intercultural exchange to an alimentary process’ that disregards the contingency of ‘blockage, collisions, and retroaction as sites of either intervention or resistance’.59 But what if the grains are not ‘sufficiently fine’,60 and do not blend easily with the receiving cultural body? What if they provoke adverse reactions—namely, forms of contestation and critique in the recipient? Bharucha has proposed an alternative paradigm that envisages intercultural movement as the ‘back-and-forth […] swing of a pendulum’.61 Not only is the pendulum two-directional but also does not drain one component while nurturing another. Filters interposed by the target culture’s ‘receptor-adapters’ determine the exchange modalities in the hourglass, whereas the pendulum assists mutual enrichment in place of an

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orderly ‘separation of relations’.62 Likewise, Lo and Gilbert have contrasted the ‘appropriative/assimilationist’ hourglass with ‘a more collaborative/negotiated’ three-elliptical configuration modelled after a toy in which a plastic disc slides back and forth along an elastic string that is pulled at each end by two players.63 As with Bharucha’s, this model supports bidirectional motion and accounts for potential frictions and interchange of positions, thus is more dialogic than the hourglass. Yet, neither the pendulum nor the triple ellipsis can comprise networked patterns, irregular polymorphic formations, and composite movements that irradiate from several points of origin into multiple directions such as those traced by transnational Chinese and Asian theatres.64 Lo and Gilbert gesture at more complex relational formations in noting ‘the rhizomatic potential of interculturalism — its ability to make multiple connections and disconnections between cultural spaces — and to create representations that are unbounded and open, and potentially resistant to imperialist forms of closure’.65 Building upon Lo and Gilbert’s insight, this study engages the rhizome as an alternate shape and fitting signifier for the multidimensional networks that are forged through the practice of transnational Chinese and Asian theatres and—more generally—by modes of performance that foreground transversalities. Theatre scholarship has drawn on Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome theory as a referential matrix for more flexible understandings of intercultural praxis. Ric Knowles has advocated ‘rhizomatic (multiple, non-hierarchical, horizontal) […] intercultural performance ecologies’ that are premised upon structures of solidarity and recognition of diversity.66 Helena Grehan has described Singapore’s Flying Circus Project as ‘rhizomatic practice’.67 Lia Wen-ching Liang has appealed to the Deleuzian assemblage to deemphasize notions of ethnicity, authenticity, and cultural (mis)representation and foreground, instead, ‘the lines of “deterritorialisation” in the [intercultural] production that constantly destabilise presupposed identities and bring about new relations’ between heterogeneous practices.68 Denise Varney has documented the ‘rhizomatic dramaturgy’ of Journey to Con-Fusion (1999–2002), a process-focused collaboration between Not Yet It’s Difficult (Melbourne) and Gekidan Kaitaisha (Tokyo). As Varney proposes, a rhizomatic framework can apprehend alternate modes of corporeal and aesthetic gathering and deconstructive articulations of nomadological states of becoming:

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Becoming allows for fragmented, split, and multiple subjectivities to ‘enter into composition’ with an image and then to disperse and move on. It provides a model of performance that sits well with the movement of the performance across time and space, where there is no such thing as a fixed point.69

The categorization of transnational Chinese and Asian theatres as rhizomatic inflections of intercultural performance that are constituted by networks of relations—namely, as a practice, method, and theory that foregrounds connectivity—converges to some degree with Erika Fischer-Lichte’s epistemology of ‘interweaving performance cultures’. In Fischer-Lichte’s formulation, assorted cultural ‘strands’ can be threaded into composite textures that neither essentialize the intrinsic diversity of each strand nor conceal them into a seamless pattern, but rather reveal the ‘inherent processual nature’ of cultures. As emphasized above, however, it is imperative not to grasp the ‘continuous production of new differences’ in oppositional terms, but rather to embed difference within a ‘logic of interconnectedness’70 or, put differently, into a ‘poetics of Relation’.71 In addition to shifting the meaning and value of interculturalism in transnational collaborative contexts, the rhizome assists a critical reassessment of the metaphoric ecologies and botanical signifiers that have been mobilized to denote geopolitical configurations, cultural crossings, and patterns of identitarian formation in the Sinophone world. One of these is the trope of the root, as evidenced by the ‘roots-seeking’ (xungen) trend in 1980s mainland Chinese literature and by the pursuit of indigenous roots of the nativist (xiangtu) literary movement in Taiwan. Another is the tree, as invoked by the well-known description of ‘Cultural China’ (Wenhua Zhongguo) as a ‘living tree’ in Tu Wei-ming’s edited volume of the same title, wherein the process of identity formation is depicted ‘as a tree-like pattern radiating from the center’.72 In fairness, Tu’s recognition of the power of the periphery in (re-)defining Chineseness represents an important step towards cultural decentralization, for it envisages a pluralistic field of ‘unity in diversity’ that marginalizes China’s ‘Middle Kingdom syndrome or Central Country complex’.73 This approach does, however, still posit the hegemony of a presumed centre from which seeds (i.e. the diaspora, whose literal meaning is ‘the scattering of seeds’) are dispersed and to which they eventually return—ethically, ontologically, and culturally, if not physically.74 No matter whether ‘the roottree’75 paradigm is applied to processes of identitarian formation or to

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the modelling of transnational networks, it is inadequate to apprehend the transvergent mechanisms that underlie such practices. Deleuze and Guattari take the root and the tree, or ‘the root-tree’, as foils to the rhizome to critique arborescent structures embedded in dichotomy, linearity, and binarism. Instead, they propose ‘principles of connection and heterogeneity’,76 for ‘the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, “and…and…and…” […] nullify[ing] endings and beginnings’.77 Whereas the root-tree betrays a fixation on origin, genealogy, and singular ‘filiation, the rhizome is alliance’.78 The rhizome evokes multiplicity, non-hierarchical grouping, and movement ‘between things’79 which reflect the relational constitution of transnational Chinese and Asian theatres. As the rhizome allows for transversal assemblages and crossbreeding between species, it also embodies the transactional quality of performative acts of the transnational, transmedial, and transgeneric variety, which interlock forms, styles, and traditions within and beyond the categories of Chineseness and Asianness, or Chinese and Asian cultures. A counter-genealogical embrace of a poetics of uprootedness—or anti-rootedness—facilitates the mapping of acentred, mobile matrixes of investigation that can overrule old-time fixations on the origin of a technique, a creative seed, or a performance system. This enables an assessment of the value of differential variation and of the mechanisms of transmission and transaction that underpin the collaborative process in more nuanced fashion, and beyond a mere concern with the barter of aesthetics or the traceable reproduction of cultural lineages. As ‘transformational multiplicities’,80 rhizomes—and so rhizomatic interculturalism—promote plural agency and assist the destabilization of enduring axes of discursive authority. The interconnected ecology of rhizomatic performance presumes that seeds can ‘radicate’ and disseminate along and across countless vectors, and germinate from a plurality of decentred locations. As the assemblage expands, connections also shift and proliferate. Rhizomatic theatricalities are invested in the politics of process over product, dynamism over difference, organicism and adaptable organization over order, origin, and Orient-ation. The source and itinerary of the interchange—the roots and routes—are not essential(ist) traces, but intersecting coordinates and ‘directions in motion’.81 The discursive geography of the rhizome pertains to ‘a map and not a tracing ’,82 for it rejects exact reproduction of (cultural, performative) systems along predesigned paths to generate adaptable dimensions of connectivity with

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manifold frontiers, access points, and ‘lines of flight’.83 As with the rhizome, the map presents ‘multiple entryways’: it is inherently performative and open to incessant transformation.84 The ‘new ecological praxes’85 and attendant theoretical articulations of rhizomatic interculturalism enable a transversal understanding of interactions between heterogeneous performative and enunciative assemblages. Rhizomatic formations neither seek to circumscribe the object of investigation to a set of totalizing principles nor obsess about the individuation of dichotomies between opposite structures and organisms. Rather, they deal ‘solely with the movement and intensity of evolutive processes’.86 In accordance with Guattari’s juxtaposition of ‘process’ versus ‘system’ and ‘structure’, collaborative intercultural processes of the rhizomatic kind reject systematization and stable epistemological structuration while treasuring protean impulses towards deterritorialization and reterritorialization of forms and meanings along ‘processual lines of flight’.87 Rhizomatic interculturalism delves into the suppressed specificities and subjective singularities of ‘sub-sets of expressive ensembles’, which rupture the ‘totalizing frame’ imposed on them by unbending, restrictive, and monological (or genealogical) paradigms, ‘and set to work on their own account, gradually superseding the referential totality from which they emerge, and manifesting themselves finally as their own existential index’.88 Nicolas Bourriaud has proposed the notion of ‘radicant’ to describe a prevalent trend in contemporary art that is likewise grounded in mobility and connection.89 The radicant builds on the Deleuzian rhizome and Bourriaud’s own preceding theorization of relational aesthetics to designate art that establishes networks, fosters circuits of creativity, and encourages intermedial and ‘inter-human relations’.90 The potential of the radicant to embody processes of intercultural collaboration is worth investigating as a complement to the rhizome. The botanical definition of the rhizome refers to ‘a continuously growing horizontal underground stem which puts out lateral shoots and adventitious roots at intervals’91 from its nodes or buds. The radicant differs from the rhizome in that it roots on or above ground, as well as from the stem.92 Bourriaud further distinguishes between ‘radicants, which develop their roots as they advance’, and ‘radicals, whose development is determined by their being anchored in a particular soil’.93 As with the rhizome, the radicant counters the mythologizing of roots and origins. Radicant art propagates in multiple directions and acquires new elements

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as it proceeds—constantly performing and redefining its ‘roots in motion’ according to the different media and cultural soils it encounters, yet ‘denying them the power to completely define one’s identity’.94 It traces paths and itineraries—‘dialogical or intersubjective narrative[s]’.95 Radicant art is based on ‘translating ideas, transcoding images, transplanting behaviours, exchanging rather than imposing’.96 As with some of the performance works surveyed in this volume, it is not medium-exclusive, thus enabling collaborators to traverse disciplinary fields and, in the process, regenerate themselves and the new territory in which they venture. Bourriaud’s description of the radicant encapsulates the operational dynamics of transnational Chinese theatres and the ways in which they contribute to framing and (re)define Chineseness or, more generally, identity. Identity is not, or not only, the common place where we all come from, but a dynamic process of growth in motion—a direction, a destination, a place where we may all be going to, but in different ways and through different routes. Transnational Chinese theatres negotiate identity through rhizomatic itineraries ‘proceeding from the middle, through the middle, coming and going rather than starting and finishing’.97 They resonate with the Deleuzian notion of haecceity, an identitarian mode defined by ‘relations of movement’ rather than by permanent individual subjectivities.98 Identitarian trajectories and paths of creative and intellectual identification are chosen, not endured. This echoes Ien Ang’s compelling distinction between being ‘Chinese by descent ’—as a biologically inherited, socioculturally constructed, and reflexively accepted condition—and ‘Chinese by consent ’, through a reasoned embrace of one’s elective identity.99 An additional differentiation between the radicant and the rhizome concerns the sphere of subjectivity. Deleuze and Guattari frame the rhizome as an asubjective multiplicity characterized by ‘determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions’.100 In contrast, Bourriaud visualizes the radicant as a trajectory, a path-like ‘movement that ultimately permits the formation of an identity’.101 Unlike the rhizome, the radicant always entails a subject, though this is neither ‘stable’ nor ‘closed’.102 The radicant does not reject filiation and identity; rather, it objects to fixed notions of identity or fixation on origins. Once more, these observations resonate with the ontology of transnational Chinese theatres as manifestations of networked interculturality. While journeying through common histories, cultures, and identities, transnational Chinese theatres do not assign

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collaborators to a structured hierarchy of stable roles within a group. Identity is a/in flux; it is negotiable and subject to perpetual redefinition. Deleuze and Guattari’s concept does not only marginalize subjectivity but also devaluates positionality, in that the rhizome is comprised of ‘only lines’.103 While recognizing the key function of connective vectors in the constitution of transnational Chinese theatres, the question of assuming a ‘position’—of taking a stance or situating oneself critically at the confluence of various standpoints—constitutes, as well, one of its defining attributes. This is especially true of performances that explore regional conflicts, territorial disputes, and diplomatic tensions. Of those examined in this volume, the 38th Parallel series is a case in point. A choral work involving partners from mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and South Korea, it attends to geopolitical and affective divisions between Taipei and Beijing and between Pyongyang and Seoul comparatively, linking up with social movements and grassroots debates on democratization and civil society. Indeed, the term ‘grassroots’ may be taken as an additional organic signifier of theatrical varieties of ‘minor transnationalism’,104 or ‘transnationalism from below’,105 and of transnational Chinese theatres as practices that intervene individually and informally, rather than institutionally. The 1997 edition of Zuni’s Journey to the East contributes additional evidence, with performances debating the need for taking a position on the theatre stage and in one’s social performances on the stage of politics as they foreshadow prospective (im)balances, dwindling autonomies, and blurring of geopolitical positions in the inter-China area subsequent to Hong Kong’s handover to Beijing. The post-handover collaboration Experimental Shakespeare: King Lear (Shiyan Shashibiya zhi Li’er wang , 2000), also a Zuni production, further attests to this phenomenon. Each individual segment in this intermedial quadriptych throws into relief distinct engagements with the themes of authority, sovereignty, and nationality mobilized by the Shakespearean text. Yung harnesses political metaphors and Hong Kong’s linguistic heteroglossia as a form of resistance; Beijing director Meng Jinghui confronts paternalism and intergenerational hierarchies; Stan Lai (Lai Shengchuan; Lai Sheng-chuan), from Taipei, tackles the geopathological plight of the loss of homeland by way of Buddhist signifiers, whereas Edward Yang (Yang Dechang), also from Taipei, seems more concerned with US cultural imperialism than PRC neo-colonization.106 As with Journey, Lear imparts a transnational allegory of post-1997 inter-Chinese politics that is symptomatic of

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transnationalism’s tensional positioning vis-à-vis the lasting potency of nation-states in shaping identitarian politics, so that individual and national stances become dialectically entangled in the transnational work.107

Mobile Networks of Performance in Journey-Form A constitutive feature of networked performance in the rhizomatic and radicant mode is that it traverses borders, draws maps, creates paths and itineraries—nomadic routes rather than permanent roots. It thus posits the artist as a traveller or, according to Bourriaud’s description, a ‘homo viator’108 and a ‘semionaut : a creator of paths in a landscape of signs’.109 Bourriaud identifies the journey as a prominent semantic trope, metaphoric signifier, and compositional device, as ‘the journey-form’, in contemporary art. Artists become wanderers, nomads, and flâneurs, while the journey turns into a conceptual principle and a form of ‘visual writing’.110 Artworks embrace the language and imagery of travel and replicate the probing impulses of the nomadic odyssey, the archaeological exploration, and the pyschogeographic voyage. Accordingly, festivals, exhibitions, choral productions, and performance series can be envisaged as multi-station itineraries and peripatetic trajectories drawing on an ‘aesthetic of expeditions’111 that posits individual works—and the work of individuals—as points on a map, nodes in a network, or fragments of an assemblage. Similarly, transnational Chinese theatres—as a performance practice, a method of collaboration, and an epistemological framework— present an intrinsic iconography of mobility and an impulse towards the ‘viatorization’ of forms.112 The performance work resulting from such networks of collaboration-in-motion falls within a topology that, following Bourriaud, I designate as performance in journey-form. The conception and realization of rhizomatic performance in journey-form involve physical and virtual movement of individuals and groups across the multiple vectors of the network of collaboration to convene in an interstitial location—a shared space of relations—and embark on a communal itinerary of aesthetic mapping and cultural critique. Consequently, many of these journeys are in fieri; namely, pending, in the course of execution, or in the course of performance. Since, in several cases, the purposes of the collaboration are series of productions or long-term projects rather than

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one-off events, one can never be certain of the position of the work along the route, of what station of the journey it has reached, whether or not there will be a follow-up, or whether, when, and in what direction it will proceed. They are pilgrimages to unknown destinations. Its producers and performers are also not stable: they populate nomadic assemblages and embody the human component of the rhizome of collaboration. As with rhizomatic multiplicities and radicant identities, nomadic subjects refrain from rooting in any radical or radicated manner of identification. As Rosi Braidotti observes: Being a nomad, living in transition, does not mean that one cannot or is unwilling to create those necessarily stable and reassuring bases for identity that allow one to function in a community. Nomadic consciousness rather consists in not taking any kind of identity as permanent: the nomad is only passing through; he makes those necessarily situated connections that can help him to survive, but he never takes on fully the limits of one national, fixed identity.113

The nature of nomadic consciousness and, by extension, of nomadic performance in journey-form is inherently transnational, for it trespasses the physical, affective, and perceptual boundaries of national singularities and nationalist identifications. It is transnational because it (grass)roots through informal vectors and intermediaries that counter the divisive and often antagonistic logic of the nation-state. This rings particularly true in the context of Sinophone East Asia where, as the performances scrutinized in this volume repeatedly reflect—inter-state relations have often been unsettled by diplomatic tensions, ideological rivalries, territorial disputes, and institutional inability to come to terms with the region’s troubled legacy of imperialism, colonialism, and warfare. Journeying and nomadology are constitutive to the concept of transnational Chinese theatres not simply because collaborators move physically between places to take part in these projects—often through intersecting routes, as members of more than one network—but also because the themes, tropes, technologies, iconographies, and paratextual components (creative statements, promotional materials) of the collaborations resonate persistently with the ontology and semantics of travel. Their approach to structure, poetics, and technique, as well as their authorial and curatorial motivations, foreground archaeological journeys into the past and

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through history, autobiographical travelogues, existential psychogeographies, and intertwining trails of collective and individual experience. As they trace factual and imagined cartographies of China(s) and Asia, Chineseness and Asianness, performances delve into transient embodiments of fluid identities, polymorphic joint itineraries, and meditations on literary, mnemonic, and metaphysical voyages in time and space. The journeys embedded in those theatrical articulations may be literal or conceptual. Mobility is embodied and experienced but also performative, hence signified in performance as both a motif and a method. While invoking Bourriaud’s notion of the artist as a traveller, I am cognizant of the theoretical and ethical flaws that the postulation of the traveller as the chief signifier for the human condition in an interconnected global society might entail. The suggestion that multitudes of individuals across the globe exist in circumstances of ‘professional nomadism’ and ‘more or less voluntary exile’114 is somewhat naïve, as is Bourriaud’s inadequate consideration of the manifold and manifest disparities of choice and circumstance that run through the broad spectrum of the world’s transient humanity. Not all journeys are elective and, as we envisage our theoretical abstractions and operational metaphors, it is our moral obligation to draw a clear line between the tourist and the refugee, the vagrant and the urban wanderer, the holidaymaker and the homeless, the expat and the exile.115 Accordingly, the practice of transnational Chinese theatres is not merely fascinated with the allegorical and conceptual potential of the journey-form, but endeavours to address actual experiences of displacement, transience, and trauma, questions of cultural and economic globalization, and movement of people and capital. Projects examined in this volume such as Journey to the East, the 38th Parallel series, and The Spirits Play adaptations trace historical itineraries across the entangled politics of the Asian nation-states, while also documenting personal odysseys and generational trajectories of introspection and self-questioning. They chart traumatic and occasionally thwarted attempts to traverse physical borders, ideological blockades, and psychic liminalities, anxiously awaited passages to deceptive ports of arrival, and spectral voyages to geopathic destinations. As a drama of division, the above-mentioned four-hand adaptation of King Lear draws on geopolitical tropes of cartography and territoriality as it outlines political and affective frontiers to be crossed and conquered anew.

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According to Bourriaud, the journey-form spatializes time, for it conceives time as ‘a territory’. Artworks thus produced are more ‘timespecific’ than place- or site-specific: they speak to and of an epoch, rather than of a locality or, better still, of spatial environments within a precise temporal juncture.116 This observation resonates with this study’s investment in collaborative practices that reflect critically on the significant chronotopes of modern Asian history, delve into the circumstances preceding major historical turning points—such as the expectations surrounding Hong Kong’s handover—or attend to the aftershocks of tumultuous events such as the Korean War and World War II. In both its practical and metaphoric implications, the journey-form presents an efficient mode of creation (praxis) and criticism (theory) of networked performance in the transnational rhizomatic mode, for it endows this type of collaborative work with a conceptual and compositional principle as well as a hermeneutical tool to understand it. An itinerant and dynamic geometry-cum-geography of performance is intrinsic to the description of transnational Chinese theatres as a practice of multiple trans-ing: as a mode of production and dissemination grounded in movement—in trans-itions and trans-actions of people, ideas, genres, media, and technologies.

Performing the Nomadic Rhizome: Poisonous Weeds The conclusion to this chapter will briefly examine a performative installation by Danny Yung, Poisonous Weeds (Da ducao, 2002), which suitably illustrates the practice and method of rhizomatic performance in journey-form. In July 2002, twenty-one participants ranging from visual and performance artists, art critics, and literary authors to architects, journalists, and engineers presented artworks in the transmedial exhibition, Professional/Amateur: Contemporary Cultural Exchange Programme (Zhuan–ye–yu — dangdai wenhua jiaoliu huodong ). Curated by Zhang Yingchuan, Li Xianting, and Liu Jiakun at the He Duoling Open Studio in Chengdu, the project wished to foster cross-field interaction between art professionals and amateurs with the expectation that the performative embrace of alternate identities would release new creative potential across the different areas of expertise within the group, and encourage dialogues between individuals of disparate vocations and

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social backgrounds. In addition to the host, painter He Duoling, contributors included Yung, performance artists Wang Jianwei and Dai Guangyu, architect Liu Jiakun, filmmaker and curator Ou Ning, art critics/curators Li Xianting and Fei Dawei, dancer/choreographer Wen Hui, and Zhao Chuan—then a writer and cultural critic who, in 2005, would co-found the independent performance collective Grass Stage (Caotaiban), whose work is examined in Chapter 4 of this volume. Yung’s installation probed his mutable identities as a transmedial artist while playing with Maoist motifs. This is a recurrent feature in his poetics, as evidenced by numerous artworks and stage productions with Zuni. As he explained in a conversation with the author in Cambridge, MA, on 6 May 2011, the He Duoling Open Studio—designed by Li Jiakun and built by local farmers with locally sourced materials—had a ‘rough’ and ‘unfinished’ feel to it, and its ‘ambiguous’ interior lighting seemed to blur the boundaries between indoors and outdoors. In the installation, this locational and perceptual dualism became associated with the bioideological dichotomy intrinsic to the Maoist distinction between ‘fragrant flowers’ (xiangcao) and ‘poisonous weeds’ (ducao).117 The phrase ‘poisonous weeds’ was widespread in socialist China as a derogatory designation for works of art and literature that did not toe the official line. In May 1956, Mao Zedong launched the Hundred Flowers Campaign to promote cultural diversity with the slogan, ‘let a hundred flowers blossom; let a hundred schools of thought contend’. The unforeseen chorus of malcontent that rose against the Party-State’s crippling interference in literary and artistic production did, however, alarm the political leadership. A counter-campaign was launched in mid-1957 and the ‘fragrant flowers’ which had blossomed during the 1956 campaign swiftly transmuted into ‘poisonous weeds’. Those who had spoken out against official policies were branded as counter-revolutionaries and subjected to public humiliation during the Anti-Rightist Movement of 1957– 1958. Some were imprisoned, and others were dispatched to the countryside for ideological re-education through labour.118 Many felt betrayed by the abrupt volte-face, believing that the leadership had purposely misled artists and intellectuals into exposing their disagreement only to ensnare dissenters more efficiently. The following extract from a speech Mao delivered on 9 July 1957 appears to corroborate this hypothesis: [P]oisonous weeds must be uprooted. Let ghosts and monsters come out and make an exhibition of themselves, and afterwards the people will

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say these ghosts and monsters are no good and must be eliminated. Let poisonous weeds sprout, then uproot them and plough them under for manure.119

The phrase ‘poisonous weeds’ was employed throughout the socialist era to brand political opponents and re-emerged occasionally in the postMao period to criticize controversial works. During the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), most of China’s theatrical repertoire was denounced as ‘great poisonous weeds’ (da ducao), with the exception of the newly composed revolutionary model plays (geming yangbanxi).120 In short, the ‘poisonous weeds’ became a standard rhetorical weapon that would resurface whenever required. Should the political winds change course, fragrant flowers would promptly turn into poisonous weeds, and vice versa. As Perry Link notes, [A]n extraordinary range of physical and biological metaphors came into popular use to describe functions of the control system. […] Winds blew in one or another direction, the atmosphere could be warmer or colder, and writers could be under higher or lower pressure. There were freezes and thaws. Flower gardens could thrive or wilt. Weeds could invade. Some weeds were poisonous. To touch them was unhealthful.121

Yung’s installation repurposed the Maoist tenet of letting weeds propagate to use them as fertilizer to the effect that wild weeds, typically an outdoor plant, were let to grow along the interior walls of the exhibition space. The concept responded, as well, to one of the core themes of the exhibition: dislocation (yiwei)—not only of people and professions but also of resources, environments, and processes.122 Originally, Yung’s project comprised an indoor and an outdoor installation. However, as he became unable to travel to Chengdu, the outdoor plan was abandoned. For the indoor work, he shipped two bags of wheatgrass (xiao maicao) seeds from Hong Kong and entrusted someone in Chengdu to set it up according to instructions that he also forwarded. The seeds were planted in transparent plastic containers along the walls of the studio and inside the cracks of the stone steps of the internal stairs, and started radicating after only three days. As with the rhizome (weeds are botanical rhizomes), Yung’s weeds grew in-between and in all directions across the site. As they expanded into areas where they would and should not

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naturally venture, the weeds tested sanctioned boundaries and negotiated notions of permission and prohibition. Curator Zhang Yingchuan regards the installation, wherein the artist directs the weeds by recasting himself ‘as a farmer’ in his own performance script, as a variation on Yung’s ongoing investigation of notions of ‘“outside” and “inside”, “on-stage” and “off-stage”, “possibility” and “impossibility”’, hence an extension of his theatre practice.123 As Yung explains in a letter to Zhang, the weeds did enact a ‘play’ (xi) that, in this context, should be grasped as both a game (youxi) and a theatrical performance. Moreover, by assuming the role of a farmer, Yung reflected on the literal meaning of notions of ‘growth’ and ‘cultivation’, which artists commonly associate with creation.124 The weeds that trespass into new territory denote fertile infiltration and positive development, highlighting the generative potential of broadening conceptual and cognitive coordinates. As they intruded uncharted territories, the outcomes of their journey—though spurred by deliberate intentions and plans—were uncontrolled and unexpected. As, literally, an organic actor, the weeds travelled and adapted to unfamiliar ground, turning it into a location for their live radicant performance. Through displacement, the weeds facilitated an interactive relationship between the artist and the time-space of the exhibition and opened a channel of communication with other individuals (artists, audiences) who were transiting through the rhizome of exchange at that chronotopic juncture. The weeds served as a proxy for the artist-traveller, providing a medium and a ‘platform for his “re-location”’.125 As with the artist-traveller, the weeds became an actor in the transnational performance network. Poisonous Weeds submits a tangible visualization of rhizomatic practice that can initiate dialogues, associations, and interconnections. As transformational multiplicities, the nomadic weeds forge ‘allogeneic’ itineraries of enrooting and en-routing—namely, practices of deterritorialization, transposition, and reterritorialization into foreign performative environments. The weeds mutate function and appearance along with the configuration of the times and territories they penetrate, thereby assuming and simultaneously engendering alien (‘allo-’, from the Greek allos ) states and identities. Marcos Novak defines allogenesis as the ‘pattern of the production of the alien’.126 As with rhizomes, allogenesis proceeds centrifugally, shooting out through multiple vectors of transvergence. As with rhizomes, allogeneic formations reject monocentrism and straight

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evolutionary trajectories to proceed ‘translinearly, by tactics of derailment […] leaps, flights, and voyages’.127 Accordingly, Yung’s weeds evolved and transmuted during their passage from Hong Kong to Chengdu and, further along the route, through their functional dislocation across the interiors of the exhibition space— concurrently breaking and bridging borders between times, places, skills, and social roles, while also nourishing an organic nexus of connection with new realms of perceptual relationality. As he writes, at the heart of Poisonous Weeds rests a metamorphic process of ‘dialectical creativity’ constituted by a perpetual deconstruction and resignification of boundaries.128 Such an allogeneic redefinition of boundaries is also an indicator of nomadic intercultural practice—one that does not fix—but rather fluctuates—roles and meanings. Poisonous Weeds encapsulates the key markers of rhizomatic practice as defined in this chapter and variously reflected in the performance work surveyed in the remainder of this volume: the use of botanical imagery to articulate alternative patterns, spaces, and directions of intercultural collaboration; the production of radicant performative acts that reject centrism and linearity and branch out in multiple directions to connect individuals and communities transversally; and the relevance of the journey-form as a defining conceptual and stylistic cipher in the demarcation of transnational performance networks. According to Novak, ‘allogenesis suggests the production of an alien species from genetically compatible lineages, or the alien-from-within’, unlike xenogenesis , which presupposes an ‘encounter with an initially alien species, the alien-fromwithout ’. ‘While the xenogeneic is that which is derived from another species’, Novak continues, ‘the allogeneic is that which is formed from within a species as that species evolves to become alien to its origins’.129 Unlike the xenogeneic procedures of canonical, or hegemonic, interculturalism, which are firmly rooted in monolinear encounters with the xeno—the foreign, or alien-from-without—transnational Chinese theatres articulate mobile patterns of engagement across multiple transvergent vectors that proceed rhizomatically from within. Visually, semantically, and conceptually, the enhanced relationality ensuing from these networked itineraries irradiates a spectrum of cross-field nodality that enables the disclosure of subterranean interconnected histories and alternate understandings of Asian intercultural performance cultures from a transnational perspective.

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Notes 1. Chen Kuan-hsing, Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 216. 2. Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih, “Introduction: Thinking through the Minor, Transnationally,” in Minor Transnationalism, ed. Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 8. 3. Naoki Sakai, “Dislocation of the West and the Status of the Humanities,” Traces: A Multilingual Journal of Cultural Theory and Translation 1 (2001): 71–94. 4. James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 4. 5. Drawing on Daphne Lei’s distinction between ‘ideological’ and ‘geographical East’, I employ ‘East’ to denote the former and ‘Asia’, or ‘East Asia’, the latter. See Lei, “Interruption, Intervention, Interculturalism: Robert Wilson’s HIT Productions in Taiwan,” Theatre Journal 63, no. 4 (2011): 571–86. Likewise, I take ‘South’, ‘West’, and ‘North’ as ideologically invested constructs rather than value-neutral geopolitical denominations. 6. Scholars of Asian descent have offered incisive critiques, with Rustom Bharucha standing out as one the most vocal detractors. See Bharucha, The Politics of Cultural Practice: Thinking through Theatre in an Age of Globalization (London: Athlone Press, 2000); “Interculturalism and Its Discriminations: Shifting the Agendas of the National, the Multicultural and the Global,” Third Text 13, no. 46 (1999): 3–23; Daryl Chin, “Interculturalism, Postmodernism, Pluralism,” in Interculturalism and Performance: Writings from PAJ, ed. Bonnie Marranca and Gautam Dasgupta (New York: PAJ Publications, 1991), 83–95; Gautam Dasgupta, “The Mahabharata: Peter Brook’s Orientalism,” in Marranca and Dasgupta, Interculturalism and Performance, 75–82; and Hae-kyung Um, “Introduction: Understanding Diaspora, Identity, and Performance,” in Diasporas and Interculturalism in Asian Performing Arts: Translating Traditions, ed. Hae-kyung Um (London: Routledge, 2005), 1–13. 7. Bharucha, Politics, 31. 8. Una Chaudhuri, “Beyond a ‘Taxonomic Theater’: Interculturalism after Postcolonialism and Globalization,” Theater 32, no. 1 (2002): 38. See also Chaudhuri, “The Future of the Hyphen: Interculturalism, Textuality, and the Difference Within,” in Marranca and Dasgupta, Interculturalism and Performance, 192–207. 9. John Russell Brown, “Theatrical Pillage in Asia: Redirecting the Intercultural Traffic,” New Theatre Quarterly 14, no. 53 (1998): 14.

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10. Craig Latrell, “After Appropriation,” TDR: The Drama Review 44, no. 4 (2000): 44–55. See also Catherine Diamond, “The Floating World of Nouveau Chinoiserie: Asian Orientalist Productions of Greek Tragedy,” New Theatre Quarterly 15, no. 2 (1999): 142–64. 11. Chaudhuri, “Taxonomic Theater,” 39. 12. Rustom Bharucha, “Under the Sign of ‘Asia’: Rethinking ‘Creative Unity’ beyond the ‘Rebirth of Traditional Arts’,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 2, no. 1 (2001): 155. 13. Chaudhuri, “Taxonomic Theater,” 44. 14. Christopher Innes examines interculturalism in the context of avantgarde theory in Avant Garde Theatre 1892–1992 (London: Routledge, 1993), and Richard Schechner includes ‘an intercultural avant-garde’ in the fivefold topology he outlines in The Future of Ritual: Writings on Culture and Performance (London: Routledge, 1993), 5. 15. On Eurocentric exceptionalism in comparative studies see Shu-mei Shih, “Comparison as Relation,” in Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses, ed. Rita Felski and Susan Stanford Friedman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 79–98. 16. Erika Fischer-Lichte, “Interweaving Cultures in Performance: Different States of Being In-Between,” New Theatre Quarterly 25, no. 4 (2009): 399. 17. Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei, “Countering ‘Theoretical Imperialism’: Some Possibilities from Japan,” Theatre Research International 32, no. 3 (2007): 314. 18. Siyuan Liu, Performing Hybridity in Colonial-Modern China (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 19. On the ‘directionality of art’ see Michael Kirby, The Art of Time: Essays on the Avant-garde (New York: Dutton, 1969), 18–19. Schechner mentions ‘a forward-looking avant-garde,’ in Future of Ritual, 5. 20. James M. Harding, “From Cutting Edge to Rough Edges: On the Transnational Foundations of Avant-garde Performance,” in Not the Other Avant-garde: The Transnational Foundations of Avant-garde Performance, ed. James M. Harding and John Rouse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 20. 21. James M. Harding and John Rouse, “Introduction,” in Harding and Rouse, Not the Other Avant-garde, 15. 22. Harding, “Cutting Edge,” 22–24. 23. Sakai, “Dislocation.” 24. Helen Gilbert and Jacqueline Lo, Performance and Cosmopolitics: CrossCultural Transactions in Australasia (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 209. The present study focuses on embodied interactions, but the field of intercultural adaptation presents noteworthy instances of minor-to-minor relations. Bharucha details some examples in Theatre and

2

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

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the World: Performance and the Politics of Culture (London: Routledge, 1993 [1990]). Ric Knowles, Theatre & Interculturalism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 75. Yasushi Nagata, “The Future Possibilities of Inter-Asian Theatre Research,” Theatre Research International 35, no. 3 (2010): 295–96. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993), 3. Koichi Iwabuchi “De-Westernisation, Inter-Asian Referencing, and Beyond,” European Journal of Cultural Studies 17, no. 1 (2014): 47. Tadashi Uchino, Crucible Bodies: Postwar Japanese Performance from Brecht to the New Millennium (London: Seagull Books, 2009), 98–99. Ibid., 101. Ibid., 97. Ibid., 96. Bharucha (“Interculturalism”) discusses voluntarism to differentiate ‘democratic’ from ‘coercive’/‘assimilationist’ inflections of interculturalism. On contact zones see Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992). Brown, “Theatrical Pillage,” 14. Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1995), 20. Julie Holledge and Joanne Tompkins, Women’s Intercultural Performance (London: Routledge, 2000), 1. Uchino, Crucible Bodies, 97. Lei, “Interruption.” Rustom Bharucha, “Thinking through Translation: The Psychophysical Dynamics of Direction,” Theatre Journal 59, no. 3 (2007): 352. For an example, see William Peterson, “Consuming the Asian Other in Singapore: Interculturalism in TheatreWorks’ Desdemona,” Theatre Research International 28, no. 1 (2003): 79–95. Uchino, Crucible Bodies, 110. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to ActorNetwork-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 39. Ibid., 130. Ibid., 59. Ibid., 108. Ibid. Ibid., 128. Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods (Dijon: les presses du réel, 2002).

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50. Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October 110 (2004): 51–79. 51. Bharucha, “Sign,” 155. 52. Naoki Sakai, “From Area Studies toward Transnational Studies,” InterAsia Cultural Studies 11, no. 2 (2010): 273. 53. Ibid. 54. Rustom Bharucha, “The Limits of the Beyond: Contemporary Art Practice, Intervention and Collaboration in Public Spaces,” Third Text 21, no. 4 (2007): 413. 55. Latour, Reassembling the Social, 132. 56. Ibid., 34. 57. Patrice Pavis, Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture, trans. Loren Kruger (London: Routledge, 1992), 4. 58. Lo and Gilbert, “Toward a Topography of Cross-Cultural Theatre Praxis,” TDR: The Drama Review 46, no. 3 (2002): 41, 43. 59. Ibid. For critiques of the hourglass paradigm see also Bharucha, Theatre and the World, 243–53; Diane Daugherty, “The Pendulum of Intercultural Performance: Kathakali King Lear at Shakespeare’s Globe,” Asian Theatre Journal 22, no. 1 (2005): 52–72. 60. Pavis, Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture, 4. 61. Bharucha, Theatre and the World, 244. 62. Ibid., 244–45. 63. Lo and Gilbert, “Topography,” 44. 64. Knowles (Theatre & Interculturalism, 41) dubs Lo and Gilbert’s model ‘a kind of horizontal hourglass’ because of its inability to comprehend multi-way trajectories. 65. Lo and Gilbert, “Topography,” 47. Emphasis added. 66. Knowles, Theatre & Interculturalism, 59. 67. Helena Grehan, “Questioning the Relationship between Consumption and Exchange: TheatreWorks’ Flying Circus Project, December 2000,” positions: east asia cultures critique 12, no. 2 (2004): 583. 68. Wen-Ching Liang, “Assembling Differences: Towards a Deleuzian Approach to Intercultural Theatre” (PhD diss., Royal Holloway, University of London, 2008), 74. 69. Denise Varney, “Rhizomatic Dramaturgy: Alternative Performance Practices,” in Alternatives: Debating Theatre Culture in the Age of Con-Fusion, ed. Peter Eckersall, Tadashi Uchino, and Naoto Moriyama (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2004), 123. 70. Erika Fischer-Lichte, “Introduction: Interweaving Performance Cultures—Rethinking ‘Intercultural Theatre’: Toward an Experience and Theory of Performance beyond Postcolonialism,” in The Politics of Interweaving Performance Cultures: Beyond Postcolonialism, ed. Erika FischerLichte, Torsten Jost, and Saskya Iris Jain (London: Routledge, 2014), 11.

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71. Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997 [1990]). 72. Hsu Cho-yun, “A Reflection on Marginality,” in The Living Tree: The Changing Meaning of Being Chinese Today, ed. Tu Wei-ming (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 240. 73. Tu Wei-ming, “Cultural China: The Periphery as the Center,” in Tu, Living Tree, 26, 4. 74. For a critique of Tu’s model see Ien Ang, On Not Speaking Chinese: Living between Asia and the West (London: Routledge, 2001), 40–44. 75. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987 [1980]), 5. 76. Ibid., 7. 77. Ibid., 25. 78. Ibid. 79. Ibid. 80. Ibid., 11. 81. Ibid., 21. 82. Ibid., 12. 83. Ibid., 11. 84. Ibid., 12. 85. Félix Guattari, “The Three Ecologies,” trans. Chris Turner, New Formations 8 (1989): 139. 86. Ibid., 136. 87. Ibid. 88. Ibid. 89. Nicolas Bourriaud, The Radicant, trans. James Gussen and Lili Porten (New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2009). 90. Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 112. For an earlier discussion of interculturalism and transnational Chinese theatres informed by Deleuze’s and Bourriaud’s concepts see Rossella Ferrari, “Journey(s) to the East— Travels, Trajectories, and Transnational Chinese Theatre(s),” Postcolonial Studies 13, no. 4 (2010): 351–66. 91. Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd ed., s.v. “Rhizome”. 92. Webster’s Dictionary Online, s.v. “Radicant,” accessed May 15, 2013, https://www.webster-dictionary.org/definition/radicant. 93. Bourriaud, Radicant, 51. 94. Ibid., 22. 95. Ibid., 55. 96. Ibid., 22. 97. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 25. 98. Ibid., 261. 99. Ang, On Not Speaking Chinese, 36.

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100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107.

108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113.

114. 115.

116. 117.

118. 119. 120.

121. 122.

Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 8. Bourriaud, Radicant, 55. Ibid. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 8. Lionnet and Shih, “Introduction.” Michael Peter Smith and Luis Eduardo Guarnizo, eds., Transnationalism from Below (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1998). On geopathology see Una Chaudhuri, Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995). On Lear see Rossella Ferrari, “Transnation/Transmedia/Transtext: Border-Crossing from Screen to Stage in Greater China,” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 2, no. 1 (2008): 53–65. Bourriaud, Radicant, 113. Vi¯ ator, from via (way) and vi¯ a (re) (to travel), is Latin for ‘traveller’. Ibid., 102. Ibid., 114. Ibid., 113. Ibid. See also Nicolas Bourriaud, ed., Altermodern (London: Tate, 2009). Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 64. Bourriaud, Radicant, 21. Deleuze and Guattari’s tendency to romanticize nomadism has, likewise, been critiqued. See Ronald Bogue, Deleuze’s Way: Essays in Transverse Ethics and Aesthetics (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 113–21. Bourriaud, Radicant, 79. Mao outlines this distinction in a speech delivered on 27 February 1957. A revised version was published in Renmin ribao (People’s Daily) on 19 June 1957. See Mao Zedong, “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People,” in Selected Works of Mao Tsetung, vol. 5 (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1977), 384–421. Bonnie S. McDougall and Kam Louie, The Literature of China in the Twentieth Century (London: Hurst, 1997), 202–3. Mao Zedong, “Beat Back the Attacks of the Bourgeois Rightists,” in Selected Works, vol. 5, 463. Kwok-sing Li, A Glossary of Political Terms of the People’s Republic of China, trans. Mary Lok (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1995), 111. Perry Link, The Uses of Literature: Life in the Socialist Chinese Literary System (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 68. Rong Nianzeng [Danny Yung], “Zhi Chengdu ‘Zhuan–ye–yu: dangdai wenhua jiaoliu huodong’ cehuaren: Xiangcao ducao,” in Xunzhao xin

2

123.

124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129.

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Zhongguo: Rong Nianzeng wenzi jilu (erlinglingsan), ed. Tan Meiqing (Hong Kong: IATC, 2004), 33. Chang Ying Chuan [Zhang Yingchuan], “Transplanting ‘Poisonous Grass’,” in Juli: Shihua Rong Nianzeng/From Close from Afar: An Anthology on Danny Yung, ed. May Fung (Hong Kong: 1a Space, 2003), 31–32. Rong [Yung], “Zhi Chengdu,” 33. Chang [Zhang], “Transplanting,” 32. Marcos Novak, “Speciation, Transvergence, Allogenesis: Notes on the Production of the Alien,” Architectural Design 72, no. 3 (2002): 65. Ibid., 66. Rong [Yung], “Zhi Chengdu,” 33. Novak, “Speciation,” 67.

Bibliography Ang, Ien. On Not Speaking Chinese: Living between Asia and the West. London: Routledge, 2001. Bharucha, Rustom. “Interculturalism and Its Discriminations: Shifting the Agendas of the National, the Multicultural and the Global.” Third Text 13, no. 46 (1999): 3–23. ———. “The Limits of the Beyond: Contemporary Art Practice, Intervention and Collaboration in Public Spaces.” Third Text 21, no. 4 (2007): 397–416. ———. The Politics of Cultural Practice: Thinking through Theatre in an Age of Globalization. London: Athlone Press, 2000. ———. Theatre and the World: Performance and the Politics of Culture. London: Routledge, 1993 [1990]. ———. “Thinking through Translation: The Psychophysical Dynamics of Direction.” Theatre Journal 59, no. 3 (2007): 352–55. ———. “Under the Sign of ‘Asia’: Rethinking ‘Creative Unity’ beyond the ‘Rebirth of Traditional Arts’.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 2, no. 1 (2001): 151– 56. Bishop, Claire. “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics.” October 110 (2004): 51–79. Bogue, Ronald. Deleuze’s Way: Essays in Transverse Ethics and Aesthetics. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. Bourriaud, Nicolas, ed. Altermodern. London: Tate, 2009. ———. The Radicant. Translated by James Gussen and Lili Porten. New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2009. ———. Relational Aesthetics. Translated by Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods. Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2002.

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Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. 2nd ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Brown, John Russell. “Theatrical Pillage in Asia: Redirecting the Intercultural Traffic.” New Theatre Quarterly 14, no. 53 (1998): 9–19. Chang Ying Chuan [Zhang Yingchuan]. “Transplanting ‘Poisonous Grass’.” In Juli: Shihua Rong Nianzeng/From Close from Afar: An Anthology on Danny Yung, edited by May Fung, 31–32. Hong Kong: 1a Space, 2003. Chaudhuri, Una. “Beyond a ‘Taxonomic Theater’: Interculturalism after Postcolonialism and Globalization.” Theater 32, no. 1 (2002): 33–47. ———. “The Future of the Hyphen: Interculturalism, Textuality, and the Difference Within.” In Interculturalism and Performance: Writings from PAJ, edited by Bonnie Marranca and Gautam Dasgupta, 192–207. New York: PAJ Publications, 1991. ———. Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995. Chen Kuan-hsing. Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Chin, Daryl. “Interculturalism, Postmodernism, Pluralism.” In Interculturalism and Performance: Writings from PAJ, edited by Bonnie Marranca and Gautam Dasgupta, 83–95. New York: PAJ Publications, 1991. Clifford, James. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Dasgupta, Gautam. “The Mahabharata: Peter Brook’s Orientalism.” In Interculturalism and Performance: Writings from PAJ, edited by Bonnie Marranca and Gautam Dasgupta, 75–82. New York: PAJ Publications, 1991. Daugherty, Diane. “The Pendulum of Intercultural Performance: Kathakali King Lear at Shakespeare’s Globe.” Asian Theatre Journal 22, no. 1 (2005): 52– 72. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987 [1980]. Diamond, Catherine. “The Floating World of Nouveau Chinoiserie: Asian Orientalist Productions of Greek Tragedy.” New Theatre Quarterly 15, no. 2 (1999): 142–64. Ferrari, Rossella. “Journey(s) to the East—Travels, Trajectories, and Transnational Chinese Theatre(s).” Postcolonial Studies 13, no. 4 (2010): 351–66. ———. “Transnation/Transmedia/Transtext: Border-Crossing from Screen to Stage in Greater China.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 2, no. 1 (2008): 53–65. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. “Interweaving Cultures in Performance: Different States of Being In-Between.” New Theatre Quarterly 25, no. 4 (2009): 391–401.

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———. “Introduction: Interweaving Performance Cultures—Rethinking ‘Intercultural Theatre’: Toward an Experience and Theory of Performance beyond Postcolonialism.” In The Politics of Interweaving Performance Cultures: Beyond Postcolonialism, edited by Erika Fischer-Lichte, Torsten Jost, and Saskya Iris Jain, 1–21. London: Routledge, 2014. Gilbert, Helen, and Jacqueline Lo. Performance and Cosmopolitics: CrossCultural Transactions in Australasia. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso, 1993. Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997 [1990]. Grehan, Helena. “Questioning the Relationship between Consumption and Exchange: TheatreWorks’ Flying Circus Project, December 2000.” positions: east asia cultures critique 12, no. 2 (2004): 565–86. Guattari, Félix. “The Three Ecologies.” Translated by Chris Turner. New Formations 8 (1989): 131–47. Harding, James M. “From Cutting Edge to Rough Edges: On the Transnational Foundations of Avant-garde Performance.” In Not the Other Avant-garde: The Transnational Foundations of Avant-garde Performance, edited by James M. Harding and John Rouse, 18–40. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006. Harding, James M., and John Rouse. “Introduction.” In Not the Other Avantgarde: The Transnational Foundations of Avant-garde Performance, edited by James M. Harding and John Rouse, 1–17. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006. Holledge, Julie, and Joanne Tompkins. Women’s Intercultural Performance. London: Routledge, 2000. Hsu Cho-yun. “A Reflection on Marginality.” In The Living Tree: The Changing Meaning of Being Chinese Today, edited by Tu Wei-ming, 239–41. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994. Innes, Christopher. Avant Garde Theatre 1892–1992. London: Routledge, 1993. Iwabuchi, Koichi. “De-Westernisation, Inter-Asian Referencing, and Beyond.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 17, no. 1 (2014): 44–57. Kirby, Michael. The Art of Time: Essays on the Avant-garde. New York: Dutton, 1969. Knowles, Ric. Theatre & Interculturalism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-NetworkTheory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Latrell, Craig. “After Appropriation.” TDR: The Drama Review 44, no. 4 (2000): 44–55.

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Lei, Daphne P. “Interruption, Intervention, Interculturalism: Robert Wilson’s HIT Productions in Taiwan.” Theatre Journal 63, no. 4 (2011): 571–86. Li, Kwok-sing. A Glossary of Political Terms of the People’s Republic of China. Translated by Mary Lok. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1995. Liang, Wen-Ching. “Assembling Differences: Towards a Deleuzian Approach to Intercultural Theatre.” PhD diss., Royal Holloway, University of London, 2008. Link, Perry. The Uses of Literature: Life in the Socialist Chinese Literary System. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Lionnet, Françoise, and Shu-mei Shih. “Introduction: Thinking through the Minor, Transnationally.” In Minor Transnationalism, edited by Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih, 1–23. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. Liu, Siyuan. Performing Hybridity in Colonial-Modern China. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Lo, Jacqueline, and Helen Gilbert. “Toward a Topography of Cross-Cultural Theatre Praxis.” TDR: The Drama Review 46, no. 3 (2002): 31–53. Mao Zedong. “Beat Back the Attacks of the Bourgeois Rightists.” In Selected Works of Mao Tsetung, vol. 5, 457–72. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1977. ———. “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People.” In Selected Works of Mao Tsetung, vol. 5, edited by Michael Y. M. Kau and John K. Leung, 384–421. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1977. McDougall, Bonnie S., and Kam Louie. The Literature of China in the Twentieth Century. London: Hurst, 1997. Nagata, Yasushi. “The Future Possibilities of Inter-Asian Theatre Research.” Theatre Research International 35, no. 3 (2010): 295–96. Novak, Marcos. “Speciation, Transvergence, Allogenesis: Notes on the Production of the Alien.” Architectural Design 72, no. 3 (2002): 64–71. Pavis, Patrice. Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture. Translated by Loren Kruger. London: Routledge, 1992. Peterson, William. “Consuming the Asian Other in Singapore: Interculturalism in TheatreWorks’ Desdemona.” Theatre Research International 28, no. 1 (2003): 79–95. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1992. Sakai, Naoki. “Dislocation of the West and the Status of the Humanities.” Traces: A Multilingual Journal of Cultural Theory and Translation 1 (2001): 71–94. ———. “From Area Studies toward Transnational Studies.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 11, no. 2 (2010): 265–74. Schechner, Richard. The Future of Ritual: Writings on Culture and Performance. London: Routledge, 1993.

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Shih, Shu-mei. “Comparison as Relation.” In Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses, edited by Rita Felski and Susan Stanford Friedman, 79–98. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. Smith, Michael Peter, and Luis Eduardo Guarnizo, eds. Transnationalism from Below. New Brunswick: Transaction, 1998. Sorgenfrei, Carol Fisher. “Countering ‘Theoretical Imperialism’: Some Possibilities from Japan.” Theatre Research International 32, no. 3 (2007): 312–24. Tu Wei-ming. “Cultural China: The Periphery as the Center.” In The Living Tree: The Changing Meaning of Being Chinese Today, edited by Tu Wei-ming, 1–34. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994. Uchino, Tadashi. Crucible Bodies: Postwar Japanese Performance from Brecht to the New Millennium. London: Seagull Books, 2009. Um, Hae-kyung. “Introduction: Understanding Diaspora, Identity, and Performance.” In Diasporas and Interculturalism in Asian Performing Arts: Translating Traditions, edited by Hae-kyung Um, 1–13. London: Routledge, 2005. Varney, Denise. “Rhizomatic Dramaturgy: Alternative Performance Practices.” In Alternatives: Debating Theatre Culture in the Age of Con-Fusion, edited by Peter Eckersall, Tadashi Uchino, and Naoto Moriyama, 117–25. Brussels: Peter Lang, 2004. Young, Robert J. C. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. London: Routledge, 1995. Yung, Danny [Rong Nianzeng]. “Zhi Chengdu ‘Zhuan–ye–yu: dangdai wenhua jiaoliu huodong’ cehuaren: Xiangcao ducao.” In Xunzhao xin Zhongguo: Rong Nianzeng wenzi jilu (erlinglingsan), edited by Tan Meiqing, 33. Hong Kong: IATC, 2004.

CHAPTER 3

Hong Kong Transfers: Transmedial Travels in the Theatre of Relations

Between November–December 1980 and January 1981, Shanghai-born, Hong Kong-raised, and US-educated multi-artist Danny Yung (Yung Ning-tsun; Rong Nianzeng) curated a four-part cycle of performance happenings at the Hong Kong Arts Centre titled Journey to the East (Zhongguo lücheng).1 Originally a transmedial platform for local artists, Journey expanded in the next two decades into a trans-Chinese and, subsequently, trans-Asian series of performances, art exhibitions, and critical forums, becoming one of the region’s most enduring and influential templates for intercultural collaboration. Between 1980 and 2000, Journey brought together over a hundred theatre- and filmmakers, visual artists, scholars, and art critics with the purpose of exploring the potential of performance to redefine aesthetic and methodological borders through inter-Asian relationality. Subsequent to the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration, Journey gained momentum as a choral response to the ‘anticipatory trauma’2 of the British colony’s handover to the People’s Republic of China on 1 July 1997 and its projected reverberations on the geopolitics of the Chinesespeaking region in the third millennium. It also came to represent the signature exchange programme of Hong Kong’s leading art collective, Zuni Icosahedron (Jinnian ershimianti), which Yung co-founded in 1982 and has directed since 1985. The range and effectiveness of Zuni’s initiatives have played a key role in the advancement of trans-Asian networked

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practices. A considerable share of their repertoire is the result of transnational collaboration and often accomplished through long-term, processfocused work that aims at developing a predefined production format or concept over several months or years. In addition to lending a paradigm for exchange programmes and arts festivals across the Asia Pacific region, Journey’s distinctive curatorial framework of One Table Two Chairs (yi zhuo er yi, or yi zhuo liang yi, also known by its acronym, 1T2C) has been adapted widely not only in subsequent Zuni productions but also in visual and performing arts projects by other Asian and international practitioners.3 This chapter offers a complete chronological examination of the Journey series from the 1980s to 2000 to trace the evolution of the theoretical framework elucidated in the previous chapter and expanded—conceptually and geographically—in the following ones. Journey illustrates the manner in which an originally ‘transnational Chinese’ network encompassing Hong Kong, Taiwan, and mainland China morphed progressively into a ‘transnational Asian’ one comprised of collaborators from East, South, and Southeast Asia and Sinophone communities worldwide, to eventually reach Europe. As the scale and scope of the series increased with each edition, Journey also served as a springboard for concomitant transmedial applications that shared and developed its structural parameters and conceptual motivations. These comprise the touring programme, In Search of Modern China/Hong Kong: An Exchange Project on Experimental Theatre (Xin Zhongguo shiyan lüyou—Zhonggang shiyan xiju fazhan jiaoliu jihua, 2002–2004), and the installation series, Video Circle (Luxiang quan, 1996–2003), both examined below. This generative reverberation across borders testifies to the significance of the Journey concept as a conduit of rhizomatic interculturalism and transnational performance in journey-form, as well as to the lasting impact of the 1T2C template as a key signifier of Zuni’s transmedial poetics of relations.

Journey to the East: A Paradigm of Networked Performance As stated in the introduction, tropes of mobility, interconnection, and border-crossing inform the constitutive topology of transnationalism as a geopolitical configuration and conceptual domain as much as a manner of cultural performance. Likewise, transnational theatricalities such

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as those displayed in the Journey series enact epistemic itineraries across East Asia’s rhizomatic cartographies, tracing collective passages through physical and cognitive boundaries while also resonating with fundamental tropes of movement (material, perceptual, virtual) and circulation of people, concepts, and identities. The conjunction of multiple conjugations of trans-ing—of cultures, languages, texts, media, and bodies— inherent in the Journey collaboration underscores a concerted endeavour to locate transversal vectors of creative dialogism across polymorphic and polycentric—or ex-centric—clusters of embodied relationality. Zuni’s transvergent practices do not only constitute seminal articulations of networked performance in journey-form but also illuminate a composite understanding of transnational Chinese and Asian theatres as critical constructs, intercultural exchange models, and collaborative methods. Transdisciplinarity and transmediality have defined Zuni’s conceptual agenda since their origins. Their creative interventions in theatre, dance, music, video, animation, illustration, installation, and performance art have routinely intervened in, or even elicited, debates on cultural policymaking, institutional reform, gender politics, urban planning, heritage, and education, among other areas. The twenty-sided polyhedron that gives the group its name, the icosahedron, is a suitable visual signifier for their multilayered praxis. Zuni’s propensity for transmedial and transtextual crossings is integral to their investment in the transnational. While their work attends to the literal functions of transnationalism through involvement with nongovernmental structures in facilitating informal collaborations, their transnational practice has persistently relied on transmutations and transpositions across genres and technologies to expose the disjunctures and multiple implications of border-crossing, thereby revealing the wide-ranging modalities in which the performances of the transnational can be conceptualized and communicated. Zuni’s collaborative platforms have functioned as unofficial forums for collective reflections on focal moments in the entwined histories of the ‘three Chinas’—the mainland, Taiwan, and Hong Kong—and of the nations of East Asia. The group has been invested in social and political action since its foundation and has instigated transregional debate through artistic engagement with respect to controversial histories ranging from the Opium Wars to the Cultural Revolution. As with most Hong Kong cultural production in the decade preceding the handover, deepseated anxiety over the loss of identity and the erosion of civil liberties after 1997 became a key catalyser for Journey and much of Zuni’s

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repertoire since the mid-1980s. This trend became even more evident in the aftermath of the violent repression of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, which many in Hong Kong perceived as an ominous prefiguration of the city’s impending future. Thus, Zuni’s transnational performances in journey-form engaged the ontology and imagery of the ‘trans-’ to articulate not only tangible circumstances of mobility and embodied interaction but also allegorical expeditions across the fractured borderlands of liminal identity, the deep crevices of memory, and the unsettling disjunctions between public histories and marginalized narratives of the (post-)colonial condition.

Departures: Transmedial Crossings in the Colonial City The journey started in 1980 when Yung and Gus Wong devised a fourpart cycle of performance events, Journey to the East, which is generally regarded as the earliest instance of multimedia theatre in Hong Kong. For the first time, the city’s burgeoning underground arts scene was given a combined platform for mixed-media experimentation encompassing film, video, installation, music, design, performance, and photography. Performers from local ensembles such as City Contemporary Dance Company participated, along with would-be Zuni core members Pia Ho, Jim Shum, Edward Lam, and others. Yung had recently returned to Hong Kong from the United States, where he was involved in film production and conceptual art while studying architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, and urban design at Columbia University in New York. The visual poetics of his early screen-based experiments anticipate tropes of journeying and mobility that his later performance work would reveal fully. One example is the ten-minute Super 8 film, Journey (Lücheng , 1978), featuring a soundtrack by future Zuni founding member Pun Takshu, which also attests to Yung’s long-standing fascination with socialist iconographies and soundscapes. Another is the three-minute short film, Chair (Yizi, 1979), showcasing a dance of animated chairs that forestalls the centrality of the chair as a key stage property and signifying vehicle in the Journey series and many other Zuni productions. The concept of the 1980–1981 happenings draws inspiration from Michelangelo Antonioni’s documentary film, Chung Kuo, Cina (1972)— proscribed for decades in the PRC because of its unflattering portrayal of life under state socialism—and the European fantasies of the ‘East’

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reflected in the thirteenth-century travelogue, The Travels of Marco Polo (Il Milione). The purpose of questioning notions of exotic discovery (Chinoiserie) to interrogate questions of identity (Chineseness) was to unpack the dialectics of ‘seeing and being seen’,4 namely to scrutinize Western imageries of the ‘East’ along with the East’s own perception of those images and to contrast mythical visions of Cathay with the actual realities of everyday life in China and Hong Kong. The four segments composing the cycle were devised as structured events integrating time- and screen-based media, live action, and prerecorded soundtracks with a repertoire of repetitive movements and gestures that would become synonymous with Zuni-style performance, such as walking and running across the stage and pointing or gazing into various directions. Another feature that would become a persistent trademark of Yung’s later work was the repeated and almost ritualistic occurrence of extended sequences of questions or questions/problems—in keeping with Yung’s idiosyncratic English rendition of the Chinese word, wenti (‘question’ or ‘problem’), as it appears in various publications, stage productions, and artworks.5 These were conveyed via live enunciation, taped vocal tracks, and slide projections. The inaugural instalment, Ideogram (Zhongguo lücheng zhi yi—yitu), marked a watershed in Hong Kong as the earliest local presentation of non-textual/non-narrative conceptual performance. It was, essentially, an assemblage of visual and aural signifiers of the PRC: slideshows of colour photographs of China by George Chan juxtaposed with black-and-white shots of Hong Kong by John Fung, renditions of scar literature (shanghen wenxue, a popular late 1970s fiction genre that denounced the excesses of the Cultural Revolution), and scenes from David Hare’s play on the Maoist revolution, Fanshen (1975).6 These were mixed with voiceovers that recounted journeys and asked questions at regular intervals. Some of the questions were concrete: Where is China going? Where are her journeys leading? What is the purpose of these journeys? But some delved into the very essence of questioning: Why must we ask questions? What makes an answer?7 The second part, Past Events (Zhongguo lücheng zhi er—gushi), combined monologues, dialogues, video sequences, and silent actions. It featured re-enactments of the trials of Mao Zedong’s wife, Jiang Qing, and of Dou E, the tragic heroine of Guan Hanqing’s classic drama of the Yuan dynasty, The Injustice to Dou E (Dou E yuan)—subsequently reprised in

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Guan Hanqing (1958) by Tian Han, who died in prison during the Cultural Revolution. In the third instalment, Question/Problem (Zhongguo lücheng zhi san—wenti), mirror panels partitioned the performance space into two separate areas where different actions occurred simultaneously, whereas the fourth, Morphology (Zhongguo lücheng zhi si—cifa), relayed footage of the previous three happenings on three separate cameras while another captured the live event as it unfolded. Yung envisioned the cycle as a ‘container’ of time, space, and media components that would be controlled by each collaborator in accordance with their distinctive perception of the practice and purpose of journeying: I felt as if we were making a boat in which the whole group would travel. I suppose some of them started out of curiosity but soon they were helping in the construction. Some, upon boarding, went as far as questioning the route, direction and objective.8

A text from the slideshow appearing in Ideogram articulates the project’s intent to support the discovery of uncharted perceptual latitudes through mobility: In In In In

the the the the

journey, journey, journey, journey,

he begins…… he begins to discover……. upon repetition, he begins to discover himself……. he begins to attempt to go beyond himself…….9

The gesture of ‘going beyond’ (kuayue) forestalls a vision of transnational Chinese theatres as a system of multiple crossings, transgressions, and trans- actions—material, conceptual, and methodological. Though not yet transnational in terms of participation, the series’ inaugural cycle laid the foundation for more ambitious future endeavours, as it brought together the core membership of the creative powerhouse that, in 1982, would be formalized as Zuni Icosahedron. Furthermore, it introduced the intermedial format—harnessing the tensional relations between video, film, installation, and performance—that would come to constitute a mainstay of Journey, with collaborators interchanging roles, personae, and positions while traversing media borders and persistently shifting domains.10 As such, it anticipated the cross-field, cross-media, crossregion, and cross-cultural focus that has since informed the underlying philosophy of the group.

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In the early 1980s, Zuni pioneered not only seminal performance work but also video art. On 10–13 December 1983, they co-presented the first Hong Kong International Video Art Exhibition at the Hong Kong Arts Centre and Hong Kong’s first-ever video workshop, led by German videomaker Barbara Hammann and hosted by the Goethe-Institut. The exhibition featured work by international artists including Bill Viola, Vito Acconci, Joan Jonas, Terayama Sh¯uji, and Nam June Paik alongside contributions by Zuni’s Pia Ho, Margaret Lee, Edward Lam, Pun Tak-shu, and other local videomakers.11 Echoing some core tropes in the Journey performance cycle, Yung and Jim Shum’s eleven-minute Videotable (Luying zhuo, 1984) displays recurring shots of a map and a clock to draw attention to the impending chronotopic relocation—and affective dislocation—of Hong Kong to the PRC. Two vocal tracks raise questions about time, direction, and spatial positioning in connection with the handover, interspersed with wry remarks on political orientations (left, centre, right) and politicized locations, such as mainland China (Zhongguo) as the ‘centre’ (zhong ) or ‘middle’ kingdom.12 In that period, Zuni collaborated frequently with a group of independent curators and film- and videomakers known as the Phoenix Cine Club (Huoniao dianying hui; 1974–1986). In 1986, Phoenix’s Ellen Pau, May Fung, Wong Chi-fai, and Comyn Mo founded the influential media art collective Videotage (Luying taiqi) and became involved in Zuni’s performance projects, including the Journey series. Alice Ming Wai Jim attests to the close connection between performance and experimental film and video in Hong Kong’s late colonial era, noting that the two scenes crossed paths regularly in that period: Sometimes video would be used on stage as another actor or an extension of the stage, juxtaposing pre-recorded or real-time imagery with the stage performance. Video artists would document their performances in experimentations of their own work, resulting in single-channel tapes, video installations or video performances developed in relation to the stage.13

Yung himself has repeatedly transposed Zuni’s performance work to screen-based media and installation and integrated his visual artworks into his stage productions. The large-scale outdoor installation, The Star (Xing), provided a backdrop to the open-air promenade-cumperformance Journey to the East, Part Eight: Here Here There There

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(Zhongguo lücheng zhi ba—lidu lidu guodu guodu, 1994), which featured downscaled replicas of the giant star as mobile props. The installation, The Deep Structure of Chinese (Hong Kong) Culture, no. 4 (Zhongguo [Xianggang] wenhua shenceng jiegou zhi si), served as a stage set in Zuni’s eponymous 1990 production before being exhibited at the Hong Kong Museum of Art in 1992. The Deep Structure of Chinese Culture, no. 5 (Zhongguo wenhua shenceng jiegou zhi wu, 1996) was incorporated in the stage design of The Book of Mountain and Ocean: Life and Times of Lao She (Shanhai jing —Lao She zhi si, 1996), while six digital paintings and texts from another installation, In Search of Modern China (Xunzhao xin Zhongguo, 2001), appeared in a tribute performance for the late Singaporean dramatist Kuo Pao Kun named In Search of Modern China: Descendants of the Eunuch Admiral (Xunzhao xin Zhongguo—Zhenghe de houdai, 2002).14 Transmediation of tropes and techniques is integral to Zuni’s practice, with members transiting effortlessly through disciplines and transposing one concept across multiple formats. The Journey series provides an archetype for this kind of cross-field approach since the curatorial parameters stipulated in 1997—requiring collaborators to employ a standard xiqu set of one table and two chairs—were applied to both the performance and visual arts programmes. In all editions, filmmakers were invited to create stage work, theatremakers experimented with screenbased media, and both screen and stage directors ventured into sculpture and installation. In one of the 1999 programmes, singers, writers, filmmakers, and video artists reviewed past Zuni performances through video. In 2000, dancers and choreographers created video works to play as media backgrounds to their own live performances. The kernel of the transnational and transmedial rhizome weaved by the Journey series was nurtured within a relatively circumscribed local network of kindred individuals and organizations in Hong Kong. Through the 1980s and 1990s, the creative seed sown by the original four instalments branched out into multiple directions across the artistic constituencies of East Asia, as the trope of travelling, initially a conceptual vehicle, developed into a practical mode of creation through connective mobility.

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Cross-Strait and Trans-Pacific Itineraries The March 1982 début of Journey to the East, Part Five: Hong Kong – Taipei (Zhongguo lücheng zhi wu—Xianggang –Taibei) at the first Asian Theatre Festival in Taipei wielded a lasting impact on the Taiwanese theatre circles. Rozanna Lilley argues that soaring anxiety over the future of post-1997 Hong Kong was a decisive factor in Zuni’s resonance in Taiwan, because of widespread public concern for the handover’s repercussions on cross-strait relations and the contentious issue of the island’s unification with the mainland. The Performance Workshop (Biaoyan gongzuofang, est. 1985), a prominent local ensemble led by Stan Lai, even subsidized Zuni’s 1989 tour to the Toga Festival in Japan after the Hong Kong authorities denied financial support, in an attempt to raise awareness of Hong Kong’s (and, possibly, Taiwan’s) retrocession plight.15 It was in this period that Zuni began forging long-term artistic relations across the Sinosphere to embark on joint explorations of identity, politics, and, indeed, identity politics through touring, residencies, and guest performances. While resisting ethnocentric pigeonholing, Zuni were keen on intensifying contacts with the Asian and global Sinophone communities rather than with the Western world, whose reductionist cultural assumptions frequently made them feel as if they ‘were just like a circus. A nice exotic circus from Hong Kong’, as Yung once remarked.16 In contrast, the Taiwanese related and responded intensely to their performances because, as he expressed to Lilley, ‘they look at us in Hong Kong as an alternative reflection of their own culture — they look at us as part of them’.17 Zuni’s Taipei performances in 1982 and, again, in 1984 with Taiwan’s Cloud Gate Theatre (Yunmen wuji) were of great inspiration to local theatremakers.18 Among these were Stan Lai and Ping Fong Acting Troupe (Pingfeng biaoyanban, est. 1986) director, Lee Kuo-hsiu (Li Guoxiu; Hugh Lee), who became regular Zuni collaborators and the founder of Notebook Theatre (Biji juchang, est. 1985), Huang Chenghuang (Huang Cheng-huang).19 Huang’s Eclipse of Love (Qingshi, 1984) and Rumours (Liuyan, 1985) drew inspiration from scripts previously authored by Yung for Zuni. In 1985, Notebook Theatre devised Old Testament, a group improvisation named after an eponymous Zuni performance.20 In 1987, Notebook Theatre, Huanxu Theatre (Huanxu juchang, est. 1985), and Left Bank Theatre (He Zuo’an juchang, est.

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1985) created October (Shiyue), once more named after a Zuni production staged in Taipei earlier that year. Veteran Taiwanese theatremaker, Wang Molin (Wang Mo-lin), was among the participants. The two segments composing Journey to the East, Part Six (1988), From Hong Kong to Beijing (Xianggang wang Beijing), and From Beijing to Hong Kong…A True Beginning (Beijing wang Xianggang…yi ge zhenzheng de kaishi), closed the Zhong-gang-tai (China-Hong KongTaiwan) triangle symbolically, with the mediated incorporation of the PRC. The performance integrated mainland Chinese aural, visual, and textual sources including classic film scores, samples from the revolutionary model opera, Azalea Mountain (Dujuan shan), and tracks by the 1940s songstress Bai Guang and 1980s rockstar Cui Jian.21 In 1990, Wang Molin published an essay collection that documents early cross-strait dialogues between theatremakers and critics from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and mainland China—or liang ’an sandi (literally, ‘the three places on the two shores’, a common designation for the three territories). These early records are helpful for retracing the contemporary evolutions of transnational Chinese theatres. In two separate interviews from 1987, the year of Zuni’s third Taiwan tour, Wang discusses Hong Kong and Taiwan’s theatre scenes with Yung and Eddy U (Yu Weikang), co-director of Zuni’s Romance of the Rock (Shitou ji, 1987).22 Matters of censorship in China and Hong Kong and cross-comparisons of Hong Kong-PRC and PRC-ROC relations emerging from both conversations beckon at more or less veiled concerns for the future of the two minor Sinophone territories under the looming shadow of Beijing. Yung speaks of potential difficulties with touring Zuni productions to the mainland because of their political connotations, while also stressing the significance of participation (canyu) in Zuni’s performance experiments as part and parcel of their ‘experiments with democracy’.23 Additionally, Wang’s volume features two conversations with influential scholar Lin Kehuan and experimental theatre pioneer Lin Zhaohua, both based in Beijing. In the former, dated 1988 and described as ‘possibly the first real dialogue’ between theatre critics from the two sides of the Taiwan Strait, Wang and Lin Kehuan examine recent developments which attest to intensifying contacts between the Taiwanese and mainland Chinese artistic communities since the 1980s, after forty years of separation. They also note the significance of Japanese, Korean, and Hong Kong models for the development of Taiwan’s little theatre (in addition to Euro-American approaches), particularly with respect to the growing

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presence of physical theatre alongside canonical spoken drama.24 Comparable themes emerge from Wang’s 1989 dialogue with Lin Zhaohua, which touches again on the PRC’s institutional control over the arts and mentions Zuni as an exemplar of sociopolitical activism in the theatre.25 These trilateral conversations highlight two substantive issues. First, in the context of inter-Chinese geopolitics, they establish repeated analogies between Hong Kong and Taiwan’s pursuit of democracy and autonomy from the mainland. Multiple mentions of the year 1997 reveal subcutaneous angst over China’s threat to grassroots democratization processes in the region following the handover and a resolve to strengthen trilateral theatre connections in the run-up to 1997. Second, in the context of theatre historiography, these discussions indicate that the various experimental scenes that emerged across the region in the 1980s were not quite as isolated as the nation-based approaches of many available theatre histories seem to suggest. Opportunities for dialogue and collaboration increased throughout the decade, expedited by the lifting of Martial Law in Taiwan in 1987 and the relative liberalization of Deng Xiaoping’s China in the years preceding the Tiananmen Square crackdown of 1989. Fecund territories for artistic cross-fertilization gradually opened up, setting the foundations for a new networked ecology of Sinophone theatres. Robust evidence to the generative effects that the experimental scenes of the Sinophone region have exerted onto one another—as testified by recurrent indications, in these and other sources,26 of Zuni’s impact in China and Taiwan—attests to a degree of imprecision in the tracking and attribution of innovation (aesthetic and technological) almost exclusively to Euro-American models. Accurate to an extent, this Western-centric genealogy of progress does nonetheless occlude an equally vital record of inter-Chinese and inter-Asian relationality. Albeit still sporadic and nonsystematic, these formative encounters sustain the application of alternate historiographical approaches that can account for convergent translocal networks and transvergent nodes of transmission and dissemination. In other words, the above testimonies provide fertile ground for a critical rethinking of Chinese-language theatre history as multiple and interconnected histories. Journey to the East, Part Seven: Yellow Springs sanctioned the expansion of the journey to the outlying frontiers of Chineseness with the inclusion of participants from the transnational diaspora. It took place at the Yellow Springs Institute for Contemporary Studies and the Arts in Pennsylvania, where Yung and Chinese American director Ping Chong

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held a residency in September–October 1990. Installation artist Choi Yan-chi, choreographer Miranda Chin, Zuni’s Pia Ho and Mathias Woo, Comyn Mo of Videotage, and New York-based Chinese composer Qu Xiaosong worked together on a forty-minute programme of indoor and outdoor performances and installations. Yung’s curatorial statement underscores the generative function of tropes of mobility and indeterminacy in collaborative creation: As if on a journey, the destination does not matter. What matters is that we are all heading into one direction […]. Everyone understands that our cooperation, while on this journey, does not harm our independence. We are all heading into one direction. The journey points to uncertainty, and everyone shares this attitude of exploration.27

New York-based Japanese choreographer, Yoshiko Chuma, spearheaded the extension of the network to non-Chinese collaborators from East Asia and East Asian transnational communities. Chuma choreographed Journey to the East, Part Eight: Here Here There There (1994), an ‘environmental audio-visual collage’—as described in an unpublished production plan—consisting of an outdoor parade along the Tsim Sha Tsui East Promenade followed by a multimedia concert outside the Hong Kong Cultural Centre. Beijing-born writer and composer Liu Suola, also based in New York, and local composer Tats Lau curated the music programme with contributions by Qu Xiaosong and Pun Tak-shu and visuals by Freeman Lau. As a ‘continuing moving stage’, the itinerant procession marched along the waterfront that connected the new railway station in Hung Hom—the arrival point for train routes from the mainland—and the old colonial terminus in Tsim Sha Tsui East. It thus traced an emblematic passage, or a novel Long March, from Beijing to British Hong Kong. The parade involved forty-eight to sixty-four performers at any given time; among these were high-school and college student carrying large rectangular white tables to form ‘a train of tables’ along the itinerary. The tables—signifying each performer’s ‘stage’, ‘forum’, ‘shield and weapon’, ‘shelter and platform’—were eventually joined together to compose a large empty platform (Fig. 3.1). This configuration hinted at the ostensible institutional vacuum perceived in Hong Kong during the late transitional stage but also embodied a potential screen for future projections or a blank canvas for new possible designs.28

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Fig. 3.1 A train of tables is formed along the Tsim Sha Tsui East Promenade in Zuni Icosahedron’s Journey to the East, Part Eight: Here Here There There (1994) (Courtesy of Zuni Icosahedron)

Yung’s installation, The Star—a giant thirty-feet high and forty-feet wide section of a half-sunken red star—was erected on the piazza of the Hong Kong Cultural Centre and served as a backdrop to the final concert (Fig. 3.2). Some performers paraded signboards displaying mordant proclamations which reflected the current zeitgeist in Hong Kong, ‘such as “peaceful transition,” “drifting along,” “ambiguous attitude” and “amen”’.29 Others manoeuvred five nine-feet-tall downscaled models of The Star to recreate a mobile replica of the PRC’s national flag—and Hong Kong’s future constellation—while executing rapid convulsed movements in semi-ritualistic fashion that captured the city’s ‘frantic search for post-1997 safe havens’.30 The itinerant performance in journey-form highlighted a polysemic pattern of transient movement—of melancholic efforts to safeguard a vanishing past (the old station, colonial Hong Kong) and tentative passages from a treasured old to an unfamiliar new. Yet the project’s rhizomatic parentage, gathering individuals of disparate backgrounds to articulate a communal concept, also affirmed

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Fig. 3.2 Danny Yung’s installation, The Star, provides a background to Zuni Icosahedron’s itinerant performance, Journey to the East, Part Eight: Here Here There There (1994) (Courtesy of Zuni Icosahedron)

Journey’s purpose as not simply a subterranean channel of mnemonic retreat but a programmatic call for augmented dialogue, hence a voyage of expectation, rather than merely of escape. As Yung reasoned: ‘1997 is not a terminal disease. After 1997, Hong Kong will have greater interaction with the rest of China and we could be the most creative frontier of Chinese culture’.31 Equally ambivalent is The Star’s description, in the above-mentioned production plan, as ‘sunken/rising’. On the one hand, this double connotation summons visions of irreversible wreckages and foreign celestial bodies landing from outer space (or descending from the North) but also hints at the prospect of new dawns and re-orientations. If taken as a cypher for a vertically imposing singular entity, the semantically ambivalent star may denote the Chinese nation as a foreboding invader. But if placed within a plural(istic) and horizontal constellation, it outlines the potential for a more inclusive trans-Chinese community. Andrew Lam’s designation of the project as ‘public performance as constellation’ reflects

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the archipelagic disposition of this kind of transvergent work as an ‘intersupportive, communication-effective system’ wherein each component can still locate an autonomous position.32

Remapping the Sinosphere: Journey to the East 1997 Within fifteen years, Journey evolved from a local micro-event into a farreaching transborder network. In this respect, the series typifies a shift in focus within the Sinophone theatres of this period from the contained dimension of the national to the expansive scope of the transnational. The imminence of Hong Kong’s handover prompted an increase in exchanges between the creative clusters of the Chinese-speaking region. As the ultimate temporal frontier and affective fracture, 1997 urged a reassessment of mutual relations and a reorientation of the Journey network into new directions. Its renewed curatorial concept comprised a theatre programme, a visual arts exhibition, and a critical forum. Artists, scholars, and critics of diverse professional backgrounds and nationalities converged to Hong Kong from various localities across the Sinosphere to respond to the sociocultural and affective shifts resulting from the city’s impending political transition. Between 1997 and 2000, four festivals of increasingly larger scale took place in Hong Kong, providing a dialogic space for the exchange of concepts and methods across Asia and Asian communities worldwide. Journey evolved into a paradigm for transnational and transmedial collaboration, with selected programmes travelling to Beijing, Macau, Okinawa, New York, London, and Berlin. Filmmakers, theatremakers, visual artists, and critics from Hong Kong, Beijing, and Taipei convened at the Hong Kong Arts Centre for the first edition on 1–5 January 1997. Instead of simply inviting pre-existing productions ‘to showcase to passive spectators’, Journey’s innovative festival format offered a concomitantly ‘myopic and hyperopic’ curatorial framework that enabled contributors to review their ‘history and future as a journey’, conceive relational work ex novo, and forge genuine interpersonal connections through collaborative performances, participatory installations, open forums, and interactive feedback.33 The short duration and controlled production parameters of the 1T2C contributions deterred ‘the idea of making “a masterpiece”’, encouraging a processual engagement with the exchange per se.34

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As noted in Chapter 2, the transnational artwork in journey-form stems from ‘time-specific’35 practices that privilege mobile pathways and openended structures over bounded forms to enhance contemporary experiences of mobility—temporal, territorial, and historical. Accordingly, the chronotope ‘Hong Kong, 1997’ anchored Journey to a shifting coordinate of conflicted in-betweenness that would seal Hong Kong’s British colonial history and launch a new path into Chinese history or, as some feared, merely a passage to a new regime of internal colonialism. In 1997, Hong Kong left behind a centuries-long ‘journey to the West’ to embark on alternate journeys to the ‘East’ by the ‘East’.36 Along these EastEast routes, the (post-)colonial city of Hong Kong turned into a privileged locus of encounters. As Oscar Ho (He Qingji, a contributor to the 1998 visual arts programme) reasons, if Hong Kong is the meeting point of two supposedly authentic and discretely situated entities called ‘East’ and ‘West’, then what and where is Hong Kong? Can Hong Kong merely exist via the existence of others? Can Hong Kong only define itself vis-à-vis other spaces? Can Hong Kong only be situated in-between?37 Rather, Hong Kong has often provided the Sinophone creative communities with an ideal networking space, and Hong Kong artists have been greatly invested in facilitating such interactions. Hong Kong’s position as a strategic space of relations strengthened as the temporal threshold of 1997 approached. In Journey as in much local culture of this period, metaphors of lapsing time, if not impending doom, and portrayals of the city as living on borrowed time in paradoxical timezones of ‘déjà disparu’38 and ‘future anterior’39 —where the present merely exists as an expectant dimension, and the yet-to-come is already past—articulate anxiety over looming change, loss of identity, and prophecies over the future of Hong Kong and the inter-China region after the handover. Questions listed in an audience feedback form which Zuni compiled for Journey ’97 (‘Zhongguo lücheng jiuqi: wenda biao’, dated 1 January 1997) attest to an impulse to rethink shared identities and mutual relations: ‘When did you become aware of “China”?’ ‘Have you ever travelled to “Taiwan”?’ ‘Have you ever travelled to “China”?’ ‘What are the similarities and differences between “China”, “Hong Kong”, and “Taiwan”?’ Rather than simply providing a theme, Journey’s collaborative concept was to stipulate a shared method that would enhance ‘juxtaposition’40 and enable the excavation of intracultural difference while also assisting a relational comparison of the collaborators’ distinct engagements with

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the series’ curatorial parameters. In 1997, its format was codified so that each of the six contributors to the performance programme was invited to devise a twenty-minute piece for two performers using a conventional xiqu stage set of one table and two chairs. In a further nod to tradition, the individual segments of the resultant portmanteau production were categorized as zhezixi, a term that is commonly employed in xiqu to denote the execution of discrete excerpts, or ‘highlights’, from longer compositions. The incorporation of pre-recorded video segments into the live performance was added to the curatorial guidelines in 1999. The rationale behind the stipulation of a communal format was to ground each contribution within a cohesive concept that would enable a meaningful cross-referencing of individual responses to the chronotope ‘Hong Kong, 1997’. Louis Yu’s characterization of Journey ‘97 as ‘one table, two chairs, six gestures’, or ‘postures’ (zishi), encapsulates the curatorial pursuit of concomitant homogeneity and differentiation.41 A further trademark of the series is its transmedial emphasis, which encourages contributors to shift creative domains while remediating themes and formats. Hong Kong Second Wave filmmaker Stanley Kwan and Taiwan New Cinema auteur Edward Yang directed theatrical performances alongside Zuni’s Yung and Edward Lam (Lam Yik-wah; Lin Yihua), and theatre directors Lee Kuo-hsiu, from Taipei, and Li Liuyi and Lin Zhaohua, from Beijing, while leading Chinese documentarian Wu Wenguang was cast to perform in the latter’s work. Contributors to the visual arts programme gathered in Hong Kong one week ahead of the opening to each create one outdoor and one indoor installation that would deploy the same 1T2C configuration as the stage performances. This team comprised one male and one female artist from each participating locality: Wong Shun-kit and Choi Yan-chi from Hong Kong, Tsong Pu and Margaret Shiu Tan from Taipei, Wang Jianwei from Beijing (who took part in absentia, as he could not obtain a visa to Hong Kong), and Chen Yanyin from Shanghai. The exploration of dialogic relationality via shared themes and formats attended to gender distinctions and spatial arrangements (indoor/outdoor) in addition to geopolitical and affective structures. Taiwanese art critic and curator JJ Shih (Shi Ruiren) identifies contrasting treatments of form, themes, and materials in the exhibition on grounds of gender and geographic provenance alongside a tendency to deconstruct the mainstream media’s handover rhetoric.42 Margaret Shiu Tan crafted a collage of ‘alternative news’ in the interactive installation, News: Editing

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(Kanbao jianbao). The table and chairs were covered with clippings from Shanghai, Taipei, and Hong Kong newspapers from the period between 1 December 1996 and 1 January 1997. Visitors were encouraged to rearrange, cut, paste, edit, and write comments on the displayed headlines to produce a palimpsestic three-China newspaper or, as the artist put it, a grassroots ‘people’s daily’.43 The textual and photographic documentation featured in the promotional materials (posters, playbills, catalogues) displays persistent travelrelated imagery and tropes of mapping, exploring, and journeying. As the structural vehicle that carries the aesthetic journeys forward, the 1T2C set may, as well, be taken as a figurative means of transport. In xiqu, the polysemantic table and chairs enable performers to move across temporal, spatial, and perceptual dimensions; they can signify social hierarchies and identitarian positions depending on their configurations within the performance space. They are connective entities, but also elements of obstruction and separation.44 Essentially, the table and chairs are a metaphor for dialogue and embodied signifiers of a theatre of relations. Singapore-based director and Zuni collaborator Liu Xiaoyi underscores the generative potency of 1T2C: [I]t is very interesting to see how one can be creative and deliver one’s intention under such a form where the game rules have been fixed. These few performances permutated within the same fixed configuration, and you can witness not only similarities but each performance’s individuality as well. The configuration is very simple, but from its simplicity you find creativity. […B]ecause of its simplicity, it gives the creator much freedom to play and create. At the same time, because of its simplicity, it can also be a huge challenge for the creator.45

In Journey, the xiqu décor supplied a vehicle of informal diplomacy, polyphonic dialogues, and (trans-)national allegories as an abstract indicator of power positions and individual, social, and affective formations. The metaphor of ‘one table, two chairs’ originated as an ironic refashioning of Hong Kong’s post-1997 constitutional principle of ‘one country, two systems’ (yi guo liang zhi). It also referenced the Sino-British Talks that heralded the signing of the 1984 Joint Declaration between the UK and the PRC, which Hong Kong watched unfolding as the passive audience of a drama (xi) scripted by others.46 Furthermore, the tripartite configuration gestured at trilateral inter-Chinese negotiations in the pre-1997 period

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in the context of the cross-strait crisis, with Hong Kong epitomizing an in-between space of mediation between the PRC and the ROC. Thus, the suggestive spatial arrangement of multifunctional signifying objects as identitarian and ideological cyphers foregrounded Hong Kong’s strategic capacity for transnational re-positioning at a historic juncture. 1T2C triggered divergent definitions of China(s) and Chineseness. Although collaborators converged to Hong Kong to allegedly ‘manifest a “Whole China”’, each maintained their distinctive identity and understanding of ‘China’ as nothing more than a subjective notion. Critic Leung Man-tao writes of the 1997 programmes: ‘Here is only a group of people often referred to as “Chinese”, investigating both explicitly and implicitly what China means to them. China is put in quotation marks, in a theater and a journey — though it “exists”, it is also absent’.47 In Journey’s post-1997 editions, as the thematic accent shifted away from the particularities of the handover, 1T2C was engaged as a more generic, yet no less evocative, signifier of a theatre of relations (guanxi)—of multiple inflections of social, cultural, political, economic, and affective relationality. The table and chairs performed the function of basic communicative tools, supplying not only a stage metaphor but also a platform for dialectical thinking. As stated in a projected text which Yung wrote for Chairs Part Two ( Yizi [er]), performed at the opening ceremony of the Hong Kong Belt Road City-to-City Cultural Exchange Conference at the Hong Kong Cultural Centre on 9 December 2017: ‘The chair is a barometer of human behaviour and attitudes to posture. Do we want to recline, lounge, slouch, or sit upright? Do we seek status or comfort? Or both? The chair answers these questions’. Journey’s 1997 programmes reflected on Hong Kong’s looming passage to the PRC, raising questions of national, regional, and local identities while probing the boundaries of the behavioural and chronotopic dimensions elicited by the keywords ‘journey’, ‘East’, and ‘1997’. Contributors delved into dichotomies of self and other, individual and institution, ‘active’ (performance) and ‘static’ (installation).48 Stanley Kwan declared an interest in testing conceptual ‘boundaries […] between visual and audio, light and darkness’ to expand the possibilities of theatre and film through intermedial interaction. The Hong Kong filmmaker intended to relate the three-dimensionality of the stage to the flatness of the screen to seek ‘for the “demarcation” (if it exists at all) between film and theater’.49 In Work (Zuopin), Kwan engages the public discourse of Hong Kong’s disappearance through intermediality and autobiography.

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Ackbar Abbas has famously portrayed late transitional Hong Kong as a liminal space ‘whose appearance is posited on the imminence of its disappearance’, hence defined by the ontology—or hauntology—of the déjà disparu, namely a perception of the present as persistently verging on absence.50 Journey thematizes the tensional co-relations of presence/absence and appearance/disappearance as it contemplates Hong Kong’s paradoxical condition as, concurrently, an expansive transnational hub and a shrinking space of nostalgia. The (dis)appearance dialectics also defines Journey’s form and mise-en-scène by illuminating distinct applications of the media involved in its realization and distinct engagements with the signifying table and chairs. Journey’s engagement with the chronotope ‘Hong Kong, 1997’ can be framed within the ‘aesthetics of precarity’, or of the ‘just-in-time’, which Shannon Jackson theorizes, in a different context.51 Indeed, the precarious ontology of the déjà disparu can be said to permeate the ephemeral constitution of live performance. As Peggy Phelan formulates: Performance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance. To the degree that performance attempts to enter the economy of reproduction it betrays and lessens the promise of its own ontology. Performance’s being […] becomes itself through disappearance.52

Kwan summons the medium of cinema to negotiate the seeming impossibility of capturing the vanishing condition of a transient space at a transitional time via the evanescent matter of theatre. Filmic segments are fed into the live performance to endow it with presence and permanence through the interaction of the tangible physicality of the props and performers and film’s capacity to record and retain reality. Kwan’s firstperson voiceover (in Cantonese, alternating briefly with Mandarin) supplements the intermedial display. Self-narration and microhistory serve as antidotes to the anxiety of disappearance. Work self-reflexively interlocks footage of Hong Kong street life, visual and aural citations from Kwan’s cinema, and personal reminiscences of family history and familiar childhood spaces, conjuring a sense of nostalgia for the colonial city’s fading social memory.

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Work unpacks the allegorical potential of the xiqu set obliquely, rather than by direct political commentary. The table imparts a sense of spatial instability and temporal suspension as it hangs from the ceiling and is lifted up and down during the performance to double up as an additional projection screen. Muddled lights and shadows converge onto its imagesaturated surface to ‘prewrite’53 the city’s history of disappearance. Their ‘swift’, ‘criss-crossing’ motions simulate an invisible ‘blackboard duster, rubbing out the [sic] Hong Kong’s collective memory. They bring the audience from nostalgia back to reality, and craftily portray the fear and helplessness of the loss of memory’.54 Jumbled reels of film unroll from the ceiling onto the floor, piling up in a disorderly fashion at the feet of one of the chairs, which also occasionally serves as a supplementary screening surface. The second chair lingers on a side in semi-obscurity as a concrete manifestation of uncertain identity and tangible signifier of a spectral state of absence/presence. Work opens with a citation from Princess Changping (Di nü hua). Kwan’s pre-recorded commentary ponders the significance of this popular piece of Cantonese opera during his formative years, as he explored his professional vocation alongside his sexual orientation. Kwan cites this drama again in the 1997 documentary, Still Love You After All These (Nianni ruxi), which features excerpts from Work and echoes some of its themes. As he explains, the titular character’s line, ‘I deny, I deny, yet in the end I cannot deny’, resonates doubly with the acknowledgement of his homosexuality, which he announced publicly in 1996, and Hong Kong’s reluctant identification with China. Kwan connects personal and public spheres, the sexual and the political, or, better still, he engages sexual politics to make a statement about Hong Kong’s identitarian conundrum on the eve of the handover. As Helen Hok-sze Leung writes: Kwan seems to be implying that it is time for Hong Kong people to stop denying their Chinese identity, just as he had to stop denying being gay in the past. Yet, paradoxically, what Kwan lovingly evokes in the film is not his ‘liberation’ from denial and the reassurance of coming into identity, be it sexual or national. Rather, Kwan seems to cherish precisely the experience of denial.55

Likewise, in Work, feelings of loss and denial arising from the inevitability of Hong Kong’s evanescent chronoscopes are brought to the fore intermedially, by collision of bilingual soundscapes, adroit manipulation

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of the ontological frictions between theatre and film, and intertextual traces of Hong Kong’s distinctive cinema of disappearance, which Abbas also examines.56 Film fragments fill the screen while the suggestive projection of a clock materializes on one of the two chairs and a digital chronometer starts a countdown. As Kwan’s voiceover deliberates on real and cinematic time, the actors re-enact a dialogue from Wong Kar-wai’s Days of Being Wild (Ah Fei zhengzhuan, 1991), also on the subject of time, while the clock ticks away, hauntingly. Work is emblematic of Journey’s overall engagement with intermediality as a ‘time machine’57 so that the mixed-media format becomes a means of material and mnemonic preservation. It attests to an impulse to safeguard ‘vanished or ruined environments’, as Susan Sontag writes of the relationship between film and theatre or, as in this case, film with/in theatre.58 Yet the hanging table repurposed as a screen, which supplies one of its key cinematic signifiers, beckons at the danger of obliteration of an already fragmented and impermanent reality, and so does the intermittently obscured chair. The remaining contributions to the 1997 programme engaged the table and chairs in equally suggestive manners to embody the paradoxical cohabitation of presence and absence that defines the ontology of the déjà disparu. However, in contrast with Kwan’s predilection for obliqueness, others underscored the xiqu décor’s potential for political signification through forthright allusions to inter-state dealings and tensions between ‘individual and institution, inside and outside, self and the public, community and authority’.59 Yung’s This is a Chair (Zhe shi yi zhang yizi) offered a candid and dispassionate response to the handover question. In the performance, an actor made up to resemble Hong Kong’s former Chief Executive, Tung Chee-hwa sits on a well-lit chair at the centre of the stage and in full view of the audience. The second chair stands behind the table, in the dark, and is only seen sporadically. A background projection reads: ‘This is 1997’ (Fig. 3.3). Yung’s treatment of the stage décor forestalls unequal power dynamics in post-1997 inter-Chinese politics, for the hidden chair may suggest either Hong Kong’s marginalized position in the shadow of the mainland or a yet indistinct presence that watches from behind the scenes. Succinct statements-cum-subtitles in a sequence of slide projections reiterate, and concurrently magnify, key passages in the Tung’sdoppelgänger’s wry monologue in Cantonese. It soon becomes obvious

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Fig. 3.3 Actor Jimmy Kwok impersonates Hong Kong’s former Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa in This is a Chair, Danny Yung’s contribution to Journey to the East ’97 (Courtesy of Zuni Icosahedron)

that the latter’s ideological orientation departs drastically from the then Chief Executive’s pro-Beijing agenda: This is a chair. This is…Tung Chee-hwa. Each and every seat has a direction. Each and every Tung Chee-hwa Has a seat facing a direction. […] I have decided…to sit… with a different direction.60

The text encapsulates Hong Kong’s anxious quest ‘for a “position”, an identity that would accommodate its transition from British to Chinese rule’, hinting that the most urgent concern after 1997 might be to safeguard the boundaries of one’s beliefs.61 These boundaries were tested in the run-up to the première when several contributors from Beijing— including director Lin Zhaohua and his performers, Wu Wenguang and Lin Chun, visual artist Wang Jianwei, and art critic Fan Di’an—were refused visas to travel to Hong Kong. This incident prompted Yung to devise this explicitly political, and polemical, response to substitute for Lin’s piece.62

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The faux Tung’s speech attends to matters of direction, orientation, position, and choice, in a sort of public invitation to audiences to play the power game according to their own rules. Such relativist stance ‘allows for manipulation’63 of power positions, enabling a counter-discursive rewriting cum performative re-enactment of institutional attempts to align the colonial city with the path laid for her by Beijing: I decide…to leave my seat and stand up. I have…my own stand. […] When I am on stage, I can choose not to follow the script. […] I can choose to ignore the director. Would I then become the director? I could choose not to read the lines. I could choose to be silent. […] I prepare to remain silent for 3 minutes.64

Local critics viewed the actor’s attempt to hijack the director’s script as indicative of Hong Kong’s artistic freedom, which may or may not survive after 1997.65 Scholars have noted the resistant function of scant dialogue, strategic silences, and deliberate inarticulateness in Zuni’s performance poetics in highlighting the increasing stigmatization of Cantonese in Chinese Hong Kong.66 A caustic statement in Yung’s text concerning the untranslatability of Hong Kong’s unique identity corroborates this point: This is a subtitle. I’m afraid the subtitler is unable to translate Cantonese.67

Yung’s emphasis on possibility, choice, and unregimented shifting of positions seems to affirm a more expectant outlook on the future of Hong Kong and the Sinophone region than that of his Taiwanese counterparts, as both Lee and Yang delve into cynical, if caustic, prophecies of the post1997 scenario. In Lee’s In the Name of Lee Teng-hui…Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust (Feng Li Denghui qingjie zhi mi…chen gui chen, tu gui tu), sexually suggestive interactions between two female performers allude to

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the state of cross-strait relations in the mid-1990s. On a dim stage submerged by lights that reflect the ROC’s national colours (white, blue, and red), a ROC flag spreads across the stage floor underneath one of the chairs. The second chair hangs from the ceiling—swaying and spinning intermittently—as a memento of the island’s precarious diplomatic status. One performer wears a white bridal gown, her hair adorned with small PRC and ROC flags. The other sports a suit jacket and a tie over red tights and a blue Nationalist Party (Kuomintang [KMT]) flag on her crotch to reproduce the colour scheme and arrangement of the ROC flag, yet matched to a Western-style garment. Whereas the former seems to embody a cross-strait marriage under the aegis of the PRC’s One China Policy, the latter personifies Taiwan’s Westernized model of democracy. The grating noise of trickling and flushing water evenly punctuates fragments from the then Taiwanese President Lee Teng-hui (Li Denghui)’s emotive speeches, shown on two television sets. A blurred background projection, ‘This is 1997’, changes into a string of ambiguous statements such as ‘my sexual prowess has drained’, ‘how long more must I endure’, ‘our relationship can no longer carry on as it used to’, and ‘is that him on that seat’. The sequence superimposes a montage of portraits of PRC and ROC leaders and the suspended chair’s spectral silhouette. The boundaries of erotic and political signification are persistently muddled, as these silent scripted utterances are juxtaposed to the performers’ vehement carnal interactions and Roman salutes. The stark physicality and sadistic overtones of the performance—which flaunts scenes of masturbation and sexual intercourse consummated on national flags—communicate ‘[t]he fear and helplessness towards the future of Taiwan society’68 in conjunction with post-1997 doomsday prophecies, along with the Taiwanese national psyche’s conflicting emotions during the Lee era. In 1996, Lee won the first direct presidential election in Taiwan’s history. He was the first native-born ROC president and KMT leader after decades of waishengren (mainlander) supremacy. A champion of democracy and independence, he enjoyed enormous grassroots popularity and cross-party appeal during his tenure. This phenomenon, known as the ‘Lee Teng-hui complex’, pervaded the island’s political unconscious through the 1990s. In the Name of Lee Teng-hui…, however, exudes scepticism towards Taiwanese democratization and its post-1997 fortunes. A simulation of painful labour and childbirth early in the performance suggests ‘the difficult delivery of democracy’69 in Taiwan and across the inter-China region,

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while the protruding umbilical cord that keeps binding the new-born baby (a doll) to her mother (the performer styled as ‘Westernized Taiwan’) may indicate the ambivalent co-dependence between the Taiwanese and their leader, and Taiwan’s difficulty in doing away with her China complex. The image of a neglected child—the doll is carelessly dragged along the floor and abandoned on the chair at the centre of the stage— may possibly also hint at the island’s depiction as the ‘orphan of Asia’.70 Taiwan’s self-perception as a forsaken orphan devoid of stable identitarian parentage implies ‘a lingering psychological, if not cultural, affiliation with the homeland […] yet the very definition of the orphan elicits the presence of an absence’.71 Not unlike Kwan and Yung, Lee explores the paradoxical cohabitation of absence and presence that equally defines Hong Kong’s matrix of disappearance and Taiwan’s perpetual threat of marginalization and diplomatic invisibility as ‘a non-nation-state nation’.72 This shared anxiety of obliteration is most evident in the closing sequence when a gigantic PRC flag is dragged onto the stage to submerge the Taiwanese ensign. The obvious inference is that Taiwan might follow along Hong Kong’s trail of retrocession and be made invisible as a sovereign entity. Hence, one may contend that, besides addressing the specific realities of 1997, Journey’s crosscomparative framework provided Taiwanese contributors with a vector of transnational visibility. Its mode of experiential inter-referencing through the theatrical stage assisted the articulation of anxieties over their homeland’s disputed positionality on the stages of history and politics while facilitating informal processes of infranational mediation despite enduring conflict between nation-states. In response to the question of whether Chinese societies can engender genuine democracies, Edward Yang remarked that the Journey experiment attested to the effectiveness of grassroots diplomacies in non-institutional realms thus was ‘already very democratic’.73 Nonetheless, Yang appears to be as cynical as Lee towards Taiwanese democracy and post-1997 interstate relations. Brother Nine and Old Seven: A’97 Fantasy (Jiu ge yu lao qi—jiuqi kuangxiang) portrays a tense encounter between Brother Nine (Jiu Ge), a Taiwanese bureaucrat of dubious motives who is in Hong Kong to ostensibly promote inter-Chinese cultural cooperation, and a gangster named Old Seven (Lao Qi) who has fled Taiwan after murdering a lawmaker and his family. The play uncovers seedy financial transactions between violent criminals and corrupt officials to berate the moral vacuum that lurks behind the shimmering façade of Taiwan’s economic miracle. By

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equating the KMT government to a mob on the payroll of a secretive ‘Big Brother’, and inter-Chinese politics to underhand dealings between shifty mobsters, the production casts doubt on the true intentions of stateto-state cultural exchanges of the kind that Journey set out to counterpoise. To this effect, Yang draws a metatheatrical parallel between his play and a play-within-the-play on the subject of deceptive democracies and devious institutions which Brother Nine’s cultural agency is promoting in Hong Kong—ostensibly a mock-up of his own Journey contribution. This self-reflexive expedient assists a consideration of the limited efficacy, if not outright pretence, of certain state-sponsored cultural interactions within the inter-China area, which have less to do with artistic exchange than with providing a cover-up for inter-governmental negotiations and a stage for the reciprocal showcase of soft power. The play-within-theplay upsets Old Seven not only because it echoes his personal situation (‘It was about a hitman on the run’.) but also because ‘[i]n that play, all of us are murderers, and our country is one big gang’.74 The theatrical experience makes him appreciate that gangsters, politicians, and ordinary citizens are equally at the mercy of the absent, yet ubiquitous, Big Brother and that the political developments that Brother Nine exalts as ‘our great democratic reforms’ are undercut by deceit: ‘We tried democracy. And that’s when we discover that it’s fun!’, Brother Nine enthuses. ‘All you have to do is to tell the people to vote, and they vote. Telling them who to vote for is no problem at all’. He confides in the irrelevance of the ‘cultural bullshit’ he purportedly endorses on behalf of the ROC government: ‘By sponsoring them, we draw attention to their failings…deficits, empty theatres, the obscurity of their stuff, their focus on minority interest. You think that stuff wins the public’s respect? […] They’ll never get it together to unite against us. The bottom line is: we’re rich’.75 On the surface, Brother Nine seems preoccupied mostly with Taiwan’s political realities, as the two mobsters discuss fraudulent electoral dealings, US interference in domestic affairs, and the omnipresent question of unification versus independence. However, its setting in Hong Kong, at the crossroads of China and Taiwan, and the combination of the two protagonists’ names to form the indicative cypher, ‘97’, clearly indicate broader metaphoric reverberations with the post-handover context of the Chinese-speaking region. In this instance, too, suggestive layout of the table and chairs and subtle play with tropes of appearance and disappearance convey preoccupations with political imbalances in the Zhong-gang-tai triangle. In the final

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sequence, a single spotlight cast onto a dark and deserted stage reveals a concealed chair, which Taiwan critic JJ Shih interprets as an indication of underhand inter-Chinese negotiations.76 For Beijing scholar Lin Kehuan, the chair rather embodies an ‘invisible master’,77 thus conjuring once more the plight of the two minor Sinophone territories under the foreboding shadow of the mainland. As in Yung’s and Lee’s segments, an overhanging or concealed chair—namely an unsteady or missing component in the triangular geometry of liang ’an sandi—gestures at paradoxical conditions of (in)visibility and absent presence. As Alice Rayner writes of the signifying functions of theatrical chairs, Chairs themselves are never abstract. They are, rather, readable objects of culture. A chair speaks of the kind of human that would occupy it, of social position and history, of class, of gender, of quality. A chair always has a character. […] It identifies the person, the status, and the location of absent occupants in history, in social relations. […A]n empty chair speaks of a future arrival or a loss: it anticipates the person who will sit; it remembers the person who did sit. A body leaves its imprint on the chair, which holds the memory of the body in place. The pathos of an empty chair holds both memory of a loss and anticipation of return in all the particularity of a person, in character, in quality. It remembers both authority and vulnerability. A chair, in short, is also a memorial device.78

While expressing fear for the loss of memory, identity, and individuality, motifs of (in)visibility and absent presence also tie in with the ontology of theatrical performance: ‘The disappearance of the object is fundamental to performance; it rehearses and repeats the disappearance of the subject who longs always to be remembered’.79 Phelan’s description of performance’s constitutive impermanence resonates with Leung Mantao’s interpretation of the trope of absence as a signifying device in the Journey performances: Absence means someone is not there, yet one’s position is very clearly reserved. Once the position is reserved it is functional. Once it is functional it influences others. But who is the one who should have come but has not yet appeared? Where is the chair that should have appeared but is not yet there?80

These questions inform equally Edward Lam’s Springs and Moonlight Reflections (Erquan yingyue) and Li Liuyi’s Table and Chairs Without

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Story (Zhuoyi wu gushi). Although remarkably dissimilar in style—the former is a static drama based entirely on dialogue, while the latter is a nonverbal piece defined by gesturality—both seem determined to elude obvious political interpretations by omitting direct references to China. Yet it is precisely this ‘absence of China’81 that accentuates her incumbent presence. On his first-ever appearance in Hong Kong, Li defeated the ‘many exceptional expectations’82 of a frank commentary on life in the PRC. Nonetheless, as the sole mainland Chinese contribution as a result of the visa refusal to Lin Zhaohua’s team, Li’s abstract production brought those significant nonattendances into even greater relief, raising questions as to whether the open platform that Journey proposed to forge was a plausible reality or merely a utopia. Lam deals with topical issues of migration and identity in the prehandover years when an unprecedented mass exodus exacerbated Hong Kong’s cultural crisis. The frantic race for foreign passports escalated in the aftermath of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown because of pervasive fear of possible reiterations of Beijing’s violent events in Hong Kong in a not-so-distant future. Lam, however, does not delve into the ‘atrocities of the imagination’83 or fictional projections of impending disaster. Rather, he engages the phenomenon through a leisurely and fairly rambling conversation between two real-life overseas students on topics of cultural difference in Hong Kong, the United States, and the UK— where the young men reside—with no mention of the doom and gloom induced by the British colony’s imminent cross-border transit. The actors sit on two chairs adorned with red covers and positioned on either side of a table, also draped in red cloth. The effect is that of a solid ‘red entity’ towering on the empty stage of Hong Kong so that China’s conspicuous absence from the dialogue is counterbalanced visually by the evident signification of the décor. Not only the eloquence of the visual compensates for the silence of the verbal but also the dynamism of the exchange—essentially, a reflection on themes of mobility, adaptation, and transition—contrasts with the utter staticity of the props and the speakers, who almost never leave their seats. ‘The stability of the table and chairs reinforces the instability of the players’, Lin Kehuan remarks.84 The young men attempt to play the hybridity game with their shifting geographic positions and Westernized behaviours, but the contrast of rhetorical fluidity and physical immobility seems to indicate that they—not unlike their home city—stay consistently in-between. Their identitarian choices and cultural affiliations remain situated within their Chineseness,

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conditioned as they are by the expectations and typecasting they are invariably subjected to while abroad. Absence is furthermore inferred from the coordinates of the two men’s journeys between home and abroad. The dialogue never mentions 1997, but the stage directions indicate that—subsequent to their appearance on the stage of the Hong Kong Arts Centre on 1 January 1997—the young men will travel back to their respective destinations: ‘On July 1, 1997, from the other side of the ocean, they both will witness Hong Kong returning to the People’s Republic of China’.85 Hence, they will be absent when their homeland, too, transits to the ‘other side’. Lam is invested in a discourse of hybridity that unfolds at multiple levels: linguistically, by mixing Mandarin, English, Cantonese, and Hong Kong slang; thematically, by addressing ethnic stereotypes, cultural preconceptions, and perceived disparities between life in Hong Kong and abroad; visually, because the crimson setting is not only a cypher for ‘red China’ but also evokes the traditional colour of marriage in Chinese culture. It thus delineates Hong Kong’s identity as a not-always-harmonious union of distinct components while, possibly, also hinting at the impending (arranged) marriage of the capitalist colonial city with the socialist nation-state.86 Li Liuyi presents comparable visual evocations of China and Chineseness in connection with questions of tradition and modernity, Westernization, and individual behaviour or in his own words: ‘Humans. Man, woman, historical being, modern being, being foreign, being Chinese’.87 Li’s piece lacks any identifiable narrative, focusing primarily on human interactions within ‘the transient process of existence’.88 It is also the only contribution that totally evades the issue of 1997. This omission—or, again, absence—may be ascribed to a penchant for allegorical obliqueness when it comes to addressing political matters in mainland China as well as to Li’s interest in stylization and suppositionality (jiadingxing ) because of his background in xiqu. Hints at power hierarchies and conflicts between individual and authority can nonetheless be inferred and are mainly channelled through silent signification of the table-and-chairs imagery. This is evident in the closing scenes when the action—initially abstract and ritualistic—escalates into a frenzied crescendo of absurd gestures, sexual allusions, and latent national(istic) allegories. A male performer drags the table onto the stage while also carrying a female performer on his shoulder, as if she were herself a piece of furniture. The couple rubs and dusts all over the table, the chairs, the floor,

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and their own bodies for an excruciatingly long time, silently. Both wear traditional Chinese suits and dark sunglasses so that their gender is barely discernible. Swathed in red cloth, the xiqu stage set produces the same impression of an imposing static presence as in Lam’s work, hence comparable associations with chromatic stereotypes of Chineseness. The man weeps as he removes his traditional clothing to reveal a Western-style suit underneath, while the woman giggles. He then moves the chairs onto the table and wraps them and their crimson coverings with golden yellow silk. This action seems to intimate not only at China’s painful path towards modernity and conflicting connection with her past but also at the individual freedom of self-discovery brought about by modernization. The couple keeps rubbing one another’s bodies while undressing, possibly alluding at the sexual liberation that came along with modernity in China. Meanwhile, the man removes the yellow and red fabrics from the furniture and throws them furiously onto the floor. The woman sniggers, seemingly delirious, until her partner drags her offstage. Hong Kong and Taiwan critics were prompt to infer political meanings. The prolonged dusting and rubbing were seen as allegorizing the alienating ritualization of behaviour under totalitarian regimes and ‘Beijing’s obsession with cleansing the past’.89 The table and chairs became ‘indisputable’ markers of authority, and the costume changes were deemed to signify a progression from dehumanization to self-awakening.90 Equally, the stripping of the furniture of its premodern (imperial yellow) and modern (communist red) robes may indicate a rebellion against all shades of Chineseness. But Li’s directorial notes gloss over ideological connotations to underscore, instead, ‘the integration of humans and objects’ and ‘absurd relation[s]’ between objects as symptomatic of objectified human relations, so that ‘objects are dressed up and personalized by humans. Humans are remodelled, made functional, and thus dehumanized, by objects’.91 The capacity of objects to represent relations became more conspicuous in subsequent editions. Although new critical target gradually superseded the chronotope ‘Hong Kong, 1997’, the table and chairs maintained a crucial position in Journey’s theatre of relations as phenomenological signifiers of various social, political, and affective interactions. The onstage deployment of screen-based media—a supplementary curatorial requirement introduced in 1999—also took prominence. Hence, both transmediality, the repurposing of formats across media,92 and intermediality, the investigation of tensional ‘co-relations’93 between media in performance, acquired significance as the series progressed.

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Trans-Asian Travels: Journey to the East 1998 Journey’s transnational rhizome expanded in 1998 to include Southeast Asia and the North American Sinophone communities with the enlisting of theatre director Ong Keng Sen and filmmaker Eric Khoo from Singapore, videomaker, photographer, and performance artist Paul Wong from Vancouver, and director/playwright Ping Chong from New York. Theatre directors Zhang Xian from Shanghai and Lin Zhaohua from Beijing also contributed work in addition to Edward Lam, Danny Yung, and installation artist Wong Shun-kit from Hong Kong, filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang (Cai Mingliang) and theatre directors/dramatists Stan Lai and Wei Ying-chuan (Wei Yingjuan) from Taipei. Consistent with the project’s transmedial orientation, filmmakers and visual artists became involved in the performance programme while theatremakers such as Zhang and Lai ventured outside their habitual creative domain and exhibited installations alongside those by Hong Kong, Taipei, Singapore, and transnational Sinophone visual artists. Edward Yang participated in The Critics’ Sojourn (Yipingren zhi lu), a critical forum associated with the art programmes. Whereas the chronotope ‘Hong Kong, 1997’ was the almost inevitable conceptual hinge of the previous edition, the 1998 programmes (held on 22–25 January at the Hong Kong Arts Centre) attended to a more expansive range of relational configurations: not only interactions between Hong Kong and China, China and Taiwan, and real and imaginary Easts and Wests, but also intimate and familial relations; relations between individuals, between individuals and authority, and between individuals and homelands; relations with time, travel, and destinations; with history, memory, and the past; relations between genders, cultures, and ethnicities and between tables and chairs per se, as embodiments of ‘a multiplicity of intimate and social significations’.94 As Yung’s curatorial statement emphasizes: The aim of the journey is to start and widen the horizon and scope. As a cross-media topic, maybe Journey to the East should conclude in 1998. The China-complex in the journey and the self-scrutiny of the Chinese culture should be relaxed. In other words, one should be searching for a way to face oneself. To stand on one’s feet makes the journey a reality. As for ‘China’, it is no longer important.95

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‘China’ remained, nonetheless, a fairly persistent referent for Hong Kong artists such as Lam, Wong, and, indeed, Yung himself. Yung’s Memorandum of the Rock 1998 (Shitouji beiwanglu) reworked motifs from Journey’97 (the hidden chair) and scenes from a Zuni handover production from the previous year, Romance of the Rock 97 (Shitou zai xianshi). In the performance, two silent actors execute stylized movements against a video background (by Ellen Pau of Videotage) replete with visual mementoes of the Cultural Revolution. Socialist iconographies superimpose with textual projections of a succession of four-character idioms (chengyu) featuring two identical characters. Set phrases excerpted from Cao Xueqin’s eighteenth-century novel Dream of the Red Chamber (Honglou meng), also known as Shitou ji (The Story of the Stone or Story of the Rock), fade sequentially into Maoist slogans, consumerist catchphrases, commercial advertisements, and contemporary slang, somewhat pointing to the lasting relevance of China’s past for Hong Kong’s present and future. Similarly, Lam’s Eighteen Mile Farewell (Shiba xiangsong), named after an operatic aria from The Butterfly Lovers (Liang Shanbo yu Zhu Yingtai), resorts to traditional tropes of Chineseness to make a statement about current realities, asking resonant questions as ‘have you thought of doing something for China?’ and ‘who can do something for China?’ Wong’s Dismantling a Wall (Chai qiang) juxtaposes the motif of the wall, a signifier of relational obstruction, with the table-and-chairs set as ‘the simplest, oldest, and most traditional site of communication (jiaoliu chang )’ to highlight the ideological misconstructions that prevent the dismantling of inter-Chinese divides.96 Likewise, Stan Lai’s cross-strait satire, Open the Door, Sir! (Xiansheng, kai ge men!), tackles long-standing walls between mainlanders and Taiwanese. The witty sketch revolves around a one-night stand between a Chinese female train controller and a travelling Taiwanese businessman—indicatively named C and T—during a train journey from Shenzhen to Shanghai to denote the augmented socioeconomic contact, and enduring mistrust, between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait since the 1990s.97 Venturing beyond the inter-Chinese triangle, Ping Chong’s millennial meditation, Nocturne in 1200 Seconds (Yequ 1200 miao)—the programme’s only English-language production with a Caucasian cast—attends to universal questions of guilt and historical responsibility. The performers’ disjointed recollections engage the legacies of the Japanese invasion of China, the Holocaust, and other violent chapters in twentieth-century world history. They address the plight of the victims of imperialistic wars,

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of the destitute and disenfranchised, of those ‘who have no seat’ at the negotiating table—yet again taking the xiqu set as indicative of sociopolitical hierarchies. Likewise, Ong Keng Sen and Paul Wong stretched their analytical latitude beyond political relations in the Sinosphere to explore questions of migration and multilingualism. Ong’s Eat Me (È) documents successive regimes of ethnic domination in Singapore through an intermedial overlay of documentary footage and live accounts of early migratory waves of Chinese labourers to the affluent city state and of the present-day exploitation of South Asian immigrants by the dominant Chinese population. Video interviews by Wu Wenguang and K. Rajagopal with second-generation Chinese and construction workers of Indian descent residing in Singapore are relayed by two monitors installed on either side of the table-and-chairs set and magnified onto a large screen. The recorded testimonies point to a dispersal of genealogical memory and ancestral awareness among contemporary Singaporeans, while condemning the social phagocytosis—‘Basically, we ate them’, avows the closing line—of those subaltern minorities that have been cyclically relegated to a vulnerable existence ‘under the table’,98 behind the global city’s multiracial façade. Wong’s trilingual (English, Cantonese, Mandarin) segment raises comparable questions of migration and objectification of labour as the xiqu set is arranged to simulate the setting of an immigration office. Wong and his co-performer inhabit an image-saturated panoptical site of surveillance and scopophilia wherein pre-recorded video interrogations about the sexual mores of the Canadian Chinese community intersect with realtime captures of immigration files, photographs, written testimonies, and various personal documents spread onto the table’s reflecting surface— private histories of sexuality laid bare for the audience to peruse in a forced exhibit of public voyeurism. Yet others, such as Tsai Ming-liang, Zhang Xian, and Wei Ying-chuan, opted for stylized compositions tackling communication, language, and relations on more abstract levels. Echoing Stanley Kwan’s Work, Tsai’s silent tableaux, Xiao Kang and Table (Xiaokang gen zhuozi), draws on personal recollections and family relations as it refashions key authorial markers of Tsai’s filmography such as detached human interactions, emotional alienation, staticity, slowness, protracted silences, and nostalgic recreations of bygone eras by way of vintage soundscapes (Tsai sings an old Mandarin ballad from the back of the audience stalls during the performance). Actor Lee Kang-sheng, a constant presence in Tsai’s cinema,

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appears as his ubiquitous onscreen alter ego, Xiao Kang. In this polished retro-evocation of Taiwanese life in the 1960s, Lee is a young father lost in childhood memories—he is engrossed in playing with old toys for most of the performance—alongside a female actor that exudes old silver-screen glamour and eventually breaks into a melancholic tune. Zhang and Wei equally accentuate interpersonal relations—the former to reflect on language as an instrument of coercion and the latter to deliver a feminist critique of patriarchy. Zhang’s Mother Tongue (Muyu) explores power relations between body and language, rejecting coherent verbal enunciation to bring into relief the ways in which loss of speech and retreat into physicality can offset the violent hegemony of words. As he states in a production note, silence provides ‘the only chance of survival’ in times when one’s muyu (mother tongue) is nurtured by duyu (poisonous language).99 Quite fitting of the only woman director on the programme, Wei’s Whatever Doing (Suibian zuozuo) engages the relational semantics of the table and chairs to draw attention to gender inequality and women’s struggle against patriarchy. The overturned table—half covered in black cloth with red silk shoes stuck on its capsized feet—conjures the image of a bound-feet woman who has fallen forward to the ground under the weight of what Wei describes as ‘the black curtain of history’.100 The traditionally attired chairs, outfitted in imperial yellow fabric, stand for patriarchal authority. This may explain why the two identically styled female performers, who look and act like mechanical dolls, find it so hard to sit on them. Their struggle with the chairs indicates a power and identity struggle, and so do the red strings that bind their hands.101 The strings denote physical constriction, oppression, and imprisonment, but are also reminiscent of blood dripping from the women’s wrists, hence of physical abuse. The diversification of approaches to the production concept suggests that the 1T2C framework and the journey-form acquired increasingly universal signifying capacities. In addition to marking Hong Kong’s significant chronotope, their relational semantics came to denote a multitude of movements, intersections, and associations: individual and interpersonal, private and public, generative and antagonistic, insular and archipelagic, or, indeed, rhizomatic.

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Transnationalism as Transmediality: Journey 99 The participation of choreographer Jane Lei in the 1999 edition, held at the Hong Kong Cultural Centre on 10–14 March 1999, signalled Journey’s inclusion of Macau—significantly in the year of the Portuguese enclave’s own sovereignty transfer to the PRC. The East/China component was removed from the title to become, simply, Journey 99 (Lücheng 99). The purpose was to minimize identity and geopolitics and bring into relief the journey-form per se, more than its itineraries. The graphic design of the paratextual materials reflects this shift in focus, for it neither foregrounds cartographic iconographies, as in 1997, nor does it give prominence to the table and chairs, as in 1998. The central image in the Journey 99 promotional posters features Barbie and Ken dolls outfitted in flight attendant uniforms. Leaflets, programme brochures, and playbills likewise abound with travel-related graphics of planes, air tickets, passports, boarding passes, and luggage tags. Yet some contributions still bear traces of the quest for the meaning, direction, and position of China(s) and Chineseness that defined the previous editions. Cross-examinations of tradition and identity—as embodied, respectively, by the xiqu set and the exploration of inter-Chinese relations—kept lingering in the background as shadows of a subcutaneous cultural unconscious. Unlike previous editions, mainland China produced the most explicit political allegories. Beijing director Meng Jinghui’s Nowhere to Hide: Doctor and Incurability (Wuchu cangshen—yisheng ji wufa zhiliao) plays with motifs of illness and doctor–patient interactions as teasing reminders of 1970s PRC-US ping-pong diplomacy. Attired in medical uniforms, Meng and his co-performer and producer, Ge Dali, sit on either side of a pingpong table. Behind them is a video background of contemporary Beijing street scenes. They simulate a catalogue of bodily ailments and then proceed to call the names of prominent intellectuals from Republican China, mock the Red Guards, comment on football matches, and play a game of table tennis with the audience. The piece is notable for its commentary on the interaction, inspiration, and improvised responses that the collaborative framework can trigger. Allusions to Journey 99 and its participants were included in the second performance after the opening night: the names of curator Danny Yung and producer Louis Yu joined the roll call of China’s prominent intellectuals, and characteristic actions from other contributions to the programme, such as Wei Ying-chuan’s Unbalance (Dongwai xidao) and Jane Lei’s The Sparkling Hallucination (Na yi mo

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yanhua), were incorporated into Meng and Ge’s routine. Furthermore, Meng appears to nod at Zuni’s repertoire. The ping-pong balls shot into the audience are reminiscent of the majestic cascade of ten thousand yellow balls seen in Zuni’s provocative handover piece, Two or Three Events…of No Significance (Xianggang jiuwu er san shi, 1995), which the Hong Kong Urban Council notoriously disavowed for fear of upsetting Beijing by granting its support to the production.102 The intertextual allusion seems to reaffirm the precariousness of intellectual freedom and the inherent authoritarianism of PRC cultural diplomacy. In addition to the above-mentioned works, the Journey 99 portmanteau comprised Zhang Xian’s Sunday Morning (Xingqitian zaoshang), starring Shanghai actor Xu Zheng and Hong Kong dancer Yeung Chi-kuk, Danny Yung’s She Knows He Is (Ta zhidao ta shi), performed by novelist and composer Liu Suola and pipa (Chinese lute) player Wu Man, and Chan Ping-chiu’s Best Wishes (Shui diao ge tou), casting Bonni Chan and Sean Curran of Hong Kong’s Theatre du Pif (Jin juchang). Intermediality and transmediality became essential constituents of the transnational experiment since the Journey 99 curatorial guidelines systematized the incorporation of screen-based media in performance, enhancing the transferability of formats across media and disciplines. The conceptual framework was amended so that—in addition to the customary ‘one table, two chairs, two performers, twenty minutes’ guideline— each director was also invited to produce a video work. Unified production parameters were set for this component, too: a fixed twenty-minute duration, the requirement to provide both a silent version to use as a visual environment in the stage productions and a sound version to exhibit as a standalone piece, and specific instructions regarding location, camera movement, editing, and production. These video commissions were subsequently included in an exhibition of Chinese video art which Yung curated at Transmediale 99 in Berlin. The incorporation of dynamic visual backgrounds as digital-age recreations of the embellished backdrops (shouju) of xiqu strengthened the suggestive capacities of 1T2C, heightening juxtapositions between the immediacy of live reality (xianchang ) and the realm of the virtual (xuni) or suppositional (jiading ). Media-generated surroundings enhanced tensions between material and virtual components, while the integration of mediated and embodied tableaux underscored intermedial frictions in performance. For example, in Unbalance, two performers danced before a video screen that relayed a pre-recorded choreography, blurring (self-)perceptual boundaries along with boundaries between substance

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and simulation, representation and reproduction. Yung reflects on the capacity of video to amplify the chronotopic confines of the performance in journey-form in a conversation with Zuni co-Artistic Director, Mathias Woo (Woo Yan-wai; Hu Enwei) printed in the programme brochure: In the past, we examined the ‘present moment’ (xianzai) through mirrors, but after video was introduced we were given another way of understanding it. Stage performance is also about the ‘present moment’: audiences undergo a certain experience in a specific time and space, and video can act as a ‘setting’ (bujing ), a ‘mirror’ (jingzi), or an ‘observer’ (guanchazhe) on the theatre stage. From an actor’s perspective, the video image can be a reference point, or an interactive partner.103

Yung recalls how he came up with the idea of transposing the experience of travelling into theatrical form during a train journey through Europe: ‘As I observed the changes in the scenery outside, I thought of the relationship between those images and the stage, and whether the feeling of travelling by train can be recreated on the stage’.104 The tripartite configuration of the Journey programmes (performances, exhibition, and critical forum) was enriched with new video projects to generate a full-fledged ‘transcultural, transmedial and transtechnological’ (kuawenhua, kuameijie yu kuakeji) experience.105 Contributors were once more challenged to venture beyond their habitual creative territories to produce video-based artworks in journey-form. The three-part exhibition, Video Arts of China: Collaboration and Creativity ( Zhongguo luxiang yishu zhi hezuo yu chuangzuo), was launched on this occasion and subsequently displayed at Transmediale 99. In Starting Stage—Hong Kong (Cong Xianggang chufa), Hong Kong videomaker Ellen Pau, filmmaker Stanley Kwan, singer and producer Anthony Wong, lyricist Lin Xi, and other contributors revisited past Zuni performances through MTV and documentary film formats to investigate practices of remediation and transmedial recycling. Chinese Cities Chinese Visions (Zhongguo chengshi Zhongguo shiye) showcased commissioned video works by theatre directors Zhang Xian, Wei Ying-chuan, and Danny Yung and transmedial artist Xu Tan on their home cities: Shanghai, Taipei, Hong Kong, and Guangzhou. Lastly, Beijing Hong Kong, Hong Kong Beijing (Beijing Xianggang, Xianggang Beijing) intended to test the concept of ‘procedural collaboration’, as stated in an archival production outline, ‘Video Arts of China 1999: Collaboration and Creativity’. Namely, Beijing-based

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artists of various specialisms were asked to provide sound and text to a 20-minute video shot by their Hong Kong counterparts and vice versa, so that visual artist Song Dong worked with Danny Yung, Wu Wenguang with Mathias Woo, and Meng Jinghui with Anthony Wong. It is worth emphasizing yet again the relevance of shared production parameters to the realization of networked structures that can extend the value of the collaboration beyond the aesthetic realm—into the sphere of the social and the political. Communal vehicles (the 1T2C framework) and universal rules of travel (the fixed parameters) that apply consistently to all travellers (the artists) and all stations along the route (the artworks) are fundamental to open the collaborative journey to meaningful crosscomparisons. The predefined format endows Journey’s theatre of relations with a cognitive bridge to productive contact zones of dialogic encounters. The occasional breaking of the rules itself represents a communicative approach. As Nicolas Bourriaud writes: ‘Producing a form is to invent possible encounters; receiving a form is to create the conditions for an exchange’.106 Louis Yu notes that ‘without explicitly demanding or announcing that the theme [of the inaugural edition] should be 1997 and the three places, discussion naturally gravitated towards these topics. The form directed the content. The performance was the point of departure; the means and discussion became the ends’.107 Ping Chong’s comment on his 1998 contribution further attests to the expediency of the curatorial restrictions and the positive challenge of creating form-induced content: ‘(This exercise) is quite pragmatic for me, I have 20 minutes to work with, and a nearly nonexistent budget… that determines what I am going to do’.108 The constitutive minimalism and multifunctionality of the Journey concept thus echo Bourriaud’s description of the relational artwork as a ‘social interstice’, which assigns value to manoeuvrability, simplification, and downsizing and casts the artist as a ‘semionaut ’ who ‘invents trajectories between signs’.109

Re-routing Exchange: Journey 2000 1T2C and the Festival of Vision Journey reached its zenith in 2000, when theatre, dance, film, and visual arts professionals from Hong Kong, Taipei, Beijing, Shenzhen, Chengdu, Macau, Tokyo, Seoul, Bangkok, and Mumbai gathered at the Hong Kong Arts Centre on 27–30 April for the launch of Journey 2000: 1T2C

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(Lücheng 2000–1T2C) at Zuni’s Journey 2000 Festival (Lücheng 2000 yishu jie).110 In addition to the standard 1T2C grouping of one director and two performers, some directors also doubled up as performers in their own contributions. Dancers Matsushima Makoto (Tokyo) and Edwin Lung (Hong Kong) choreographed and performed The Mandarin (Guoyu [Guanhua]), and Thai choreographer Peeramon Chomdha√ vat appeared in a video dance piece, 2 = PERFORMANCE, codevised with digital artist Paritat Tiphayakul. Astad Deboo from Mumbai choreographed and performed Serenity Steps. Turmoil Steps. Togetherness (Pinghe de jubu. Saodong de jubu. You’ai) alongside Zuni’s Cedric Chan. At a time of strained diplomatic relations between China and India, Deboo construed 1T2C as suggestive of the intercultural encounter (the table) between two nations (the chairs), as indicated in the programme brochure.111 But he also deployed performing objects and bodies— the table, the chairs, and the dancers—as signifiers of intergenerational relations. The piece probes the potential for intimacy of old-age composure and youthful dynamism through the kinaesthetic interaction of two bodies-in-motion of complementary ethnicities, ages, and physiques (Deboo was fifty-five and Chan twenty-six at the time)112 (Fig. 3.4). Other segments were contributed by pairs of collaborators who either co-devised a continuous twenty-minute performance or shared the allocated twenty-minute slot to present two discrete short pieces. Seoul-based choreographers Joh Seong-joo and Park Ho-bin jointly performed the two-part Fever Heat/Ejaculator (Kuangre/fasheqi), whereas theatre directors Xiong Yuanwei from Shenzhen and Tang Shu-wing from Hong Kong each created a ten-minute piece casting the same actors. Xiong’s 9 and 6 (Jiu yu liu) engaged the yin-yang symbolism of the black-and-white tonal scheme of a weiqi (Go) chessboard to comment on gender differences. Likewise, Tang’s The One Before and The One After (Shang jia xia jia) dramatized exchanges between a man and a woman through a game of mah-jong. In both, the table and chairs signified strategic positions on the gaming tables of sexual and interpersonal relations. Additional presentations came from Beijing performance artist Zhu Ming with the solo work, 2000.4.27 (Erlinglingling nian si yue ershiqi ri), named after the date of the première, and American-born filmmaker Christine Choy with the English-language play, Fish/Cabbage (Yu/shengcai). Chuanju (Sichuan opera) performer Tian Mansha and Macanese choreographer Jane Lei co-created Where The Light Is Low

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Fig. 3.4 Astad Deboo (left) and Cedric Chan (right) interact with the One Table Two Chairs relational framework in Serenity Steps. Turmoil Steps. Togetherness (2000) (Courtesy of Zuni Icosahedron)

(Denghuo lanshan chu), Shimizu Shinjin of the Tokyo-based performance group, Gekidan Kaitaisha, presented The Death Walk (Siwang zhi lü), Zuni’s Edward Lam directed 1T2C as Metaphor (Dancing Version), and Wei Ying-chuan of Shakespeare’s Wild Sisters Group (Shashibiya de meimeimen de jutuan) returned with Lecture on Nothing (Xuwu zhi yan). Similar to Unbalance, Wei’s 1999 piece, Lecture on Nothing pursues tropes of stasis and ennui and allegories of female subjugation through symbolic mise-en-scène. Two traditionally attired female performers sit

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on silk-covered chairs by the sides of a likewise traditional-looking table, adorned in golden and crimson satin. They execute a kinetic routine redolent of languor, weariness, and complete lack of existential purpose, even of a timid willingness to break free. Yet they never leave their seats— their physical immobility seemingly implying a corresponding inability to escape patriarchal constraints. 1T2C presented collaborators with an opportunity to critique concrete societal and gender interactions, though predominantly through metaphor and stylization. Yet most harnessed the latent functions of the xiqu set design to signify conceptual relations between physical and psychical, active and passive, embodied and intangible, substance and immateriality. A case in point is Zhu Ming, who traced the uneven contours of an impalpable table-and-chairs set onto a transparent backdrop, as he stood stark naked—his body smeared in paint—before a darkened auditorium of silent observers.113 As the transnational horizon stretched out to encompass an increasingly expansive spectrum of cultures, nationalities, and languages, contributions to the Journey series tended to understate speech, dialogue, and forthright geopolitics to privilege a composite layering of abstract sound- and mediascapes, corporeal articulacy, and oblique signifiers of multiple manners of relationality. With this edition, moreover, the 1T2C format came to incorporate the notion of ‘one stage, two cultures’ (yi ge wutai, liang zhong wenhua),114 once the series was exported to Berlin—a city that shares several commonalities with Hong Kong as both a bridging location and a society in transition. As noted in the archival production outline, ‘Video Arts of China 1999: Collaboration and Creativity’, Berlin was a window to the former Eastern Bloc during the Cold War just like Hong Kong was seen as ‘the bridge’ to Communist China. Both post-reunification Berlin and post-handover Hong Kong had recently traversed momentous historical thresholds. Journey served, therefore, as a symbolic conduit of informal diplomacy, with Hong Kong and Berlin representing the two chairs by each side of the table—two interlocutors and one shared channel of intercultural communication embarking on a transnational expedition.115 A selection of the Journey 2000: 1T2C performances toured to Berlin to participate in the One Table Two Chairs programme at the Festival of Vision: Hong Kong/Berlin (Xianggang Bolin dangdai yishu jie)—a largescale exchange co-organized by the Hong Kong Institute of Contemporary Culture and Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt.116 Consisting of two sections, ‘Hong Kong in Berlin’ (28 July–10 September) and ‘Berlin

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in Hong Kong’ (3 November–20 December), the festival was hitherto the largest Asia-Europe city-to-city collaboration. It involved over a hundred cultural institutions, over a thousand contributors from twenty cities from Germany and the Asia Pacific region, and over a hundred events across eight focus areas: performing arts, visual arts, music, literature, film and television, creative industries, conferences, and lecture series. In both locations, German cross-media artists worked with 1T2C alongside their Asian counterparts, thus taking the ‘transcultural, transdisciplinary, and transregional’ (kuawenhua, kuajiebie, kuadiyu) collaboration yet another step ahead along the route. The Festival of Vision grew out of dissatisfaction with conventional festival formats and venues. Most Hong Kong events took place at the purpose-built Festival Centre at the Tamar Site in Admiralty—usually a trade show location that was reclaimed as a haven of non-profit creativity in an attempt to dislocate the arts from the institutionalized spaces of cultural production. The iconic Bamboo Pavilion, designed by architect Rocco Yim and modelled after the bamboo stages of Cantonese opera, supplied an alternative to traditional exhibition and performance spaces, allowing visitors to roam freely inside and outside its precincts. In Berlin, the Pavilion was erected outside the Haus der Kulturen der Welt. Originating entirely from nongovernmental organizations in Hong Kong,117 the Festival of Vision challenged the bureaucratism, commercialism, and elitism of mainstream arts festivals with its core principles of inclusivity, voluntarism, collaboration, and economic sustainability. Most staff (including Yung, as festival co-director) volunteered their services, admission to most events was either inexpensive or free of charge, and the creative ranks were not only comprised of well-known personalities but also welcomed emergent artists and ordinary citizens.118 The inclusion in the programme of Black Box Exercise ( Heixiang zuoye) testifies to the far-reaching spectrum of the initiative. Black Box Exercise is an art-in-education activity that Zuni has conducted in Hong Kong and several Asian and European cities since 1995. As with Journey, it is based on a prearranged framework so that each contributor must create an artwork inside the small microcosm of a 30 × 30 × 30 cm cardboard box. This was the first time that the project was tested in Europe. As stated in the festival programme, over six hundred schoolchildren and educators from Berlin, Hong Kong, Macau, and Singapore showcased their ‘miniature galleries’ in a collective exhibition where visitors were encouraged to interact with the installations.119

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The Festival of Vision deemphasized institutionalization and state-level cooperation alongside profit-oriented rationales. Instead, it wished to draw attention to the spearheading function of nongovernmental organizations in enhancing long-term exchange and collaboration as ‘the true sources for cultural development’ and economic growth, rather than oneoff cultural events of limited effectiveness.120 Another key element in the festival concept was to take cities, rather than nation-states, as basic units ‘in the formation of a new mode of cultural exchange’.121 Since cities have progressively superseded nations as the hubs of transnational cultures and identities, creative interactions achieved through cultural exchange should strive to reflect common urban experiences and weave the arts into the fabric of the quotidian rather than to showcase national spectacles and accentuate national differences. A constellation of three German and seventeen Asia Pacific cities clustered at the Festival of Vision alongside Hong Kong and Berlin, as the primary partners, thus breaking with the unchallenged linearity and hierarchical ordering of hegemonic East-West exchanges while simultaneously revealing the strategic role of cities—Hong Kong, in this instance—in mediating across geopolitical constituencies beyond national(istic) prescriptions and regulatory regimes: Change is no longer concentrated in any one privileged locale, but as a global phenomenon that takes place in many different cities simultaneously. Hence neither ‘centers’ nor ‘margins’ are easily locatable. Instead of thinking in terms of location, we have to think in terms of circulation and exchange: the circulation and exchange of money, ideas, people, and cultures.122

This curatorial statement resonates with the critique of artistic (uni)directionality and binary patterns of intercultural propagation outlined in the previous chapter. It reiterates the methodological imperative of understating notions of ‘centre’ and ‘edge’ to envision alternate perceptions of the transnational routes of knowledge production and transmission as multiple, acentred, and diffuse.123 The Journey cycle was reprised and sealed, conceptually, more than a decade later at the Asian Cultural Vision Journey Festival (Yazhou wenhua shiye lücheng yishu jie) held at Beijing’s Penghao Theatre in December 2012. The project’s transnational maps were re-routed back to Asia and,

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significantly, to mainland China—the sole remaining shore in the symbolic liang ’an sandi archipelago which the series had not yet touched physically.124 Journey’s evolutions over more than three decades attest to a progressive remodelling of the intercultural network from a straight line connecting Hong Kong to other cities, via the Hong Kong–Taiwan– China triangle, to a rhizomatic trans-Asian assemblage.

Global Itineraries: Closing the (Video) Circle The collective installation and performance series, Video Circle, presents an additional case of collaborative transmedial practice that is assisted by predefined production parameters, lending further evidence to the relational geometry-cum-geography of the transnational artwork in journeyform. As with Journey, Video Circle originated locally, from a video installation exhibit that Danny Yung and Ellen Pau co-curated in 1996 at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) to showcase work by seven Hong Kong artists (Yung, Pau, Siu King-chung, Wong Chi-fai, Duncan Wong, Ernest Fung, and May Fung). In 1997, the video works travelled to the European Media Art Festival in Osnabrück, Germany, and to the Art Space in Sydney. In 1998, CD-ROM and video works by Hong Kong and German videomakers were displayed in Video Circle II: Contemporary Video and Media Art at the HKUST Centre for the Arts. In 1999 and 2000, the project incorporated an increasingly large number of participants from the Asia Pacific region and became part of the Journey Festival programmes in Hong Kong before touring to the Festival of Vision in Berlin in 2000 and to Vancouver in 2003.125 The installation consists of thirty-two sets of video monitors and VCR decks that sit on one-metre high stools. The sets are arranged in a circle of about fifteen metres in diameter, with the screens facing inwards. The three-minute videos submitted by each contributor are edited together to produce an unbroken compilation that plays continually, in a loop, on each manually operated monitor, with a three- to six-second delay in the starting time between monitors. The same sequence of images travels counter-clockwise around the circle, from screen to screen, to generate ‘an enclosed performance-space with a repetitive repertoire’, as Pau explains.126 Passages of the same size as each set are left between sets to allow a residual ‘space for imaginative association’,127 as intangible signifiers of the viewer’s actual lived reality juxtaposed to the virtuality of ‘the image whirlpool’128 which is propelled by the (tangible) monitors.

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Since the viewer is unable to watch all screens at once, the images drifting around the circle can only be grasped ‘conceptually’.129 As stated in the programme brochure, the shape of the installation affects ‘the meaning of the various messages as [does] the position of the viewer, whether inside the circle surrounded by images, or outside as a peripheral onlooker’.130 Viewers interact with the installation performatively as they transit in and out of the circle, experiencing differentiated modes of engagement that are consistent with the specific video content they are exposed to at any given time. They enter a subjective relationship with the artwork when they trespass and transgress the synesthetic boundaries traced by the artists and demarcate their own. The installation was reworked in 1999 to comprise twenty-two video works supplemented by five ‘responding installations’, with the purpose of enhancing transmedial frictions and intercultural connectivity between collaborators from Beijing, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Vienna, and Vancouver. Video Circle 2000: Centrifugal Vision (Luxiang quan 2000—lixin jingxiang), previewed at the Journey 2000 Festival in Hong Kong, featured work by 108 cross-media artists from twelve Asia Pacific cities. The group included professional videomakers, theatre and visual artists, architects, designers, filmmakers, photographers, and students. Sixteen contributors from Berlin submitted additional segments for the version that travelled to the Festival of Vision later in the same year. A selection of the video programmes was also exhibited at Hong Kong International Airport to figuratively foreground the motifs of journeying, transit, and perpetual motion embedded in the curatorial concept. The installation’s circular structure originates in the cosmological principles outlined in ‘one of the oldest Chinese classic[s] on communication’: the ancient divination text, Book of Changes (Yijing).131 The succession of thirty-two ‘positive’ (tangible, physical) entities—the video sets— and thirty-two ‘negative’ (empty, intangible) spaces—the gaps between them—engenders a perceptual interchange of real (shi) and virtual (xu), of matter and void. This configuration alludes to the yang-yin binary while also replicating the pattern of alternate broken and unbroken lines that characterizes the sixty-four hexagrams.132 The circulating ‘phantasm’ (huanxiang ) summoned by these divinatory signs symbolizes ‘the reconstruction of the basic concept of time and space, as well as the interaction between various polarities’.133 Not only the viewers’ responses were contingent on the curatorial variables, but the contributors’ treatments of the pre-set parameters also varied significantly. Whereas some took the circle

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Fig. 3.5 South Korean dancer Deresa Choi performs inside the Video Circle installation at the Festival of Vision (2000) (Courtesy of Zuni Icosahedron)

‘as a static installation’134 and concentrated on the video content, others harnessed the spatial interruptions and temporal fluctuations intrinsic to its layout to explore juxtapositional effects of fragmentation and collage. The disjointed circle illustrates the cultural geometry of the Asian Sinosphere—whole yet uneven, one yet plural—consequently articulating a sense of connection and layered identity. However, as noted previously with regard to Yung’s treatment of 1T2C in This is a Chair, the circle’s structural conformation also reveals a preoccupation with placement and negotiation of positions. Echoing Bourriaud’s relational depiction of the art field as a Bourdieusian ‘system of differential positions ’, the aesthetic microcosm thereby generated can be said to constitute a ‘space of objective relations between positions ’.135 The predefined parameters elicited questions ‘of boundaries and power’,136 since the distinctive positions that each ‘visitor-as-interactor’137 assumed—either at the centre or periphery of the circle, inside or outside—might reflect ‘cultural and nationalistic differences in attitude’ but also encourage ‘centrifugal vision’.138 Ultimately, the curatorial intention for Video Circle was to probe collective dynamics along the boundaries of individual freedom.139

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The introduction of a performance element in 2000 enhanced the installation’s relational potential. Under the Video Circle Performance ( Luxiang quan yanchu) framework, fifteen artists including musicians, choreographers, theatremakers, vocalists, and xiqu performers (most of whom were also concurrently involved in the 1T2C collaborations) each devised a live performative interaction with the media circle which, on this occasion, would cyclically transmit an eighteen-minute video of their own creation (Fig. 3.5). Once more, contributors traversed genre and media boundaries—venturing into uncharted conceptual territories and performing amidst self-generated virtual surroundings—to prompt interhuman bonds and intermedial linkages between disparate disciplinary and media spheres. The relational space thereby produced, ‘the Video Circle theatre’, shaped and conditioned their movement, probing the intersections of liveness and mediation, of the corporeal, the visual, and the virtual.140

Terminus: Tropes and Trajectories of Travel To complete the mapping of Journey as a paradigm of networked performance in journey-form, it is worth reviewing some conceptual, thematic, and structural tropes that define the series as well as the constitutive topology of transnational Chinese theatres as a theoretical framework and collaborative practice. Bourriaud’s designation of the artist as a homo viator, discussed in Chapter 2, reverberates with the artist-traveller’s nomadic routes of intercultural odysseying that shaped the Journey network, and so does the journey-form as an aesthetic production mode that ‘materiali[zes] trajectories rather than destinations’.141 The artist-traveller wanders ‘through signs and formats’142 to produce knowledge through acts of transmediation, translation, and transcoding, thus positing tropes of bridging and border-crossing as key to the definition of transnational performance in journey-form. Bridges and borders resonate with Yung’s description of the theatre as ‘a passage’ between states of being and orders of things: ‘Let the boundary of the stage expand or shrink to become boundless. Let the performance become endless and indefinite’.143 But passages can be obstructed, and borders can become barriers. While the liminality of borders enables the emergence of ‘new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation’ in the interstitial spaces of postcoloniality,144 borders can also divide and separate. Specifically, in the in-between space

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of 1990s Hong Kong, the border/barrier came to denote a conflicted ‘site of resistance or compliance’, and a psychological ‘wound’.145 Barriers between nations, politics, ethics, and economics can impinge on transnational Chinese theatres’ collaborative undertakings. Borderland encounters such as those that Journey tried to stimulate are not immune to tensions, contradictions, and inequalities. It is, therefore, worth restating that the theoretical assertion of transnational Chinese theatres as a rhizomatic and inherently dialogical method is not equivalent to unreflectively construing its practices as harmonious, unbiased, and unambiguously progressive. As with all journeys, itineraries can be disrupted, and travellers can go astray. Some of Journey’s barriers were intramural—when collaborators circumvented the curatorial guidelines—while others were institutional, when participants were precluded from travelling because of bureaucratic obstructions. The co-curator of the 1998 installation art exhibition, Siu King-chung, writes that a distinctive characteristic of Yung’s curatorial practice—in the Journey series as in Black Box Exercise, Video Circle, and other collaborative formats—is ‘to determine a frame (kuang ) […] and then invite participants to create inside (or outside?) this frame’.146 Although the one who sets the rules may be perceived as an ‘Artistic Controller’, rules exist to be broken.147 The frame is simply a creative compass that orients the course of the exploration. In fact, Yung broke his own rules in This is a Chair by casting only one actor, and others followed suit. In an archival production outline for Video Arts of China 1999 (‘Video Arts of China 1999: Collaboration and Creativity’), Yung admits that while some contributors welcomed the prearranged parameters, others found them restrictive: ‘I explained to them that guidelines […] could never be the burden for creative development. Guidelines were proposed as a platform for all participating artists to respond. Rules are created by people and can be changed by people’. Barriers were satirized in such works as Chen Yanyin’s outdoor installation, Gate (Men, 1997), which channels the artist’s frustration at having to reach Hong Kong via Australia after the British Embassy in Beijing rejected her visa application. Chen’s indoor installation, likewise, reflected on the bridges and barriers she encountered on her journey. The work displayed Zuni’s invitation letter (the bridge) and her visa application form (the barrier) to the soundtrack of a recording of her telephone conversation with a British Embassy officer.

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Wang Jianwei was also refused a visa in 1997 and had to fax instructions for the assembly of Ceremony-1997 (Yishi-1997). Glass panels were placed under a red carpet leading into the exhibition hall so that visitors would shatter the artwork by treading on them and reconfigure the installation as a ‘glass fracture’, which would indicate the artist’s ruptured journey to Hong Kong.148 Edward Lam’s Springs and Moonlight Reflections investigated barriers between Euro-American and Chinese cultures, while Stan Lai’s Open the Door, Sir! satirized those between China and Taiwan. Yung’s She Knows He Is investigated the deteriorating relationship between novelist Zhang Ailing and husband Hu Lancheng to address affective barriers and feelings of ‘departure’ and ‘separation’.149 In the London version of Lin Zhaohua’s Three O’ Clock in the Afternoon (Wuhou san dian zhong, 1997, script by Li Yiming), Wu Wenguang recounted his frustration at not being able to attend the Hong Kong première of Journey ’97 because he was denied a visa.150 The incident resurfaced in Lin’s Dream (Meng, 1998), in which Wu appeared alongside jingju (Beijing opera) actor Wang Jing. As with those works invested in critiques of migration policies and economic discrimination, such as Ong Keng Sen’s Eat Me, the above pieces are stark reminders of the barriers that can hinder transnational movement and, conversely, of the misplaced utopianism of many popular imaginings of global mobility. Zuni’s touring programme, In Search of Modern China/Hong Kong, further testifies to the institutional barriers that can obstruct itinerant performances in journey-form. The Hong Kong Arts Development Council commissioned the activity to introduce Hong Kong experimental theatre to mainland China. Theatre professionals, academics, and critics from Hong Kong, Beijing, Chengdu, Nanjing, and Shanghai were invited to select six Hong Kong performance groups that would devise 15-minute 1T2C pieces on the subject of ‘New China/Hong Kong’.151 Conceived as a multi-station tour (lüyou), the programme was designed as a transborder expedition to discover unexplored performance territories for networked interaction. As with Journey, the abundant travel iconographies featured in the promotional materials enhanced its emphasis on travel. The artists-travellers were scheduled to perform in four Chinese cities (Chengdu, Shanghai, Nanjing, Beijing) in March–April 2004 after two performances in Hong Kong. Zuni’s co-presenters at the Shanghai Theatre Academy, however, advised that the anticipated public run should be replaced by internal (neibu) performances behind closed doors.152 The reason for this sudden variation was, presumably, the unorthodox form

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and potentially sensitive content of some of the productions, which might have upset the local authorities. Likewise, after the opening night at the Nanjing Art Institute a few days later, the second scheduled performance was cancelled because of alleged technical issues with the venue’s electrical equipment. But this was, most likely, a pretext to cut the tour short. Anonymous user comments to a blog post published on a local website at the time of the incident suggest that some content was satirical or, at best, ambiguous about mainland Chinese society and politics—a good enough reason for the local organizers to become apprehensive.153 For example, the substitution of the required two performers with two turtles in Tang Shu-wing’s The No Man’s Land of New China (Xin Zhongguo de wuren didai) may have been perceived as offensive since turtles bear negative connotations in Chinese culture as a common derogatory metaphor found in various profanities. Furthermore, ‘turtle’ (gui) is homophonous with ‘return’ (gui), therefore possibly characterizing the tour as a performative—and polemical—reiteration of Hong Kong’s retrocession (huigui) to China. The presence of foul language and footage of street violence in Tang’s piece, along with references to the Tibetan question and allusions to the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, might also have alarmed mainland Chinese officials and contributed to halting the journey. A few weeks later, however, the programme was given the green light at Shenzhen University, possibly because of the city’s more relaxed cultural policies resulting from its status as a Special Economic Zone of the PRC. Such incongruities do, nonetheless, illustrate the extent to which institutional barriers can fluctuate significantly across times and localities. Travelogues, maps, and palimpsests supply the poetics of performance in journey-form with rich imageries of collective excursions and artiststravellers’ chronicles of personal exploratory routes in pursuit of alternate cartographies and new conceptual coordinates.154 The central graphic on the playbill of Journey’s first instalment, Ideogram, whose Chinese title (Yitu) evokes a cartographic image (tu), is an idiosyncratic map of China on which city names are either misplaced or displayed upside down.155 Like a palimpsest—a layering of signs from disparate time-spaces—Journey draws affective maps of negotiated being and multiple belonging, reproducing the distinctive aesthetic entanglements, intertextual impulses, and cyphers of multiplicity that are embedded in the notion of transnational Chinese theatres. Customized (counter-)cartographies recur through the series as emblems of performative mapping and visual indexes to the journeys. In the 1997 installation, Map (Ditu), Tsong Pu cut up a map of China and reconstituted it into a long strip to trace the silhouette of the

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island of Taiwan. Visitors to the exhibition would readjust its shape, orientation, and contours—either deliberately or fortuitously—thus performatively refashioning their own atlas of China(s). Next to the map stood a table flanked by two chairs, which the Taiwanese artist had cemented together to build a ‘monument’—or, possibly, a tomb—that carried the inscription: ‘1997’. Tsong’s installation appears to suggest that while Hong Kong would be permanently engraved onto the maps of China after 1997, Taiwan’s position was still susceptible to constructive variation, yet also volatile, and easily manipulated by external agents. Integral to the representational topography of Journey is also the archipelago, if one envisions the performance network as a clustering of ‘autonomous theatrical islands’156 that constitute the transnational assemblage. The archipelagic (networked, rhizomatic) method that defines Yung’s practice has been depicted as ‘a constellation’157 which, like the archipelago, draws on the interlocking of transversal relations. Yung himself has argued for the advantages of the ‘network’ (wangluo) over the ‘centre’ (zhongxin) as a structure to foster creativity, hence of archipelagic pluralism over insular singularities.158 The inherent relationality of these tropes reverberates with a view of transnational Chinese theatres as intercultural rhizomes comprised of multiplicities of intersecting nodes. As with the rhizome, the map of transnational Chinese theatres ‘is always detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple entryways and exits and its own lines of flight’.159 The rhizome endows transnational Chinese theatres with a ‘symbolic geography of relations’160 that does not postulate a privileged point of ‘filiation’161 within a fixed hierarchy of centres and margins. Moreover, its structural symbolism illustrates Journey’s polymorphous trajectories from the infranational scope of its early instalments in Hong Kong, through the regional dimension of the China–Hong Kong–Taiwan triangle, to the trans-Asian expanses of its final destinations. Thus, by extension, Journey catalyses the ‘directions in motion’162 of transnational Chinese theatres. Journey’s rhizomatic routes mirror the revisionist trajectory of intercultural theory from a conventional West-to-East scheme (classic interculturalism), via the East-to-East redefinition of transnational Chinese theatres (rhizomatic interculturalism), to an East-to-West template whereby the ‘East’ sets a paradigm for the ‘West’. As illustrated by the case of the Festival of Vision, the ‘West’ is readmitted into the network no longer as a hegemon but as one among equals, so that the intercultural collaboration can be relieved—‘politically and economically’—of stereotypical expectations of the ‘East’ and ‘become a pure creative journey’.163

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Notes 1. The Chinese title translates as ‘Chinese journey’ or ‘journey to/through China’. 2. Michael Berry, A History of Pain: Trauma in Modern Chinese Literature and Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 12. 3. Subsequent 1T2C collaborations include Yung and Sat¯ o Makoto’s The Spirits Play (2011/12, see Chapter 5), and Salute to Pao Kun: An Evening of Four Experimental Theatre Pieces (Xiang Baokun zhijing — si duan huiying ‘Lao Jiu’ de xiaopin, 2013), premièred in Singapore and consisting of four interpretations of Kuo Pao Kun’s Lao Jiu: The Ninth Born (Lao Jiu, 1990) by Yung, Li Liuyi (Beijing), Lawrence Lei (Macau), and Li Baochun (Taipei). 1T2C productions have also been commissioned for the Toki International Arts Festival in Nanjing and the Hong Kong Belt Road 2017 One Table Two Chairs. Adaptations of Yung’s concept by others include Taipei’s OFF Performance Workshop (Wai biaofang)’s One Table, Two Chairs, Three Directors (Yi zhuo, er yi, san daoyan, 2000), 1 Table 2 Chairs Experimental Series (Yi zhuo er yi shiyan xilie) by TTP and the Southernmost: 1 Table 2 Chairs Project 2017 by Emergency Stairs (Binan jieduan), both in Singapore. 4. Rong Nianzeng [Danny Yung], Haohao xuexi, tiantian xiangshang: Rong Nianzeng wenji + gainian manhua (Guilin: Guangxi shifan daxue chubanshe, 2012), 224–25. 5. One example is Question/Problem: Collection of Films and Videos by Danny Yung (1977 –1996), the English title of Yung’s video collection, Wenti: Rong Nianzeng luying dianying zuopinji (qiqi zhi jiuliu) (Hong Kong: Videotage, 1997). On Yung’s use of questioning, see Jaspar Lau, “Writing In- and Out-side the Frame: Dialogue with Danny Yung’s Writings,” in Juli: Shihua Rong Nianzeng/From Close From Afar: An Anthology on Danny Yung, ed. May Fung (Hong Kong: 1a Space, 2003), 68; Siu King Chung [Siu King-chung], “Questioning Danny Yung’s Questionnaires,” in Fung, Juli, 83–87. 6. David Hare, Fanshen: A Play (London: Faber & Faber, 1976). Hare’s play draws on William Hinton’s Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966). 7. Li Rusi, “‘Zhongguo lücheng’: Yi ge canyuzhe de fanxing,” Dianying shuangzhoukan 48 (January 18, 1980): 39. 8. Danny Yung, “Journey to the East ’98,” in Zhongguo lücheng 98, ed. Danny Yung (Hong Kong: Zuni Icosahedron, 1998), 7. 9. Ibid., 6. 10. Henk Oosterling describes intermediality as ‘enhancing an experience of the in-between and a sensibility for tensional differences’ in “Sens(a)ble

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11.

12.

13.

14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21.

22.

Intermediality and Interesse: Towards an Ontology of the In-Between,” Intermédialités 1 (2003): 30. Roger Garcia, ed., Hong Kong International Video Art Exhibition (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Arts Centre, with Zuni Icosahedron and GoetheInstitut Hong Kong, 1983). Hector Rodriguez, “The Fragmented Commonplace: Alternative Arts and Cosmopolitanism in Hong Kong,” in Multiple Modernities: Cinemas and Popular Media in Transcultural East Asia, ed. Jenny Kwok Wah Lau (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003), 145. Alice Ming Wai Jim, “Urban Metaphors in Hong Kong Media Art: Reimagining Place Identity” (PhD diss., McGill University, 2003), 32– 33. Ellen Pau’s Drained II (1988) and Ernest Fung 95/23: NinetyFive/Two or Three (1995) incorporate motifs from Zuni’s stage productions of the same period. These and Videotable by Yung and Shum are included in Videotage, Lost and Found: The Best of Videotage (1986– 1996), Vol. 1 (Hong Kong: Videotage, 1997). See Andrew Lam, “Not Making a Star, but Configuring a Constellation: A Dialogue with Danny Yung’s Star System,” in Fung, Juli, 37– 39; Leung Po Shan, “The Deep Structure of Chinese Culture (Sister Version),” in Fung, Juli, 25–26; Lam Kam Po, “Six Paintings, Six Texts,” in Fung, Juli, 45–46; and David J. Clarke, “Found in Transit: Hong Kong Art in a Time of Change,” in Inside Out: New Chinese Art, ed. Gao Minglu and Norman Bryson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 175–81. Rozanna Lilley, Staging Hong Kong: Gender and Performance in Transition (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1998), 109–10. Ibid., 114. Ibid. Lin Kehuan, “Xianggang de shiyan xiju,” Shanghai xiju Z1 (2004): 17. Chung Mingder, “The Little Theatre Movement of Taiwan (1980– 1989): In Search of Alternative Aesthetics and Politics” (PhD diss., New York University, 1992), 112–13, 146. Ibid., 145–47. See also Wang Molin, Dushi juchang yu shenti (Taipei: Daoxiang chubanshe, 1990), 131–32. Rong Nianzeng [Danny Yung], Zhongguo shi ge da huayuan: Rong Nianzeng juchang yishu 1984–2008 (Hong Kong: Zuni Icosahedron E+E, 2009), 97. Wang Molin and Yu Weikang [Eddy U], “1987 Taiwan–Xianggang xiaojuchang de duihua zhi yi,” in Wang, Dushi juchang, 293–300 [first published in Nanfang 11, 1987]; Wang Molin and Rong Nianzeng [Danny Yung], “1987 Taiwan–Xianggang xiaojuchang de duihua zhi er,” in Wang, Dushi juchang, 301–7 [first published in Chang jingtou 11, 1987].

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23. Wang and Rong [Yung], “1987 Taiwan–Xianggang,” 305. 24. Wang Molin and Lin Kehuan, “1988 haixia liang’an shiyan xiju duihua zhi yi,” in Wang, Dushi juchang, 275–84 [first published in Yuanwang 10, 1989]. 25. Wang Molin and Lin Zhaohua, “1989 haixia liang’an shiyan xiju duihua zhi er,” in Wang, Dushi juchang, 285–91 [first published in Yuanwang 1, 1990]. 26. See Zhang Zhongnian ed., Zhongguo shiyan xiju (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 2009), 1. 27. Wong Yuewai and Lai Tat Tat Wing, eds., Rong Nianzeng wutai ru jianzhu zhan/Danny Yung Architecture Is Theatre Exhibition (Hong Kong: Zuni Icosahedron E+E, 2013), 92. 28. All quotes in the preceding paragraph are from an unpublished production plan (“Here Here There There”, typescript) provided by Zuni Icosahedron. 29. Louise Do Rosario, “Voice of the Arts: Zuni Icosahedron Confronts Sensitive Issues,” Far Eastern Economic Review 158, no. 23 (June 8, 1995): 28. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 32. Lam, “Not Making a Star,” 37, 39. 33. Vicki Ooi, “Journey to the East ’97 —From the ‘West’ to the ‘East’,” in Zhongguo lücheng ’97: Liang ’an sandi wenhua jiaoliu jihua; di yi jie chengshi wenhua guoji huiyi jiemu/Journey to the East ’97: A Cultural Exchange Project; A Program of the First International Conference on Urban Culture, ed. Danny Yung (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Center for the Arts and Zuni Icosahedron, 1997), 23. 34. Louis Yu, “One Table, Two Chairs and Six Gestures,” in Yung, Zhongguo lücheng ’97, 108. 35. Nicolas Bourriaud, The Radicant, trans. James Gussen and Lili Porten (New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2009), 79. 36. Ooi, “Journey,” 23. 37. He Qingji, “Zhongjie yu jiaoliu,” in Yung, Zhongguo lücheng 98, 47. 38. Ackbar Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). 39. Nick Browne, “Introduction,” in New Chinese Cinemas: Forms, Identities, Politics, ed. Nick Browne, Paul G. Pickowicz, Vivian Sobchack, and Esther Yau (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 7. 40. J. J. Shih, “Journey to the East ’97 —An Artistic Dialogue across Regions, Fields and History,” in Yung, Zhongguo lücheng ’97, 16. 41. Ru Guolie [Louis Yu], “Yi zhuo liang yi, liu zhong zishi,” in Yung, Zhongguo lücheng ’97, 106–7. Yu coproduced the performing arts programme with Mathias Woo and Lin Kehuan.

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42. Shih, “Journey,” 16. 43. Margaret Shiu Tan, “Visual Artist’s Answers to the Organizer’s Questions,” in Yung, Zhongguo lücheng ’97, 88. 44. Hu Zhiquan, “Liang zhang yizi yi zhang tai de lishi ji minzu lianxiang,” in Yung, Zhongguo lücheng 98, 51. 45. Huang Shuhuai, Kuo Jian Hong, Liu Xiaoyi, and Lim Chin Huat, “Examining the Modern and Traditional in ‘One Table, Two Chairs’,” trans. Wang Liansheng, The Practice Journal 3 (2013): 4–5. 46. Rong Nianzeng [Danny Yung], “Houji: Zhongguo lücheng,” in Lai Shengchuan, Lai Shengchuan: Juchang 4 (Taipei: Yuanzun, 1999), 248. 47. Leung Man-tao, “The Absent Role in Journey to the East ’97,” in Yung, Zhongguo lücheng ’97, 119. 48. Shih, “Journey,” 16. Performance descriptions and analyses in this section are based on video recordings of the programmes held between 1997 and 2000. 49. Stanley Kwan, “Director’s Answers to the Organizer’s Questions,” in Yung, Zhongguo lücheng ’97, 28. 50. Abbas, Hong Kong, 7. 51. Shannon Jackson, “Just-in-Time: Performance and the Aesthetics of Precarity,” TDR: The Drama Review 56, no. 4 (2012): 10–31. 52. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993), 146. 53. Michael Berry (History of Pain, 381) defines ‘prewriting’ as the fictional anticipation of a traumatic event. 54. Shih, “Journey,” 18. 55. Helen Hok-sze Leung, Undercurrents: Queer Culture and Postcolonial Hong Kong (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2008), 13. 56. Abbas, Hong Kong. 57. Susan Sontag, “Film and Theatre,” in Theater and Film: A Comparative Anthology, ed. Robert Knopf (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 145. 58. Ibid. 59. Yu, “One Table, Two Chairs,” 108. 60. Danny Yung, “This Is a Chair,” in Yung, Zhongguo lücheng ’97, 74. 61. Clayton G. MacKenzie and Moira Arthurs, “‘Together Again’: Theatre in Postcolonial Hong Kong,” Comparative Drama 37, no. 1 (2003), 77. 62. Lin’s piece was included in the programme re-run at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in June 1997. 63. Yu, “One Table, Two Chairs,” 109. 64. Yung, “This Is a Chair,” 74–75.

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65. Kevin Kwong, “Original Humour,” South China Morning Post, January 5, 1997, 12. 66. Lilley, Staging Hong Kong, 137–39. 67. Yung, “This Is a Chair,” 75. 68. Hugh Lee, “Director’s Answers to the Organizer’s Questions,” in Yung, Zhongguo lücheng ’97, 43. 69. Shih, “Journey,” 17. 70. This metaphor for the Taiwanese national consciousness originates in Wu Zhuoliu’s novel, The Orphan of Asia (Yaxiya de gu’er, 1946). 71. Leo T. S. Ching, Becoming “Japanese”: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 179. 72. Shu-mei Shih, Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations Across the Pacific (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 55. 73. Yu, “One Table, Two Chairs,” 109. 74. Edward Yang, “Brother Nine and Old Seven: A’97 Fantasy (London Version),” in Yung, Zhongguo lücheng ’97, 66. 75. Ibid. 76. Shih, “Journey,” 17. 77. Lin Kehuan, “Chairs of Differences,” in Yung, Zhongguo lücheng ’97, 112. 78. Alice Rayner, Ghosts: Death’s Double and the Phenomena of Theatre (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 111–12. 79. Phelan, Unmarked, 147. 80. Leung, “Absent Role,” 119. 81. Paul Yeung, “Reflection of [sic] Zuni Icosahedron and Journey to the East ’97,” in Yung, Zhongguo lücheng ’97, 123. 82. Yu, “One Table, Two Chairs,” 109. 83. Berry, History of Pain, 366. 84. Lin, “Chairs,” 113. 85. Lam, Edward, “Springs and Moonlight Reflections,” in Yung, Zhongguo lücheng ’97, 3. 86. Edward Lam was one of Zuni’s founding members and principal directors until he left to work exclusively with the Edward Lam Dance Theatre (Feichang Lin Yihua, est. 1991). His last production with Zuni was in 2005. 87. Li Liuyi, “About Table and Chair [sic] Without Story,” in Yung, Zhongguo lücheng ’97, 52. 88. Ibid. 89. Ooi, “Journey,” 23. 90. Shih, “Journey,” 18. 91. Li, “About Table and Chair,” 52.

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92. Irina Rajewsky defines the transmedial as ‘the appearance of a certain motif, aesthetic, or discourse across a variety of different media’ in “Intermediality, Intertextuality, and Remediation: A Literary Perspective on Intermediality,” Intermédialités 6 (2005), 46. 93. Chiel Kattenbelt, “Intermediality in Theatre and Performance: Definitions, Perceptions and Medial Relationships,” Cultura, Lenguaje y Representación/Culture, Language and Representation 6 (2008): 25. 94. Rayner, Ghosts, 113. 95. Yung, “Journey to the East ’98,” 7. 96. Wong Chunjie [Wong Shun-kit], “Chai qiang,” in Yung, Zhongguo lücheng 98, 23. 97. Lai Shengchuan, “Xiansheng, kai ge men!” in Lai, Lai Shengchuan: Juchang 4, 223–46. 98. Ong quoted in Yang Liling, “Shengming zhong buke chengshou de ‘jing’ yu ‘zhong’,” Biaoyan yishu 63, no. 3 (1998): 45. 99. Zhang Xian, “Muyu,” in Yung, Zhongguo lücheng 98, 18. 100. Quoted in Yang, “Shengming,” 50. 101. Iris Hsin-chun Tuan, Alternative Theater in Taiwan: Feminist and Intercultural Approaches (Youngstown: Cambria Press, 2007), 92. 102. Victoria Finlay, “Provoking a Reaction,” South China Morning Post, August 8, 1997, 6. 103. Hu Enwei [Mathias Woo] and Rong Nianzeng [Danny Yung], “Lücheng duihua,” in Zuni Icosahedron, Lücheng jiujiu: Juchang /Journey 99: Theatre (Hong Kong: Zuni Icosahedron, 1999). Woo has served as Zuni co-Artistic Director since the 2009/10 season. 104. Ibid. 105. Liang Huiling, “Shijimo lüxingtuan you Xianggang chufa: Zhongguo lücheng jiujiu kuameijie yishu zhi lu,” Mingbao/Ming Pao Daily News, February 10, 1999, C08. 106. Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods (Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2002), 23. 107. Yu, “One Table, Two Chairs,” 108. 108. Kevin Kwong, “Venturing into Fresh Territory,” South China Morning Post, January 16, 1998, 6. 109. Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 14–15, 113. 110. The programme also included Vanity Fair: A Love Story in Glamorous Costume (Huali yuan—yi ge xingtou kaojiu de aiqing gushi), Video Circle, and the Asia Arts Net Conference 2000. 111. Zuni Icosahedron, Lücheng 2000: 1T2C/Journey 2000: 1T2C (Hong Kong: Zuni Icosahedron, 2000). 112. Lin Yihua [Edward Lam], “Meiyou bijiao de luntan: tan ‘lücheng erqian’ pinglun bufen,” Xingdao ribao/Sing Tao Daily, May 19, 2000, D04. 113. Huizi, “‘Yi zhuo liang yi’ dailai fansi,” Ta Kung Pao, May 5, 2000, B08.

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114. Lin, “Meiyou bijiao.” 115. Zheng Weiyin, “Xianggang si Bolin—yanshen yi zhuo liang yi de jiaoliu,” Mingbao/Ming Pao Daily News, June 20, 2000, C07. 116. The Goethe-Institut Hong Kong, Zuni Icosahedron, and the Annie Wong Art Foundation co-organized the festival. As the founding director of the Hong Kong Institute of Contemporary Culture, Yung served as festival co-director with Ulrich Sacker of the Goethe-Institut Hong Kong and Hans-Georg Knopp, the then Secretary-General of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt. 117. Clarence Tsui, “A Vision of Two Cities,” HK iMail, June 20, 2000, C6. 118. Joyce Siu, “Breaking the Wall, Never U-Turn: Festival of Vision: Berlin in Hong Kong,” BC Magazine, November 2, 2000, 44–45. 119. Hong Kong Institute of Contemporary Culture [HKICC], Xianggang Bolin dangdai wenhua jie: Bolin zai Xianggang/Festival of Vision: Berlin in Hong Kong (Hong Kong: HKICC, 2000), 87. See also Wong Yuewai, “The Black Box Exercise: An Arts Education Model from Hong Kong,” in Educating in the Arts: The Asian Experience, Twenty-Four Essays, ed. Lindy Joubert (Dordrecht: Springer, 2008), 313–29. 120. Danny Yung, “Yishu zongjian de hua/Artistic Director Notes,” in Zuni Icosahedron, Jinnian ershimianti 2000–2001 nianbao/Zuni Icosahedron 2000–2001 Annual Report (Hong Kong: Zuni Icosahedron, 2001), 9– 10. 121. Ibid., 11. 122. Danny Yung, Hans-Georg Knopp, Ulrich Sacker, and Annie Wong, “Joint Statement,” in Chuangyi gongye yu wenhua jiaoliu—Xianggang Bolin dangdai wenhua jie, huiyi jilu/Creative Industries & Cultural Exchange: Festival of Vision—Hong Kong/Berlin, Record of the Conferences, ed. Ching Chee-fong, Man-ho Lung, Steven Pang, and Vicky Leong (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Institute of Contemporary Culture, 2002), 108. 123. James M. Harding, “From Cutting Edge to Rough Edges: On the Transnational Foundations of Avant-Garde Performance,” in Not the Other Avant-Garde: The Transnational Foundations of Avant-Garde Performance, ed. James M. Harding and John Rouse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 18–40. 124. Only Yung’s This Is a Chair was staged in China before 2012, at Beijing People’s Art Theatre Studio Theatre in October 1997. 125. Video Circle was remounted in 2016 for the Videotage retrospective exhibition, No References: A Revisit of Hong Kong Video and Media Art from 1985, at the Cattle Depot Artist Village in Hong Kong. 126. Ellen Pau, “How Did Video Circle Come About?” in Fung, Juli, 51. As the number of participants increased, several compilations were produced and relayed along the circle on rotation. There were four programmes in

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127. 128. 129. 130.

131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137. 138. 139. 140. 141.

142. 143. 144. 145.

146. 147. 148. 149. 150.

151.

1999 and six in 2000, each comprising videos by eighteen contributors from three Asia Pacific cities. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Hong Kong Institute of Contemporary Culture [HKICC], Video Circle: Cross-Cultural Creative Collaboration (1996–2003)—Video Installation Exhibition and Performance (Hong Kong: HKICC, 2003). Zuni, Jinnian ershimianti 2000–2001 nianbao, 17. Ibid. HKICC, Video Circle. Ibid. Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 26–27. HKICC, Video Circle. Johannes Birringer, “Dancing in the Museum,” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 33, no. 3 (2011): 45. HKICC, Video Circle. Ibid. Ibid. Nicolas Bourriaud, “Altermodern Manifesto,” Tate, 2009, accessed July 18, 2013, https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/ altermodern/altermodern-explain-altermodern/altermodern-explained. Ibid. Danny Yung, “Preface,” in Yung, Zhongguo lücheng ’97, 7. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 1–2. Michal Kobialka, “Introduction: Of Borders and Thresholds,” in Of Borders and Thresholds: Theatre History, Practice, and Theory, ed. Michal Kobialka (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 3. Xiao Jingcong [Siu King-chung], “Zhongguo lücheng 98 zhuangzhi yishuzhan,” in Yung, Zhongguo lücheng 98, 27. Ibid. Shih, “Journey,” 20. Wang could not contribute an outdoor installation because of his forced absence. Zuni Icosahedron, Lücheng jiujiu/Journey 99: Juchang/Theatre (Hong Kong: Zuni Icosahedron, 1999). Li Yiming, “Three O’ Clock in the Afternoon (London Version),” in Yung, Zhongguo lücheng ’97, 59. Lin Zhaohua’s former collaborator and Nobel Prize Laureate Gao Xingjian was also invited to participate in the 1998 edition, but was denied a visa in Paris and could not travel to Hong Kong. The six groups were: No Man’s Land, 20 Beans + A Box, Clash Theatre Group, Atomic Cantonese Opera, Black Dragon, and Xiongdiban.

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152. In mainland China, neibu (internal) refers to a non-ticketed performance for a select audience. 153. Anzhizhi’an, “Zuotian Jinnian de yi dian zhaopian,” Anzhizhi’an de jiaoluo (blog), April 12, 2004, accessed October 27, 2009, http://www. xici.net/d18776783.htm (site discontinued). 154. An example is a journal entry that Pia Ho (He Xiuping) sent from the United States to a Hong Kong magazine after the Yellow Springs performances: He Xiuping, “Jinnian de Huangquan lu,” Yuejie, October 25, 1990, 25. 155. Zhang Jinman, “Zhongguo lücheng: Diyi zhan de jianlüe baogao,” Dianying shuangzhoukan 49 (December 4, 1980): 40. 156. Eugenio Barba, “The Paradox of the Sea,” New Theatre Quarterly 22, no. 2 (2006): 108. 157. Lam, “Not Making a Star”. 158. Rong Nianzeng [Danny Yung] and Lai Shengchuan, “Juchang, wenhua, chuangyi chengshi: Gangtai liangwei xiju mingjia duitan,” Zaobao zhoukan/zbWEEKLY 847 (February 29, 2004): 6. 159. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987 [1980]), 21. 160. Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih, “Introduction: Thinking through the Minor, Transnationally,” in Minor Transnationalism, ed. Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 2. 161. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 25. 162. Ibid., 21. 163. Yung, “Preface,” 7.

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Hong Kong Institute of Contemporary Culture [HKICC]. Video Circle: CrossCultural Creative Collaboration (1996–2003)—Video Installation Exhibition and Performance. Hong Kong: HKICC, 2003. ———. Xianggang Bolin dangdai wenhua jie: Bolin zai Xianggang/Festival of Vision: Berlin in Hong Kong. HKICC, 2000. Huang Shuhuai, Kuo Jian Hong, Liu Xiaoyi, and Lim Chin Huat. “Examining the Modern and Traditional in ‘One Table, Two Chairs’.” Translated by Wang Liansheng, The Practice Journal 3 (2013): 2–10. Hu Zhiquan. “Liang zhang yizi yi zhang tai de lishi ji minzu lianxiang.” In Yung, Zhongguo lücheng 98, 51. Huizi. “‘Yi zhuo liang yi’ dailai fansi.’ Ta Kung Pao, May 5, 2000, B08. Jackson, Shannon. “Just-in-Time: Performance and the Aesthetics of Precarity.” TDR: The Drama Review 56, no. 4 (2012): 10–31. Jim, Alice Ming Wai. “Urban Metaphors in Hong Kong Media Art: Reimagining Place Identity.” PhD diss., McGill University, 2003. Kattenbelt, Chiel. “Intermediality in Theatre and Performance: Definitions, Perceptions and Medial Relationships.” Cultura, Lenguaje y Representación/Culture, Language and Representation 6 (2008): 19–29. Kobialka, Michal. “Introduction: Of Borders and Thresholds.” In Of Borders and Thresholds: Theatre History, Practice, and Theory, edited by Michal Kobialka, 1–29. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Kwan, Stanley. “Director’s Answers to the Organizer’s Questions.” In Yung, Zhongguo lücheng ’97, 28–29. Kwong, Kevin. “Original Humour.” South China Morning Post, January 5, 1997, 12. ———. “Venturing into Fresh Territory.” South China Morning Post, January 16, 1998, 6. Lai Shengchuan. “Xiansheng, kai ge men!” In Lai Shengchuan, Lai Shengchuan: Juchang 4, 223–46. Taipei: Yuanzun, 1999. Lam, Andrew. “Not Making a Star, but Configuring a Constellation: A Dialogue with Danny Yung’s Star System.” In Fung, Juli, 37–39. Lam, Edward [Lin Yihua]. “Springs and Moonlight Reflections.” In Yung, Zhongguo lücheng ’97, 39–41. ———. “Meiyou bijiao de luntan: tan ‘lücheng erqian’ pinglun bufen.” Xingdao ribao/Sing Tao Daily, May 19, 2000, D04. Lam Kam Po. “Six Paintings, Six Texts.” In Fung, Juli, 45–46. Lau, Jaspar. “Writing In- and Out-side the Frame: Dialogue with Danny Yung’s Writings.” In Fung, Juli, 67–73. Lee, Hugh. “Director’s Answers to the Organizer’s Questions.” In Yung, Zhongguo lücheng ’97, 43. Leung, Helen Hok-sze. Undercurrents: Queer Culture and Postcolonial Hong Kong. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2008.

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Leung Man-tao. “The Absent Role in Journey to the East ’97.” In Yung, Zhongguo lücheng ’97, 119. Leung Po Shan. “The Deep Structure of Chinese Culture (Sister Version).” In Fung, Juli, 25–26. Li Liuyi. “About Table and Chair [sic] Without Story.” In Yung, Zhongguo lücheng ’97, 52. Li Rusi. “‘Zhongguo lücheng’: Yi ge canyuzhe de fanxing.” Dianying shuangzhoukan 48, January 18, 1980, 39–40. Li Yiming. “Three O’ Clock in the Afternoon (London Version).” In Yung, Zhongguo lücheng ’97, 59. Liang Huiling. “Shijimo lüxingtuan you Xianggang chufa: Zhongguo lücheng jiujiu kuameijie yishu zhi lu.” Mingbao/Ming Pao Daily News, February 10, 1999, C08. Lilley, Rozanna. Staging Hong Kong: Gender and Performance in Transition. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1998. Lin Kehuan. “Chairs of Differences.” In Yung, Zhongguo lücheng ’97, 112–13. ———. “Xianggang de shiyan xiju.” Shanghai xiju Z1 (2004): 16–19. Lionnet, Françoise, and Shu-mei Shih. “Introduction: Thinking through the Minor, Transnationally.” In Minor Transnationalism, edited by Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih, 1–23. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. MacKenzie, Clayton G., and Moira Arthurs. “‘Together Again’: Theatre in Postcolonial Hong Kong.” Comparative Drama 37, no. 1 (2003): 75–87. Ooi, Vicki. “Journey to the East ’97 —From the ‘West’ to the ‘East’.” In Yung, Zhongguo lücheng ’97, 23. Oosterling, Henk. “Sens(a)ble Intermediality and Interesse: Towards an Ontology of the In-Between.” Intermédialités 1 (2003): 29–46. Pau, Ellen. “How Did Video Circle Come About?” In Fung, Juli, 51–52. Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London: Routledge, 1993. Rajewsky, Irina O. “Intermediality, Intertextuality, and Remediation: A Literary Perspective on Intermediality.” Intermédialités 6 (2005): 43–64. Rayner, Alice. Ghosts: Death’s Double and the Phenomena of Theatre. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Rodriguez, Hector. “The Fragmented Commonplace: Alternative Arts and Cosmopolitanism in Hong Kong.” In Multiple Modernities: Cinemas and Popular Media in Transcultural East Asia, edited by Jenny Kwok Wah Lau, 128–48. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003. Shih, J. J. “Journey to the East ’97 —An Artistic Dialogue across Regions, Fields and History.” In Yung, Zhongguo lücheng ’97, 16–21. Shih, Shu-mei. Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.

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Shiu Tan, Margaret. “Visual Artist’s Answers to the Organizer’s Questions.” In Yung, Zhongguo lücheng ’97, 88–89. Siu, Joyce. “Breaking the Wall, Never U-Turn: Festival of Vision: Berlin in Hong Kong.” BC Magazine, November 2, 2000, 44–45. Siu King-chung [Siu King Chung; Xiao Jingcong]. “Zhongguo lücheng 98 zhuangzhi yishuzhan.” In Yung, Zhongguo lücheng 98, 27. ———. “Questioning Danny Yung’s Questionnaires.” In Fung, Juli, 83–87. Sontag, Susan. “Film and Theatre.” In Theater and Film: A Comparative Anthology, edited by Robert Knopf, 134–51. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. Tsui, Clarence. “A Vision of Two Cities.” HK iMail, June 20, 2000, C6. Tuan, Iris Hsin-chun. Alternative Theater in Taiwan: Feminist and Intercultural Approaches. Youngstown, NY: Cambria Press, 2007. Videotage. Lost and Found: The Best of Videotage (1986–1996), Vol. 1. Hong Kong: Videotage, 1997. VHS. Wang Molin. Dushi juchang yu shenti. Taipei: Daoxiang chubanshe, 1990. Wang Molin, and Lin Kehuan. “1988 haixia liang’an shiyan xiju duihua zhi yi.” In Wang, Dushi juchang, 275–84. Wang Molin, and Lin Zhaohua. “1989 haixia liang’an shiyan xiju duihua zhi er.” In Wang, Dushi juchang, 285–91. Wang Molin, and Rong Nianzeng [Danny Yung]. “1987 Taiwan–Xianggang xiaojuchang de duihua zhi er.” In Wang, Dushi juchang, 301–7. Wang Molin, and Yu Weikang [Eddy U]. “1987 Taiwan–Xianggang xiaojuchang de duihua zhi yi.” In Wang, Dushi juchang, 293–300. Woo, Mathias [Hu Enwei], and Danny Yung [Rong Nianzeng]. “Lücheng duihua.” In Lücheng jiujiu: Juchang /Journey 99: Theatre. Hong Kong: Zuni Icosahedron, 1999. Wong Shun-kit [Wong Chunjie]. “Chai qiang.” In Yung, Zhongguo lücheng 98, 23. Wong Yuewai. “The Black Box Exercise: An Arts Education Model from Hong Kong.” In Educating in the Arts: The Asian Experience, Twenty-Four Essays, edited by Lindy Joubert, 313–29. Dordrecht: Springer, 2008. Wong Yuewai, and Lai Tat Tat Wing, eds. Rong Nianzeng wutai ru jianzhu zhan/Danny Yung Architecture Is Theatre Exhibition. Hong Kong: Zuni Icosahedron E+E, 2013. Yang, Edward. “Brother Nine and Old Seven: A ’97 Fantasy (London Version).” In Yung, Zhongguo lücheng ’97, 64–67. Yang Liling. “Shengming zhong buke chengshou de ‘jing’ yu ‘zhong’.” Biaoyan yishu 63, no. 3 (1998): 44–52. Yeung, Paul. “Reflection of [sic] Zuni Icosahedron and Journey to the East ’97.” In Yung, Zhongguo lücheng ’97, 122–23.

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Yu, Louis [Ru Guolie]. “Yi zhuo liang yi, liu zhong zishi.” In Yung, Zhongguo lücheng ’97, 106–7. ———. “One Table, Two Chairs and Six Gestures.” In Yung, Zhongguo lücheng ’97, 108–9. Yung, Danny [Rong Nianzeng], ed. Zhongguo lücheng ’97: Liang ’an sandi wenhua jiaoliu jihua; di yi jie chengshi wenhua guoji huiyi jiemu/Journey to the East ’97: A Cultural Exchange Project; A Program of the First International Conference on Urban Culture. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Center for the Arts and Zuni Icosahedron, 1997. ———. “Preface.” In Yung, Zhongguo lücheng ’97, 6–7. ———. “This Is a Chair.” In Yung, Zhongguo lücheng ’97, 74–75. ———. Wenti: Rong Nianzeng luying dianying zuopinji (qiqi zhi jiuliu)/Question/Problem: Collection of Films and Videos by Danny Yung (1977–1996). Hong Kong: Videotage, 1997. VHS. ———. “Journey to the East ’98.” In Yung, Zhongguo lücheng 98, 6–8. ———, ed. Zhongguo lücheng 98/Journey to the East 98. Hong Kong: Zuni Icosahedron, 1998. ———. “Houji: Zhongguo lücheng.” In Lai Shengchuan, Lai Shengchuan: Juchang 4, 247–50. Taipei: Yuanzun, 1999. ———. “Yishu zongjian de hua/Artistic Director Notes.” In Zuni Icosahedron, Jinnian ershimianti 2000–2001 nianbao/Zuni Icosahedron 2000–2001 Annual Report, 6–11. Hong Kong: Zuni Icosahedron, 2001. ———. Zhongguo shi ge da huayuan: Rong Nianzeng juchang yishu 1984–2008. Hong Kong: Zuni Icosahedron E+E, 2009. ———. Haohao xuexi, tiantian xiangshang: Rong Nianzeng wenji + gainian manhua. Guilin: Guangxi shifan daxue chubanshe, 2012. Yung, Danny, Hans-Georg Knopp, Ulrich Sacker, and Annie Wong. “Joint Statement.” In Chuangyi gongye yu wenhua jiaoliu—Xianggang Bolin dangdai wenhua jie, huiyi jilu/Creative Industries & Cultural Exchange: Festival of Vision—Hong Kong/Berlin, Record of the Conferences, edited by Ching Cheefong, Man-ho Lung, Steven Pang, and Vicky Leong, 108. Hong Kong: Hong Kong Institute of Contemporary Culture, 2002. Yung, Danny [Rong Nianzeng], and Lai Shengchuan. “Juchang, wenhua, chuangyi chengshi: Gangtai liangwei xiju mingjia duitan.” Zaobao zhoukan/zbWEEKLY 847 (February 29, 2004): 3–6. Zhang Jinman. “Zhongguo lücheng: Diyi zhan de jianlüe baogao.” Dianying shuangzhoukan 49 (4 December 1980): 40. Zhang Xian. “Muyu.” In Yung, Zhongguo lücheng 98, 18. Zhang Zhongnian, ed. Zhongguo shiyan xiju. Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 2009. Zheng Weiyin. “Xianggang si Bolin—yanshen yi zhuo liang yi de jiaoliu.” Mingbao/Ming Pao Daily News, June 20, 2000, C07.

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Zuni Icosahedron. Lücheng jiujiu/Journey 99: Juchang/Theatre. Hong Kong: Zuni Icosahedron, 1999. ———. Lücheng 2000: 1T2C/Journey 2000: 1T2C. Hong Kong: Zuni Icosahedron, 2000. ———. Jinnian ershimianti 2000–2001 nianbao/Zuni Icosahedron 2000–2001 Annual Report. Hong Kong: Zuni Icosahedron, 2001.

CHAPTER 4

Performing the 38th Parallel Across the Taiwan Strait: Territorial Divides and Theatrical Dialogues in East Asia

In 2005, the Shanghai-based performance collective Grass Stage (Caotaiban) devised two productions in collaboration with members of Body Phase Studio (Shenti qixiang guan) and Assignment Theatre (Chaishi jutuan) from Taipei and Clash Theatre Group (Zhuang jutuan) from Hong Kong. 38th Parallel Still Play (38 xian youxi) premièred in May at the Asian Madang Theatre Festival in Gwangju, South Korea, and subsequently enjoyed a short run in Shanghai. The second instalment, 38th Parallel in Taipei (Taibei 38 duxian), was staged in Taipei in October of the same year. The project tackles conflictual inter-Asian diplomacies and questions of global and intraregional (neo-)imperialism through a cross-examination of geopolitical and affective divides between South and North Korea, and Taiwan and mainland China. The first of a succession of collaborations between independent people’s theatre ensembles from Shanghai, Taipei, and Hong Kong, the series illuminates the social consequences of the military and ideological conflicts that have torn Northeast Asia since the second half of the twentieth century—the Pacific War (i.e. World War II in Asia and the Pacific, 1941–1945), the Korean War (1950–1953), and the Cold War—along with more recent nuclear fears and threats of warfare in the Korean Peninsula and across the Taiwan Strait. Heonik Kwon argues that the temporality of the Cold War is far less closed, coherent, and complete than it has generally been perceived. Far © The Author(s) 2020 R. Ferrari, Transnational Chinese Theatres, Transnational Theatre Histories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37273-6_4

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from being shelved as dead matter in the archives of the past, the Cold War permeates the quotidian experience of entire communities as an organic historical trace that re-inscribes itself continually into the social texture of the present tense. For those societies that were relegated to little more than a marginal footnote in the binary West- and Soviet-centric narratives of the era, the Cold War was not an ‘imaginary war’ but an intensely embodied reality of extraordinary violence, whose harrowing residues linger in contemporary times.1 It is thus imperative, Kwon maintains, to engage its presumed ending as an unsettled ‘field of time-space that is open to creative political acting and moral imagining’ rather than as a ‘fait accompli’.2 Kwon’s observations resonate with 38th Parallel ’s commitment to exposing ‘the psychic wounds’3 of the Cold War as protracted remnants and reminders of unhealed—and often unacknowledged—private records of pain. The performances excavate the paradoxical dynamics of societal interactions which, for years, were moulded by a psychological tug of war between deep-seated hostility and intrinsic co-dependency or, in the words of the producers, by ‘a situation of heartless division, and of unavoidable mutual imbrication’.4 On the one hand, 38th Parallel dramatizes the Cold War mentality and its contemporary remains, as epitomized by the long-standing division of the two Koreas—the Republic of Korea (ROK) in the South and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) in the North— and enduring diplomatic conflicts between the two Chinas—the People’s Republic of China (PRC) on the mainland and the Republic of China (ROC) in Taiwan. On the other hand, it typifies a contemporary upsurge in inter-Asian cooperation that has been enabled by the gradual dissolution of the old ideological structures that the project sets out to critique. Cold War tensions have not entirely subsided, and the two Koreas were still nominally at war at the time of the performances.5 Nonetheless, steady efforts have been made in both academic and artistic circles and in the sphere of social movements, civil society, and non-governmental organizations to reassess the joint histories and collective memories that bind—but also separate—the nations of East Asia. In this chapter, an overview of the activities of two converging twenty-first-century trans-Asian rhizomes—the East Asia People’s Theatre Network (EAPTN) and Asia Meets Asia (AMA)—complements the analysis of the 38th Parallel performances to address issues of

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transnational collaboration and inter-Asian methodology. Most individuals and groups who have been associated with these networks are long-term advocates of activist performance practices that circulate through non-institutional and, often, culturally marginal production and reception channels. Most have been conspicuously invested in applied theatre and community arts initiatives ranging from playback, forum, documentary, and ecocritical theatres to theatre in education and have been involved in a broad spectrum of socio-performative articulations such as street parades, political demonstrations, and environmental rallies. Most have been intensely committed to the safeguard of minority rights and supported labour struggles and pro-democracy movements. The transecting networks forged through the creation and circulation of collaborative performances in journey-form across these grassroots theatrical communities have re-enacted and responded to the divergent intellectual debates and competing discourses that have surfaced since the 1990s to assess the geopolitical reconfiguration and altered positionality of East Asia in an allegedly post-Cold War global landscape. These communities of interest may be understood as twenty-firstcentury variations of the ‘contact nebulae’ that Karen Thornber theorizes in her study of ‘writerly’ and ‘readerly’ connections between the literary fields of Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and China under the Japanese Empire (1895–1945), and between the Empire and other geopolitical sites in Asia.6 Thornber notes the theatre’s significance in the interlocking of ‘vectors of intra-East Asian cultural negotiation’ within those seminal formations of transnational nodality.7 Touring performances and collaborations between Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and China, which were common in the first half of the twentieth century, have intensified in the post-1980s era, consistent with the partial thawing of diplomatic relations and the intensification of democratization processes across the region. As with the Journey to the East productions charted in Chapter 3, the 38th Parallel series and other collaborations involving the EAPTN, AMA, and their member groups problematize notions of boundary, barrier, and (trans-)border—and transgressions of boundaries, barriers, and borders—that are intrinsic to the ontology of transnationalism. Likewise, these networks elicit the significance of community-based festivals, city-to-city (or place-to-place) synergies, and artist-driven initiatives in consolidating transnational alliances. Their practice sustains and signifies paths of nomadic performance—or performance in journey-form—both theoretically and thematically since poetics and aesthetics of travel inform

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their concept and content. On the one hand, the viatorization of performance is accomplished through residencies, festivals, touring productions, and work that is expressly conceived for travelling—namely, work that is devised on the road, via different stages and stations, through itineraries and actual physical movement. On the other hand, these performances engage tropes of dissemination, dispersion, and dislocation, travel metaphors, and experiences of mobility—sometimes deliberate, sometimes obstructed and enforced—as they tackle issues of territorial division and affective divides, revisit collective memories and individual traumas, and confront the psychological thresholds and physical walls that have loomed over East Asia for more than half a century.

Meeting at the Madang: Asian People’s Theatre Networks in South Korea 38th Parallel Still Play marked the founding of Grass Stage, which writercurator Zhao Chuan and independent theatre collaborator Liu Yang established over a series of workshops they conducted in Shanghai in preparation for the South Korean première.8 The 2005 Asian Madang Theatre Festival also sanctioned the formalization of the EAPTN. Chang Soik—a member of the Korean People’s Theatre Association (KPTA) and director of Namoodak Movement Laboratory (est. 2002)—and associates from Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and mainland China launched this informal network with the purpose of assisting exchanges between East Asian people’s theatre practitioners. Members included Grass Stage, the Assignment Theatre, established by Chung Chiao (Zhong Qiao) in Taipei in 1996, the Asian People’s Theatre Festival Society (Yazhou minzhong xiju jie xiehui), founded in Hong Kong in 1994 by veteran social activist and theatremaker Mok Chiu-yu (Augustine ‘Gus’ Mok; Mo Zhaoru), and Yasen No Tsuki, led by the Japanese tent theatre facilitator Sakurai Daiz¯o.9 People’s theatre is an umbrella term for a range of practices that seek to foster community-based activities, often for the benefit of marginalized groups, and to mobilize the theatre as a conduit of social awareness, empowerment, and education. Inspired by Augusto Boal’s concept of the theatre as ‘a rehearsal of revolution’,10 people’s theatre conceives performance as concrete political action that intervenes in social reality to support democratization, liberation, and resistance movements and contributes to global struggles against inequality, economic exploitation, and

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political oppression. Boal’s method challenges the Aristotelian ‘poetics of oppression’ of the ‘spectacle-theatre’ of the ruling classes with a processbased ‘rehearsal-theatre’ that can ‘present images of transition’ and turn audiences into active participants.11 In accordance with Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, people’s theatre strives to release the spectator from the ‘finished visions of the world’12 enforced upon them by the naturalistic theatre of the bourgeoisie to engender a new brand of ‘spect-actor’.13 In addition to Boal, Bertolt Brecht’s epic drama and the tradition of ‘radical people’s theatre’14 epitomized by Dario Fo’s ‘throwaway theatre’ of the 1970s and the political practices of the Bread and Puppet Theatre and the San Francisco Mime Troupe, among others, are oft-cited models by Asian people’s theatre practitioners, along with the trailblazing work of the Philippines Educational Theatre Association (PETA, est. 1967) and the Japanese Black Tent Theatre 68/71 (BTT). Since the late 1970s, PETA and BTT have endorsed collaborations between Asia’s grassroots theatre communities and inspired the practices of activist performance groups that are equally invested in mobilizing the arts in support of civil movements.15 The Theatre of the Oppressed was introduced to South Korea in the late 1970s along with the works of Paulo Freire, the Brazilian philosopher and theoretician whose writings—primarily Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968)—form the ideological and theoretical backbone of Boal’s method. Boal’s propositions greatly influenced the practices of such groups as Park In-pae’s Field Theatre Company (est. 1988) and Hae, which was formed as a result of Boal’s 1997 workshop in South Korea.16 In 1989, Park attended a PETA trainers’ training programme in South Korea supported by the Asian Council for People’s Culture (ACPC), an organization established in Manila in 1985 with the purpose of fostering exchange between cultural activists, arts workers, and educators across the Asia Pacific region. Chung Chiao was introduced to people’s theatre on this occasion and subsequently participated in the ACPC-sponsored itinerant collaboration, Cry of Asia! 17 In South Korea, Chung also met Mok Chiuyu, with whom he would subsequently collaborate on several cross-strait and trans-Asian projects.18 Largely thanks to their efforts, practices associated with people’s theatre and PETA’s Basic Integrated Theatre Arts Workshop (BITAW) approach have developed in Hong Kong and Taiwan since the early 1980s and early 1990s,19 respectively. In mainland China, people’s theatre was virtually unknown before the emergence of such groups as Grass Stage in Shanghai, the New Workers Art Troupe

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(Xin gongren yishu tuan, aka Dagong qingnian yishutuan, est. 2002) and Candied Fruits Theatre Society (Bingtang hulu jushe, est. 2006) in Beijing, and the playback theatre ensemble Kapok Theatre (Mumian jutuan, est. 2005) in Guangzhou.20 Local NGOs have also promoted theatrical activities to empower disadvantaged social groups, for example, the Beijing production of A Migrant Worker’s Beautiful Expectations (Yi ge mingong de meili qidai, 2007) devised by labourers and endorsed by the Cultural Communication Centre for Facilitators.21 Grass Stage defines itself as a minjian (‘people-based’) organization. In the mainland Chinese context, minjian can denote ‘folk’ and ‘vernacular’ phenomena as well as non-governmental grassroots activities grounded in civil society and independent from both institutional structures (including state funding) and commercial dynamics. Minjian theatre exists outside the mainstream circuit of state-sponsored cultural organizations and understands performance as ‘a politicized gesture’ that seeks to generate an autonomous realm for people-led ‘social intervention’22 in the emergent ‘non-profit public space’ of mainland China.23 Grass Stage positions itself as the harbinger of a ‘new social theatre movement’24 aimed at tracing a ‘third path’25 onto China’s theatrical maps—one that can provide a civil society (minjian shehui) alternative to both the commercial realm (shangye kongjian) and the domain of the state (guojia kongjian).26 Grass Stage supports participatory practices that valorize the lowliness and ugliness of the quotidian and empathize with the disenfranchised precariat of China’s economic miracle. The group creates socially invested productions such as The Little Society (Xiao shehui, 2009–2011), which gives the marginal and emarginated characters in the Big Society spectacle outside the performance space—beggars, prostitutes, rag pickers, migrant workers—a leading role in the minor public sphere that their minjian theatre engenders.27 The group’s ethos takes distance from both the ideologically inflected repertoire sanctioned by the Chinese Party-State and the profit-driven entertainment promoted by the commercial establishment. Grass Stage has consistently endeavoured to bring theatre among communities and ‘provide, in a country relatively lacking in opportunities for public participation, a fluid and varied range of public social spaces’.28 Likewise, the values of the 2005 Asian Madang departed radically from the ‘convenient’ and ‘superficial’ logic of mainstream arts festivals, which is driven by institutional agendas and economic rationales rather than by an aspiration to intervene in social processes.29 The Chinese participants were taken by the Madang’s ‘utopian’ spirit of comradeship and

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welcomed its model for a collaborative platform that valorizes the social experience of the minzhong —or minjung , in Korean.30 Minzhong and minjung both translate as ‘people’, or ‘masses’, but minjung is associated specifically with processes of democratization from below and grassroots nationalism in South Korea. Minjung designates the ‘common people’, particularly the underprivileged, but in modern political discourse it has come to comprise all ‘those who suffered under the current system and at the same time were capable of societal transformation’.31 The Korean minjung movement emerged in the 1960s and gained momentum in the 1970s and 1980s, reaching a turning point in the Gwangju Democratization Movement of May 1980 (aka the Gwangju Uprising, or 5/18 Uprising). It mobilized a wide spectrum of social agents: student and labour organizations, oppositional political factions, and intellectual groups that championed democracy and national reunification while endorsing the revitalization of indigenous traditions undermined by Japanese colonialism, industrialization, and Western cultural imperialism.32 Travelling to Gwangju with Grass Stage was Zhang Xian, a Shanghaibased theatremaker who has upset Chinese censors on more than one occasion because of his frank criticism of political authority and mainstream cultural institutions. In a conversation with Zhao Chuan, Zhang praises the Madang’s progressive politics, anticapitalistic approach, and commitment to integrate artistic and social performances in the performances of the quotidian. There were no roles, no hierarchies, no ‘big shot’ artistic director, and no profit-driven agendas in Gwangju; lodgings were shared, meals became communal rituals, performances were free of charge, performers doubled up as stage workers, and the festival was run by volunteers. The Madang approach rejected the twin pressures of power and capital and presented Chinese collaborators with a model of people-based (minjian) practice and people’s (minzhong ) theatre that departed radically from the nationalistic conception of the ‘people’ (renmin) embraced by those state-sponsored institutions in the PRC that were styled as ‘People’s Theatres’ (renmin juyuan) in the socialist era. Madang curator Chang Soik shared this view as he remarked that the work he saw at the prestigious Beijing People’s Art Theatre (BPAT, Beijing renmin yishu juyuan) in 2004 differed greatly from his understanding of ‘people’s’ and ‘popular’, despite the official designation of this and other government-sponsored troupes as ‘renmin’.33 Zhao Chuan has likewise taken distance from mainstream establishments such as BPAT, as the epitome of official culture, and the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre

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(SDAC, Shanghai huaju yishu zhongxin), as the emblem of commercial culture.34 The Madang prompted Grass Stage to embrace an alternative approach in creating their inaugural production, 38th Parallel Still Play. Zhao writes that he ‘made a conscious decision to abandon all of the typical business and commercial models for this play; it was not going to become a commodity’.35 Madang means ‘yard’ or ‘square’ in Korean. It refers to the site of an open-air performance but also to a gathering space, an agora, a place for social interaction and participation.36 The term carries ‘utopian’ connotations, for it conjures a symbolic locus of carnival where hegemonies can be subverted and collective resistance acted out.37 Madang theatre, or madangguk ˘ (in Chinese, guangchang ju; outdoor or ‘open-square’ theatre), translates as ‘(Korean) open-air theatre’; yet its practices are not confined to outdoor performance.38 In keeping with Boal’s notion of the active spectator, the participative disposition of madangguk ˘ strives to generate ‘a social space for dialogue’39 through a total, if temporary, breakdown of class barriers as well as barriers between actors and audiences. Madangguk ˘ engenders a theatrical civitas as it projects ‘a shared utopian vision of a new cultural community’.40 Stylistically, madangguk ˘ merges elements of Korean shamanism and indigenous performance genres with extracultural varieties of political theatre such as Brecht and Boal.41 Eugène Van Erven describes it as ‘the South Korean version of agitational street theatre based on traditional ˘ rose to prominence in folkdrama and Western agitprop’.42 Madangguk the late 1970s and 1980s as ‘a constitutive part’ of the minjung (popular) democratization movement, to which it offered ‘an alternative, even utopian’ vehicle of dissent.43 Performances took place in factories, community halls, campuses, markets, and squares, and the 1980 Gwangju Democratization Movement ultimately implemented Boal’s concept of the theatre as a rehearsal of revolution through a ‘grand-scale transformation of spectator into participant’.44 The 2005 Asian Madang was held in Gwangju’s May 18 Memorial Park (aka May 18 Freedom Park) and inaugurated by a ritual ceremony to commemorate the victims of the movement on its twenty-fifth anniversary. 38th Parallel Still Play opened the festival on 21 May in a tent theatre which Sakurai Daiz¯o built for the occasion, while other performances took place outdoors. Two other mainland Chinese groups, both from Beijing, presented work alongside Grass Stage: The Sun Society

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(Taiyang jushe) and the ‘Che Guevara’ group, which performed an allfemale version of the controversial neo-leftist play, Che Guevara (Qie Gewala, 2000), by Huang Jisu, Shen Lin, and Zhang Guangtian. Participants also included Yasen No Tsuki, the Assignment Theatre, the Theatre of Silence (Wuyan tiandi jutuan, from Hong Kong), Mok Chiu-yu’s playback theatre group Living Stories (Lingdong kongjian, est. 1998), a troupe of shamanic dancers from Jeju Island—the scene of another major Korean uprising, in April 1948—and various local ensembles. Veteran theatremaker Wang Molin of Taipei’s Body Phase Studio joined the 38th Parallel team as a performer and movement advisor. The Madang 2005 programmes addressed questions of division—of the two Koreas, and of China and Taiwan—memories of the Korean War, and the implications of Japanese imperialism, US intervention, and Cold War politics for the history and future of East Asia.45 Zhao categorizes the performances as minzhong xiju (people’s theatre). Minzhong xiju links the theatre to social movements to engender an empowering space for all kinds of people (zhongren) to express themselves.46 As Chung Chiao notes in a summary of the Assignment Theatre’s objectives: ‘People’s theatre is a theatre style that proceeds from reality, integrating the local history and life experiences of a community […] and enhancing social awareness at all levels’. It privileges ‘learning from the process’ for the purpose of ‘educating, communicating, and growing together’.47 Mok Chiu-yu’s playback theatre presentation accomplished just that, as the performance re-enacted narratives volunteered by members of the audience, ranging from reflections on the Madang to reminiscences of May 1980. The Theatre of Silence presented a pantomime, My Red Dress (Hong qunzi), based on accounts of the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot’s genocide in Cambodia. It was directed by former San Francisco Mime Troupe member Dan Chumley, the sole non-Asian participant.48 The Assignment Theatre’s Silent Wave (Chaoyin), first performed in 2004 in an old military compound in Taipei, tackled ethnic conflict in Taiwan through the story of a soldier who died in the Pacific War. The aim was to flesh out the ‘organic memory’ of Taiwanese society through the actors’ bodies, as Chung expressed.49 In New Angels, Sakurai played a man in charge of collecting corpses during the Gwangju unrest. As representatives of Korea’s former colonizer, the Japanese Yasen No Tsuki declined their allocation of the funding that the organizing committee had secured from the local administration in a gesture of atonement for an equally painful history of Asian violence and of symbolic repayment of debt. Local

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performers dressed in white blood-stained gowns summoned additional memories of the Korean struggle for democracy in The Uprising People. A meaningful aspect of participant-driven platforms such as the Asian Madang is the potential for conceptual irradiation that can be generated through collaboration and bartering of aesthetics. Performance becomes mobile and nomadic—not solely because it thematizes journeys, viatorizes forms, and is, literally, generated by transnational itineraries, only becoming possible in the form of travel, but also because of the relational field of exchange that it engenders—with intersecting radicant vectors propagating throughout the trans-Asian rhizome. Accordingly, the 2005 Madang sowed the seeds for subsequent collaborations. In July 2006, the EAPTN held a month-long Trainers’ Training Workshop in South Korea modelled after the above-mentioned PETA/ACPC sessions of 1989. Performers from Taipei, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Seoul, Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou trained for three weeks in Y˘ongdong before embarking on a week-long performance tour.50 In December 2006, EAPTN members convened in Seoul to travel to the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) at Panmunjom with Chang Soik and other delegates from the KPTA and Seoul’s Sungkonghoe University. Mok Chiu-yu, Sakurai Daiz¯ o, Chung Chiao, and Zhao Chuan were among the attendees.51 The 38th Parallel project did not only produce a sequel, 38th Parallel in Taipei, but also prompted additional collaborations between Zhao Chuan, Wang Molin, and Chung Chiao, and assisted Grass Stage’s involvement with AMA after the EAPTN ceased to exist as a formal organization around 2008/09. As a result of the 2005 Madang, Grass Stage member Hou Qinghui participated in productions by Chang Soik’s Namoodak Movement Laboratory, and Namoodak produced a Korean version of Che Guevara in 2006, prompted by the Gwangju performances. Also in 2006, Chung Chiao devised Midnight Angel (Ziye tianshi), set in Gwangju during the 1980 protests and inspired by the 2005 Madang. This ‘poetry drama’ (shiju) draws on Lu Xun’s prose poem, The Shadow’s Farewell (Ying de gaobie, 1924), and the political verse of activist poet Kim Nam-ju (1946–1994), who spent almost a decade in prison because of his militancy in the Korean Democratization Movement. From Taipei, the production toured to Shanghai’s Downstream Garage in 2006 and to the International Drama/Theatre Education Association (IDEA) World Congress in Hong Kong in 2007.52 Chung Chiao, Wang Molin, and Sakurai Daiz¯ o have also supported people’s theatre initiatives in mainland China.53

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Parallel Stages: The Korean Peninsula and the Taiwan Strait Chang Soik invited Zhao Chuan to develop a piece for the Madang after their first meeting in Shanghai in 2004. Chang sought Zhao on the advice of Chung Chiao, who had been appreciative of Zhao’s playwriting debut on the subject of PRC–ROC relations, The Toilet’s Face (Cesuo de lian, 2002), produced by Wang Molin at Guling Street Avant-garde Theatre in Taipei. The title of 38th Parallel Still Play was conceived already in 2003 when Zhao visited South Korea to discuss a collaboration with a local installation artist and planned to create a static performance (i.e. a ‘still play’) in the space where his associate would exhibit their installation. During that visit, Zhao travelled to the DMZ—the buffer zone crossed by the 38th parallel north that formally divides the ROK in the South from the DPRK in the North. The collaboration never materialized, but the concept resurfaced ahead of the Madang production. While seeking for collaborators, Zhao met Grass Stage co-founder Liu Yang. Zhang Xian joined the team in an advisory role and Wang Molin came to the project as a ‘Taiwanese voice’, since the discourse surrounding the Korean division would offer an opportunity to raise valuable questions about the fifty years of separation between Taiwan and China.54 Weeks before Grass Stage’s departure for South Korea, Wang travelled to Shanghai to train the newly formed ensemble, comprised largely of young professionals and university students with no previous theatre experience. Zhao looked deliberately for the ‘untrained’ bodies of ‘common’ people, believing that professional actors would have made the project ‘unauthentic’. His goal was to explore the mnemonic and psychosomatic potential of the performative body as a natural and unstructured signifying vehicle: ‘I threw away the script, got rid of any professional actors and had no fixed roles; and what was left on stage was a collective body not unlike the audience’.55 Upon their arrival in Gwangju, two Korean actors also joined. Originally a transnational Chinese project, 38th Parallel thus morphed into a trans-Asian collaboration, which caused both form and content to be reshaped by its ‘mobile geographies of performance’.56 38th Parallel presents a meaningful illustration of rhizomatic performance in journey-form—of performance praxis that is forged by tangible processes of travel and motion and dramatizes experiences of transit, as well as transition. Zhao has commented widely on the task of performance as a form of public sphere and on the theatre as ‘a moveable

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public space’.57 As performance itinerates through networks of people, venues, and locations, it generates mobile sites of public engagement. Though temporary, these public spaces do not vanish with the end of the actual theatrical event but are routinely reconstituted through travel, so that their effects can reverberate more extensively. Zhao and Liu compiled the one-hour performance script on the basis of improvised segments that the ensemble devised over three months of rehearsals in Shanghai. During the preparatory phase, the cast researched the Korean War, talked to war veterans and witnesses, and debated the histories of division of the Koreas and of China and Taiwan, assessing the legacies of colonialism and imperialism in East Asia, comparisons between socialist and capitalist governance systems, and the role of subalterns in shaping historical discourse. This initial stage of ‘intellect’ (zhixing ) steered the creative process into a second stage of direct ‘perception’ (ganxing ) through collective improvisation.58 The project’s potential for historical critique became more important than its aesthetics. The group’s determination to break with mainstream production values pushed them to deemphasize form in favour of a laboratory approach that ascribed significance to impromptu physical expression. The production was framed as a choral ‘learning process’ (xuexi guocheng ) rather than a cultural commodity, in an attempt to debunk conventional hierarchies that give prominence to the director’s creative authority.59 38th Parallel Still Play is not a conventional ‘work’ (zuopin) but an artistic and social ‘incident’ (shijian).60 It does not draw incisiveness from aesthetic sophistication but from its contingency and immediate connection with reality (xianshixing ).61 However, some performers became anxious about the absence of a script and of a director, fearing that the work would lack focus. This led to a partial reinstatement of traditional relationships so that Liu and Zhao are generally credited as the co-writers and co-directors of the ‘outline-like’ script of Grass Stage’s collective creation, and Wang as the artistic director (Zhao, Liu, and Wang also performed in the production). Zhao has nonetheless remarked that, although he often writes or, better still, compiles many Grass Stage scripts, these are not the outcome of a hierarchical relationship but collaborative efforts that incorporate the collective’s multiple perspectives.62 Corporeality, kinaesthetic articulacy, and the agentive potential of the unrestrained body in performance are core to the Grass Stage approach. The group’s performative interventions signal a twofold reaction against the formalized conventions of professional acting in Chinese theatre and

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‘the commoditisation of the human body’ that has resulted from the marketization of China’s social body since the 1980s.63 As Zhao contends, once conventional notions of actor (yanyuan), role (juese), and logocentric ‘spoken drama’ (huaju) are debunked, all that is left is a collective body (jiti de qunzhong shenti).64 Zhao’s views resonate with a Foucauldian understanding of the individual body as disciplined and policed by technologies of power and social surveillance so that the unrestrained body in performance provides a self-empowering medium and potent ‘choreopolitical’ carrier of (counter-)discourse.65 As he writes of the early days of Grass Stage, ‘the only thing we had was this raw, physical energy: an energy that ignored the rules […]. Those performers took charge of their bodies and temporarily escaped the oppression of the mainstream stage in the process’.66 The body connects the imaginative pursuits of the theatre to the sphere of ‘social initiative’, for ‘only through physical acts’ can one ‘achieve truths in all those fictitious or self-claimed social relations’ that characterize interpersonal and collective interaction in today’s China.67 ‘Physicalized discussion’, or ‘discussion through the body’ (shentixing taolun), is key to Zhao’s notion of biwen juchang,68 which he has translated as ‘the theatre of urge’69 and others have rendered as the ‘theatre of inquisition’.70 Biwen juchang denotes a theatre of incitement and investigation that can be regarded as Zhao’s own variation on the notion of people’s theatre. As he has stated, Grass Stage’s goal was to make ‘theatre that probed and provoked’.71 The writings and practice of Chung Chiao and Wang Molin have informed Zhao’s conception of the performative body as a channel of psychic release, self-empowerment, and critical inquiry, along with his interest in biopolitics and in the relationship between bodies and ideology. In the late 1980s, Wang devised a form of social theatre in Taiwan known as the ‘theatre of action’ (xingdong juchang ). Since establishing Body Phase Studio in 1991, he has developed a broadly defined ‘theory of the body’ (shenti lun), which integrates conceptual and technical elements of diverse performance, political, and philosophical traditions ranging from Taiwanese aboriginal rituals to Japanese n¯ o theatre and postwar avant-garde forms, Euro-American conceptual art, and Tanztheater. Long-term experience with working with the untrained bodies of nonprofessional and differently abled performers has shaped his approach significantly.72 Wang regards body language as a physical manifestation of the ‘national/state system’ to the extent that the body can be conditioned

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to function as an institutional mouthpiece, which imparts ‘social norms’ and ‘cultural meanings’.73 He contends that bodies have been ‘colonized’ by national systems,74 having internalized the regulatory strategies, political gesturality, and ritualized behaviour of authoritarian governmentality along with the effects of prolonged endogenous violence. Hence, one of the goals of his body-centred approach is to stimulate a shift from a submissive notion of the ‘controlled/written body’ (bei kongzhi/shuxie de shenti) to an active, mindful, and self-regulated practice of ‘body writing’ (shenti shuxie)75 —namely, from an outwardly constrained and reflexively inscribed body to an autonomous body that can signify itself and invest itself with meaning. Wang has likewise been concerned with the status of bodies in postcolonial contexts, arguing that Asian bodies have been regimented by externally enforced processes of modernization, imperialism, and globalization. To paraphrase André Lepecki, the forces of imperialism have ‘choreopoliced’ the Asian body ‘to de-mobilize political action by means of implementing a certain kind of movement that prevents any formation and expression of the political’.76 Consequently (trans-)Asian performance should aim to transcend the restraints of the subdued and subjugated colonial body to rediscover synergetic perceptions and practices of the body that can be ‘differentiated from Euro-American aesthetics’ and truly belong to Asia (women zishen de; i.e. ‘our own’)77 ; or, put differently, to embrace the Asian body as a method.78 This focus on Asian corporeality does not mean to reduce the discourse on the body to a homogenizing singularity but rather to foreground the potential of inter-Asian corporeal interactions to forge relational tactics of discursive de- and re-inscription of the body in performance, thereby voicing—or, literally, embodying—shared political strategies. In 38th Parallel Still Play, Asian bodies divided by generational, affective, and historical barriers—the performers were of different geopolitical origins, cultural backgrounds, and age cohorts—joined together to articulate a discourse of community and prove the power of physicality as a social connective and carrier of collective agency. As stated in the promotional leaflet, the production cast ‘an accusing and taunting look at the political divide [between] a separated but unseparable [sic] people’.79 The 38th parallel—essentially a mark of discord and disunion—was reconceived as a passage wherein to trace new connecting lines between peoples and bodies, on and off the stage. Although individual memories and life experiences varied greatly within the ensemble, their insights into the

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Cold War effects on the histories of their homelands were comparable. As Wang Molin explains in a production note, the performance relied on the body’s narrative capacities to expose ‘common memories’ that ‘have not yet been healed’.80 A mainland Chinese commentary likewise characterized the creative process as a collective ‘healing of wounds’.81 The graphic design of the playbill features two individuals shaking hands as they stand on either side of a black and white yin-yang symbol (taiji, or taegeuk in Korean), which is the central image in the ROK national flag. Usually a signifier of harmony and unity, the Daoist diagram is re-signified to provide a wry visual remark on the lack of cohesiveness on the Korean Peninsula. It points, as well, to the shared Asian identities and cultural heritage of the people that the production calls into question—the North and South Koreans, the Chinese and the Taiwanese. It thus reinforces mnemonic cross-parallels at multiple levels—identitarian, cultural, ideological, historical, and ethical. At the same time as it proposes a reflection on the negative consequences of the ontology of the division on the Korean Peninsula and across the Taiwan Strait, 38th Parallel Still Play also promotes a polyphonic trans-Asian discourse that rejects disruptive binaries to endorse, instead, an alternate discursive regime of rhizomatic alliance. Zhao has argued that the Chinese theatre scene, particularly within the state system, lends little support to transregional projects of this nature because it lacks ‘Asian vision’.82 Furthermore, the Taiwan question is still a proscribed topic in the PRC; thus, it would have been unfeasible to present this production within the mainstream circuit. Anxiety over political sensitivities may as well be a reason for the absence of media coverage of the performances of 1–2 June 2005 at Shanghai’s Downstream Garage. South Korean scholar Koh Sung-bin formulates a comparably unfavourable assessment as Zhao’s of China’s ‘vertical view of East Asia’, which reinforces nationalistic perceptions of neighbouring nations as satellite entities in a PRC-centric ‘Greater-China Ideology’.83 Koh appraises the views of likeminded Asian academics regarding the endurance of Sinocentrism in PRC public discourse (Sun Ge) and the lack of ‘horizontal perspective’ among mainland Chinese intellectuals (Baik Youngseo).84 Koh dubs the PRC’s ‘hierarchical approach toward the Korean peninsula’ as the ‘Greater-China vs. Little-Korea structure’,85 critiquing China’s self-perception as a ‘benign broker between the two Koreas and other major powers regarding unification’.86 Koh notes Sun’s assertion that contentious historical legacies still inform a great deal of

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institutional and societal processes in contemporary East Asia, for nationstate ideologies are as resilient in the PRC as elsewhere across the region. Yet this does not refute—but rather sustains—the embrace of inclusive methodologies such as Baik’s ‘East Asia in intellectual praxis’ and Arif Dirlik’s ‘East Asia as a project’ to consolidate transborder integration and boost a sense of transregional identity.87 On a similar note, Taiwanese scholar Chen Kuan-hsing has critiqued the ‘leaving Asia for America’88 discourse that shaped the region’s intellectual mindset in the post-war period. Chen has resumed the pioneering proposal outlined in Takeuchi Yoshimi’s 1960 lecture, ‘Asia as Method’ (H¯ oh¯ o to shite no Ajia, 1960),89 to reposition Asia at the centre of knowledge production. The understanding of Asia as a methodological hub instead of merely as an object of inquiry yields a tripartite shift towards ‘deimperialization, decolonization, and de-cold war’ in an effort to overcome hegemonic Western-centric epistemologies which, in turn, enables a reorientation of the discourse about Asia within Asia itself. In Chen’s own formulation of ‘Asia as method’ (Yazhou zuowei fangfa), ‘Asia’ is neither a racialized imperative nor an expression of cultural absolutism that risks overlooking the region’s heterogeneous constitution. Asia is, rather, ‘a pervasive structure of sentiment’ that can foster relational comparison: Asia refers to an open-ended imaginary space, a horizon through which links can be made and new possibilities can be articulated. As an attempt to move beyond existing limits, and as a gesture toward something more productive, my notion of method does not imply an instrumentalist approach, but is imagined as a mediating process.90

The concept of Overcoming the Division System (ODS), which Paik Nak-chung has developed since the 1980s to assess the inter-Korean reconciliation process, has been influential in this respect. In June 2009, Taiwan shehui yanjiu jikan (Taiwan: A Radical Quarterly in Social Studies) published a special issue on Paik’s ODS framework to evaluate its feasibility in the analysis of China–Taiwan relations.91 A prominent South Korean intellectual who played a major role in the Korean democratization debates of the 1980s, Paik contends that the partition of the Korean Peninsula along the 38th parallel after the end of Japanese colonial rule in 1945 marked the origins of the division. The division system (pundan ch’eje) did effectively come into existence in the aftermath of the 1953 post-Korean War armistice, with the consolidation ‘of a self-reproducing system of a sort in which the North and South are interlocked in a

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curious symbiotic relationship’.92 Paik’s notion of the division system does not simply denote territorial and ideological separation but argues for the existence of a self-perpetuating mechanism which governments in the North and the South have been invested in maintaining regardless of its adverse effects. Hence, the division denotes ‘a more fundamental social structure than the antagonism across the Military Demarcation Line’.93 Baik Ji-woon identifies two key implications in Paik’s theory. First, reunification depends on democratization; thus, there can be no reunification without democracy. Second, the division system has global repercussions, since Paik frames the Korean system as a specific ‘sub-system’ within the ‘modern world system’ that ‘internally restricts the democratic advance of the society and externally maintains or reinforces the abnormal state of the modern capitalistic system’.94 Paik recognizes that increased democratization in South Korea following the first direct presidential elections in 1987 has somewhat destabilized the division system, yet a tacit agreement between ‘the entrenched establishments on both sides’ hinders its complete dismantlement: ‘despite their belonging to two very different and often mutually hostile societies, [the North and South Korean establishments] have common vested interests in maintaining division’.95 With regard to PRC–ROC relations, Baik supports Chen Kuan-hsing’s view that the cross-strait conflict and the Chineseness-versusTaiwaneseness identity debate should overcome the narrow confines of the Taiwan Strait to be reframed within an East Asian transnational perspective.96 Like Paik, Chen has praised the contributions of the Korean debate in advancing comparative epistemologies across the region, while also admitting the potential incongruences that may result from cross-referencing the two Koreas and the two Chinas through the ODS framework. On the one hand, there are obvious geopolitical and historical differences between the two contexts, such as divergent experiences of Japanese colonialism and US intervention, and greater disparity in size and power distribution between China and Taiwan.97 On the other hand, there are also a number of similarities that corroborate the application of Paik’s methodology to the cross-strait scenario. These include shared cultural heritage and co-ethnicity (though conflicts between waishengren and benshengren in Taiwan complicate the picture in the PRC–ROC case),98 the presence of authoritarian regimes legitimized by the Cold War mentality, comparable ideological divides between a US-backed capitalist system and a communist state, and the justification of institutional violence, nondemocratic politics, and repression of public

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dissent because of official claims to a persistent state of emergency due to the alleged national security threat posed by the rival side.99 The ODS project is not nationalistic but grounded in claims to democratization, anti-capitalist resistance, and the strengthening of solidarity networks.100 In Paik’s words, ‘the discourse of the division system calls for a people-oriented, rather than a state- or ideology-oriented, approach to the reality of Korea’s division’.101 It is on this premise that Chen has advanced the idea of ‘Chinese as a post-nation’—a non-nationalistic approach that draws strength from civil society and people-based (minjian) alliances. Chen contends that this kind of approach may help dismantle ‘the cross-strait system’—namely, the China–Taiwan equivalent of the Korean division system. Overcoming the cross-strait system is no longer a question of independence versus unification, Chen argues, but one of ‘self-determination, post-imperialism, and removal of capitalist exploitation’.102 Chen supports a reconsideration of Taiwaneseness as neither entirely alien nor radically antagonistic to the notion of Chineseness, noting that it would be ‘a-historical to exclude Chinese identity from the notion of Taiwanese’.103 The valorization of interconnected histories and augmented transborder integration below and beyond the scope of the nation-state may thus constitute fundamental steps towards overcoming division, at least at the level of popular awareness and civic intervention.104 Baik details further proposals for ‘a third framework’ to assess the cross-strait conflict beyond dichotomous China-versus-Taiwan epistemologies.105 Chao Kang and Ning Yin-bin have advanced notions of ‘the Chinese as a methodology’ and ‘China as history-culture’, respectively, in support of a cultural–historical Chinese identity that transcends nationalistic ideologies without imposing yet ‘another super-identity’ and allows for a pluralistic differentiation of multiple inflections and intensities of Chinese culture(s).106 Likewise, Zhang Kun-jiang’s suggestion that China and Taiwan should intensify dialogues ‘at the cultural and community level rather than at the political level’107 echoes Paik’s call for bridge-building initiatives among ‘ordinary citizens’108 and Chen’s belief in a ‘daily life reconciliation movement’ that can complement—or even circumvent—state-to-state procedures.109 It is precisely in this spirit that the 38th Parallel collaboration was conducted. Although the production was unable—or, rather refused—to settle the independence versus unification conundrum, it presented a ‘third’ approach to addressing PRC–ROC relations at a grassroots level despite enduring disagreements at the institutional level.

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The Division System in Performance: 38th Parallel Still Play The twenty-fifth anniversary of the Gwangju Democratization Movement was the catalyst for the South Korean première of 38th Parallel Still Play. Yet, as a performance in journey-form, the project acquired new meanings as it travelled—its critical and semantic targets being contingent on specific time-spaces of memory. In Shanghai, it would have echoed comparable historical junctures such as the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) and the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, while in Taipei it would have resonated with the February 28 (2/28) Incident of 1947 and the White Terror—the violent repression of political dissent by the ruling Nationalist Party (Kuomintang [KMT]) under Martial Law (1949–1987). Thus, beyond its immediate value as a response to the Gwangju events, the production established a more universal framework for a transnational reflection on thwarted democratic struggles and relational comparison of significant chronotopes of historical trauma.110 The Gwangju protest was misrepresented as a seditious communist insurgency and banished from public discourse in South Korea until its official reassessment and recognition as a popular pro-democracy movement in the late 1980s. Likewise, contentious historical events in China and Taiwan such as the Cultural Revolution and 2/28 were removed from collective memorialization for decades, and the ban on civic debate on the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown persists to this day. Consideration of matters of spectatorship and reception in the three locations where the 38th Parallel plays were staged, albeit important, exceed the scope of this study. From a production perspective, however, the joint creation of a work on Korean history by mainland Chinese and Taiwanese collaborators in partnership with South Korean performers clearly invested the performances with complex implications with respect to the participants’ distinct experiences of institutional atrocity and perceptions of the PRC– ROC conflict in the light of the Korean division. 38th Parallel Still Play is an intermedial reflection on the genealogy of the division system and the affective mechanisms that have justified its existence and ensured its persistence since the 1950s—both in the Koreas and on the two sides of the Taiwan Strait. As a performative enactment of conditions of territorial partition and physical separation, the project appraises notions of place, space, and border, and their role in identity

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formation processes. As Suk-Young Kim writes of South Korean dramatizations of the border-crossing experience, the act of trespassing is a potent ‘performative gesture’111 that not only disrupts geopolitical frontiers but also upsets national(istic) allegiances and statutory definitions of citizenship. By forging alternate loyalties that are ‘engraved on bodily senses and emotional registers’,112 the trespassers’ performances become ‘mobile frontiers’ for the articulation of ‘emotional citizenship’.113 A video prologue signals an intention to trace the genesis or, quite literally, the infancy of the division system with a close up on two schoolchildren’s arms resting side by side on a classroom desk. One wears a red garment and the other a white one, in an allusion to the competing political colours on the two sides of the Korean border and of the Taiwan Strait. The children nudge one another and invade each other’s desk space repeatedly until they decide to draw a line between them. As they cannot agree on its position, they erase it, take measurements, and trace it anew—incessantly teasing, pushing, and interfering with one another. Various stationery items are employed to erect a barrier along the line, which is sketched first in pencil, then in pen, and eventually carved deeply onto the desk surface with a paperknife. An additional dividing line is traced longitudinally on the stage floor with a strip of yellow tape, ostensibly evoking the Military Demarcation Line (MDL, aka the Armistice Line) in the Korean DMZ and China–Taiwan borders. The two segregated zones thus created refashion the DMZ and the Taiwan Strait figuratively, as ‘environmental “haunted stage[s]”’ for the enactment of substitute forms of affective kinship.114 The video recreates childhood memories of a popular game in Chinese primary schools by which pupils would trace a line across their desk and call it ‘the 38th parallel’ (sanbaxian), implying that it should not be trespassed.115 It exposes the role of official holders of power-knowledge in shaping the nation-state’s collective unconscious since the formative stages of a citizen’s life, revealing the extent to which the Cold War mentality is ingrained in popular perceptions and ritualized in quotidian behaviours. Furthermore, it foregrounds institutionalized strategies to inculcate conflict and perpetuate the division consciousness through selective forms of knowledge acquisition. An illustration of such technologies of power is the well-documented phenomenon of routine rewriting of history textbooks to either conceal episodes of authoritarian infra-violence by nation-states on their citizenry or redraft shameful pages in the region’s

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historical record, such as Japan’s military atrocities in China and Korea during the Pacific War. Since the 1950s, authorities in the two Koreas, like in China and Taiwan, have disseminated partisan histories and distorted portrayals of the opposing side, spawning persistent anxiety and mistrust. Because of travel bans and censorship of public information, citizens on either side of each divide have been hostile to one another despite lacking any direct knowledge of life across the border, and beyond the strait. In the Korean Peninsula, the first round of widely publicized reunions of families that were divided by the war took place in August 2000 in the wake of a historic summit between Kim Dae-jung and Kim Jong-il two months before. Yet Koreans are still not permitted free cross-border travel. In China and Taiwan, family reunions and cross-strait journeys became possible in the late 1980s, direct flights have been available since 2008, and cultural and economic contact has increased steadily, along with grassroots interaction. Yet, profound fractures persist. As Chen Kuan-hsing wrote in 2010, ‘the gap is still unbridgeable. Although in their own society they [PRC and ROC citizens] each may hold a critical attitude towards the state, they trust their own regime far more than the counterpart. How to form a trans-border alliance among the people is the most challenging obstacle’.116 While portraying the genesis of the division system, the video prologue retraces the process by which the partition line—initially provisional and mutable (pencil marks can be erased)—progressively turns into a perpetual fracture that cuts across the metaphorical terrain of the school desk, leaving a permanent scar behind. This sequence mirrors actual occurrences in the region’s political theatres of the 1950s. The forced post-World War II division of the Korean Peninsula into two spheres of influence was supposedly ‘temporary’. Nonetheless, the intensification of the Cold War relegated Korea’s destiny to a matter of secondary importance in the strategic agendas of the world’s superpowers. Ideological boundaries between the two sides hardened in the aftermath of the Korean War. Permanent hostilities were declared in no uncertain terms, setting the stage for the definitive consolidation of the division system.117 Likewise, the ROC government’s move from mainland China to Taiwan was expected to be short term. According to an enduring KMT-fuelled myth, the mainland should have been soon recovered (guangfu). Such optimistic projections, however, never materialized, and an entire generation of waishengren was cast into a division drama of perpetual longing and geopathic disorder.118 As

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with the DMZ—a once peaceful natural sanctuary turned into a stage for struggle draped with barbed wire—the Taiwan Strait, formerly a utopian route to the homeland, became a theatre for military exercises and missileloaded provocations. The performers enter as the video ends, entirely clothed in black. This choice of costume does not only signal the production’s aesthetic minimalism but also throws into relief the semiotic neutrality of the actor, who has neither an assigned part to play nor a plot to perform, and yet is endowed with a plurisignifying body that creates the performance and is constantly foregrounded by it (Fig. 4.1). The affirmation of ontological nonalignment that is implicit in the costume design counterbalances the factionalism of the wrangling children in the opening filmic segment, whose clothing evokes the ideological chromatics of the disputing constituencies that the performance brings under the spotlight—the Chinese and North Korean ‘reds’ versus the Taiwanese and South Korean ‘whites’.

Fig. 4.1 Grass Stage during a performance of 38th Parallel Still Play at the Asian Madang Theatre Festival in Gwangju, South Korea, in May 2005 (Courtesy of Grass Stage)

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A further evocation of conflicting political and economic discourses under the Cold War regime occurs in a scene wherein one actor, impersonating a border sentinel, sits on the ground drinking Coca Cola. Another sentinel stands straight and solemn on the other side of the yellow demarcation line that was traced previously across the stage floor as a signifier of the division. The empty Coca Cola bottle discarded by the former rolls beyond the boundary line and is resolutely kicked back by the latter. This action imparts a caustic comment on US military intervention and cultural imperialism in South Korea, as in Taiwan, while hinting at the temptations of capitalism of the Communist side of the border—particularly, the PRC’s hybrid system of ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’, which endorses a market economy while opposing political reform or, put differently, does trade Coca Cola but does not purchase democracy. A subsequent sequence addresses the human cost of the division system: the drama of displacement, geopathology, and separation. Standing on either side of the division line, a man and a woman try to connect but realize that an invisible wall has been erected between them. They stroke, push, and hit the wall repeatedly until their bodies become crooked and twisted as they turn over with their hands and heads touching. They eventually collapse to the ground while other performers in the role of soldiers patrol the borderline in the same manner as South and North Korean troops have been guarding the DMZ perimeter for decades. The pair’s resistant kinesis, albeit thwarted, illustrates ‘both the collective connectivity that is achieved among protesting bodies and the violence of the encounter between their bodies and those defending the status quo’, as Susan Leigh Foster writes of the choreography of protest.119 In the prologue and at various key moments in the performance, intermediality is deployed as a mnemonic device to document foundational events in the material and mental configuration of the division system. A projected display of monochrome portraits of unnamed victims of massacres and persecutions signals one such intervention, instantly evoking the Gwangju Democratization Movement and comparable traumatic occurrences in the history of the Sinophone region such as the Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmen Square crackdown in China and the White Terror in Taiwan. As an exemplar of nomadic performance, the production’s contextual references are fluid, so that different temporalities and geopolitical sites can elicit different historical associations to articulate different modes of being and becoming within the conceptual assemblage that is East Asia. As performance transits across territories and

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reverberates through the irradiating vectors of the rhizome of exchange, its semantics and significations are also deterritorialized and reterritorialized incessantly. The viatorization of performance adds value and renegotiates meaning. En route, performance becomes ‘other’, but its destinations are also altered. Thus, in Gwangju, Shanghai, and Taipei, distinctive contextual connections would have been induced, and different events memorialized. As Amanda Rogers notes, the ‘mobile geographies of performance’ can modify and be modified by the sociocultural setting of relocation. Rogers draws attention to the significance of networks in the transnational circulation of performance and in consolidating inter-place connections through performance, as well as to the effects of context, location, and translocal mobility on performance praxis.120 The performing body and the mixed media environment persistently interact in 38th Parallel Still Play. In this scene, the photographic vestiges of the nameless dead congregate onto the back screen to form a circle, which resembles a full moon. The performers beckon at those hauntological appearances to dispel agonizing visions and pay homage to their unacknowledged sacrifice. The inclusion of historical footage of American troops unfolding a white strip to mark the MDL at the 38th parallel, thereby signalling the formalization of the DMZ, further foregrounds this documentary impulse. As the film rolls, two performers stand beneath the screen on either side of the partition line. Physical markers such as metal plaques, barbed wires, fences, adhesive tape, and human walls are deployed in reality as in performance to define the MDL materially and metaphorically, as tangible mementoes of a traumatizing fracture. Live improvisation complements filmic imagery to record and relay emotions and reminiscences that may be either lost or censored in speech but are retained and revived by the organic memory of the body in performance. Signification is generated primarily by visual and sensorial means, while words and speech are sparse. The first noteworthy instance of verbal deliverance of meaning occurs when a projected Korean and English text explains that, subsequent to the establishment of the MDL, ‘Asia entered the Cold War. Since then, North and South Korea and the two sides of the Taiwan Strait have been divided for more than 50 years’.121 This moment also marks the first explicit mention of the Korea–China parallelism. This is verbalized shortly afterwards by a character described as the Old Man (Laonian nanzi, played by Wang Molin) who seemingly acts as the group’s voice and conscience. By framing the Korean/Chinese question as a problem of ‘Asia’, this statement attempts to engender a sense

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of transnational community, shared history, and joint destiny within and between the two regions. As the Chinese title suggests (youxi means ‘game’), the production features games and play prominently to deliver a somewhat cynical counterpoint to the sombre quality of the subject and provide an outlet for exorcizing traumatic experience. The opening scene recreates a war theatre. The performers play a game involving an eagle snatching chicks from a hen—a sarcastic allusion to big and small players on the Asian diplomatic stages and to power inequalities between the two sides of the 38th parallel and of the Taiwan Strait. The image of a hen striving to protect her breed mirrors the human tragedy of countless divided families, in both contexts. The metaphorical parallel is stretched to a further degree once the cast split into two rival teams and mimic the tossing of hand grenades and the noise of firearms, explosions, and air raids until contenders on both sides simulate death by enemy fire and collapse onto one another. Vivid depictions of dismemberment and violation of bodies in subsequent scenes expose the brutality of militarism and the thanatology, or ‘thanatopolitics’,122 of war. Corpses made of clothes stuffed with newspapers are scattered all over the performance area, as synecdochal props and objectified substitutes for the absent anonymous actors in the theatre of history. Two performers pick up military vests from the ground and wear them to assume the role of soldiers. They figuratively remove the viscera from the dead bodies by pulling the innards out of the stuffed garments, amputate their limbs, tear them apart, and toss them around. Others, conjuring the spectral presence of the deceased, crawl all over the ground with slow, zombie-like movements—their eyes closed, their faces twisted, their bodies dehumanized. These ‘resented spirits’ creep, howl, growl, and wriggle as if ‘an animal’ had seized their bodies and ‘an evil demon’ their soul.123 The abused and empty garments become, literally, bodies without organs, whose pain is conveyed performatively by the tormented kinesis of the actors’ schizophrenic bodies. To say it with Artaud, who inspired the Deleuzian concept of body without organs with his radio play, To Have Done with the Judgment of God (Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu, 1947): When you will have made him a body without organs, then you will have delivered him from all his automatic reactions and restored him to his true freedom.124

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Deleuze takes Artaud as the personification of a schizophrenic subject who, in the absence of a rational grasp of the ‘surface’ language of reality, penetrates the ‘depth’ of reality with his body.125 The schizophrenic can only process reality through the ‘language without articulation’ of a howling and breathing physicality, for words can neither represent nor make sense to them.126 In the desolate landscape of wounded bodies and wronged souls of 38th Parallel, raw physicality becomes a primary catalyst for the muffled words of the disembodied casualties of history, which erupt from ‘the depth of bodies’127 in performance with unreserved emotional energy. The performers’ choreopolitical effort to redeem the bodies without organs’ right to freedom counteracts the soldiers’ damaging choreopolicing, and their attempts to regulate space, positions, and circulatory trajectories behind, between, and beyond sanctioned borders.128 Institutional enforcement of collective amnesia is exposed in two ensuing actions wherein civilian attempts to honour the past are sabotaged—hence made invisible—by brutal force. Subsequent to the war theatre simulations, several performers enter, brandishing brooms, to ‘clean up the debris of war’.129 The centre of the performance space is cleansed and sanitized, as a symbolic locus of public exposure and visibility. Weapons, rubble, and uncomfortable mementoes of violence are removed and discarded. The martyrized bodies without organs become useless garbage—nothing more than unwanted testimonies of the past to be promptly hidden from view, and from memory. Another group of performers, embodying the minjung (the common people), arrange ritual food offerings for the dead, but two soldiers push them aside. A character described as the Indifferent Man (Lengmo de nanzi, aka the Cool Man, or Detached Man, played by Shanghainese performance artist Tang Guangming) walks onto the stage brandishing a kitchen knife and chops everything up with staggering fury. As he walks off, impassive and uncaring, the soldiers withdraw the remains of the aborted memorial from the centre of the stage. The implied suggestion is that state authorities discourage collective remembrance because, consistent with Paik’s ODS theory, their power is endogenously sustained by the acrimony and disunion of the status quo. In both the Korean and the Chinese contexts, state violence has been routinely rationalized by the permanent state of emergency that was, de facto, prompted by the division system itself. Accordingly, the production intimates that authorities have vested interests in removing citizens from circumstances of community and commemoration, and in diffusing the uncomfortable traces of the past into spectral ephemeralities.

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As Chen remarks with regard to Paik’s propositions, ‘national security’ has provided Korean leaders with a convenient pretext to preserve the status quo, sustain a totalitarian state, and indefinitely postpone democratic reform. While publicly hostile towards one another, governments on both sides have fostered a ‘symbiotic’ regime of collaboration that covertly yet effectively nurtures, preserves, and replicates the system ad infinitum. A comparable self-contradicting logic has informed PRC–ROC relations, though the sense of vulnerability and fear of a military aggression are more acute in the Korean Peninsula because of greater territorial proximity.130 Citizenries in both regions have grown so accustomed to the division that they can barely recognize its artificiality and have come to accept ‘a historically determined reality as a natural environment’— a condition that Paik dubs as ‘Acquired Division Awareness Deficiency Syndrome’.131 38th Parallel foregrounds political and psychological codependency by way of a game involving two players that carry ropes tied around their waist. Whenever one contestant loses balance or does not pull strongly enough, the other wavers and weakens, too, because each camp depends on the stability and strength of its counterpart to continue playing the game. Yet the game also exposes the frail balance of their relationship, which may degenerate into total war at any moment. In addition to games and role-play, the production dramatizes military action and the arbitrariness of war through the interaction of humans and objects, particularly toys. In one scene, two battery-powered toy soldiers crawl in from each side to interact with the two sentinels who are patrolling the division line. The human soldiers attempt to direct the toy soldiers towards the rival camp, but their movement is unpredictable. Upon reaching the opposite side, however, the toy soldiers are promptly neutralized by their flesh-and-blood counterparts, who take pleasure in tormenting them as if they were torturing war prisoners. In another sequence, one sentinel flies two paper aeroplanes to the enemy camp, upon which his opponent sends one to the ground and another in the direction of the audience. As with the actors, audiences are split on either side of the yellow demarcation line that runs vertically across the performance area. On the one hand, they are vicariously made participants and accomplices in the division system; on the other hand, they are invested with the role of juries and witnesses who passively observe the unfolding of the division drama. In Gwangju, the hijacking scene may as well have evoked the explosion of the Korean Air Flight 858

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at the hand of North Korean intelligence in November 1987—a notorious incident that further widened the diplomatic rift across the peninsula. Children’s play and jocular overtones are deployed again—and again to demystifying purposes—in one of the concluding actions when the sentinels wink and grimace to one other until they burst into laughter and join hands onto the invisible wall. Another game in which the two reproduce each other’s actions, as if facing a mirror, accentuates tropes of consanguinity and brotherhood. Both the mirror and the figurative border traced by the invisible wall are heterotopias, or ‘other spaces’—parallel dimensions in which anarchistic impulses of role-playing and carnival subversion can be released, and alternative scenarios envisaged. As ‘a placeless place’, Michel Foucault writes, the mirror is ‘a utopia’, ‘an unreal, virtual space’ that imparts substance and ‘visibility’ so that the gazing subject can establish a connection with his or her own reflection. ‘But it is also a heterotopia’ wherein the awareness of one’s image—of one’s ‘other’ beyond the reflective surface—permits a reconstitution of the self. The mirror is an identitarian tool and an instrument of (self-)recognition. The mirror makes ‘the other side’ appear ‘at once absolutely real […] and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there’.132 Acknowledging the existence of this intangible limen—of the division line traced by the invisible wall—makes one aware of their mirror image and capable of instigating a dialogue with it. As both a ‘privileged or sacred or forbidden place[s]’ and a space of potential heterodoxy, the division is, therefore, a ‘heterotopia of crisis’ and, concurrently, one ‘of deviation’.133 Only by recognizing its ideological nature as an artificial condition of fabricated crisis can one deviate from it, smash the mirror, and traverse the wall. Identitarian politics shapes the conceptual core of the penultimate scene, as well, where the accent shifts from the Korean division to the China–Taiwan conflict. The action engages the Chineseness-versusTaiwaneseness debate that has polarized Taiwan’s public sphere for decades, and more forcefully so since the lifting of Martial Law in 1987 and the rise of the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in the 1990s. Two diplomatic ‘negotiators’, described as ‘puppets’ (kuilei ren; literally, ‘puppet men’) in the script, re-enact a paradigmatic ‘bilateral talk’ scenario as they dispute over identity and cross-strait politics. The puppets—which are, in fact, impersonated by actors—simulate the act of talking, but their lines are delivered by two ‘manipulators’ who speak for them from behind (in Gwangju, the Chinese dialogue carried Korean

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and English surtitles). The negotiators’ characterization as puppets and their inability to speak their own truth resonates once more with tropes of institutional surveillance and lack of democratic representation and civil debate. Their quarrel shifts from identity affirmation (‘we are all Chinese’; ‘we are Taiwanese’) to a dispute on whether shared language and traditions are sufficient to define a common identity, from verbal intimidation to threats of military aggression, and from accusations of neo-colonialism to defiant indictments, by the Chinese side, of Taiwan’s role as the United States’ Asian ‘puppet’. The production enacts a drama of geopathic platiality, namely one that elicits ‘a recognition of the signifying power and political potential of specific places ’.134 Identity becomes a form of ‘negotiation’ with the ‘power of place’ and is concurrently defined by the subject’s problematic relationship with it.135 The manipulators’ speech becomes muddled as the puppets begin teasing one another, contentedly, despite their masters’ attempts at restraining them. The loss of control is signified by a gradual loss of speech and of the ability to articulate meaning. Eventually, all they can deliver is a jumbled composition of meaningless sounds and incoherent laughter. Once more, the performance imparts a fleeting vision of iconoclastic revolts of human automata and inanimate beings—the toy soldiers shifting direction, the robotic sentinels playing games, the anthropoid puppets reclaiming their human status. A temporary suspension of order in this anarchistic world-upside-down sublimates conflict into carnival play. But once order is restored, the puppet men—now blindfolded—execute a pointless dance routine on command, until their manoeuverers push them aside while screaming at one another, thereby signalling the apparent failure of the negotiations. Whereas this sequence seems to presage a bleak outcome for the China–Taiwan conflict, the closing scene, wherein the focus shifts from the national to the transnational setting of East Asia, projects more optimistic prospects. A filmic montage of salient events in East Asia during the Cold War seems to imply that only a move away from insular approaches and the embrace of a transnational archipelagic vision can advance effective solutions to national conflicts. A group of performers assemble along the division line to form an interconnected human wall, while two others struggle to interfere with it. Is this yet another figuration of an insurmountable divide that keeps bouncing back any form of resistance? Or is it rather the embodiment of a rhizomatic alliance that strives to expel disruptive attempts at reinstating dichotomous and divisive thinking?

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Ana Mª Manzanas has examined tropes of circles and crosses as literary archetypes of both separation and connection, noting that the same dual ‘logic of ambiguity’136 can be ascribed to the trope of the wall, which 38th Parallel evokes repeatedly as an emblem of the division system. ‘As a representation of the vertical axis, the wall/fence stands as a crucible of power and phallicism. […] The wall cuts, distinguishes, purifies’ and excludes ‘alien exteriorities and contaminated “Others”’.137 On the one hand, the wall epitomizes what Gilbert Durand describes as the ‘morbid geometrics’138 of division, in that it spatializes and gives substance to the hierarchical verticality of authoritarian power. On the other hand, the wall can also facilitate communication. It signifies obstruction but also circulation. Furthermore, Manzanas highlights the ambivalence of the term ‘between’, which invokes both separation and sharing.139 The wall stands between people and territories, separating them, but it is also shared between them, signifying potential connection. As the epitome of Durand’s concept of ‘regime of antithesis’,140 the wall sets itself ontologically against the rhizome, which disallows binary structures to maximize relationality, multiplicity, and assemblage. From an identitarian perspective, the division line might, therefore, instigate a process of recognition rather than alienation since it is ‘in this hinge between two things [that] a resemblance appears’, as Foucault argues.141 Foucault’s understanding of the hinge as a permeable margin that enables relations and bidirectional passage echoes Michal Kobialka’s concept of the border as ‘a site of resistance or compliance’.142 This dialectical vision applies equally to a description of the border as an artificial line (the MDL), a fabricated space (the DMZ, the ultimate non-place), or a natural geographical location (the Taiwan Strait, a site of both utopia and dystopia). The laceration that the two schoolchildren inflict on their desk in the video prologue attests to the metaphorical value of the border as ‘a wound’.143 This is equally true of the DMZ, which has been described as ‘the most dangerous and heavily fortified border in the world’.144 But the border can also disclose ‘a field of struggle’.145 This alternate understanding of the border does not refer to violent and compliant acts of warfare, but rather to the resolve to break through and cross over, and to turn the border (the line, the wall) into a threshold, a passageway, a channel by which to renegotiate, reconsider, and redefine one’s identity transversally and relationally. The production’s inherent logic of ambiguity climaxes in the final scene. A projected text foretells the breakdown of the 38th parallel in

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2010 and the unification of Korea and of China and Taiwan in 2013. The performers embrace and rejoice, as they proceed to remove the demarcation line from the ground. Reportedly, audiences in Gwangju cheered at this point. Nonetheless, as soon as an apparent resolution is achieved, the Indifferent Man returns to throw a bucket of cold water at the jubilant performers, leaving them soaked in astonishment and discomfort (Fig. 4.2). Does this represent a wake-up call to reality? Does the final intervention of a dispassionate deus ex machina suggest that the prospect of unification is merely a deception, or yet another childish game, thus defusing any facile utopia of painless reconciliation? Considering the creative team’s alertness to intraregional debates, such a facile solution as the ‘one China’ argument (though it is not specified under which government) should not be taken at face value. On the one hand, if one postulates that democracy is a precondition to overcoming the division system, in keeping with Paik’s ODS theory, then this deceptively naive conclusion may dispute the political status quo by presuming the advent of a democratic China. On the other hand, the Indifferent

Fig. 4.2 Final water scene in the Grass Stage production of 38th Parallel Still Play (Photo by Chen You-wei. Courtesy of Grass Stage)

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Man may embody a dramaturgical principle of estrangement. Along with the Old Man, the Indifferent Man is the only named character, which suggests a key semantic or symbolic function. Whenever the overarching tenor of emotive neutrality slips into overt romanticism or melodramatic excess, the Indifferent Man intervenes as a distancing device to preserve rational detachment and enhance the effect of theatricality. His function is to break the dramatic illusion and redirect the audience’s emotional engagement to the sphere of reality. Essentially, the finale questions the ability of the theatre to advance simple solutions to complex historical situations. As Zhao Chuan has remarked, ‘the 38th parallel is not only play (youxi) but also a current situation’.146 The epilogue does not provide any epistemological or emotional closure. Actors and audiences come together at the curtain call to sing and dance along a medley of Korean, Chinese, Japanese, and Soviet wartime tunes, and conclude with the quintessential Korean folk song, ‘Arirang’.147 The production thus wavers between estrangement and empathy, irony and idealism. It refuses to provide a conclusive answer to the ODS question and only imparts an open-ended projection of possible outcomes. It does, however, deliver a sustained vision of ‘minjian East Asia’ as a ‘non-governmental’ space for collaborative interaction between ‘people-based’ communities and solidarity networks across the region.148 The South Korean public sphere has been seen as a key mediating space for the reconstitution of a transregional minjian discourse in East Asia due to its solid tradition of grassroots activism. This is ‘because in the Northeast Asian “map of feelings”, Korea is the only country that neither has a notorious history of invading neighboring countries, nor is a super power of imposing presence on others’.149 Accordingly, the 38th Parallel project reflects an increasing ambition among East Asian intellectuals to institute informal transregional platforms that can monitor, supplement, and balance state-to-state interactions and capital-based transactions through the integration of minjian agents in sociopolitical processes, as well as in cultural praxis.

Staging the Cross-Strait System: 38th Parallel in Taipei 38th Parallel in Taipei debuted on 14–16 October 2005 at Guling Street Avant-garde Theatre during the Taipei-Shanghai-Hong Kong Tri-City

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Co-Body Theatre Festival (Sancheng xiju gongtongti, aka Tri-City Theatre Community). As with the previous instalment, the performance was largely devised, although Zhao Chuan directed the production and compiled the final script. Tom Tong (Tong Sze-hong; Tang Shikang) of Hong Kong’s Clash Theatre Group led the improvisation training while Tang Guangming, who played the Indifferent Man in 38th Parallel Still Play and created the video components in both instalments, curated the multimedia design. Taipei collaborators contributed stage and light design and live music. Zhang Xian, Tang Guangming, and Wang Molin performed in the production alongside Chung Chiao, Chen Yiling, Lin Shuling, and Duan Huimin from Taipei, and Grass Stage member, Wu Meng. 38th Parallel in Taipei is not an alternate version of 38th Parallel Still Play but its extension and culmination. It constitutes an integral element in the dialectical process instigated by the first instalment to debate, defy, and deconstruct the dualistic ontology of the division system and the binary structures of feeling that typify its cross-strait equivalent. To some degree, 38th Parallel in Taipei is antithetic to 38th Parallel Still Play. Whereas the former shuns verbal expression to rely almost exclusively on visual and corporeal signification, the latter is an extended and prevalently speech-based debate. Whereas the former delivers meaning through physicality and play, the latter accentuates intellectual analysis and individual testimony. Whereas the former attempts, to an extent, to weave a consequential dramaturgical tapestry by focusing on distinct dramatic situations wherein actors step in and out of various personae and states of becoming (animal, corpse), the latter is entirely plotless. Compared to the former, moreover, the latter reflects more closely on Taiwanese history and politics. The performers go onstage as themselves (Zhao Chuan’s 2005 unpublished script designates them as either a collective ‘people’/‘mass’ [qunzhong ] or by their real-life names) to scrutinize individual and family histories, mutual relationships, and divergent perceptions of the Cold War by way of personal storytelling: All (in chorus): What shall we perform on this stage today? Fifty years ago, fifty years later; in history, at present; divided by politics and military affairs; the Korean Peninsula and the two sides of the Taiwan Strait; a reflection on indissoluble, unbroken destinies.

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The performance resembles ‘a symposium’ or ‘a piece of performance art’ that delves into mutual relations between ‘you, me, him/her, the stage, and history’. It ‘emphasizes process’, ‘has no conclusion’, and is structured as an ‘unconventional play within the play’,150 for it reviews salient moments of the Gwangju performances of 38th Parallel Still Play and their aftermath, interspersed with biographical accounts of life across the Strait. 38th Parallel in Taipei can, therefore, be understood as a summary, an expansion, and a meta-comment on 38th Parallel Still Play. At the time of the Gwangju performances, Zhang Xian was working on an adaptation of Antigone called The Raped A-n-t-i (Bei jianwu de Andi, 2005). His and Zhao’s research into Greek tragedy during that period partly filtered into this second instalment of the 38th Parallel series. They envisioned the cast as a polyphonic chorus, yet one invested with nonAristotelian distancing functions of Brechtian parentage, since the Taipei production intended to ‘question reality’ (biwen zhenshi) and extend the implications of the theatrical performance to the stage of the quotidian and the public sphere of real life.151 Additionally, Zhao has invoked the Artaudian concept of cruelty (canku) to denote the persistent and occasionally ruthless practice of self-excavation the actors subjected themselves to during the performances.152 His understanding of language’s role in unearthing the ‘depths’ of one’s consciousness is, again, reminiscent of the Deleuzian interpretation of the language–body relationship in Artaud. Commenting on the improvised playscript, which the performers kept challenging and changing night after night, Zhao notes: ‘At this stage, language is no longer illustrative, nor is it dialogic; it becomes flesh. Like the body, it can feel, it occupies space, and aches when crushed or constrained’.153 38th Parallel in Taipei interweaves history and present, collective experience and private narration to question the legacy of the cross-strait system in Taiwan since the 1950s. The older male performers (Zhang Xian, Chung Chiao, and Wang Molin) address ideological and identitarian topics concerning the Cold War regime under Martial Law, the White Terror, and the question of independence versus unification, whereas the younger female performers delve into intense self-exploratory accounts of individual and family histories. Notwithstanding its progressive leftist pedigree, the production appears, to a degree, to establish a gender-inflected divide by allocating the enunciation of the grand narrative of public history to the male intellectuals while assigning the younger women to microchronicles of private memoir and minor discourse. The fundamental

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distinction concerning this performance-cum-debate is, however, between those who did and did not live through the heavy-handed authoritarianism and socio-ideological polarization of the Cold War regime. Unlike the older men, whose bodies carry a permanent mnemonic trace of the past, the younger women can only invoke the vicarious experiential heirloom handed down by their parents and grandparents.154 To some degree, all individual accounts interweave historical commentary and personal anecdotes to retrace a record of the past while negotiating one’s own subjective position within the Cold War’s residual history, as it unfolds into the present and future of China, Taiwan, and their respective communities of belonging. Collective and singular identities also intertwine. As a chorus, the performers incarnate ‘the invisible and nameless body of history’ while simultaneously ‘constructing their own selves through language’.155 Duan recounts a typical cross-strait narrative of a man—in fact, his father—who left a family behind on the mainland to start a new one in Taiwan. Wu invokes parallel memories from the Chinese side as she recalls the destruction of her grandfather’s grave during the Cultural Revolution, which deprived her family of a mourning place. But they also address more recent issues such as the one-child policy in China and social inequality in Taiwan. The younger performers challenge the older generation’s obsessive preoccupation with politics and the past, drawing attention to more pressing concerns and more important ‘lines’ (xian) in the contemporary age than the 38th parallel, ‘such as the internet line [and] the economic curve of the market’, as the script indicates. Moreover, the collaboration provided a testing ground for renegotiating mutual relations and (mis)perceptions. Lin and Wu acknowledged their unconscious internalization of the cross-strait divide by revealing tense interactions during rehearsals. Lin admitted taking pleasure in wrangling with Wu in one scene while Wu voiced her discomfort at being framed as a ‘mainlander’, rather than simply a Chinese, by her fellow actor. The production thus mobilized multiple kinds of division—gender, generational, and geopolitical. The significance of establishing a direct correlation between performance and reality is consistent with Zhao’s investment in the relationship between ju and chang —the two characters composing the Chinese word juchang , ‘theatre’. Variously translated as ‘scene’, ‘place’, ‘site’, or ‘field’, chang ‘does not only indicate an actual place for performance but also refers to the wider context, including the people within it. Ju and chang can stimulate one another’.156 Chang is the place where ju occurs and

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ju must foreground chang, so that a play or performance (xi) can always relate to the social field of reality and interfere with the environment wherein it occurs.157 The bright yellow line that partitioned the stage into two sections to signify the trope of division—as previously in Gwangju—elucidates the interaction of ju and chang as the link between theatricality and lived experience. Since one cannot overtake across an unbroken line, both on the theatre stage and on the streets outside the theatre in Taipei this ‘do not cross’ cautionary sign of the colour of road traffic markings came to denote the impossibility of trespassing—hence transcending—the imaginary yet influential borderline that separates the mainland from Taiwan, politically and psychologically. 38th Parallel in Taipei begins with a sequence of self-introductions interspersed with accounts of family genealogies and individual recollections. The definition of cultural and national identity in connection with language is a key theme in the opening scenes. Can one conflate culture and nationality? Can one construct shared identity on the basis of shared language? Does Chineseness include or exclude Taiwaneseness? The actors/speakers relate their stories in Mandarin, known as the ‘common language’ (putonghua) on the mainland and the ‘national language’ (guoyu) in Taiwan. But they also use local languages that their fellow actors, as well as members of the audience, may neither understand nor identify with, such as Shanghainese, Yunnanese, Hakka, and various inflections of Taiwanese.158 Consistent with 38th Parallel Still Play, wherein corporeal articulations are consistently framed by multimedia, visual intermediation supplements the verbal deliverance of meaning in 38th Parallel in Taipei. Oversized live captures of the actors’ physiognomic details, such as hands, mouths, and facial features, are videoed and relayed in real time as in an attempt to fix identity permanently onto a screen at the very moment in which its elusive substance is being challenged on the stage. The conversation shifts from language boundaries to ethnic distinctions, culminating in a debate on the conflicts between benshengren, waishengren, and yuanzhumin (aboriginals) that have upset Taiwanese society since the 1940s, and even more since the 1950s when the crossstrait ideological rift and the internal fracture between pro-unification and pro-independence factions hardened ethnic, linguistic, and cultural barriers on the island. Chung Chiao’s monologue intersperses considerations on the impact of the Korean War and international Cold War alliances on the cross-strait divide with personal reminiscences of growing up in Communist-phobic Taiwan. As a child, he once saw a warning sign

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depicting a man wearing sunglasses—just as he does in this performance. The man on the sign represented the ‘Communist spies’ that purportedly infiltrated Taiwanese society from all corners. ‘Only after I grew up, I realized that my way of thinking had been conditioned entirely by the Cold War’, Chung reasons. In the stifling climate of Taiwan under Martial Law, and especially as a member of the Hakka ethnic minority, Chung felt as if he was being cannibalized, just as the title character of Lu Xun’s classic novella ‘A Madman’s Diary’ (Kuangren riji, 1918). However, Chung realizes that he was also ‘eating others’, as the madman states, having internalized the anti-China mentality since childhood. His stream of consciousness thus frames the cross-strait crisis as an act of consanguine and intra-ethnic cannibalism. Taiwan’s anti-Communist paranoia is exposed further in Lin’s soliloquy. Lin recollects the ubiquitous slogans against mainland ‘bandits’ which she learned in school and became so ingrained in her mind that when she eventually met mainlanders for the first time she was afraid to talk to them, assuming that they might be spies. As mentioned previously, 38th Parallel in Taipei reviews salient moments of the Gwangju and Shanghai performances of 38th Parallel Still Play—from the video prologue to the portraits of the nameless victims of institutional atrocity, from the ludic play to the restless spirits crawling among the ruins of war, from moments of antagonism and provocation to lyrical interludes of peaceful commemoration. The media components are relayed in their original form, whereas the theatrical sequences are partly narrated and partly re-enacted (Fig. 4.3). Processes of production and reception are also retraced through reminiscences of past rehearsals and performances and reconstructions of critical and spectatorial responses. Taipei audiences are told of the unflattering judgement of a Beijing critic in Gwangju, who found the first instalment disrespectful of the past because its insistence on games (youxi) trivialized ‘the wounds of history’ as mere ‘children’s play’ (erxi), as noted in Zhao’s production script. As if to offset accusations of superficial insensitivity towards historical trauma, Chung and Zhang interpose poignant recollections of their visits to a former execution ground in Shanghai and mass graves in Taipei and Gwangju. As with the first instalment, cross-comparisons of Korean and Chinese involvement with Cold War politics and critiques of the Korean conflict’s repercussions on the China–Taiwan divide are conveyed transmedially and transtextually. Film footage of the Korean War punctuates readings of Mao Zedong’s military writings and General Matthew

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Fig. 4.3 A scene of ritual offerings from the South Korean performances of 38th Parallel Still Play is reconstructed in the 2005 production of 38th Parallel in Taipei (Photo by Xu Bin. Courtesy of Grass Stage)

Ridgway’s memoir, The Korean War (1967).159 A Chinese war veteran’s filmed testimony of the horrors of the frontline intersects Mao and Ridgway’s texts. Extracts from the US Army Commander’s diary reveal the United States’ hegemony in the conflict and impact on East Asian diplomatic relations in its aftermath. Likewise, Mao’s writings— in which the Korean War is denounced as an act of American imperialistic aggression—testify to the PRC’s power position on the opposite side of the Iron Curtain and her strategic role as a mediator on the Korean Peninsula in the second half of the twentieth century. Chung’s ensuing overview of the war’s effects in Taiwan and Northeast Asia indicates once more a tendency to interweave history and current affairs; in other words, to connect ju and chang. Chung compares American interference in the domestic affairs of Taiwan, South Korea, and other Asian nations since the 1950s to the US-led military

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intervention in Iraq in 2003. He bemoans the Taiwanese citizenry’s passive acquiescence, in the past as in more recent times, claiming that ‘the American value system has seeped through every person’s bones’, as recorded in Zhao’s production script.160 As a performance in journey-form, 38th Parallel in Taipei continues and completes the itinerant route which 38th Parallel Still Play inaugurated in Gwangju. In addition to its mobile production approach— contingent on the physical travel of both performers and performance—in this second instalment, too, the poetics and politics of travel lend a discursive framework wherein transnational histories and cross-strait imaginations can be situated, conceptualized, and conveyed performatively. At one point, Wang reminisces his travels to Japan—Taiwan’s former colonizer—while Chung recalls dreaming of a train ride across the Taiwan Strait: on a deserted carriage, he found the ashes of his mainland ancestors and a genealogical tree inscribed with his father’s handwriting. Travel narratives and itinerant imageries intersect like roads, rails, and routes on a journey, as they lead the transborder voyages across history that the two productions trace—both real and symbolic—to their final destination. As with 38th Parallel Still Play, 38th Parallel in Taipei does not impart a final verdict on the unification versus independence debate, not even a utopian projection of hypothetical futures of the kind posited in the first instalment. All possible arguments and counterarguments about the China–Taiwan question are considered, including issues of ethnic and cultural affinity, economic rationales, class divides, ideological motives, comparisons with the European Union and the German reunification model, and predictions of the eventual disappearance of nation-states. Transnational grassroots approaches to conflict resolution are once more thrown into relief; the onstage debate highlights the benefits of a generative shift from nationalism to ‘transnational history’—namely, to a vision of history as the political and intellectual outcome of ‘networks of influence and interconnection that transcend the nation’.161 The performance resonates once more with scholarly debates on the historical necessity of ‘de-Cold War [ing]’ the cross-strait discourse to bring about ‘great reconciliation’ between benshengren and waishengren, pro-independence and pro-unification factions, Chinese and Taiwanese societies, as well as across East Asia.162 In Chen Kuan-hsing’s formulation, to ‘de-Cold War’ is not synonymous with endorsing historical amnesia. It rather denotes an alternate discursive regime that can help

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East Asian communities unpack hitherto ‘unspoken histories’ and alleviate the lasting frictions that imperialism, colonialism, and the Cold War have brought upon the region.163 Minor intellectual alliances and transregional interaction—not only virtual but also by repeated ‘physical encounter’—are crucial to reconciliation, and so is the critical cross-comparison of ‘living history and popular memory’, affective structures, and traumatic experiences of historical pain.164

Trans-Asian Rhizomes of Collaboration: Asia Meets Asia In 2008, Grass Stage joined their Hong Kong and Taiwan collaborators in the extended trans-Asian network of AMA, a non-profit organi¯ zation established in 1997 by Ohashi Hiroshi of Tokyo’s DA·M Theatre and Tom Tong of Hong Kong’s Clash Theatre Group to foster intercultural knowledge through transregional collaboration.165 Between 2009 and 2014, Grass Stage widened the reach of their minjian vision through participation in a series of itinerant AMA productions involving collaborators from several localities in Asia and the Middle East. A memorandum published on AMA’s website and social media channels elucidates the network’s intent to ‘cultivate the diversified cultural provinces of Asia to contribute to coexistence and peace’ and to nurture ‘relations of mutual trust’ through ‘the frequent performance of collaborative pieces beyond borders’. AMA’s action plan consists of five points: ‘To Know, To Collaborate, To Open, To Communicate, To Gather’.166 ‘To know’ means to enhance public knowledge not only of theatre developments but also of sociopolitical conditions in the network members’ homelands by facilitating dialogues between artists and audiences that are ‘close geographically but distant politically/religiously/socially’. ‘To collaborate’ refers to the collective production of works that tackle issues of globalization, development, and human rights and address transnational experiences of warfare, migration, exile, human trafficking, social violence, religious discrimination, and economic inequality. The purpose is to overcome cultural, linguistic, religious, and political barriers, boost a sense of community and transregional identity, and reflect critically, as well as comparatively, on shifts in politics, economics, and societal processes. ‘To open’ means to relinquish the ivory tower to engage in immersive experiences that can provide young people and unprivileged social groups with opportunities for self-empowerment and growth

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through intercultural contact. ‘To communicate’ entails the creation of informal networks that can present an alternative to official channels of cultural diplomacy. ‘To gather’ requires joining forces with both professional and amateur practitioners to produce performance outside conventional settings and promote interaction between communities.167 Once more, state-to-state relations are underemphasized in favour of city-to-city—or place-to-place—minor connections. AMA’s grassroots philosophy sets them apart from mainstream cultural institutions, whose primary goal is to showcase major international acts or simply invite artists to present work with little or no involvement with the local artistic community as well as with one another. AMA is about sharing, not showing—process, rather than product. It designates itself as a network that draws strength from embodied relationality and direct ‘people to people exchange’.168 As noted previously, to foreground relationality and communitarianism within the trans-Asian theatrical rhizome is not tantamount to subscribing to an idyllic vision of Arcadian harmony; cultural exchange can indeed turn into cultural conflict. Yet AMA’s concept—originally a microfestival of performances, workshops, and symposia which subsequently expanded to include collaborative productions—has provided theatremakers of disparate backgrounds with an active social platform for sharing practices and initiating joint projects. AMA’s inaugural festival took place in November 1997 at the Proto Theatre in Tokyo, with the participation of DA·M, Clash, and the Castle Theatre from Suwon, South Korea. With the second gathering in 1998, the programme became itinerant, travelling from Tokyo to other Japanese and Asian cities. The network’s membership extended to include an increasingly wider spectrum of cultures and countries from East, South, and Southeast Asia and the Middle East (in 2018, it counted members from seventeen Asian regions). AMA’s signature collaboration, Unbearable Dreams , premièred in 2000. Whereas the first instalment only involved members of DA·M and Clash, the project was later reconceived as a regular trans-Asian series exploring ‘the common fates of Asians from ¯ and Tong have described Unbearable Dreams diverse regions’.169 Ohashi and their approach to performance as ‘image theatre’ and ‘action theatre’, respectively.170 As a constellation of disparate cultural satellites, AMA strives to dismantle linguistic barriers by privileging physicality, improvisation, and devised practice. Their projects give prominence to unrehearsed processes that foreground affective, sensorial, and kinaesthetic communication over form and aesthetics. Script and narrative are devaluated in

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favour of movement and voice. When speech is deployed in performance, it often serves as a carrier of sound in a heteroglossic and often deliberately dissonant Babylon of transecting idioms and disjointed enunciations. Unbearable Dreams 2 premiered at the fourth AMA festival in October ¯ 2003 in Tokyo and was co-directed by Ohashi, Tong, and Wang Molin with a cast of performers from Tokyo, Hong Kong, Taipei, and Hanoi. In November of the same year, the performance programmes, workshops, and symposia, which involved 32 artists from Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Iran, and Iraq, travelled to Taipei’s Asia Pacific Little Theatre Festival, supported by Taipei City Government’s Department for Cultural Affairs.171 Performances took place in a purpose-built tent theatre at the Huashan Arts District with neither elaborate stage sets nor costumes, as in an open rehearsal. The script was sparse, and the performers spoke infrequently. Their physical postures and nonsynchronized monologues in Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese, and Vietnamese engendered a harsh cacophony of contortions and noise. A tapestry of fragmented vocalizations, screams, groans, sneers, and loud percussions lent a jarring soundtrack to a resilient kinesis of the oppressed which conjured harrowing scenarios of conflict and struggle—unwanted and ‘unbearable’ visions of nightmarish realities. The repertoire of bodily actions devised by the performers, some of whom were blindfolded and some truly blind, generated a visual and affective landscape of profound desolation—a testament to places and people in ruin.172 As with the people’s theatre championed by the EAPTN and its member groups, the grassroots activism of Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed informs the AMA approach, along with Eugenio Barba’s ‘third theatre’. As with the third theatre, AMA can be envisaged as a ‘theatrical archipelago’173 that sets itself apart from both the mainstream and the avant-garde. Its constituency inhabits the peripheries of culture and capital, and values ‘relationships’, or ‘network[s] of relationships’, more than production.174 As with the third theatre, AMA is an artist-driven ‘voluntary alliance’, which relies on direct, personal, and informal connections between participants rather than on external promoters.175 Its significance is not found in economic value but in its social implications. Likewise, the third theatre’s tradition of bartering, which AMA embraces, originates from relational archipelagos of exchange where performance constitutes the only currency. The token of exchange does not matter—it can be a gesture, a movement, a song, a story, or a technique—and neither does the final product. What matters is ‘the process of exchange itself’.176

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The rise of Islamophobia following the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York, the global war on terror, and armed conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, and Bangladesh were core critical concerns in the 2003 AMA gathering. In the Bangladesh Centre for Asian Theatre’s adaptation of the classic Sanskrit play, The Breaking of the Thighs (Urubhangam, by Bhasa, circa second–third century AD), scenes of epic battles between the Kauravas and the Pandavas, from the Mahabharata, were recontextualized through a blend of improvisation and Bengali performance techniques to reflect current world affairs.177 As with Zuni Icosahedron’s 1T2C commissions, surveyed in Chapter 3, participants were assigned a fixed set of production parameters so that all contributions would feature the same basic set design, run for no longer than one hour, and end with a post-performance discussion. In keeping with the principle of performance barter, each group run a one-hour workshop for the other contributors to set a common ground for collaboration.178 In the same manner as the 1T2C productions employed xiqu stage conventions to address contemporary events, classical texts and performance paradigms were adapted in this and subsequent AMA programmes to respond to present-day concerns. As with the Zuni collaborations, workshops and public forums were held routinely alongside the performances. Three symposia involving theatremakers, writers, critics, academics, and social activists took place in Taipei in 2003 with the purpose of reassessing postcolonial legacies and socioeconomic disparities in Asia.179 Their titles—‘Asia in the Neighbourhood’, ‘Asia in the Distance’, and ‘Asia in Dreams’—collectively denote an understanding of the region as a chromatic assemblage of geopolitically adjacent and often culturally affine communities, which have been made distant by internal division and by the othering gaze of colonialism. AMA has forged a maze of ‘organic subterranean bridges’ to reconnect these intersecting routes of endogenous and exogenous separation ‘in the country of the theatre’—a liquid constituency that ‘is united although spread in geographically distant places’.180 In these conversations, Asia is framed, and occasionally romanticized, as an imagined transnational community. But Asia is also a concrete social discourse and critical framework, which can prompt alternate regimes of production and dissemination of practices and engender an enhanced sense of self-awareness through crosscomparison.181 Unbearable Dreams 2 has been described as an intercultural collaboration that strives to shape a new pathway for ‘Asian theatre’ (Yazhou juchang ) through ‘collective creation’ (jiti chuangzuo).182

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This description reflects an Asia-focused agenda that supports the decolonization, deimperialization, and de-cold waring of trans-Asian intercultural crossings rather than hegemonic interactions of the classic East– West/North–South variety. In 2005, the borders of the ‘Asian neighbourhood’183 were stretched to Cambodia, Mindanao (Philippines), Vietnam, Assam (India), Afghanistan, and Kyrgyzstan. The Integrated Performing Arts Guild (IPAG) from Mindanao, the Sovanna Phum Company from Phnom Penh, and Taipei’s Waterfield Theatre (Shuitian buluo gongzuoshi, a Taiwanese aboriginal group) jointly produced Reviving Subalternity: Resisting Assimilation and Destruction of Civilization/Genocides . The programme exposed the hostile effects of globalization and industrialization on local aboriginal cultures, the marginalization of indigenous civilizations in modern societies, the predicaments of minority groups in regions ravaged by wars and genocides, and the role of subalterns in postcolonial contexts. First-hand accounts of Pol Pot’s genocide in Cambodia and of the discrimination of aboriginals in Mindanao and Taiwan took centre stage.184 Steven P. C. Fernandez of IPAG, one of the co-directors, notes that despite adverse factors such as language barriers and time constraints (the performance was devised in Taipei in only six days), the team’s focus on physical performance and a shared pool of improvisational techniques assisted the transmission of methods and traditions. Unified production guidelines were set in addition to predefined critical themes, in keeping with previous AMA projects. Reviving Subalternity was performed at the Huashan Arts District among the ruins of a former factory that was bombed by the Imperial Japanese Army during the Pacific War. The environmental location provided a hauntological locus permeated with potent mnemonic undertones, so that time- and place-specificity shaped the delivery of the production’s critical concerns. Writing in May 2005, Fernandez notes that the performances scheduled in October at the Azabu Die Pratze Theatre in Tokyo would inevitably differ from those in Taipei ‘because the impulses that drove our artists to recreate sense in the Hua Shan performance cannot be duplicated’.185 As with the 38th Parallel series, Reviving Subalternity elucidates the mechanisms by which the viatorization of form can activate alternate meanings. Nomadic performance does neither reflexively apply old techniques to new content nor adapts old textual conventions to new forms to be reproduced and circulated infinitely and without variation. Nomadic performance acquires signification through

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mobility. The perspective, place, and parameters of production are decisive to the constitution of performance in journey-form, as shifting determinants generate shifts in accents, affects, and motivations. Unbearable Dreams 3 also premièred at AMA 2005 in Tokyo and ¯ was co-directed by Tong, Ohashi, Hanasaki Setsu, and the Bangladeshi Kamaluddin Nilu. For the first time, this instalment involved participants from the Chinese and Indian diaspora alongside performers from Tokyo, Hong Kong, Taipei, and Hanoi. Subsequent to the Tokyo run, an abridged version performed only by Clash and DA·M members travelled to Hong Kong. Clarence Tsui of the South China Morning Post writes that the production challenged ‘what people take for granted in their lives […] the intense pressure that life in a capitalist society inevitably generates, including the stress of work, fears about layoffs and pay cuts, and the constraints that women and other socially disadvantaged groups face’.186 The Unbearable Dreams collaboration resumed in 2009, after a fouryear hiatus, when Zhao Chuan joined the directorial team of the fourth ¯ instalment alongside Ohashi, Tong, Wang, Robijita Gogoi from Guwahati (Assam), and Mahmoud Salimi from Kabul.187 Zhao has categorized Unbearable Dreams 4: Lost Home and his subsequent contributions to the series, Unbearable Dreams 5: Return (2010) and Unbearable Dreams 6: Hope (2011)—in which he also performed alongside other Grass Stage members—as distinct manifestations of ‘Asian physical theatre’ (Yazhou shenti juchang ) and minjian society that thrives at the margins of official and commercial performance cultures.188 The production targeted the often-neglected undersides of globalization, voicing ‘the struggles and resistance of many throughout Asia’.189 It explored conditions of displacement, terror, and conflict, including the war in Afghanistan, the predicaments of migrants and refugees, and human trafficking. The 2009 edition testified, as well, to the decisive role of technology in the realization of intercultural performance networks not only for communicative and promotional purposes but also as a creative medium and a channel of performance in absentia. Visa issues and difficult conditions in their home regions prevented Gogoi and Salimi from travelling to Tokyo, but they participated remotely, via telephone and the Internet, so that the performance in journey-form could still occur.190 A second regular collaboration involving Grass Stage, Body Phase Studio, DA·M, and Clash between 2008 and 2012 is the itinerant performance, Lu Xun 2008 (Lu Xun erlinglingba). The production has toured East and South Asia extensively since its debut in Taipei, Hong Kong,

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Shanghai, and Tokyo in October–November 2008. The concept draws on the key tropes of collective violence, cannibalism, and (in)human bestiality of Lu Xun’s ‘A Madman’s Diary’. Zhao wrote a text, loosely based on Lu Xun’s, to be delivered in different languages and at different times during an otherwise primarily physical performance. The text complements improvised actions and devised vocal fragments that channel the ‘latent beastliness in our stifling contemporary society’.191 In Shanghai, Lu Xun 2008 was part of a four-day programme of site-specific events, Under Lu Xun Banner: Body Experience in East Asia, held on the DDM Warehouse construction site (Fig. 4.4). The initiative marked the ninetieth anniversary of the publication of ‘A Madman’s Diary’ and explored its legacy as a foundational text in modern East Asian literary and intellectual histories. A team of Chinese, Japanese, South Korean, Taiwanese, and Hong Kong performers curated the East Asia Body Presentation Series (Dongya de shenti chengxian), and Grass Stage members presented Solo Creations (Geren chuangzuo duanju). In 2011, the production was presented with the new title, Lu Xun’s ‘A Madman’s Diary’ (Lu Xun ‘Kuangren riji’),

Fig. 4.4 A performance of Lu Xun 2008 by Asia Meets Asia in Shanghai (Photo by Tang Ting. Courtesy of Grass Stage)

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at the Tagtas (Trans-Avant-garde Theatre Association) festival in Tokyo and, again, in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Taipei.192 An updated version, Lu Xun 2012: A Madman’s Diary, travelled from Tokyo to Hong Kong, Taipei, and Bangalore with AMA’s ‘Resistance and Hope’ tour in 2012. As a pioneer of Chinese modernity, Lu Xun offered the three Sinophone co-directors (Zhao, Wang, and Tong) with a shared cultural anchor by which to delve into the socio-historical trajectories of their respective ¯ nations since the twentieth century. Ohashi’s participation endowed the project with an added trans-Asian dimension, opening it up to more complex relational comparisons on the wider discourse of Chinese and Asian modernities, also in view of Lu Xun’s impact on modern Japanese social and intellectual movements. Zhao Chuan has noted the potent ‘geophysical energy and unity’ triggered by this collaboration, which ‘ushered in a new sense of commonality in the face of globalisation’.193 Significantly, the 2012 tour retraced the rhizomatic trajectory through Asian modernities that Takeuchi Yoshimi—a prominent Sinologist, translator, and Lu Xun scholar—envisioned in his landmark 1960 lecture, ‘Asia as Method’, for the performance journeyed from Japan via the Sinophone territories of Hong Kong and Taiwan to reach India. Takeuchi pioneered a vision of Asia as a complex network of relations, and his groundbreaking attempt to re-evaluate Asian modernities comparatively paved the way to successive Asia-focused epistemologies such as Chen Kuan-hsing’s aforementioned reformulation of Asia as method and Mizoguchi Y¯ uz¯o’s ‘China as Method’.194 Muto Ichiyo contends that Takeuchi’s intuition of the function of Orientalism in shaping constructs of ‘East’ and the ‘West’ predates Edward Said’s propositions of several decades. As he elucidates, Europe became conscious of itself as a unity only by contact with non-Europe (Asia). Conversely, Asia’s geopolitical constituencies have predominantly conceived themselves in relation to non-Asia (Europe and North America), rather than as components of a self-defined, self-regulating, and endogenously cohesive structure.195 Takeuchi critiqued the Japanese path towards modernity as superficial, affected, and fundamentally flawed, in that post-war Japan continued to identify persistently—and somewhat delusionally, in the light of the catastrophic defeat of 1945—with the United States and the advanced nations of Western Europe instead of associating with the rest of Asia to resist foreign imperialism. He was one of the first Asian intellectuals to reject East– West hierarchical juxtapositions and to rethink modern Japanese history

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through a trilateral comparison with modernization processes in developing Asian nations such as China and India.196 Later generations of intellectuals have revisited Takeuchi’s propositions as a persuasive paradigm, even ‘an inescapable demand’,197 to dismantle residual colonial mentality and challenge resilient structures of thought entrenched in imperialistic epistemologies and binary thinking. As Chen argues in his reappraisal of Takeuchi’s method, ‘only by inter-referencing places, which are closer to each other or share similar historical experiences’, can Asian intellectuals overcome the ‘catch up’ (with the West) ‘normative mode of knowledge, and produce more grounded knowledge and understanding that come closer to historical reality’.198 Likewise, artistic projects such as those surveyed in this chapter can contribute to forging an augmented sense of trans-Asian relationality by reflecting on Asia’s historical realities rhizomatically—through collaboration and cross-comparison. As Takeuchi notes, the study of a nation’s socio-historical condition—for instance, China—‘must be situated within a larger framework’ that ‘exceed[s] the efforts of any single individual’.199 Diplomatic conflicts and territorial divisions notwithstanding, East Asia has been transitioning from a time when shared history posed a barrier to integration to one in which the interweaving of historical experience and enhanced awareness of cultural affinity have prompted intellectuals and artists to move beyond Cold War rivalries and interrogate the past anew. The traumatic inheritances of colonialism, imperialism, and militarism have been revisited, and new informal alliances have been forged. By foregrounding Asia as a grassroots social space and discursive community, these collaborations reflect performatively on a notion of Asia as a shared ‘emotional signifier’.200 Artistic networks of this kind are all the more valuable since they are not always paralleled by comparable scholarly efforts, particularly in mainland China. As noted previously, the Chinese academia’s ‘horizontal awareness’ of East Asian intellectual communities is still quite limited.201 On the whole, Asia lacks a truly inclusive awareness of herself as an integrated rhizomatic system that can be ontologically and epistemologically autonomous from the non-Asian ‘West’. Consequently, the EuroAmerican zone remains the primary referent for comparison and ultimate target of emulation. It is in this context that Baik Youngseo has advanced the notion of ‘East Asia in intellectual praxis’ while concurrently warning against a mindless replacement of the hegemonic East–West binary with equally exclusionary formulations of Asia versus non-Asia. Rather, Baik

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conceives ‘East Asia as a process of formulating an identity, not as an entity’, and an adaptable organism that is ‘always subject to self-reflection’.202 The intellectual value of conceiving Asia as a liquid assemblage of ‘peopleto-people’ formations informs the artistic approach of the EAPTN, AMA, and their member groups as vectors of ‘critical regionalism’ that can intervene positively in global capitalist practices.203 These minor transnational networks testify to Asia’s capacity to generate potent meanings and genuine critical mass ‘only as inter-Asia as dynamic processes’—namely, ‘people’s level processes of interaction, cross-fertilization and formation taking place amongst hundreds of millions of different people, living, speaking, and dreaming differently’.204

Notes 1. Heonik Kwon, The Other Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 7. 2. Ibid., 1, 8. 3. Grass Stage, “Grass Stage,” Grass Stage, accessed August 10, 2018, http://grassstage.cn/grass-stage/. 4. Ibid. 5. A formal peace treaty never followed the Korean Armistice Agreement signed in Panmunjom in July 1953, which sealed the end of the Korean War. 6. Karen Laura Thornber, Empire of Texts in Motion: Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese Transculturations of Japanese Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). Firdous Azim details Rabindranath Tagore’s 1916 Japanese sojourn and other such contacts between modern East and South Asia as ‘early attempt[s] at creating an inter-Asian cultural sphere’ in “Getting to Know You, or the Formation of InterAsian Identities,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 11, no. 2 (2010): 170. 7. Thornber, Empire of Texts, 6. 8. Born in Shanghai in 1967, Zhao moved to Australia in 1988 and relocated to Shanghai in 2001. Liu was born in 1978 and studied architecture in Chongqing before enrolling on a master’s degree at Shanghai Theatre Academy in 2003. 9. Mok is the Chief Executive of the Centre for Community Cultural Development, established in Hong Kong in 2004. Sakurai has been active in Japanese social movements and tent theatre since the 1970s. He established Yasen No Tsuki in the early 1990s and has been based in Taiwan since 1999. He and the Assignment Theatre have collaborated on several productions in Taiwan and Japan and established a biannual tent theatre festival at the Huashan Arts District in Taipei. See Ron

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10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16.

17.

Smith, “Theatre of the Oppressed and Magical Realism in Taiwanese and Hakka Theatre: Rectifying Unbalanced Realities with Assignment Theatre” (PhD diss., University of California, 2006), 125–27. In 2005, he wrote and directed Taiwan Faust in Taipei with the tent theatre group Taiwan Haibizi. The production involved workers, scholars, and theatre professionals, including Wang Molin and Chung Chiao, and addressed salient events in Taiwanese history such as the experience of Japanese colonialism (1895–1945) and the February 28 Incident of 1947. Since 2007, he has also been active in Beijing. See Taozi [Tao Qingmei], “Yingjing Dazao de zhangpeng juchang zhi lü,” Nanfang wentan 4 (2006): 75–84; Dai Jinhua, “Zhangpeng ju: liudong zhong de huhuan — Dai Jinhua dui Yingjing Dazao de fangtan,” Yishu pinglun 10 (2007): 5–9. Augusto Boal, Theater of the Oppressed, trans. Charles A. and MariaOdilia Leal McBride and Emily Fryer, new ed. (London: Pluto Press, 2008 [1974]), 119. Ibid., 135, 120. Ibid., 135. Ibid., xxi. Eugène Van Erven, Radical People’s Theatre (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988). Mo Zhaoru [Mok Chiu-yu], “Xunzhao minzhong xiju,” Xiju yishu 6 (2003): 46–50. On PETA see Eugène Van Erven, The Playful Revolution: Theatre and Liberation in Asia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992); Community Theatre: Global Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2001). On BTT’s involvement with PETA and Asian people’s theatre see Sat¯ o Makoto, “On Vernacular Theatre,” trans. Yuji Sone, Performance Paradigm 2 (2006): 4–7, accessed August 14, 2018, http://www. performanceparadigm.net/index.php/journal/article/view/13/13. Gang-Im Lee, “Directing Koreanness: Directors and Playwrights Under the National Flag, 1970–2000” (PhD diss., University of Pittsburgh, 2008), 31. Smith, “Theatre of the Oppressed,” 108; Zhong Qiao, “Dongya minzhong xiju de linglei shiye,” Sixiang 6 (2007): 53. Smith discusses the Assignment Theatre’s involvement in Cry of Asia! (1989) and Cry of Asia III (1998). Chang Soik participated in the second instalment, Cry of Asia II (1995). See Lee, “Directing Koreanness,” 35–36. On the Cry of Asia collaboration see Eugène Van Erven, “Some Thoughts on Uprooting Asian Grassroots Theater,” in Staging Resistance: Essays on Political Theater, ed. Jeanne Marie Colleran and Jenny S. Spencer (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 98–120; Van Erven, Playful Revolution. See also an account by ACPC founder Al Santos [Al Rustia], “On the Road to Multiculturalism: The Cry of Asia Experience,”

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18. 19.

20.

21. 22.

23. 24. 25.

26.

27.

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Our Own Voice Literary Ezine, July 2002, accessed November 30, 2012, http://www.oovrag.com/essays/essay2002b-2.shtml. Taozi [Tao Qingmei], “Chaishi jutuan yu minzhong juchang de taidu,” Yishu pinglun 4 (2008): 34. People’s theatre in Taiwan arguably started in 1990 with Chung Chiao’s Taiwan People’s Theatre (Taiwan minzhong jutuan), the Assignment Theatre’s predecessor. The more radical and activist strands of Taiwan’s Little Theatre Movement of the late 1980s, such as Wang Molin’s ‘theatre of action’ (xingdong xiju), also resonate with people’s theatre practices. Wang has described Expel the Evil from Lanyu Island (Quzhu Lanyu de e’ling, 1988), an anti-nuclear performance he co-devised with Zhou Yichang, as social action integrated with grassroots (minjian) social movements. See Luo Qun, “‘Xingdong juchang’ de chunüzuo — fangwen Wang Molin,” in Wang Molin, Dushi juchang yu shenti (Taipei: Daoxiang chubanshe, 1990), 339–41. On Wang’s ‘theatre of social action’ of the 1980s see Chung Mingder, “The Little Theatre Movement of Taiwan (1980–89): In Search of Alternative Aesthetics and Politics” (PhD diss., New York University, 1992); Ivy I-Chu Chang, “Remapping Memories and Public Space: The Theater of Action in Taiwan’s Opposition Movement and Social Movements (1986 to 1997)” (PhD diss., New York University, 1998). Jia Shuying, “Beijing minzhong jushe de yanchu yu huodong — ji dagong qingnian yishutuan yu bingtang hulu jushe,” Yishu pinglun 4 (2008): 37–39. Tao Qingmei, “Minzhong juchang zai Zhongguo,” Nanfeng chuang 22 (2007): 90. Chen Chieh-jen and Zhao Chuan, “People’s Writing: Bitan (‘Pen Talk’ or Interview),” trans. Ouyang Yu, in A New Thoughtfulness in Contemporary China: Critical Voices in Art and Aesthetics, ed. Jörg Huber and Zhao Chuan (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2011), 98, 90. Grass Stage, “Grass Stage.” Ibid. Gui Jie, “‘Caotaibanzi’ wei xiju xunzhao di san tiao lu,” Zhongguo qingnian bao, September 4, 2006, accessed 25 November 2012, http:// news.sohu.com/20060904/n245140850.shtml. Zhao Chuan, “Caotaiban beiwanglu_ling liu yi ling,” Caotaiban de boke (blog), October 4, 2008, accessed August 11, 2018, http://blog.sina. com.cn/s/blog_5c5194ec0100avmu.html. Pu Bo and Yang Zi, “Constructing the Alternative: Grass Stage and The Little Society,” in Staging China: New Theatres in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Li Ruru, trans. Feng Wei (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 204. The Little Society, vol. 1 premièred in 2009, and vol. 2 in 2010. The two parts were merged in 2011.

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28. Grass Stage, “Grass Stage.” 29. Zhao Chuan and Zhang Xian, “Guangzhou, sanbaxian he Caotaiban — Hanguo Guangzhou 2005 ‘Yazhou guangchang’ xiju jie guilai,” Grass Stage (2005–2016), accessed November 24, 2012, http://www. grassstage.com/main_r_zhangxianzhaochuan_guangzhou.htm (site discontinued). Information and quotations from Grass Stage’s discontinued website (http://www.grassstage.com, 2005–2016) given in this chapter were accurate on the access dates provided in the endnotes and bibliography. Archived copies can be requested from the author. Grass Stage’s active website at the time of printing is http://grassstage.cn/. 30. Zhao Chuan, “Guangzhou xiju jie de qishi,” Dang xiju zhuangji liuxing (blog), November 6, 2005, accessed November 30, 2012, http://blog. sina.com.cn/s/blog_5540382b010004r4.html. 31. Namhee Lee, “Between Indeterminacy and Radical Critique: Madangguk, ˘ Ritual, and Protest,” positions: east asia cultures critique 11, no. 3 (2003): 579. 32. Ibid. The Korean term for people’s theatre is minjungguk. ˘ Gang-Im Lee (“Directing Koreanness,” 48) further distinguishes the subcategory of minjung minjokguk ˘ (Korean people’s ethnic theatre), which is closely linked to the democratization movement of the 1980s. The Gwangju Uprising broke out on 18–27 May 1980 to protest against President Chun Doo-hwan’s military regime. The violent repression of the unrest caused up to 2000 casualties. It was renamed officially as the Gwangju Democratization Movement in 1987. 33. Zhao Chuan, “Shehui juchang,” Shanhua 3 (2012), 160. In the PRC, renmin describes the revolutionary masses under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and suggests ideological identification with the nation-state’s socialist politics. In contrast, minzhong and minjian denote people-based grassroots activities that neither subscribe to the CCP agenda nor receive state support. 34. Tao Qingmei, “‘Caotaiban’ yu ‘sanbaxian’ — Zhao Chuan fangtan,” Jintian 1 (2006), accessed November 20, 2012, http://www.jintian.net/ 106/taoqingmei.html. The SDAC is Shanghai’s foremost theatre conglomerate and a merger of two former state-run institutions, the Shanghai People’s Art Theatre and Shanghai Youth Theatre. 35. Zhao Chuan, “Physical Odyssey,” in The Body at Stake: Experiments in Chinese Contemporary Art and Theatre, ed. Jörg Huber and Zhao Chuan (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2013), 105. 36. Chungmoo Choi, “The Discourse of Decolonization and Popular Memory: South Korea,” positions: east asia cultures critique 1, no. 1 (1993): 92. 37. Ibid. 38. Lee, “Directing Koreanness,” 8.

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39. Ibid., 10. 40. Yoo Kim, “Mapping Utopia in the Post-ideological Era: Lee Yun-taek’s The Dummy Bride,” Theatre Research International 32, no. 3 (2007): 299. 41. Lee, “Indeterminacy,” 555, 570. 42. Eugène Van Erven, “Resistance Theatre in South Korea: Above and Underground,” TDR: The Drama Review 32, no. 3 (1988): 158. 43. Lee, “Indeterminacy,” 558, 555. 44. Ibid., 573. Examining the role of madangguk ˘ in the Gwangju Democratization Movement, Van Erven (“Resistance Theatre,” 165) writes that several grassroots groups emerged in the dispossessed areas of Gwangju and the neighbouring countryside in the late 1970s, as artists and intellectuals encouraged workers and peasants to devise performances to mobilize the population and spread information in the run-up to and throughout the protest. 45. Zhao Chuan, “Minzhong juchang de daxi — Guangzhou 2005 ‘Yazhou guangchang’ xiju jie qianhou,” Grass Stage (2005–2016), accessed November 25, 2012, http://www.grassstage.com/main_r_zhaochuan_ mingzhong.htm (site discontinued). 46. Zhao, “Guangzhou xiju jie.” 47. Quoted in Smith, “Theatre of the Oppressed,” 112. Smith describes Chung’s work as a ‘fusion’ of Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed and Latin American magical realism, also informed by PETA’s training programmes and the writings of Lu Xun, Karl Marx, Pablo Neruda, Bertolt Brecht, Ernesto Che Guevara, and Paulo Freire. See also Smith, “Magical Realism and Theatre of the Oppressed in Taiwan: Rectifying Unbalanced Realities with Chung Chiao’s Assignment Theatre,” Asian Theatre Journal 22, no. 1 (2005): 107–21. 48. The San Francisco Mime Troupe and the Asian People’s Theatre Festival Society co-organized the multilingual collaboration Big Wind (1994/95) with partners from Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, Taiwan, and Thailand. The outcome of a three-year exchange funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, this itinerant production proved quite difficult logistically, bureaucratically, financially, and in terms of intercultural interaction. See Joan Holden, “Big Wind Blows Across Asia,” American Theatre 12, no. 7 (1995): 16–22; Mok Chiu-yu, Colin Chi-hong Wan, and Jennifer Bikki Tam, eds., When the Big Wind Blows: Four Plays of Asian People’s Theatre (Hong Kong: Asian People’s Theatre Festival Society, 1999). 49. Wu Meng, “2005 Asian Madang — Wuyue Guangzhou 2005 Yazhou guangchang xiju jie,” Da meishu 7 (2005): 14. For Chung’s account of the Madang see Zhong Qiao, “Yazhou minzhong xiju de huiliu,” Dang xiju zhuangji liuxing (blog), January 25, 2006, accessed November 30, 2012, http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_5540382b010006kp.html.

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50. Asian People’s Theatre Festival Society, “An Invitation from the Asian People’s Theatre Festival Society,” Asian People’s Theatre Festival Society, 2006, accessed November 27, 2012, http://www.aptfs.org/pastact/ 2006/invitation.htm (site discontinued); Cui Wenqin, “Hanguo — yinxiang (lianzai er),” Shenmi xiao weixiao (blog), October 31, 2006, accessed November 30, 2012, http://www.cwq.me/archives/10212 (site discontinued). The latter is a blog post by one of the Beijing participants. 51. Zhong, “Dongya,” 63; Fengzi, “[Gonggao] ’06 Dongya minzhong xiju lianmeng nianhui,” Dang xiju zhuangji liuxing (blog), December 10, 2006, accessed November 30, 2012, http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_ 5540382b010007k2.html. A second Trainers’ Training Workshop was held in Cheongsong County, North Gyeongsang Province, South Korea, in summer 2009. 52. See Zhong Qiao, “Lengzhan fengsuo xia de minzhong wenhua,” Dushu 8 (2007): 19; Zhong, “Dongya,” 64–65; Liu Yonglai and Zhang Ying, Duli xiju (Shanghai 1985–2007) (Shanghai: Shanghai kexue jishu wenxian, 2008), 141–44. 53. In 2007, Sakurai organized a tent theatre event at the Chaoyang Cultural Palace in Beijing with participants from Taiwan, Japan, and China, including Grass Stage members. Zhao Chuan, “Shenti juchang,” Shucheng 7 (2010): 48. On the Assignment Theatre’s exchanges with Hong Kong and China see also Zhong Qiao, “Yuejie de duihua,” Taiwan shehui yanjiu jikan 68 (2007): 267–86. 54. Tao, “‘Caotaiban’.” 55. Zhao, “Odyssey,” 104–5. 56. Amanda Rogers, “Butterfly Takes Flight: The Translocal Circulation of Creative Practice,” Social & Cultural Geography 12, no. 7 (2011): 663. 57. Zhao Chuan and Tao Qingmei, “Feldmanöver/Field Manoeuvres,” Theater der Zeit Spezial China 12 (2015): 32. 58. Tao, “‘Caotaiban’.” 59. Ibid. 60. Zhao and Zhang, “Guangzhou.” 61. Tao, “‘Caotaiban’.” 62. Ibid. 63. Li Yinan, “The Physical Body on the Grass Stage,” in Huber and Zhao, Body at Stake, 116. 64. Zhao, “Shenti juchang,” 44. 65. On choreopolitics see André Lepecki, “Choreopolice and Choreopolitics: Or, the Task of the Dancer,” TDR: The Drama Review 57, no. 4 (2013): 13–27. 66. Zhao, “Odyssey,” 105. 67. Ibid., 107–8.

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68. Zhao Chuan, “Shenti weihe?” Caotaiban de boke (blog), February 25, 2011, accessed November 30, 2012, http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_ 5c5194ec0100ovlm.html. 69. Zhao Chuan, “Biwen juchang,” Dushu 4 (2006): 63–70. 70. Pu and Yang, “Constructing,” 206. 71. Zhao, “Odyssey,” 108–9. 72. On Wang’s body theory see Yu Shanlu, “‘Shuxie’ Wang Molin de shentiguan: jianzhi ‘shenti qixiangguan’,” Yishu pinglun 14 (2003): 75–102. 73. Wang, Dushi juchang, 113. 74. Zhao Chuan and Wang Molin, “Yishu yu shenti de zhengzhi,” Dushu 7 (2004): 46. 75. Yu, “‘Shuxie’,” 89. 76. Lepecki, “Choreopolice,” 20. 77. Wang Molin, “‘Yazhou’ zuowei yi zhong zhuti de huayu,” Dang xiju zhuangji liuxing (blog), December 4, 2006, accessed November 30, 2012, http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_5540382b0100071s.html. 78. See Wang Molin, “Xunzhao shenti: yi Yazhou zuowei yi zhong fangfa,” PAR Biaoyan yishu zazhi 203, August 8, 2011, 84. 79. Grass Stage, “‘38 xian youxi’ xuanchuan ye,” Dang xiju zhuangji liuxing (blog), May 15, 2005, accessed August 10, 2018, http://blog.sina.com. cn/s/blog_5540382b010005js.html. 80. Ibid. 81. Bo Xiaobo, “Kan ‘Xiao shehui’ shiyan hou Bo Xiaobo yu Zhao Chuan de duihua,” in Xinrui xiju dang’an, ed. Meng Jinghui (Beijing: Zuojia chubanshe, 2011), 412. 82. Tao, “‘Caotaiban’.” 83. Koh Sung-bin, “China’s View of Korea: A Critique in the Context of the East Asian Discourse,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 9, no. 1 (2008): 151. 84. Sun Ge, “Yazhou lunshu yu women de liangnan zhi jing,” Dushu 2 (2000): 52–59; Baik Youngseo, “Conceptualizing ‘Asia’ in Modern Chinese Mind: A Korean Perspective,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 3, no. 2 (2002): 277–86. 85. Koh, “China’s View,” 151–52. 86. Ibid., 158. 87. Ibid., 162. On ‘East Asia in intellectual praxis’ see Baik, “Conceptualizing ‘Asia’.” On ‘East Asia as a project’ see Arif Dirlik, “Culture Against History? The Politics of East Asian Identity,” Development and Society 28, no. 2 (1999): 167–90. 88. Chen Kuan-hsing, Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 212. 89. Takeuchi Yoshimi, “Asia as Method,” in What Is Modernity? Writings of Takeuchi Yoshimi, ed. and trans. Richard F. Calichman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 149–65.

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90. Chen, Asia as Method, 214, 282. 91. Taiwan shehui yanjiu jikan, “Zhuanti: Chaoke dangqian zhishi kunjing,” special issue, Taiwan shehui yanjiu jikan 74 (2009). See also Baik Youngseo, “Editorial Introduction: Korea as a Problematic and Paik Nak-chung,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 11, no. 4 (2010): 481–87. 92. Paik Nak-chung, “South Korean Democracy and Korea’s Division System,” trans. Susan Hwang, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 14, no. 1 (2013): 160. 93. Ibid. 94. Baik Ji-woon, “East Asian Perspective on Taiwanese Identity: A Critical Reading of ‘Overcoming the Division System’ of Taiwan: A Radical Quarterly in Social Studies,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 11, no. 4 (2010): 595–96. 95. Paik, “South Korean Democracy,” 160. 96. Baik, “East Asian Perspective,” 593. 97. See Chen Kuan-hsing, “Paik Nak-chung’s Theory of Overcoming ‘Division System’: Rethinking the China–Taiwan Relation with Reference to the Two Koreas,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 11, no. 4 (2010): 566–90; “Intellectual Engagement Under the Conditions of the Division System: An Interview with Paik Nak-chung,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 11, no. 4 (2010): 511–23; and Paik Nak-chung, “Barriers to Reconciliation in East Asia: The Case of Two Koreas and Its Regional Implications,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 11, no. 4 (2010): 502–10. 98. The term benshengren (‘people from the province’) refers to those who migrated to Taiwan before 1945–1949, mostly Hoklo (Hokkien, Minnanese) people from Southern Fujian. This category, usually identified with the ‘Taiwanese’, also includes the Hakka but excludes the Taiwanese aboriginals. Waishengren (‘people from outside the province’) refers to those who arrived in Taiwan in 1945–1949 or shortly afterwards, hence the ‘mainlanders’. 99. Shale Horowitz, Uk Heo, and Alexander C. Tan, “Democratization and National Identity in the China–Taiwan and Korean Conflicts,” in Identity and Change in East Asian Conflicts: The Cases of China, Taiwan, and the Koreas, ed. Shale Horowitz, Uk Heo, and Alexander C. Tan (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 1–26. 100. Baik, “East Asian Perspective.” 101. Paik, “South Korean Democracy,” 160. 102. Chen Guangxing [Chen Kuan-hsing], “Bai Yueqing de ‘chaoke “fenduan tizhi”’ lun: canzhao lianghan sixiang liang’an,” Taiwan shehui yanjiu jikan 74 (2009): 37, quoted in Baik, “East Asian Perspective,” 596. 103. Chen, “Paik Nak-chung’s Theory,” 586. 104. Ibid., 583. 105. Baik, “East Asian Perspective,” 595.

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106. 107. 108. 109. 110.

111. 112. 113. 114. 115.

116.

117. 118.

119. 120. 121.

122. 123.

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Ibid., 599–600. Ibid., 594. Paik, “Barriers,” 502. Chen, “Paik Nak-chung’s Theory,” 587. A multilingual version of Antigone (Andigangni, 2013), which Wang Molin directed in Taipei with Taiwanese, Chinese, and South Korean performers, provides additional evidence to the uses of transnational collaboration to cross-compare traumatic histories. It adapts the Sophoclean text to the Northeast Asian context to address memories of February 28, Tiananmen Square, and Gwangju. Suk-Young Kim, DMZ Crossing: Performing Emotional Citizenship along the Korean Border (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 4. Ibid., 10. Ibid., 12. Ibid., 7. An episode of Pi San’s satirical animation series, Kuang Kuang’s Diary (Kuang Kuang riji), references this popular school game and shows pupils warning each other that they are not permitted to cross the ‘38th parallel’ (buxu guo sanbaxian) on the school desk. Pi San, “Kuangkuangkuang sanbaxian,” YouTube video, 18:19, posted by “HutoonChina,” October 17, 2013, accessed May 21, 2015, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYirjrP1GyA. Chen, “Paik Nak-chung’s Theory,” 579. Chen makes a similar point in “Why Is ‘Great Reconciliation’ Im/possible? De-Cold War/Decolonization, or Modernity and Its Tears (Part I),” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 3, no. 1 (2002), 79. Don Oberdorfer, The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History, new ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 7. Una Chaudhuri defines geopathology as ‘the characterization of place as problem’ in Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), xii. Susan Leigh Foster, “Choreographies of Protest,” Theatre Journal 55, no. 3 (2003): 397. Rogers, “Butterfly,” 663, 679. Zhao Chuan and Liu Yang, “‘38 xian youxi’ juben,” Jintian 1 (2006), accessed November 20, 2012, http://www.jintian.net/106/taoqingmei. html. Performance descriptions and analyses in this chapter are based on the scripts and video recordings of the performances of 38th Parallel Still Play at the Asian Madang Theatre Festival in Gwangju on 21 May 2005 and of 38th Parallel in Taipei at Guling Street Avant-garde Theatre in Taipei on 15 October 2005. Lepecki, “Choreopolice,” 14. Zhao and Liu, “‘38 xian youxi’ juben.”

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124. Antonin Artaud, “To Have Done with the Judgment of God,” in Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings, ed. Susan Sontag, trans. Helen Weaver (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 571. 125. Gilles Deleuze, “Thirteenth Series of the Schizophrenic and the Little Girl,” in The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale (London: Athlone Press, 1990 [1969]), 86–87. 126. Deleuze (Ibid., 88–89) writes of ‘breath-words’ and ‘howl-words’, describing the schizophrenic body as ‘an organism without parts which operates entirely by insufflation, respiration, evaporation and fluid transmission (the superior body or body without organs of Antonin Artaud)’. 127. Ibid., 88. 128. Lepecki, “Choreopolice.” 129. Zhao and Liu, “‘38 xian youxi’ juben.” 130. Chen, “Paik Nak-chung’s Theory,” 578. 131. Paik, “South Korean Democracy,” 160. 132. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 24. 133. Ibid., 24–25. 134. Chaudhuri, Staging Place, 5. 135. Ibid., 56. 136. Ana Mª Manzanas, “Circles and Crosses: Reconsidering Lines of Demarcation,” in Border Transits: Literature and Culture Across the Line, ed. Ana Mª Manzanas (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 9. 137. Ibid., 11. 138. Ibid. 139. Ibid., 17. 140. Ibid., 11. 141. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge, 2005 [1966]), 20. 142. Michal Kobialka, “Introduction: Of Borders and Thresholds,” in Of Borders and Thresholds: Theatre History, Practice, and Theory, ed. Michal Kobialka (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 3. 143. Ibid. 144. Oberdorfer, Two Koreas, 2. 145. Kobialka, “Introduction,” 3. 146. Zhao, “Biwen juchang,” 68. 147. The ROK government chose ‘Arirang’ as the official march of the US Army seventh infantry division for its services during the Korean War. 148. Chen, Kuan-hsing, Hu Chin-ya, and Wang Chih-ming, “Minjian East Asia Forum: Feelings and Imaginations,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 14, no. 2 (2013): 329. The Chinese minjian corresponds to the Japanese minkan and the Korean mingan.

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149. Ibid. 150. Grass Stage, “‘Taibei 38 duxian’ Zhao Chuan 2005 nian biandao,” Grass Stage (2005–2016), accessed November 28, 2012, http://www. grassstage.com/main_w_taibei38.htm (site discontinued). 151. Zhao, “Biwen juchang,” 69. 152. Ibid. 153. Ibid. 154. Chung Chiao mentions the body’s ability to retain memory in Grass Stage, “‘Taibei 38 duxian’.” 155. Zhao, “Biwen juchang,” 68–69. 156. Ibid., 68. 157. Ibid. 158. Zhang was born in Shanghai but spent years in Yunnan during the Cultural Revolution. Duan learnt some Yunnan dialect from a soldier who followed the KMT to Taipei. Chung belongs to the Hakka ethnicity. 159. Matthew Bunker Ridgway, The Korean War (New York: Da Capo Press, 1986). Ridgway was the commander of the Eight US Army, stationed in South Korea during the conflict. The Mao citations are from Mao Zedong, “Order to the Chinese People’s Volunteers (October 8, 1950),” in Selected Works of Mao Tsetung, vol. 5, ed. Michael Y. M. Kau and John K. Leung (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1977), 43; “Unite and Clearly Draw the Line between the Enemy and Ourselves (August 4, 1952),” in The Writings of Mao Zedong 1949–1976, vol. 1 (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1986), 276; and “Congratulations on the Victory of the Chinese People’s Volunteers (October 24, 1952),” in The Writings of Mao Zedong 1949–1976, vol. 1, 298. 160. Chung compares Cold War culture in the Koreas and across the Taiwan Strait in Zhong, “Dongya.” 161. Ann Heylen, “The Transnational in Taiwan History: A Preliminary Exploration,” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 36, no. 1 (2010): 26. 162. See Chen, “Great Reconciliation (Part I),” and “Why Is ‘Great Reconciliation’ Im/possible? De-Cold War/Decolonization, or Modernity and Its Tears (Part II),” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 3, no. 2 (2002): 235–51. 163. Chen, “Great Reconciliation (Part I),” 80. See also Chen, Asia as Method. 164. Chen, “Great Reconciliation (Part II),” 246, 244. 165. DA·M is based at the Proto Theatre in Tokyo. Prior to establishing ¯ DA·M in 1986, Ohashi was director of Waseda New Theatre (Waseda Shin Gekij¯ o, 1978–1985). Clash was established in Hong Kong in 1997 by former members of the People’s Theatre Society (Minzhong jushe) and Outcry of Streetwise Ensemble. In the 1980s, Tong participated in political theatre performances alongside Mok Chiu-yu, including

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166.

167. 168.

169. 170.

171.

172.

173. 174. 175. 176. 177. 178.

1984–1997 (1982) and 1997 Hong Kong People, What Are You Afraid Of (1997 Xianggang ren, nimen haipa shenme). Asia Meets Asia (AMA) has been supported by a combination of government and private funding, the Proto Theatre’s own income (e.g. space rental fees) and crowdfunding. Asia Meets Asia [AMA], “What Is Asia Meets Asia?” Asia Meets Asia, accessed November 28, 2012, http://homepage3.nifty.com/aa/ 11what’saae.htm (site discontinued). Information and quotations from the discontinued AMA website (http://homepage3.nifty.com/aa) given in this chapter were accurate on the access dates provided in the endnotes and bibliography. Archived copies can be requested from the author. Some of this information is available on AMA’s Facebook page: https:// www.facebook.com/AmeetsA. Ibid. AMA, “Vol. 4 Asia Meets Asia 2003 Program,” Asia Meets Asia, accessed November 28, 2012, http://homepage3.nifty.com/aa/e03program.htm (site discontinued). Grass Stage, “Grass Stage.” Clash’s theatre of action (xingdong juchang ) draws on practices including Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, playback theatre, puppetry, drumming, contact improvisation, and PETA’s training method. Co-founder Virginia Chu (Chu Sau-man; Zhu Xiuwen) trained with PETA and participated in a workshop that Boal delivered at the Hong Kong Arts Festival in 1996. Asia Pacific Little Theatre Festival [APLTF], “Asia Pacific Little Theatre Festival 2003 Press Release,” accessed November 28, 2012, http:// assign.myweb.hinet.net/APLTF2003/index_english.html (site discontinued). Wang joined AMA in 2001 to present the first segment of his Black Hole (Heidong) trilogy at the third AMA festival in Tokyo and Hong Kong. Members of Clash and Grass Stage contributed to the second and third instalments, Beyond the Black Hole (Heidong zhiwai, 2003) and Black Hole, Ending (Heidong jieju, 2005). This description is based on the performance of Unbearable Dreams 2 at the Huashan Arts District in Taipei on 8 November 2003. The cast included actors from Taiwan’s New Formosa Blind People’s Theatre (Xin baodao shizhangzhe jutuan). Barba quoted in Ian Watson, Towards a Third Theatre: Eugenio Barba and the Odin Teatret (London: Routledge, 1993), 18. Ibid., 20. Ibid., 22. Ibid., 25. AMA, “Vol. 4.” Ibid.

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179. APLTF, “2003 Press Release.” 180. Eugenio Barba, “The Paradox of the Sea,” New Theatre Quarterly 22, no. 2 (2006): 109. 181. Chen, Asia as Method, 254. 182. APLTF, “2003 Press Release.” 183. AMA, “Vol. 5 Asia Meets Asia 2005 Program,” Asia Meets Asia, accessed November 28, 2012, http://homepage3.nifty.com/aa/e05program.htm (site discontinued). 184. Steven Patrick C. Fernandez, “Asian Theater Rising,” Philippine Daily Inquirer, May 16, 2005, E1. 185. Ibid. 186. Clarence Tsui, “There’s Safety in Numbness, but for a Clashing Good Time Just Ad Hoc,” South China Morning Post, October 30, 2005, 9. 187. Fengzi, “Jiaoban zhe hanshui yu xuelei de nahan,” in Zai juchang: Duli xiju de chengshi ditu, ed. Sun Xiaoxing (Tianjin: Baihua wenyi chubanshe, 2013), 129. Zhao and Tong met in 2003 at the Hong Kong–Taiwan Little Theatre Showcase (Gangtai xiaojuchang zhanyan) at the North Theatre in Beijing. Tong was lighting designer for Wang Molin’s Beyond the Black Hole. They subsequently collaborated on Wang’s Black Hole, Ending and 38th Parallel in Taipei. 188. Zhao, “Shenti juchang,” 48. 189. Zhao, “Odyssey,” 111. 190. Fengzi, “Jiaoban,” 129. 191. Grass Stage, “Grass Stage.” 192. Ibid.; Zhao Chuan, “Zai shijie de ling yi duan: Gangguo xiju, Zhongdong xiju, ji Riben dangdai juchang qianshe,” Yishu pinglun 5 (2011): 32–33. 193. Zhao, “Odyssey,” 110. 194. Mizoguchi Y¯ uz¯ o, “China as Method,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 17, no. 4 (2016): 513–18. China as Method (H¯ oh¯ o to shite no Ch¯ ugoku) is also the title of a monograph that Mizoguchi published in Japan in 1989. 195. Muto Ichiyo, “Asia, Inter-Asia, and Movement: Decolonization into the Future,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 11, no. 2 (2010): 178. 196. Takeuchi, “Asia as Method,” 156. 197. Chen Kuan-hsing, “Takeuchi Yoshimi’s 1960 ‘Asia as Method’ Lecture,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 13, no. 2 (2012): 323. 198. Ibid. 199. Takeuchi, “Asia as Method,” 157. 200. Chen, Asia as Method, 213. 201. Baik, “Conceptualizing ‘Asia’,” 277. 202. Ibid., 283. 203. Ibid. 204. Muto, “Asia, Inter-Asia, and Movement,” 181.

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Bibliography Artaud, Antonin. “To Have Done with the Judgment of God.” In Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings, edited by Susan Sontag. Translated by Helen Weaver, 553–71. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Asia Meets Asia [AMA]. “Vol. 4 Asia Meets Asia 2003 Program.” Asia Meets Asia. Accessed November 28, 2012. http://homepage3.nifty.com/aa/ e03program.htm (site discontinued). ———. “Vol. 5 Asia Meets Asia 2005 Program.” Asia Meets Asia. Accessed November 28, 2012. http://homepage3.nifty.com/aa/e05program.htm. ———. “What Is Asia Meets Asia?” Asia Meets Asia. Accessed November 28, 2012. http://homepage3.nifty.com/aa/11what’saae.htm. Asia Pacific Little Theatre Festival [APLTF]. “Asia Pacific Little Theatre Festival 2003 Press Release.” Accessed November 28, 2012. http://assign.myweb. hinet.net/APLTF2003/index_english.html (site discontinued). Asian People’s Theatre Festival Society. “An Invitation from the Asian People’s Theatre Festival Society.” Asian People’s Theatre Festival Society, 2006. Accessed November 27, 2012, http://www.aptfs.org/pastact/2006/ invitation.htm (site discontinued). Azim, Firdous. “Getting to Know You, or the Formation of Inter-Asian Identities.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 11, no. 2 (2010): 165–73. Baik Ji-woon. “East Asian Perspective on Taiwanese Identity: A Critical Reading of ‘Overcoming the Division System’ of Taiwan: A Radical Quarterly in Social Studies.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 11, no. 4 (2010): 591–604. Baik Youngseo. “Conceptualizing ‘Asia’ in Modern Chinese Mind: A Korean Perspective.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 3, no. 2 (2002): 277–86. ———. “Editorial Introduction: Korea as a Problematic and Paik Nak-chung.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 11, no. 4 (2010): 481–87. Barba, Eugenio. “The Paradox of the Sea.” New Theatre Quarterly, 22, no. 2 (2006): 107–12. Boal, Augusto. Theater of the Oppressed. Translated by Charles A. and MariaOdilia Leal McBride and Emily Fryer. New ed. London: Pluto Press, 2008 [1974]. Bo Xiaobo. “Kan ‘Xiao shehui’ shiyan hou Bo Xiaobo yu Zhao Chuan de duihua.” In Xinrui xiju dang’an, edited by Meng Jinghui, 412–15. Beijing: Zuojia chubanshe, 2011. Chang, Ivy I-Chu. “Remapping Memories and Public Space: The Theater of Action in Taiwan’s Opposition Movement and Social Movements (1986 to 1997).” PhD diss., New York University, 1998. Chaudhuri, Una. Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995. Chen Chieh-jen, and Zhao Chuan. “People’s Writing: Bitan (‘Pen Talk’ or Interview).” Translated by Ouyang Yu. In A New Thoughtfulness in Contemporary

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China: Critical Voices in Art and Aesthetics, edited by Jörg Huber and Zhao Chuan, 87–101. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2011. Chen Kuan-hsing. Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. ——— [Chen Guangxing]. “Bai Yueqing de ‘chaoke “fenduan tizhi”’ lun: canzhao lianghan sixiang liang’an.” Taiwan shehui yanjiu jikan 74 (2009): 3–47. ———. “Intellectual Engagement Under the Conditions of the Division System: An Interview with Paik Nak-chung.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 11, no. 4 (2010): 511–23. ———. “Paik Nak-chung’s Theory of Overcoming ‘Division System’: Rethinking the China–Taiwan Relation with Reference to the Two Koreas.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 11, no. 4 (2010): 566–90. ———. “Takeuchi Yoshimi’s 1960 ‘Asia as Method’ Lecture.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 13, no. 2 (2012): 317–24. ———. “Why Is ‘Great Reconciliation’ Im/possible? De-Cold War/Decolonization, or Modernity and Its Tears (Part I).” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 3, no. 1 (2002): 77–99. ———. “Why Is ‘Great Reconciliation’ Im/possible? De-Cold War/Decolonization, or Modernity and Its Tears (Part II).” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 3, no. 2 (2002): 235–51. Chen Kuan-hsing, Hu Chin-ya, and Wang Chih-ming. “Minjian East Asia Forum: Feelings and Imaginations.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 14, no. 2 (2013): 327–33. Choi, Chungmoo. “The Discourse of Decolonization and Popular Memory: South Korea.” positions: east asia cultures critique 1, no. 1 (1993): 77–102. Chung Mingder. “The Little Theatre Movement of Taiwan (1980–89): In Search of Alternative Aesthetics and Politics.” PhD diss., New York University, 1992. Cui Wenqin. “Hanguo — yinxiang (lianzai er).” Shenmi xiao weixiao (blog), October 31, 2006. Accessed November 30, 2012. http://www.cwq.me/ archives/10212 (site discontinued). Dai Jinhua. “Zhangpeng ju: liudong zhong de huhuan — Dai Jinhua dui Yingjing Dazao de fangtan.” Yishu pinglun 10 (2007): 5–9. Deleuze, Gilles. “Thirteenth Series of the Schizophrenic and the Little Girl.” In The Logic of Sense, edited by Constantin V. Boundas, translated by Mark Lester and Charles Stivale, 82–93. London: Athlone Press, 1990 [1969]. Dirlik, Arif. “Culture Against History? The Politics of East Asian Identity.” Development and Society 28, no. 2 (1999): 167–90. Fengzi. “[Gonggao] ’06 Dongya minzhong xiju lianmeng nianhui.” Dang xiju zhuangji liuxing (blog), December 10, 2006. Accessed November 30, 2012. http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_5540382b010007k2.html.

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———. “Jiaoban zhe hanshui yu xuelei de nahan.” In Zai juchang: Duli xiju de chengshi ditu, edited by Sun Xiaoxing, 129–31. Tianjin: Baihua wenyi chubanshe, 2013. Fernandez, Steven Patrick C. “Asian Theater Rising.” Philippine Daily Inquirer, May 16, 2005, E1. Foster, Susan Leigh. “Choreographies of Protest.” Theatre Journal 55, no. 3 (2003): 395–412. Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces.” Translated by Jay Miskowiec. Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 22–27. ———. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London: Routledge, 2005 [1966]. Grass Stage. “Grass Stage.” Grass Stage. Accessed August 10, 2018. http:// grassstage.cn/grass-stage/. ———. “‘Taibei 38 duxian’ Zhao Chuan 2005 nian biandao.” Grass Stage (2005–2016). Accessed November 28, 2012. http://www.grassstage.com/ main_w_taibei38.htm (site discontinued). ———. “‘38 xian youxi’ xuanchuan ye.” Dang xiju zhuangji liuxing (blog), May 15, 2005. Accessed August 10, 2018. http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_ 5540382b010005js.html. Gui Jie. “‘Caotaibanzi’ wei xiju xunzhao di san tiao lu.” Zhongguo qingnian bao, September 4, 2006. Accessed November 25, 2012. http://news.sohu.com/ 20060904/n245140850.shtml. Heylen, Ann. “The Transnational in Taiwan History: A Preliminary Exploration.” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 36, no. 1 (2010): 9–33. Holden, Joan. “Big Wind Blows Across Asia.” American Theatre 12, no. 7 (1995): 16–22. Horowitz, Shale, Uk Heo, and Alexander C. Tan. “Democratization and National Identity in the China–Taiwan and Korean Conflicts.” In Identity and Change in East Asian Conflicts: The Cases of China, Taiwan, and the Koreas, edited by Shale Horowitz, Uk Heo, and Alexander C. Tan, 1–26. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Jia Shuying. “Beijing minzhong jushe de yanchu yu huodong — ji dagong qingnian yishutuan yu bingtang hulu jushe.” Yishu pinglun 4 (2008): 37–39. Kim, Suk-Young. DMZ Crossing: Performing Emotional Citizenship along the Korean Border. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Kim, Yoo. “Mapping Utopia in the Post-ideological Era: Lee Yun-taek’s The Dummy Bride.” Theatre Research International 32, no. 3 (2007): 296–311. Kobialka, Michal. “Introduction: Of Borders and Thresholds.” In Of Borders and Thresholds: Theatre History, Practice, and Theory, edited by Michal Kobialka, 1–29. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Koh Sung-bin. “China’s View of Korea: A Critique in the Context of the East Asian Discourse.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 9, no. 1 (2008): 151–66.

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Kwon, Heonik. The Other Cold War. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Lee, Gang-Im. “Directing Koreanness: Directors and Playwrights under the National Flag, 1970–2000.” PhD diss., University of Pittsburgh, 2008. Lee, Namhee. “Between Indeterminacy and Radical Critique: Madang-guk, ˘ Ritual, and Protest.” positions: east asia cultures critique 11, no. 3 (2003): 555– 84. Lepecki, André. “Choreopolice and Choreopolitics: Or, the Task of the Dancer.” TDR: The Drama Review 57, no. 4 (2013): 13–27. Li Yinan. “The Physical Body on the Grass Stage.” In The Body at Stake: Experiments in Chinese Contemporary Art and Theatre, edited by Jörg Huber and Zhao Chuan, 113–20. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2013. Liu Yonglai, and Zhang Ying. Duli xiju (Shanghai 1985–2007). Shanghai: Shanghai kexue jishu wenxian, 2008. Luo Qun. “‘Xingdong juchang’ de chunüzuo — fangwen Wang Molin.” In Wang Molin, Dushi juchang yu shenti, 339–41. Taipei: Daoxiang chubanshe, 1990. Manzanas, Ana Mª. “Circles and Crosses: Reconsidering Lines of Demarcation.” In Border Transits: Literature and Culture across the Line, edited by Ana Mª Manzanas, 9–32. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. Mao Zedong. “Congratulations on the Victory of the Chinese People’s Volunteers (October 24, 1952).” In The Writings of Mao Zedong 1949–1976, vol. 1, 298–99. Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1986. ———. “Order to the Chinese People’s Volunteers (October 8, 1950).” In Selected Works of Mao Tsetung, vol. 5, edited by Michael Y. M. Kau and John K. Leung, 43. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1977. ———. “Unite and Clearly Draw the Line Between the Enemy and Ourselves (August 4, 1952).” In The Writings of Mao Zedong 1949–1976, vol. 1, 274– 78. Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1986. Mizoguchi Y¯ uz¯ o. “China as Method.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 17, no. 4 (2016): 513–18. Mok Chiu-yu [Mo Zhaoru]. “Xunzhao minzhong xiju.” Xiju yishu 6 (2003): 46–50. Mok Chiu-yu, Colin Chi-hong Wan, and Jennifer Bik-ki Tam, eds. When the Big Wind Blows: Four Plays of Asian People’s Theatre. Hong Kong: Asian People’s Theatre Festival Society, 1999. Muto Ichiyo. “Asia, Inter-Asia, and Movement: Decolonization into the Future.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 11, no. 2 (2010): 178–83. Oberdorfer, Don. The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History. New ed. New York: Basic Books, 2001.

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Paik Nak-chung. “Barriers to Reconciliation in East Asia: The Case of Two Koreas and Its Regional Implications.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 11, no. 4 (2010): 502–10. ———. “South Korean Democracy and Korea’s Division System.” Translated by Susan Hwang. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 14, no. 1 (2013): 156–69. Pi San. “Kuangkuangkuang sanbaxian.” YouTube video, 18:19. Posted by “HutoonChina,” October 17, 2013. Accessed May 21, 2015. https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=eYirjrP1GyA. Pu Bo, and Yang Zi. “Constructing the Alternative: Grass Stage and The Little Society.” Translated by Feng Wei. In Staging China: New Theatres in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Li Ruru, 203–14. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Ridgway, Matthew Bunker. The Korean War. New York: Da Capo Press, 1986. Rogers, Amanda. “Butterfly Takes Flight: The Translocal Circulation of Creative Practice.” Social & Cultural Geography 12, no. 7 (2011): 663–83. Santos, Al [Al Rustia]. “On the Road to Multiculturalism: The Cry of Asia Experience.” Our Own Voice Literary Ezine, July 2002. Accessed November 30, 2012. http://www.oovrag.com/essays/essay2002b-2.shtml. Sat¯ o Makoto. “On Vernacular Theatre.” Translated by Yuji Sone. Performance Paradigm 2 (2006): 4–7. Accessed August 14, 2018. http://www. performanceparadigm.net/index.php/journal/article/view/13/13. Smith, Ron [Ronald Edward]. “Magical Realism and Theatre of the Oppressed in Taiwan: Rectifying Unbalanced Realities with Chung Chiao’s Assignment Theatre.” Asian Theatre Journal 22, no. 1 (2005): 107–21. ———. “Theatre of the Oppressed and Magical Realism in Taiwanese and Hakka Theatre: Rectifying Unbalanced Realities with Assignment Theatre.” PhD diss., University of California, 2006. Sun Ge. “Yazhou lunshu yu women de liangnan zhi jing.” Dushu 2 (2000): 52–59. Takeuchi Yoshimi. “Asia as Method.” In What Is Modernity? Writings of Takeuchi Yoshimi, edited and translated by Richard F. Calichman, 149–65. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Taiwan shehui yanjiu jikan. “Zhuanti: Chaoke dangqian zhishi kunjing.” Special issue, Taiwan shehui yanjiu jikan 74 (2009). Tao Qingmei. “‘Caotaiban’ yu ‘sanbaxian’ — Zhao Chuan fangtan.” Jintian 1 (2006). Accessed November 20, 2012. http://www.jintian.net/106/ taoqingmei.html. ——— [Taozi, pseud.]. “Chaishi jutuan yu minzhong juchang de taidu.” Yishu pinglun 4 (2008): 33–36. ———. “Minzhong juchang zai Zhongguo.” Nanfeng chuang 22 (2007): 89– 91.

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——— [Taozi, pseud.]. “Yingjing Dazao de zhangpeng juchang zhi lü.” Nanfang wentan 4 (2006): 75–84. Thornber, Karen Laura. Empire of Texts in Motion: Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese Transculturations of Japanese Literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. Tsui, Clarence. “There’s Safety in Numbness, but for a Clashing Good Time Just Ad Hoc.” South China Morning Post, October 30, 2005, 9. Van Erven, Eugène. Community Theatre: Global Perspectives. London: Routledge, 2001. ———. The Playful Revolution: Theatre and Liberation in Asia. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. ———. Radical People’s Theatre. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988. ———. “Resistance Theatre in South Korea: Above and Underground.” TDR: The Drama Review 32, no. 3 (1988): 156–73. ———. “Some Thoughts on Uprooting Asian Grassroots Theater.” In Staging Resistance: Essays on Political Theater, edited by Jeanne Marie Colleran and Jenny S. Spencer, 98–120. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998. Wang Molin. Dushi juchang yu shenti. Taipei: Daoxiang chubanshe, 1990. ———. “Xunzhao shenti: yi Yazhou zuowei yi zhong fangfa.” PAR Biaoyan yishu zazhi 203 (August 8, 2011): 84. ———. “‘Yazhou’ zuowei yi zhong zhuti de huayu.” Dang xiju zhuangji liuxing (blog), December 4, 2006. Accessed November 30, 2012. http://blog.sina. com.cn/s/blog_5540382b0100071s.html. Watson, Ian. Towards a Third Theatre: Eugenio Barba and the Odin Teatret. London: Routledge, 1993. Wu Meng. “2005 Asian Madang — Wuyue Guangzhou 2005 Yazhou guangchang xiju jie.” Da meishu 7 (2005): 14–15. Yu Shanlu. “‘Shuxie’ Wang Molin de shentiguan: jianzhi ‘shenti qixiangguan’.” Yishu pinglun 14 (2003): 75–102. Zhao Chuan. “Biwen juchang.” Dushu 4 (2006): 63–70. ———. “Caotaiban beiwanglu_ling liu yi ling.” Caotaiban de boke (blog), October 4, 2008. Accessed August 11, 2018. http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_ 5c5194ec0100avmu.html. ———. “Guangzhou xiju jie de qishi.” Dang xiju zhuangji liuxing (blog), November 6, 2005. Accessed November 30, 2012. http://blog.sina.com.cn/ s/blog_5540382b010004r4.html. ———. “Minzhong juchang de daxi — Guangzhou 2005 ‘Yazhou guangchang’ xiju jie qianhou.” Grass Stage (2005–2016). Accessed November 25, 2012. http://www.grassstage.com/main_r_zhaochuan_mingzhong.htm (site discontinued).

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———. “Physical Odyssey.” In The Body at Stake: Experiments in Chinese Contemporary Art and Theatre, edited by Jörg Huber and Zhao Chuan, 99–111. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2013. ———. “Shehui juchang.” Shanhua 3 (2012): 160–61. ———. “Shenti juchang.” Shucheng 7 (2010): 44–48. ———. “Shenti weihe?” Caotaiban de boke (blog), February 25, 2011. Accessed November 30, 2012. http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_5c5194ec0100ovlm. html. ———. “Zai shijie de ling yi duan — Gangguo xiju, Zhongdong xiju, ji Riben dangdai juchang qianshe.” Yishu pinglun 5 (2011): 28–34. Zhao Chuan, and Liu Yang. “‘38 xian youxi’ juben.” Jintian 1 (2006). Accessed November 20, 2012. http://www.jintian.net/106/taoqingmei.html. Zhao Chuan, and Tao Qingmei. “Feldmanöver/Field Manoeuvres.” Theater der Zeit Spezial China 12 (2015): 32–38. Zhao Chuan, and Wang Molin. “Yishu yu shenti de zhengzhi.” Dushu 7 (2004): 45–51. Zhao Chuan, and Zhang Xian. “Guangzhou, sanbaxian he Caotaiban — Hanguo Guangzhou 2005 ‘Yazhou guangchang’ xiju jie guilai.” Grass Stage (2005– 2016). Accessed November 24, 2012. http://www.grassstage.com/main_r_ zhangxianzhaochuan_guangzhou.htm (site discontinued). Zhong Qiao. “Dongya minzhong xiju de linglei shiye.” Sixiang 6 (2007): 51– 68. ———. “Lengzhan fengsuo xia de minzhong wenhua.” Dushu 8 (2007): 15–23. ———. “Yazhou minzhong xiju de huiliu.” Dang xiju zhuangji liuxing (blog), January 25, 2006. Accessed November 30, 2012. http://blog.sina.com.cn/ s/blog_5540382b010006kp.html. ———. “Yuejie de duihua.” Taiwan shehui yanjiu jikan 68 (2007): 267–86.

CHAPTER 5

Trans-Asian Spectropoetics: Conjuring War and Violence on the Haunted Stage of History

In the suburban area of Yio Chu Kang in northeast Singapore stands the largest Japanese Cemetery of Southeast Asia. Erected in 1891 as a burial ground for destitute Japanese prostitutes (karayuki-san), in the first half of the twentieth century the site became the final resting place of hundreds of Japanese civilians, servicemen, and prisoners of war who died in the period of the Japanese Occupation of Singapore during World War II (1942–1945).1 More than four decades after the end of the war, in the late 1980s, Singaporean theatre pioneer Kuo Pao Kun (1939–2002) took a stroll around the cemetery, experiencing what Jacques Derrida describes as an encounter with the ghost that is compelled by a sense of justice. ‘If I am getting ready to speak at length about ghosts, inheritance, and generations, generations of ghosts’, Derrida writes in Spectres of Marx, ‘which is to say about certain others who are not present, nor presently living, either to us, in us, or outside us, it is in the name of justice’.2 Amid memorials to illustrious residents and visitors and cenotaphs of notable war dead, Kuo found the weathered tombstones of unnamed women and forgotten men who died far from their homeland, or even sacrificed their lives for it. This almost accidental encounter with the Derridean spectre prompted a profound and protracted reflection on the war era and on the after-effects of its unsettled legacy on contemporary interAsian relations—its divisive memorialization, blind spots, lasting reverberations, and lack of closure for many survivors in Singapore, China, and Japan. At that juncture, Kuo embarked on his own search for truth in © The Author(s) 2020 R. Ferrari, Transnational Chinese Theatres, Transnational Theatre Histories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37273-6_5

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‘respect for those others who are no longer or for those others who are not yet there, presently living, whether they are already dead or not yet born’, as Derrida would phrase it.3 The dramatist’s spectral journey from the Japanese Cemetery of Singapore to the memorial landmarks of Japan, where he spent four months in 1997, would eventually dictate a potent theatrical conjuration of the spectre of the Pacific War (1941–1945)—The Spirits Play (Lingxi, 1998). Like the Derridean spectre, the five unsettled spirits whose personal narratives animate Kuo’s poignant script hover in a suspended dimension of disjointed temporality, haunted by horrific recollections of their past and by the injustice they either inflicted or endured prior to their violent deaths in the war. As Kuo reflects in the programme notes to the play’s 1998 inaugural production: ‘When a nation engineered the atrocious death of millions [but] refuses to openly accept responsibility, the dead cannot rest. That’s how my dialogue with the dead began in that modest Yio Chu Kang cemetery’.4 Kuo’s recollection of the transformative power of ‘talking to the spirits’5 echoes Derrida’s intimation ‘to speak of the ghost, indeed to the ghost and with it’,6 for the deconstructive agency of the spectre (the ghost, the spirit) perturbs hegemonic certainties and sanitized regimes of truth; it resurrects marginal testimonies and unearths suppressed histories. The spectre issues a call for accountability and ethical politics for the present and the future against the omissions of the past—‘a politics of memory, of inheritance, and of generations’.7 Likewise, the play attempts to do justice to the war’s neglected ghosts and unsung heroes: mothers who lost their spouses and children, girls wasted to the grotesquely euphemistic task of ‘comfort women’, common soldiers and deluded martyrs unknowingly sacrificed for a higher and darker purpose, and patriotic poets whose verse was made impotent by the vicious prose of reality, because to write poetry out of atrocity is barbaric—to echo Theodor Adorno’s oft-cited assertion of the impossibility of poetic expression after the Holocaust.8 The Spirits Play overlays the horrific ontology of Japanese wartime militarism in Asia—one of obscene brutality and incommensurable pain— with a humanistic hauntology by which the monstrosity of history intertwines with the humanity of memory, culpability intersects with virtue, and the Gorgonic face of the victimizer superimposes that of the victim. The alternation of indictment and atonement in the play overwrites the master narrative of the Pacific War with an alternate trace of palimpsestic history wherein the boundaries between oppressors and oppressed are as

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permeable as those between life and death, and historical advancement blends with historical atrocity, for ‘[i]nherent in the making of history is the shared memory of its monstrosity’.9 The invocation of the paradoxical figure of the ghost as a dramaturgical device conjures a spectropoetics of violence alongside a spectropolitics of moral redemption and historical justice. The conjuration of the spectre offers a medium to channel the malignant energies of unresolved events, and a conduit of traumatic exorcism. The effect is that of a polyphonic theatrical séance—a revisitation of unspoken abuse, unmourned victims, troubled memories, and tainted politics. On the haunted stage, the spectre dictates its own truth: ‘Dead spirits don’t lie’.10 As noted previously in the context of Hong Kong’s postcolonial discourse of disappearance, performance has been described as an ephemeral and ‘nonreproductive’11 medium and associated with dichotomies of absence and presence, visibility and invisibility. At the same time, contemporary scholarship has also pointed out that the theatre’s ontological impermanence and impossibility of exact reproduction are concomitant with an uncanny sense of repetition and perpetual return.12 ‘Repetition and first time, but also repetition and last time’, as Derrida would put it.13 The theatre reworks, reiterates, recycles, recreates, and re-enacts by virtue of a constitutive ontology that is, essentially, a hauntology. The theatre also recollects, recalls, retells, and reminds audiences of their individual and collective pasts. The ghosted feeling of déjà vu—‘of something coming back’14 —which is congenital to the theatre’s ‘structural hauntedness’15 is, therefore, inherently tied to the work of memory. Theatrical performance activates mnemonic mechanisms and ‘puts history into collective (re)practice’ by virtue of the archival capacity of the actor’s embodied presence.16 The theatre is a living store of private and public testimonies and a potent ‘memory machine’.17 Particularly in contexts where contentious events have neither been processed fully nor verbalized freely in the public domain, theatrical performance can effectively channel repressed, restricted, and unrecognized narratives of violence and suffering. Performance thus functions as spectral ‘medium’ in the ritualshamanistic sense, for it channels the materialization of impermanent, mutable, and ghostly presences in the theatre of history. Likewise, theatrical ghosts are often symptomatic of experiences of injustice and trauma and come back as ‘collective points de repère’—namely, as memorial points of reference that cluster around salient locations and ‘landmark’ events.18

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As Marvin Carlson formulates in his field-defining, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine, the theatre’s mnemonic attributes are not only apparent in the onstage manifestation of ghosts as dramatis personae but also in the rhetorical ‘ghosting ’19 of its constitutive elements: texts, bodies, movements, props, costumes, and venues. It is no accident that theatre-related terms such as ‘spectacle’ and ‘spectator’ share the same etymology as ‘spectre’ (from the Latin specere, ‘to see, to look at’). Such linguistic alignment underscores both the theatricality of spectrality and the spectrality of the theatre—a point that Derrida foregrounds in his agentive intimation to the spectator ‘to do what is necessary: speak to the specter’.20 Within this conceptual framework, the ensuing analysis explores two series of collaborative adaptations of The Spirits Play that summon the figure of the spectre to cross-memorialize the controversial narratives of four haunted chronotopes, or points de repère, in modern East Asia’s histories of atrocity: ‘Singapore, 1942–1945’, ‘Nanjing, 1937’, ‘Taipei, 1947’, and ‘Beijing, 1989’. The Spirits Play: Rituals to Soothe the Unsettled Spirits (Lingxi – fuwei wanghun de jidian) is a Japanese-Mandarin portmanteau of two variations on Kuo’s script co-created by Danny Yung of Zuni Icosahedron and Sat¯o Makoto of Tokyo’s Za-Koenji Public Theatre with an ensemble of kunqu (or kunju, Kun opera) actors from Nanjing, Japanese n¯ o theatre actors, and contemporary theatre and dance performers from Tokyo.21 Premiered in 2011, this Sino-Japanese hybrid deconstruction of Kuo’s script cross-references the haunted topographies and chronologies of the Pacific War—primarily the Nanjing Massacre of 1937—and of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing. ‘Beijing, 1989’ constitutes a haunted performance site and archetypal time-space of memory also in the Cantonese-Mandarin production, The Mother Hen Next Door (Geli ge da muji, 2010), jointly written, directed, and performed by Hung Chit-wah (Hong Jiehua, Hong Kong) and Hung Pei-ching (Hong Peijing, Taipei). Premiered in Taipei in 2010, the play adapts key tropes from The Spirits Play to correlate the suppressed commemoration of the martyrs of the Tiananmen Square carnage with traumatic recollections of the February 28 (2/28) Incident of 1947 in Taiwan, which sparked a period of violent political repression known as the White Terror. Updated versions of both productions participated in the Kuo Pao Kun Festival 2012: In Search of Kuo Pao Kun (Guo Baokun jie 2012—xunzhao Guo Baokun), which The Theatre Practice organized in Singapore to mark the tenth anniversary of its founder’s

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passing. The play was renamed as The Mother Hen Next Door: A Tribute (Geli ge da muji – shinian ji) on this occasion.22 Yung and Sat¯o’s adaptation highlights the ghosted qualities of performance and the constitutive spectropoetics of Kuo’s script not only because it assigns apotropaic functions to the stage proceedings, as ‘rituals to soothe the unsettled spirits’, but also because it features indigenous performance traditions that might be perceived as anatomically haunted. In other words, the production, reception, and transmission of highly codified theatrical systems such as n¯ o and kunqu (as well as jingju [Beijing opera] and koodiyattam [Sanskrit theatre], both featured in the 2011 version) are structurally defined by reproduction and repetition, hence by the ontology/hauntology of the Derridean revenant —‘that which comes back’.23 Extreme specialization, rigorous conventions, and ritual reprocessing of texts, movements, role types, musical patterns, and material objects (costumes, props, décor) amplify the ghosting effect of those ‘intangible’ embodied articulations.24 The anxiety of spectralization of indigenous traditions within the contemporary creative industries reveals an essential ghostliness, too, as these theatrical forms seek to remain relevant, and alive, within a sociocultural system that is increasingly oblivious to their complexities. In n¯ o, especially, the ghosted visitation of revenant characters that return from the afterlife to recount their stories maximizes the genre’s hauntological potency.25 In ‘the logic of the ghost’,26 moreover, the techniques of intertextuality, citation, and repurposing that are ingrained in the works under scrutiny are likewise ghosted, for the essence of adaptation as a creative practice rests on the repeated invocation of the spectre of preceding narratives. The kun-n¯ o production is haunted by prior incarnations of transnational Chinese theatres as it reclaims the 1T2C (One Table Two Chairs) relational setting of Zuni’s Journey to the East as a mnemonic device, while also implementing a 2T4C (Two Tables Four Chairs) variant—namely, 1T2C’s spectral double. Journey to the East ’s format informed both versions of The Spirits Play and two preparatory workshop performances: Tribute (Zhiyi, 2011), examined below, and the almost eponymous Journey, presented at the Shin Minatomura Theatre in Yokohama during the Kazuo Ohno Festival in October 2011.27 This corpus of productions thus comprises multiple layers of spectropoetics: thematic, as ghost plays; processual, as deconstructive adaptations; and political, because the spectres gather around these texts as both revenants and arrivants —those which have not yet come.28

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Put differently, the ghostly channelling of traumatic experience does not only perturb the perception of bygone occurrences, compelling the viewer/witness to confront the past anew but also troubles the stability of the present, ‘gestur[ing] towards a still unformulated future’.29 The plays enact a spectropolitical invocation of the social memory of events lacking closure, which linger in the trans-Asian collective unconscious like ghosts crying for justice—skeletons in the closets of culpable nation-states. Yet, by summoning the rhetorical device of the ghost as ‘a social figure’,30 spectropolitics also proffers a potent counter-discursive expedient, for it activates an affective encounter with reality ‘as a transformative recognition’.31 Spectrality endows memory with agency because it does not fixate on an immobile past but on the fluid interpenetration and reinscription of the past onto the present and future. This resonates with the capacity of transAsian collaborative performance in journey-form to negotiate the complexities of the Pacific War’s contested histories for distinct audiences, as its travels through—and haunts—a network of interconnected sites across multiple vectors of remembrance. The evocation of traumatic violence in this dramatic corpus is palimpsestic and multilayered. It summons the ghosts of the past, particularly the victims of Japanese wartime abuse in Singapore and Nanjing, to memorialize—as well as exorcize—more recent manifestations of institutional infra-violence in Taipei and Beijing, which have equally defined the national collective psyche and whose effects still haunt contemporary sociopolitical interactions. Bert States observes that ‘[i]f something is to be remembered at all, it must be remembered not as what happened but as what has happened again in a different way and will surely happen again in the future in still another way’.32 This remark encapsulates a fundamental connection between the intersecting chronotopes charted out in this chapter, namely the cyclical reiteration and transversal re-enactment of traumatic experience across haunted temporalities and geopathological sites, because ‘each generation witnesses, withstands, and helps produce the monster of its own times’.33

Sinophone Connections in Singapore The genealogy of The Spirits Play as a catalyst for a trans-Asian theatre of memory can be traced back to Kuo’s far-reaching endeavours to establish Singapore as a prime connective node in the rhizomatic constitution

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of Sinophone theatres. As innovative aesthetics and radical politics came to redefine the performing arts of mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong through the 1980s, Kuo and TTP were instrumental in congregating these dispersed forces into a new critical mass devoted to the rejuvenation of performance practices in the contemporary Sinosphere.34 The resurgence of Chinese-language theatres in the 1980s was reflected in unprecedented gatherings of practitioners and tours of significant productions from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China to Singapore. As argued previously of Hong Kong, the Southeast Asian city state became a strategic bridging location for liang ’an sandi exchanges and a meeting point for the most cutting-edge personalities from the various Sinophone theatre scenes of the time.35 Kuo organized two historic Chinese Drama Camps (Huayu xiju ying) in 1983 and 1987 to facilitate dialogues among theatre professionals, scholars, and educators from East- and Southeast Asia and to train a new generation of theatremakers in order to revitalize the local Chinese-language scene. These meetings have acquired almost mythical significance in the theatrical historiography of the region as the sites of seminal encounters between the founding fathers of contemporary Sinophone dramaturgy and experimental performance, and de facto cornerstones in the formation of transnational Chinese theatres. The first Drama Camp, held on 23–26 December 1983, gathered 161 applicants and seven invited lecturers on subjects ranging from playwriting to acting and directing. These were Wu Jing-jyi (Wu Jingji), founder of Taiwan’s Lanling Theatre Workshop (Lanling jufang), Daniel S. P. Yang (Yang Shipeng), then Artistic Director of the Hong Kong Repertory Theatre, Hong Kong dramatists Lee Woon-wah (Li Yuanhua) and Chu Hak (Zhu Ke), Shanghai Theatre Academy alumni Lee Wing Shek (Li Yongxi) and Xia Xiaoxin, and the Head of Drama of Singapore’s United World College, Thomas Ray.36 The 1983 Camp made for a historic occasion as it marked the first official meeting between Taiwanese and mainland Chinese theatre professionals since 1949. The second Drama Camp (30 December 1987–3 January 1988) congregated 270 participants and brought together Danny Yung, Stan Lai, Yu Qiuyu of Shanghai Theatre Academy, Malaysian director Krishen Jit, and future Nobel Laureate Gao Xingjian, who was then just transitioning from the position of resident playwright in the state-run Beijing People’s Art Theatre (BPAT) to the status of renegade exile in France.37 Kuo met Gao in Beijing in 1985 during his first visit to the mainland since his

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family migrated from there to Singapore in 1949, and again at the Asian Chinese Playwrights’ Conference (Yazhou quyu huaren juzuojia yantaohui) in Hong Kong—another important platform for Sinophone theatre collaborators in that period.38 A third Drama Camp was held in December 1991 with a majority of mainland Chinese lecturers.39 These gatherings triggered numerous creative alliances in the ensuing decades, some of which persist to this day. After a twenty-year hiatus, the programme resumed in June 2010 as the Practice Theatre Camp (Shijian xiju ying), with Danny Yung as one of the keynote speakers.40 Through the 1980s and 1990s, Kuo earned a reputation as an inspired ‘discoverer, a selector, an organizer, and a friendship-weaver’.41 In addition to travelling widely to forge connections across and beyond Asia, he assisted tours of major Sinophone productions from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China to Singapore, including Lanling’s He Zhu’s New Match ( Hezhu xinpei) and BPAT’s Teahouse (Chaguan) and Death of a Salesman in 1986, and the Performance Workshop’s Look Who’s Cross-Talking Tonight (Zhe yi ye, women shuo xiangsheng) and The Night We Became Xiangsheng Comedians (Na yi ye, women shuo xiangsheng) in 1989 and 1994. Leading actors, directors, dramatists, and designers such as Liu Ching-min (Liu Jingmin) and Fu Hongzheng from Taiwan, and Xia Chun, Ren Baoxian, Huang Zuolin, Li Jiayao, and Xiong Yuanwei from China were invited to Singapore to train and direct local casts and participate in conferences and productions, while Kuo’s plays were staged in Nanjing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong. In 1988, he directed Speak Mandarin (Jiang huayu), an unprecedented cross-strait collaboration with a cast of xiangsheng (Chinese crosstalk) performers from Singapore, China, and Taiwan, based on a co-authored script by dramatists from the three places.42 On account of such cross-border endeavours, the ‘transnation state’43 of Singapore became a strategic aggregator for Chinese-speaking artists and intellectuals at a time when it would have otherwise been politically arduous for mainland practitioners to make direct contact with their counterparts in Taiwan and British Hong Kong. In a speech given at the 1987 Drama Camp, Kuo draws on botanical metaphors to portray these transnational gatherings. Scattered across disparate ‘weather and soil’, the ‘seeds’ (zhongzi) of Sinophone theatres took distinctive shapes—and, often, separate directions—in the post-war era before finally ‘com[ing] together again’ in Singapore, also owing to their shared foundation in xiqu and early twentieth-century modern drama (huaju).44 Kuo’s expansive approach to the theatre profession,

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defined by the interweaving of links, and his multicultural poetics, invested in notions of history, place, and identity, seamlessly fit the conceptual framework of rhizomatic interculturalism outlined in the previous chapters, and so does the ontological configuration of the island city state as a ‘rhizome nation’.45 Similarly, Kuo’s personal journeys from his birthplace in China’s Hebei province to Beijing, Hong Kong, Singapore, Melbourne, and back to Singapore, mirror the nomadic disposition of a self-described ‘person without roots’ who inhabits a ‘rhizomatic space’ of in-betweenness and affective dislocation as ‘the locus for social, cultural, and natural transformations’.46 The ‘paradoxical lineage’47 of the peripatetic eunuch Zheng He, the protagonist of one of Kuo’s career-defining works, Descendants of the Eunuch Admiral (Zhenghe de houdai, 1995), recasts the genealogical bond between the legendary Ming Dynasty voyager and the composite identity of his contemporary progeny—the ‘uprooted and searching’48 people of Singapore—through the prism of the rhizome, hence ‘making roots irrelevant’.49 The foundational gatherings that spearheaded the constitution of a Sinophone theatrical transnation in the 1980s and 1990s did not subscribe to any narrowly racialized conception of Chineseness. The awareness of being ‘Chinese’ (huaren) was rather an identitarian starting point to open up a critical space for ‘cross-cultural’ (kuawenhua), ‘crossregional’ (kuadiyu), and ‘cross-field’ (kualingyu) dialogue.50 At the same time, the Drama Camps and the transregional interactions they instigated in the ensuing decades gestured at an underlying impulse to shift intellectual priorities ‘back to the East—to the heritage of Asia’.51 In a keynote address on the subject of inter-Asian exchange delivered at the Asian Art Festival in Tokyo in 2000, Kuo notes the significance of refocusing creative methods and artistic affiliations onto Asia and Asian practices through a borderless ‘poetics of transnationality’.52 Reflecting on the distinctly intercultural curriculum of the Theatre Training and Research Programme (TTRP), which he co-founded in 2000, Kuo states: This is an attempt to redraw the map of theatre-learning and theatremaking which, for a hundred years, has been dominated by the theatre of the West. But this is not the East talking back to the West. This is not to establish an Asian system to counter the West’s. […] Indeed, in this day and age, if a renaissance is at all possible anywhere in the world, I am convinced it would have to be a renaissance of world cultures rather than one of any nation or region.53

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This expansive vision of transcultural liquidity in modern inter-Asian relations has been, however, often obstructed by the uneasy copulation of remembering and forgetting of ‘our painful common history which is still very much hidden and buried’.54 Echoing the Derridean invitation to do the ghost justice—for the sake of truth, and of future generations— Kuo entreats the incomplete spectral histories of the twentieth-century theatres of violence, which ‘are all crying to be remembered and made sense of’.55 Precisely, this commitment to redress and memorialize Asia’s unresolved past prompted the Singaporean dramatist to compose that which would become his final work in Chinese, and a testament to his allegiance towards building a trans-Asian humanistic community through theatremaking.

The Spirits Play and the Violence of Inter-Asian Modernity The spirits of a Mother, a Girl, a Man, a Poet, and a General have lingered for decades on an unnamed island, where they died during a war. In the opening scene, they muse over the seasonal cycle and the unending repetition of time in the forsaken nocturnal limbo they inhabit. But beneath a deceivingly serene meditation on the natural changes in colour—from the red of falling autumnal leaves to the white of snowy winter landscapes, and hues of green, black, and blue—seeps a subterranean chromatics of death. White is mourning for the innocent, red is blood and carnage, and black is the darkness of the endless night in the realm of the spirits. The chilling sound of dropping bombs interjects hallucinatory visions of bleeding rain and blood-drenched snow in a deranged otherworldly wasteland strewn with bones and festering corpses. Scenes of unspeakable brutality from the time of their violent deaths haunt the spirits without respite. The memories are intolerable and exhausting, but they cannot let go. They keep reminiscing about their pasts—ceaselessly, year after year— to try and make sense of the futile devastation and do justice to the countless men and women who were intentionally and inhumanly sacrificed on the altar of a jingoistic ‘holy war’.56 The Mother, a ‘Model Widow’, was shot by soldiers of her own country while she cremated stacks of nameless skeletons to accord ‘them all a wife’s tribute to a husband’.57 The Girl volunteered as a nurse to assist the war effort only to be raped and forced into sexual slavery with ‘thousands of patriotic sisters’.58 The Man was a soldier who is forever plagued

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by the stench of the putrefying bodies of thousands of fellow combatants who were left to die on the island. The Poet used to write poems that glorified the motherland and her patriotic war as he reported from the front for the army’s propaganda apparatus. He began doubting the triumphalist narratives of the ‘superior nation’59 while travelling back home and realizing with disbelief that the reality of the war was one of stateorchestrated deceit and democide, that his reports were fabrications, and his poems were lies. He stopped writing and eventually shot himself. The Poet calls on the other spirits as a redeemer—a spectral agent of veracity and justice—to reveal to his stunned companions the history of their glorious nation’s self-destruction: that the past which haunts them has been twisted and concealed, that the war was lost, and that the heaps of human remains scattered across the island are mostly of compatriots who were abandoned during the final battle. He also discloses to the unsuspecting Mother, Man, and Girl that the commander-in-chief of the occupation—hence the one ultimately responsible for their cruel fates— was, in fact, the General. The General is unremorseful, hard-hearted, and in complete denial of the truth. His conceited speech is replete with empty rhetoric, false gratitude, and fanatic appeals to unconditional submission and self-sacrifice. He appears to be the sole among the five spirits whom the war did not change and who has erased all memory of his suicide upon the loss of the island to the enemy. But once he removes his military insignia to reveal the fatigued and frail physique of an elderly man—propped up by stagehands and advancing hesitantly, with the aid of a walking stick—he is momentarily restored to his essential humanity. As a counterpoint to the Poet, who has redeemed and recast himself as a noble figure, the General is a grotesque caricature, permanently adrift in delusional fantasies of erstwhile grandeur. He will never repent and never rest. In contrast, his companions harbour an ardent and almost obsessive urge ‘to go home’ and finally find peace. Yet they doubt whether it is possible for those like them, so battered and betrayed by their motherland, to ever feel at home again. The spirits can no longer remember how they descended into this liminal condition of hyphenated being—between human and ghost, executor and victim, predator and prey—and no longer seem to know where home is. As the tormented Poet keeps asking the General: ‘how did we become what we have become?’60 The juxtaposition of two legends told by the General and the Poet, respectively, about the mythological creatures Can (Brutal) and Xiang

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(Auspicious) reflect the ontology of fundamental in-betweenness that haunts the text and its protagonists. Monstrous, greedy, and destructive the former, benevolent, self-sacrificing, and salvific the latter, Can and Xiang condense the paradoxical dialectics that rests at the core of Kuo’s ambivalent portrayal of the war: one of imperialistic expansion and self-preservation on the one hand, and of self-destructing implosion and self-extermination on the other. Nowhere the script indicates explicitly that ‘home’ is Japan, that the spirits are Japanese, and that the island is a cypher for wartime Singapore. Yet we know that the final lethal battle occurred ‘more than half a century’ before.61 Supposing that the present of the play overlaps, roughly, with the time of its writing, fifty years before 1997/98 coincides with the mid-1940s. The Man recalls daily salutations to the sun during his lifetime, possibly alluding to Japan’s designation as the Land of the Rising Sun. The Poet used to report for the Sun Chronicle and one of his poems features the image of a white crane, a meaningful symbol in Japanese culture.62 The Mother’s deceased husband was in the army’s suicide squad and the General’s depiction of Can’s ‘large open bloody round mouth’, which ‘stares threateningly at the world’ from ‘high up in the sky’,63 is visually reminiscent of the red disc at the centre of the Japanese national flag. At the Japanese Cemetery of Singapore, where Kuo’s dialogue with the spirits began, the anonymous tombs of karayuki-san and common soldiers might have inspired the characters of the Girl and the Man, while the Poet and the General evoke more illustrious residents at the Yio Chu Kang graveyard: novelist Futabatei Shimei (1864–1909) and Marshal Count Terauchi Hisaichi (1879–1946). The latter was the Supreme Commander of the Japanese military operations in Southeast Asia and led the Occupation of Singapore during World War II.64 The General’s delirious account of the island’s invasion resonates with salient occurrences in the wartime history of Syonan-to (Sh¯onan-t¯o, the ‘Light of the South’), as Singapore was renamed under the Japanese. Exceptionally vivid in the collective memory of the Singaporean Chinese community is the Sook Ching operation. The mass purge of tens of thousands of allegedly anti-Japanese Singaporean and Malaysian Chinese at the hands of the Kempeitai (Japan’s military police) in February and March 1942 is comparable to the dystopian sight of disinterred ‘bodies in piles, in heaps, in stacks’65 that are strewn across the island’s killing fields in Kuo’s play. Concurrently, the island’s landscape of horror conjures notorious episodes of intra-ethnic abuse that the Imperial Japanese Army inflicted

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on Japanese civilians and military personnel across the Asia Pacific region during the war. What greatly unsettles the spirits is not so much the brutal submission of the colonized as is the calculated viciousness which the colonizer’s army and leader inflicted upon their citizenry—the systematic distortion of historical facts (‘what you can see is just a tiny portion of what you have not seen’),66 the deliberate dissipation of memory, and the senseless self-annihilation of a nation. In 1997, Kuo spent four months in Japan on an Asia Leadership Fellow Programme sponsored by the Japan Foundation Asia Centre and the International House of Japan. He saw an exhibit at the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo about a young soldier who fell in battle not far from Kuo’s birthplace in China a year before he was born. A photograph was found on the soldier’s body, at the back of which he had written ‘mother’ twenty-four times.67 Kuo references this image in the Poet’s song—a son’s farewell to his mother as he departs to join the war—which the hallucinating Mother echoes as if she were summoning the return of her own deceased child. Elsewhere in Asia, however, this soldier would not be a filial son, but a war criminal. While in Japan, Kuo lived for two months in the village of Niino in Nagano Prefecture to work on the script. There he discovered a memorial tablet of another soldier who had also died in China not far from his birthplace and met an elderly army veteran who had served in Manchuria and Malaya. Kuo interpreted these coincidences as signs of how the war ‘had fatally and intricately tied’ the Asian people’s destinies together.68 Gradually, his connection to Japan, its fallen, and its survivors ‘felt much closer’.69 Japan’s quotidian experience of the war reverberated far more deeply with that of the rest of Asia because the Japanese people, too, had suffered greatly from their country’s militarist fury, as Kuo realized. Thus came a new awareness of the war ‘as not only mass killing but also mass killing with many people supporting it’ under the sway of ultra-nationalism and mass fanaticism. There also arose Kuo’s resolve to bear witness to the criss-crossing voices of countless nameless individuals whose sacrifice ought not to be forgotten so that ‘their death will not be so wasted’.70 Hence, his theatrical testimony to the war dead, The Spirits Play, took shape not simply as a political indictment against Japan but as a humanistic investigation of the excesses of nationalism and of the reasons ‘why people died unnecessarily’.71 As the Mother states in the play, it does not matter whether the victims were friends or foes; what matters is that they must have been ‘somebody’s son or daughter’.72

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During his Japanese sojourn, Kuo delivered a keynote address at a conference on Southeast Asian theatre on the theme of the Pacific War at the invitation of Sat¯ o Makoto, who was then the Artistic Director of Tokyo’s Setagaya Public Theatre, where the gathering took place. Sat¯ o’s was quite an unprecedented gesture since Japan’s public silence on the issue of war responsibility was still ‘deafening’ several decades after the events.73 But the task of Asian intellectuals, Kuo argued in his speech, was to ‘take up the responsibility to talk to each other and hear what the spirits of the dead had to say’.74 In keeping with the cross-referential framework of Asia as method surveyed in previous chapters, the creative process and subsequent stage incarnations of The Spirits Play facilitated a ‘comparative understanding’ of the cultures and structures of feeling of East and Southeast Asia, and of their intersecting paths into modernity.75 Kuo’s critical investigation of the national character and of the violence of modernity brings him into a transhistorical conversation with such seminal Asian thinkers as Lu Xun (1881–1936), particularly in illuminating the connection between ‘modernity and monstrosity’.76 While inherently universalistic, the play does not renounce historical and geopolitical ‘specificity’ and attains universal value by retrospectively gazing at Asia’s communal past and ‘pain of becoming modern’.77 C. J. W.-L. Wee ascribes Kuo’s remarkably lucid response to Japan’s history question to his extraterritoriality, namely his ability to reside ‘in languages rather than in nation-states’78 and to benefit from the entwined intellectual legacies of an interconnected notion of Asia. Else, Kuo’s public persona may be understood in the light of Bourriaud’s aforementioned conception of the artist as a homo viator. In virtue of their fluid identities, artist-travellers inhabit trajectories, rather than sites, and build transnational and translingual networks through the rhizomatic practice of performance in journey-form. The production and reception history of The Spirits Play reflects the contested formation of inter-Asian modernities. Stan Lai was enlisted from Taiwan to direct the inaugural Mandarin production that opened at the Victoria Theatre on 10 June 1998 during the Singapore Arts Festival, starring noted mainland Chinese actor Lin Liankun, from BPAT, and Singaporean TV personality Cha Shao-Kwong (Xie Shaoguang). Kuo himself directed a revised version at the Victoria Theatre in Singapore on 13 November and at Hong Kong City Hall on 22 November of the same year during the Chinese Theatre Festival. The playwright hailed the

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play’s pan-Chinese production as a ‘pinnacle’ of Singapore’s forging of ties (jieyuan) with the Asian Sinophone theatre community.79 Albeit implicit, the allegory of Japanese imperialism in Asia did not go unnoticed among Chinese-speaking audiences, but the media criticized Kuo for presenting the former colonizers as victims, hence for being too lenient towards Japan, or even ‘pro-Japanese’.80 Yet when, in 1999, Sat¯o attempted to commission ensembles from three Asian nations with three versions of the play to present at Tokyo’s New National Theatre, the project folded because neither the Japanese Ministry of Culture nor the Tokyo Metropolitan Government agreed to sponsor it. Eventually, three other works by Kuo were selected for a special programme at Tokyo’s Asian Art Festival in 2000: The Silly Little Girl and the Funny Old Tree directed by Sat¯o with the Black Tent Theatre, The Coffin Is Too Big for the Hole directed by Putu Wijaya with Teater Mandiri, Indonesia, and Lao Jiu, The Ninth Born directed by Anuradha Kapur with Dishantar, India.81 Similarly, when Ong Keng Sen’s English-language adaptation toured Japan in 2001 after its 2000 Singaporean début, some Japanese performers who had appeared in the Singaporean production declined to participate in the Tokyo version ‘because of various personal and political reasons, considering the sensitive nature of its subject matter’.82 Evidently, although the text never makes explicit mention of Japan and portrays the Japanese predicament sympathetically, the sheer invocation of war memory stirs political sensitivities and generates anxiety. Sat¯o’s proposal to tackle The Spirits Play by inter-Asian relational comparison would materialize, at last, in 2012—ten years after Kuo’s untimely passing on 10 September 2002—in a trilateral collaboration with Zuni and the Nanjingbased Jiangsu Performing Arts Group Kun Opera Theatre (Jiangsu sheng yanyi jituan kunju yuan; Jiangsu Theatre hereafter).

Tribute (To the Spirit of Kuo Pao Kun) On 13–15 December 2002, TTP presented Works for Pao Kun: Legend Alive (Chuanqi weiliao – xian gei Baokun de zuopin), wherein former collaborators Danny Yung, Stan Lai, Krishen Jit, Lin Kehuan (Beijing), Xiong Yuanwei (Shenzhen), and Hardy Tsoi (Cai Xichang, Hong Kong) reinterpreted selections from Kuo’s works to honour the recently deceased dramatist. The programme adhered to Zuni’s signature collaborative framework of One Table Two Chairs. Worth noting in connection with the investigation of ghosting practices in transnational

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Chinese theatres is that both Kuo Jian Hong, Kuo Pao Kun’s daughter and TTP Artistic Director, and Liu Xiaoyi, who was then Director of The Practice Lab, were first exposed to 1T2C on this occasion.83 Both would adopt the format in subsequent collaborations with Zuni and others, thus perpetuating the legacy of theatrical doubling by way of material objects that 1T2C has generated since the 1990s. Almost a decade later, Yung and Sat¯o revived 1T2C in the kun-n¯ o crossover, Tribute. Variations of this production travelled to Hong Kong, Nanjing, and Tokyo in June 2011 as part of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity Promotion and Development Project (Renlei feiwuzhi wenhua yichan tuiguang ji fazhan xiangmu), a city-to-city cultural exchange and touring performance programme which Zuni and Za-Koenji co-organized to mark the tenth anniversary of the May 2001 UNESCO proclamation of kunqu and n¯ ogaku (n¯ o and ky¯ ogen) as Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) of Humanity. Most significantly, Tribute served as the blueprint for a full-scale intercity, intergenre, and intercultural collaboration involving n¯ o, kunqu, and contemporary performance that would culminate in Yung and Sat¯o’s deconstructive treatment of Kuo’s script—The Spirits Play: Rituals to Soothe the Unsettled Spirits . The kun-n¯ o Spirits debuted at the same time as Tribute in the Asia ICH Performing Arts Forum (Yazhou ICH biaoyan yishu luntan) at the Hong Kong Cultural Centre in November 2011. Reworked versions were subsequently presented at the Memory, Place, Dialogue 2011–2013: N¯ o and Kun Cultural Exchange Programme, held at Za-Koenji in Tokyo on 11–14 October 2012, and at the Kuo Pao Kun Festival in Singapore (25–28 October 2012) to commemorate the tenth anniversary of Kuo’s passing. The first half of Tribute, In Search of Flee by Night (Xunzhao yeben) is a solo performance by Ke Jun, a National Class One Performer of kunqu and General Manager of the Jiangsu Performing Arts Group. It reprises text and movement segments from Ke and Yung’s long-term experimental kunqu collaboration, Flee by Night ( Yeben), itself a deconstruction of the eponymous Ming dynasty drama by Li Kaixian (1502–1568).84 In the second part of Tribute, Sound (Sheng ), directed by Sat¯o, Shimizu Kanji and Nishimura Takao from Tokyo’s Tessenkai Noh Theatre Laboratory (Tessenkai N¯ogaku Kensh¯ uj¯o) deliver a pared-down n¯ o routine with projected textual excerpts from The Spirits Play running in the background.85 The rehashing of renowned past performances in citational productions of this kind presents actors and audiences with a ‘memorial double’86 that

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suits the concept of Tribute as a homage to a deceased dramatist. Tribute activates a three-layered manner of material, textual, and kinaesthetic hauntedness, since it revisits conventional settings, celebrated scripts, and codified choreographic patterns from the kunqu and n¯ o repertoires. Two conjoined tables shrouded in white gauze stand at the centre of the stage at the outset of the performance, flanked by two chairs. A plainclothed Ke silently executes a movement routine that is typically associated with the wusheng (martial male) role of Lin Chong, the protagonist of Flee by Night , before proceeding to bow to one of the chairs—possibly a substitute for Kuo’s spirit. Alice Rayner argues that the repurposing of material artefacts in performance underscores the animistic task of stage properties ‘as memorial devices within the economy of object relations’.87 In this instance, the tables and chairs catalyse the late playwright’s spectre while retaining the memory of earlier tributes to and invocations of his work, such as the above-mentioned 1T2C choral production of Legend Alive. Additionally, the act of paying homage to an empty chair as a surrogate presence for an absent recipient illustrates Rayner’s interpretation of theatrical chairs as memorial ‘doubles for death and loss’.88 Vacant chairs are abstract stand-ins for a human body that ‘provide a material site for an intersection and exchange between the living and the dead’.89 As Rayner proposes, ‘[a]n empty chair is always available for a ghost’.90 Ke removes the white shroud—yet another analogue of death—from the table surface as he vacates the scene. An impassive Shimizu walks in and occupies one of the empty chairs. An empty glass sits on the table, foregrounding once more the memorial functions of stage objects. The scene evokes the setting of a séance, with the glass on the table standing in for a supernatural presence. Projected citations from Kuo’s haunted dramaturgy maximize the effect of theatrical doubling and spectral accumulation in this sequence. As Nishimura joins Shimizu in a measured dance, a collage of lines adapted from the opening and closing scenes of The Spirits Play runs in the background, throwing into relief the ghostly quality of the n¯ o performance that is unfolding at the front of the stage. Interspersed with original text by Sat¯ o that appears to cast the action against a present-day backdrop (‘A Southern city. An ordinary café, afternoon’.), the adapted lines reference the endless cyclicity of spectral time and changes in seasonal colours: from the green of spring leaves to the red of autumn, the purple of blood, and the ‘bloody red’ winter white snow—until ‘everything is black’ and the ‘slowly forgotten spirits […] become one with the scenery, formless’.91 These projections forestall

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the spectral chromatics of Sat¯o’s version of The Spirits Play, examined in the next section, wherein purple, white, red, green, and black ropes are each assigned to one of the five characters in an otherwise entirely monochrome setting. An additional manifestation of textual hauntedness occurs at the closing of the performance. Ke enters to sit alone on one chair, and then on the other. He inspects the glass repeatedly before placing it back onto the table and proceeding to stand with his back to the audience. Meanwhile, an excerpt from Yung’s adapted script of Flee by Night appears in the background: Locked in a mist of sadness I wander alone in this land I wander adrift and alone Hurrying, hurrying in exile An eagle breaking loose from its shackle With little in my possession Fighting to change the world.92

Flee by Night resonates with Kuo’s personal journey, in that it depicts the unjust persecution of a righteous official who is forced into exile to become a bandit, just as Kuo was imprisoned without trial (1976–1980) and had his citizenship revoked because of his political beliefs. Li Kaixian’s drama has been interpreted as a resistant statement against corrupt powers and, not unlike The Spirits Play, as a reflection on the relationship ‘between the individual and the system’.93 Yung’s production foregrounds the artist’s social responsibility as the thematic kernel of the Ming text: ‘How far does his integrity go and where does his temptation begin when his career ambitions are exposed to the external pressures of political circumstances?’94 Yet, central to Yung and Ke’s collaborative version is not only the wronged official, Lin Chong, but a stagehand that witnesses to the play’s reincarnations, repetitions, and spectral returns on China’s theatrical stages through 600 years of history, and to its multiple adaptations to mutable political circumstances. In this respect, Flee by Night does not only mirror facets of the deceased dramatist’s experience as a critical intellectual in an authoritarian state but also echoes the compositional procedure that informs posthumous reiterations of his creative legacy, which recast The Spirits Play across shifting chronotopes and vectors of remembrance.

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Settling the Ghosts of the Sino-Japanese War: The Spirits Play on the Kun-No¯ Stage The Spirits Play: Rituals to Soothe the Unsettled Spirits represents a milestone in the trilateral ICH-centred exchange between Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Nanjing that launched at the Shanghai Expo 2010 with Yung and Sat¯o’s co-directed commission for the Japan Pavilion, The Tale of the Crested Ibis (Zhuhuan de gushi), and culminated in 2012 with the inauguration of Nanjing’s Toki International Arts Festival (Zhuhuan guoji yishu jie, renamed Toki Arts Week [Zhuhuan yishu zhou] in 2014). As with the Expo project previously, the Toki collaboration wished to foster a long-term, artist-driven, and people-based (minjian) intercultural dialogue between the three cities while also attempting to engage performance as a channel of informal cultural diplomacy and grassroots reconciliation.95 In 2010, Yung and Sat¯o made considerable efforts to enlist Chinese and Japanese authorities to support the planning of a yet unrealized antiwar cultural centre in Nanjing, which would be built with funds from Japan as a symbolic reparation gesture. They also strived to forge minor transnational connections between China and Japan by casting child performers from a local Nanjing primary school in the Japan Pavilion production alongside emergent actors from the Jiangsu Theatre despite initial opposition from the pupils’ families, who resented the idea of letting their children perform for the Japanese, as Yung explained in a conversation with the author in Berlin on 13 September 2016. Similarly, when Sat¯ o presented his version of The Spirits Play in Tokyo in November 2011, representatives from the Chinese Embassy in Japan were invited to attend the performance, in a further attempt to build bridges between the two nations.96 The year 2012 marked both the 70th anniversary of the Japanese Occupation of Singapore during World War II in 1942 and the 40th anniversary of the normalization of diplomatic relations between China and Japan in 1972. Hence, a collaborative Sino-Japanese reincarnation of the play at the Kuo Pao Kun Festival in Singapore in October of the same year made for a poignant reminder of this painful page in the history of the island city state and of inter-Asian relations, in addition to delivering a fitting tribute to its creator. Sat¯o described this intercultural and intergenre production as an endeavour to turn the scars of Asia’s troubled past into hope for future

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dialogue and to remind the Japanese public of the necessity of rectifying wartime records and symbolically compensate for past errors.97 The Spirits Play ties in with Sat¯o’s long-standing concern with Japan’s post-war identity and questions of guilt, responsibility, and political extremism. As a leftist intellectual and core militant in the Japanese underground (angura) theatre movement of the 1960s and 1970s, Sat¯o has been consistently critical of militarism while also being artistically invested in unravelling the ambiguous links between ideological fanaticism and spiritual redemption. This interest derives partly from his Christian upbringing and personal history as the grandnephew of former War Minister Anami Korechika (1887–1945), who committed suicide by seppuku upon Japan’s surrender in the war.98 A steadfast advocate of grassroots pan-Asianism throughout his career as a dramatist and director of the Black Tent Theatre, which he founded in 1969, Sat¯o had previously attempted to stage Kuo’s play to scrutinize the psychological mechanisms that can turn a victim into a victimizer, and vice versa, and to excavate the hidden histories of Japan’s wartime militarism— a neglected and often distorted subject in Japanese education and public discourse. As he stated at the time of the Singaporean performances, he had long sought for ‘words’ to articulate the ‘deep and cruel scars’ left behind by Asia’s violent past until ‘I met Pao Kun and he gave me the key to changing the scars [into] hope’.99 In the production playbill, Sat¯ o describes his collaboration with the Nanjing performers as ‘a unique opportunity to reflect on how the present is an accumulation of past events, and to look for hope from the present that we can carry forward into the future’.100 He understands The Spirits Play not simply as an anti-war statement but as a reflection on ‘memory, place, and dialogue’.101 Indeed, the text can be grasped as an affirmation of the power of place—or (chrono)topos —to activate processes of mnemonic dialogism, so that significant landmarks such as the erstwhile theatres of war in Singapore and Nanjing can function as evocative points de repère for the purpose of ‘remembering in common’.102 Equally, Yung associates his and Sat¯o’s collaboration with the kunqu and n¯ o performers to ‘a bridge’ that enables communication with the spirits—of Kuo, of the war dead, of all victims of institutional atrocity. The Hong Kong director had previously ventured into theatrical hauntology in Book of Ghosts (Luguibu, 2009), a collaboration with classical performers from Bangkok, Jakarta, Nanjing, and Taipei. Based on Zhong Sicheng (ca. 1279–1360)’s Register of Ghosts (Luguibu), the production

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foregrounded spectrality as a bridge of communication between realms— of the living and the dead, of modern and classical theatres, of Chinese and Asian traditions—invoking the signifying figure of the ghost to convey the plight of dead or declining performing arts and as a metaphor for artists under censorship, reduced to spectral presences by oppressive regimes. Yung further highlights the function of the theatre (juchang ) as both a ritual ground (daochang ) and a dialectical space for dialogue, or a ‘leco crossover stages an act of theture hall’ (jiangchang ).103 The kun-n¯ atrical conjuration, or apotrotheatrics —namely an apotropaic rite against historical evil to appease the spectres of those who died unjustly. It is a theatre of cruelty, a theatre of death, and a cross-temporal platform to instigate generative dialogues and ‘develop new modes of historical cognition’.104 Coincidentally, the director of the play’s first production, Stan Lai, regarded ritualization (yishihua) as a suitable production approach and compared the script to a cross between n¯ o drama and Greek tragedy because it is structured around a succession of extended monologues by a chorus of ghosts that hover in a purgatorial limbo to narrate events occurred before their deaths.105 The significance of platiality, which Una Chaudhuri defines as ‘a recognition of the signifying power and political potential of specific places ’,106 is brought into relief in the production’s second half. Successions of keywords are projected onto a back screen throughout the performance, each containing the Chinese character chang (site, place) and each conjuring a suggestive location, and lieu de mémoire (site of memory),107 in the play’s contextual and compositional history while also foregrounding its hauntological signification. These range from the cemetery (fenchang ) where Kuo’s conversation with the wartime spirits began to the battlefields (zhanchang ) and execution grounds (xingchang ) where they perished; from the interstitial realm between life and death (shengsi chang ) where their unsettled souls drift to the ritual sites (daochang ) where they are honoured and exorcised; and from the slaughterhouse (tuchang ) of Nanjing to the theatre (juchang ) of violence at Tiananmen Square (guangchang ).108 Place is a trigger of affect and a source of geopathology, when the self’s relation to it becomes problematic,109 but also of geopathos; namely, of our capacity to sense the spectral aura of certain locations and empathize with the presences that congregate around specific traumatic sites. The

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kun-n¯ o adaptation’s emphasis on platial lexicography transposes the concomitantly universal and place-specific signification of the original script onto settings other than Japanese Singapore, such as wartime Nanjing and contemporary Beijing. Yung and Sat¯ o’s interpretation thereby combines Kuo’s formulations of ‘The Theatre that Transcends’ linguistic, ethnic, cultural, and national barriers and of ‘The Theatre of Allegory’, which exceeds ‘specific reality because it uses symbols and signs, usually from classical sources, that enjoy some measure of universal understanding’.110 Hong Kong—also a Japanese occupied territory between 1941 and 1945—intervenes in this trilateral place-to-place conversation as a mediating site between Nanjing and Tokyo. As argued previously in the context of the China–Taiwan divide, the intercession of a relatively neutral actor such as Hong Kong assists a transnational collaborative reassessment of enduring tensions between nation-states. It is, moreover, significant that the collaboration occurred at a time when the diplomatic strife between China and Japan hit a new crisis point, with large-scale anti-Japanese demonstrations unfolding in several Chinese cities in August–September 2012 over the ongoing Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands territorial dispute. Sino-Japanese disagreements over the war have intensified over time, due to the ‘selective process of remembering and forgetting’111 that has shaped Chinese memoropolitics in the post-war era. As captured in a byline printed in the production playbill: ‘One remembers/one forgets/one refuses to remember/one refuses to forget’.112 Historians have pointed out how events that are now synonymous with Japan’s military crimes in China did not dominate Chinese public discourse at the time of the invasion.113 The stark contrast between the ‘benevolent amnesia’ of the 1945–1982 period and ‘the vitriolic rhetoric’ of more recent decades has also been noted.114 Whereas efforts to shed light on atrocities such as the Nanjing Massacre of 1937 were seen as detrimental to diplomatic relations in the first decade since normalization, escalating nationalism, dramatic public memorials, and repeated attempts at historical revisionism from both sides have widened the Sino-Japanese rift since the 1980s, further aggravated by Japan’s persistent reluctance to take full responsibility for its wartime conduct.115 Similarly, controversies have swelled in contemporary Japan, engendering a jarring ‘cacophony of memory narratives’ and conflicting truths that complicates the unmitigated portrayal of concerted collective amnesia that is customarily painted in foreign media and popular culture.116

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These dissonant voices have strived equally to partake in the memorialization of the war legacy, revealing a complex moral spectrum wherein the nation is simultaneously shown as a fallen hero, a ferocious perpetrator, and a fateful victim.117 Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei argues in her study of h¯ ogan biiki (‘sympathy for the loser/victims’) in post-war Japanese drama that Sat¯ o was one of the first and few authors, already in the 1960s, to tackle the question of Japan’s historical responsibility towards its Asian neighbours without applying ameliorative filters or distancing devices to alleviate the nation’s guilty conscience.118 While The Spirits Play’s depiction of the Japanese as both victors and victims might be seen as resonating with h¯ ogan biiki, Sorgenfrei’s analysis is consistent with Sat¯ o’s remodelling of the General’s role into a realistic modern character that may plausibly rise again from within the ranks of right-wing ideologues and war crimes denialists in present-day Japan. Suzuki-trained actor Fueda Uichiro played the General in the first half of both the 2011 and 2012 versions, directed by Sat¯ o. Zhang Chunxiang, a jingju performer based in Tokyo, was cast as the Poet in 2011, with n¯ o master Shimizu Kanji as the Mother and kunqu actors Tang Qin and Sun Jing as, respectively, the Girl and the Man (Fig. 5.1). Shimizu and Sun appeared, as well, in the second half, directed by Yung, alongside kunqu actors Yang Yang and Xu Sijia, and Indian koodiyattam performer Margi Madhu. In 2012, n¯ o actor Nishimura Takao took the role of the Mother and Shimizu replaced Zhang as the Poet in the first half. In the second half, Shimizu, Yang, Tang, and Xu appeared alongside Japanese modern dancer Matsushima Makoto. The kun-n¯ o adaptation underscores the potential of Asia’s performing arts heritage to function as a carrier of ghosted dramaturgy while also fulfilling the essential function of ancient theatrical traditions of connecting the human realm to the netherworld: In many communities, past and present, theatre is known to have been a public arena to ‘talk about’ the dead and/or the past, in order to celebrate the present, as well as to discuss the problems and difficulties that the community is facing. And The Spirits Play is just that, as all of its characters are ghosts from the past.119

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Fig. 5.1 From left, kunqu actor Sun Jing (the Man), jingju actor Zhang Chunxiang (the Poet), contemporary theatre actor Fueda Uichiro (the General), and n¯ o actor Shimizu Kanji (the Mother) in the first part of The Spirits Play (2011 version), codirected by Sat¯o Makoto and Danny Yung (Courtesy of Zuni Icosahedron)

Paraphrasing Tadashi Uchino, one cannot play ghosts with Stanislavsky, because ghosts exceed ‘Stanislavskian daily mannerism’ and the psychological realism of the human world.120 Manifestations of ‘analogue pero are, formance (by and with the actor’s body)’121 such as kunqu and n¯ therefore, most suited to channel the ghostly return of the past into our amnesiac digital present. Heritage genres bear evidence to Kuo’s formulation of ‘The Theatre that Remembers’, namely, ‘a kind of spiritual lifeline’122 that endows the actor ‘with the skills of an archivist’.123 The casting of a modern theatre actor as the General despite the abundance of military roles in both the Japanese and Chinese indigenous repertoires framed the character as plausibly contemporary and unequivocally Japanese. To assign the role to a classical performer or rework it into a historical figure would have rendered it too abstract, stereotypical, and culturally distant. It would have allowed audiences in Japan to see the General as a cypher for any authoritarian figure in world history, or else

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to safely relegate his crimes to the past, thus diffusing feelings of accountability and guilt and preventing emotive identification. But the General neither is a universal evil type nor does he belong to history. Like the Derridean revenant, the spectre of fascist excess can return and reincarnate time and again. Sat¯o’s casting decision forces audiences to recognize this character as one of their own, and his actions in the past as integral to their own collective action in the present. The General is always onstage in the first half of the production to listen to the spirits’ reminiscences of crimes for which he is accountable. Yet, as the sole contemporary character in the production, he is also an eternal spectator, a witness, and a personification of the horrors of history. Equally, the replacement of the jingju performer with a n¯ o actor in the role of the Poet in 2012 circumvented any clear-cut ethical divide in characterization on grounds of nationality, ethnicity, and language, namely between good/victim/Chinese and evil/victimizer/Japanese. By casting Japanese actors to portray both the General and the Poet, as his moral alter ego, Sat¯o’s version retained the original text’s essential ambiguity and multidimensional portrayal of the transformability of human beings from ‘cattle’ into ‘wolves’,124 while also pushing the production’s critical edge towards a fundamental questioning of the constitution and motivation of mass ideology and political action. In contrast with the General’s realistic portrayal, the monochrome costumes and stylized execution of the n¯ o and kunqu actors invested the remaining four roles with the timeless attributes of the archetype. Especially noteworthy is the maximization of the universal iconicity of the maternal figure by means of intertextuality and contextual crosscomparison. In the first part, the Mother’s script was reworked to incorporate excerpts from the classic n¯ o play, Fujito. In the first act of Fujito, a grieving mother remonstrates with commander Sasaki Moritsuna for killing her innocent fisherman son during the Battle of Fujito (1184) in the Genpei War (1180–1185). It thus presents a comparably despondent atmosphere and structure of feeling as The Spirits Play. Furthermore, Fujito and other n¯ o dramas about mothers mourning their offspring inspired the deconstruction of the Mother into a choral character in the second part of the adaptation, which Yung directed. The ensemble envisaged this role as the quintessence of the Tiananmen Mothers, who have been gathering year after year since the 1989 massacre to commemorate the unsettled souls of their children and demand answers for their yet unresolved deaths.

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D¯omoto Masaki’s description of Fujito as an example of classic n¯ o dramas ‘that depict the voice of the masses demanding justice’125 applies equally to Kuo’s text, the kun-n¯ o adaptation, and the deconstructive Derridean spectre that informs their haunted dramaturgies. In Kuo’s script, the Mother reaches the island after the death of her entire family to find her husband’s remains and grant them an honourable burial, just as the fisherman’s mother arrives at Fujito to request rites to pacify her child’s wandering ghost. The fisherman’s mother challenges her son’s assassin just as the Mother eventually confronts the General about his involvement in the death of her husband, her own, and of thousands of others. In both cases, the murder of an innocent is rationalized on grounds of national security. However, whereas Sasaki admits responsibility and compensates for his fault with material and ceremonial offerings, the General never grants his victims closure, thereby pointing the finger to an open wound in Japanese history which has not yet healed. In the first half of the production, the Mother wears a fukai mask also used in Fujito and other n¯ o dramas that depict middle-aged women grieving for lost children and loved ones. In the second half, the performers wear various types of n¯ o-inspired masks which they crafted during rehearsals. The masks are one of the very few external markers of indigeneity in an otherwise extremely minimalistic, deconstructed, and decontextualized reinterpretation of the classical forms. To maximize the archetypical connotation and contemporary significance of the text, all actors don plain black or black-and-white outfits and accessories. As distinctive of Yung and Sat¯o’s experiments with indigenous genres, the adaptation does away with the elaborate costumes, props, and makeup that are usually seen in conventional performances of n¯ o, kunqu, jingju, and koodiyattam. An exception is made for sporadic indicators of tradition such as a n¯ o fan and white tabi socks, a jingju black beard and high-soled blackand-white boots, and discoloured kunqu gowns. Quite appropriately for a production concerning ghosts and ghosted genres, the frayed gowns worn by the actors in the 2012 version are old rehearsal garments used by generations of Jiangsu Theatre actors which were about to be disposed of, but were instead dyed in a neutral shade of grey and reclaimed as an added material catalyst of spectrality (Fig. 5.2). Of kunqu and jingju, the production also preserves the conventional set comprised of one table and two chairs, whereas the actors’ manner of entering and exiting from upstage right in full view of the audience is reminiscent of n¯ o conventions. Similarly, the white rectangular perimeter

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Fig. 5.2 Repurposed kunqu gowns function as material catalysts of spectrality in the second part of The Spirits Play (2012 version), codirected by Sat¯o Makoto and Danny Yung (Courtesy of The Theatre Practice LTD)

that demarcates the main performance area in the first part can be regarded as a variant of the central stage in a traditional n¯ o theatre. In stark contrast with the total blackness of the surroundings, this visible border traced onto the stage floor outlines both a metaphysical limen between the realm of the spirits and the domain of the living and a physical boundary between the sacred space of the stage and the mundane world offstage. It thus heightens both the semantic equivalence between theatre and ritual and the structural connection between performance and spectrality. In the second half, the reflective white surface of the front edge of the raised stage imparts a corresponding marker of liminality which, likewise, stands out against the black-on-black minimalism of a pitch-dark scene inhabited by monochrome apparitions. Occasionally, the performers trespass this tangible threshold as if attempting to transit to the space of the audience and connect with human life. The set design of the 2011 Hong Kong version features a passage at the rear of the elevated stage where the

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actors are seen rising and falling at regular intervals as if floating in space or surfacing from the depths of the earth. To underscore the incompleteness of their status, their bodies are often only half visible and appear and disappear like phantasmal hallucinations. Sat¯o’s part mostly adheres to the Japanese translation of Kuo’s text, with occasional alterations and additions. It also maintains the same structure and number of scenes. The action is carried forward partly by the actors’ performance and partly by projections of excerpts from the script (in Chinese and Japanese in 2011, and in Chinese, Japanese, and English in 2012) so that the surtitles become an integral component of the production. The five characters enter the stage one after another, carrying ropes around their necks. Each is assigned a rope in one of the colours mentioned in the play’s first and last scenes, which are also those that Kuo chose for the costumes in the finale of his 1998 production. The spectral chromatics of this impressionistic tableau, which is reprised at the closing of the performance, foregrounds the ropes as material signifiers of the spirits’ violent demise and purgatorial existence between life and death. Hanging from their necks over their black-clad bodies in the opening scene and dropping vertically from their heads across their faces in the final scene, the coloured ropes seem to split the spirits’ selves into halves—part human and part demon. As the actors deliver their lines, each in their own genre- and gender-specific style of enunciation, the text projected onto the back screen dismembers into a cascade of verbal fragments: ‘gone’, ‘rotten’, ‘torn’, ‘destroyed’, forgotten’, and so forth. The General is alone when the Poet enters. Donning a mournful black veil that hides his face entirely, the Poet recites the farewell song to his mother, rendered as a jingju aria in 2011 and a n¯ o chant in 2012. The Mother joins them, followed by the Man and the Girl. While the Mother, the Man, and the Girl recollect their personal histories, the General is permanently onstage, as a man of the present and chief architect of their misfortune, whereas the Poet listens silently as he sits on a chair at the back of the performance area. His liminal position near the white perimeter is consistent with his borderline status as a deconstructive figure of inbetweenness, as one who is dead but, unlike the others, knows the truth about what happened when they were alive and how their life ended. The actors deliver versions of Kuo’s original five monologues in their respective languages and distinctive manners of recitation, movement, and chanting—Mandarin and Japanese, kunqu, jingju, and n¯ o —frequently

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interjected by dissonant electronic soundscapes and background projections of multilingual text that splits, dissolves, fades, and spirals in and out to produce various visual effects. Each monologue begins with an expression of nostalgia for an idyllic treasured homeland, though one that has betrayed and sent the spirits to die. Characteristic of Sat¯ o’s pursuit of neutral aesthetics and semantic ambiguity is the detachment sought in the presentation of the female roles in this part. In the Mother’s scene, the portion of the script that recounts her violent murder is conveyed solely by textual projections. The actor that impersonates the Mother keeps silent and still, dispelling any excess of theatricality and melodramatic emotion. In the 2012 version, furthermore, the actor does not wear the traditional female n¯ o mask on his black genderless outfit, which fully exposes the cross-gendered nature of his measured performance and augments the sense of liminality induced by his character’s spectral condition. The re-enactment of the Girl’s rape is likewise understated and likewise conveyed partly through projections. The performer carries a red veil that may symbolize bridal bliss—when she wears it on her head or around her waist to execute a traditional kunqu routine—but is also evocative of a bloodbath. The sudden gesture of dropping the veil to the ground to resemble a pool of blood before proceeding to lie onto the table under a stark spotlight exposes the dark undertones of the Girl’s personal narrative. The General and the Poet sit on the two chairs in the darkness, silently witnessing to a static and highly stylized reconstruction of the Girl’s memories of multiple violations. While a written account of her rape rolls in the background for the audience to read, the Man is also onstage, singing. The vision of the Girl’s inert body lying on the table elicits both the primal scene of her rape and the semblance of a lifeless corpse. The General comes to stand behind the table, his menacing shadow towering over the Girl, possibly to suggest that her spectral existence originated from this initial abuse. The same can be inferred from the position of the red veil at this juncture, spread onto the ground across the white boundary, hence between life and death. The Girl reiterates the phrase ‘inhuman waste’ compulsively as the General leaps onto the table like a wild beast. She hides his body under the red veil while lamenting her violators’—and his—lack of warmth, tenderness, and feelings. Again, she utters ‘only waste, and waste, and waste’, as she weeps and walks off. The re-evocation of the Girl’s traumatic reminiscences by silent textual projections and through a disassociation of body (the Girl’s) and voice

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(the Man’s) amplifies the distancing effect in this scene, as previously in the Mother’s. Somewhat paradoxically, the stylized portrayal of violence protracts the affective residue that the violent image induces in the viewer because of the ‘contrast between aesthetic beauty and the horror of the actions whose effects it depicts’.126 In this adaptation, violence is ob-scene in the term’s original meaning of inauspicious and ill-omened, hence unrepresentable. Yet its abstract potency generates a sense of Artaudian ‘pure cruelty, without bodily laceration’,127 along with a vision of a Kantorian ‘theatre of death’ as embedded in ‘the notion that all representation on stage is of something that is no more and has been resurrected from memory’.128 Unlike the suggestive abstraction of the Mother’s and Girl’s key scenes, the characterization of the Man and the General is visceral and dramatic. The Man takes refuge underneath the table in the scene of his monologue and stretches an arm out as if seeking comfort against his own recollections. While lamenting the horrific sight of worms and devastated bodies, he strokes and inspects the table as if it were a miniature or a map of the island where he and his fellow soldiers perished. He then rolls onto the ground and invokes his mother in utmost pain. At this point, as in other occurrences, the n¯ o performer responds with a chant and comes to personify a timeless maternal archetype. The same mood ensues in a subsequent scene wherein the n¯ o performer recreates the role of the fisherman’s mother in Fujito, kneeling before the General to remonstrate for the senseless loss of innocents. The red veil that the Girl had previously discarded connects the Mother and the General during this charged exchange, resembling a stream of blood. The General’s portrayal is brutal and animalistic. He groans like a feral beast and looks like a fierce demon as he moves on the table underneath the red veil. The image of his body as a crimson mass set off a black background at centre stage mirrors the permanent stain on his blood-drenched dark conscience; when he recounts the legend of Can with his deep guttural voice, it is as if the man were possessed by the monster itself. The General and the Poet alternate lines, languages, and acting styles in telling the complementary myths of Can and Xiang, so that each negative action of the former is offset by a positive intervention of the latter. Such juxtaposition of moral dialectical forces strengthens the Manichaean dance of contrasts between the destructive beast and the salvific bird, while also

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reinforcing the ambivalent judgement on the characters and their historical legacy—simultaneously compassionate and damning. David Der-wei Wang writes that intrinsic to the Taowu—the mythical monster that the Chinese have long associated with history—is ‘a liminal zone where the inhuman and the human mingle, a region that is legally and morally anomalous. Evil monster and evil human intersect in looks and deeds, blurring the cultural and natural boundaries that humanity would draw around itself’.129 If one replaces the Taowu with the Can/Xiang dyad, the same liminal logic applies. Correspondingly, the Poet’s depiction as a herald of veracity and moral foil to the General is conveyed by the strategic removal of the black veil to uncover his features—namely, the face of truth—during a climatic dialogue in which one discloses and the other denies the details of the apocalyptic defeat of their once glorious nation. In the 2012 version, once the General describes the image of self-devouring Can’s ‘large open bloody round mouth’130 as a gaping hole in the sky, a circular silhouette appears at the centre of the black background, evidently reminiscent of the Japanese national flag. At this moment, the General places a white rope on his head to suggest his ritual suicide in the name of the nation, and the Poet follows suit with a black rope. The Mother, the Girl, and the Man enter carrying purple, red, and green ropes, respectively. All five spirits then kneel to the ground towards the audience, as the large circle towers high above them. Eventually, voices and languages interweave as the five characters express their longing for home but realize that they are condemned to remain forever in this timeless autumnal limbo. In the final scene, the five ropes rest on the ground adjacent to the red veil, as visual signifiers of the characters’ violent deaths and material markers of their spectrality. The five actors circle around the table and chairs like wandering ghosts before taking various positions around them, to face the audience. The concluding projection states ‘forgotten’ and the Poet pronounces his closing line: ‘And then, everything will be black’. Albeit adapted and simplified, the first part preserves the nucleus of the play’s dramatic action, whereas the almost entirely wordless second part propels the text into a radical deconstruction that only retains the semantic essence of the original. Defining tropes in Kuo’s script are condensed into stylized displays and conceptual elaborations on clusters of abstract signs and signifying objects. This part is less concerned with human prototypes than with the epiphanic and exorcistic capabilities of the stage to

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appease the spirits that keep lingering in the present, unable to ease the pain of memory. One of the core motifs is the resurrection of the platial memory of Tiananmen Square. The ritual invocation of June Fourth—or liu si (6/4), as the tragic events of 4 June 1989 are referred to in China—suits the production’s hauntological rationale, since June Fourth has been ‘transformed into an “invisible massacre,” a phantom existing only in the memory of those who experienced or witnessed it’.131 In the immediate aftermath of the crackdown, all traces of violence were promptly erased and permanently submerged in public oblivion so that ‘[t]he square itself became the ultimate site of topological denial’.132 On a more fundamental level, however, the collision of dissonant accents, emotional intensities, and corporeal registers in this part generates an elemental kinaesthetics of pain that no longer exclusively unearths the traumatic sediments of specific chronotopic sites but embodies a wider-ranging transnational allegory of democide—namely of death by nation. Rigorous aesthetic stylization makes the performers not just characters, but icons, so that their neutral personas may even stand for those killed in the final apocalyptic act of retributive violence in the theatres of war at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. In other words, the ritualistic transfiguration of the actors’ bodies into totemic incarnations of all victims of institutional atrocity enhances the spectral signification of the adaptation while also anchoring additional significant chronotopes onto the trans-Asian axes of memory. The 2011 and 2012 versions of the first part are relatively similar except for the aforementioned modifications in the cast, whereas the second part changed quite substantially in the 2012 Tokyo and Singapore performances. The 2011 version opens with the projection of a text, authored by Yung, interspersed with an eerie soundscape of wailing voices of varying intensities and intonations. Entirely dressed in black, Shimizu and Madhu appear on the stage like dark presences. Their actions produce affective counterpoints by means of aural and choreographic effects, for the former deep chanting and measured demeanour contrasts with the latter’s anguished shrieks and frantic corporeality. The text hints at an inevitable interpenetration of opposing dynamic forces—life and death, remembering and forgetting, presence and passing—that echoes the Artaudian realization of life’s ‘cruel nuance, since it is understood that life is always someone’s death’.133 Indeed, the semantic abstraction inherent to Yung’s treatment of both Kuo’s script and the

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classic performance genres resonates with Artaud’s ambition for the theatre of cruelty ‘to create a metaphysics of speech, gesture, and expression’ wherein the ‘meanings’, ‘physiognomies’ and ‘combinations’ of ‘objects, movements, attitudes, and gestures’ are ‘carried to the point of becoming signs’.134 Whereas the actors’ stylized interactions convey the performance’s basic hauntological mood, the textual projections—often of typical Zunistyle series of questions and keywords—channel the conceptual hinges of Yung’s rendition of the script. In the opening sequence, a cascade of Chinese characters runs in the background, of which only a few ji (‘to remember’) are visible at first. Next, a succession of complementary and somewhat contradictory statements enhances the constitutive interdependence of remembrance and oblivion, for ji is not only a marker of memory but also a component of the Chinese word for forgetting (wangji): ‘I cannot remember…I can no longer remember…I cannot remember anything…how can I not remember’; ‘you want to remember…you cannot not remember…you must remember…’; ‘you must forget…you can forget…you must forget’; ‘I must find a way to forget’, and so forth. Another set of projections concerns the suppression of negative emotions in Buddhism. Four phrases—tan/Madness, chen/Anger, chi/Obsession, and ba or ba le/Enough—are displayed in a variety of visual combinations in both Chinese and English to introduce climatic moments in the performance.135 These concepts resonate with the affective spectrum of Kuo’s script while adding to the ceremonial gist of Yung’s execution. Shimizu Kanji, as the Mother, performs a n¯ o chant as he perambulates the black space to demarcate an invisible perimeter—perhaps a ritual boundary or a spectral zone. Shrouded in a black veil, Shimizu then shares a sombre scene with Xu Sijia, as the Girl, likewise clad in a simple black costume and likewise engaged in re-enacting decontextualized excerpts from classic dramas—in this instance, from Tang Xianzu’s Peony Pavilion (Mudan ting, 1598)—in dissonant surroundings, as their movements and vocals interject one another. In Yung’s as in Sat¯o’s part, basic stage properties such as veils, sheets, and the tables and chairs which are brought onto the stage in a later scene function as signifiers of relationality that connect characters, performers, and performance genres. A spiritual link is established between the two female figures when the Girl performs a choreographic sequence holding the black veil and eventually covers herself with it, somewhat turning

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into the Mother’s twice-spectral double. In a subsequent scene, the two trace invisible circles around the table and execute parallel movements as if committed to a silent dialogue. This is a poignant moment of psychic connection but also one of profound isolation; the Mother and the Girl move towards one another repeatedly but can never truly meet, for all spirits are alone in their pain. The presence in this scene of a table without chairs—an incomplete xiqu set—mirrors the incompleteness of their ontological condition. Like the metaphysical border that divides life and death, the table is not purely a marker of physical distance or separation but, symbolically, it becomes ‘a wound, or a field of struggle’136 —the struggle of the spirits that strive to be remembered. Actors Yang Yang and Sun Jing likewise negotiate their symbolic status by means of signifying objects. They oversee the movement and arrangement of the stage set, whose shifting configurations are metonymical of the performers’ relational positions and spectral personas. It is once the actors vacate the stage, leaving the white table behind to dominate the dark empty space, that the ghosted life of objects attains its full potential. In the absence of humans, objects linger as reminders of that which is no longer there. As Rayner argues, tables and ‘[c]hairs onstage offer occasions for exploring the effects of the theatrical double’, becoming ‘the very vehicle by which an unknowable event, such as death, can be perceived’.137 As mentioned previously, the status of objects as the spectres’ material double is accomplished in the concluding scenes with the duplication of the conventional 1T2C set seen in the first half of the production into a 2T4C configuration of two tables and four chairs (Fig. 5.3). Yang and Sun’s joint scenes—as with Shimizu and Xu’s and those featuring the entire ensemble—involve conspicuous manipulation of white sheets and black veils and layering of these onto basic black-and-white outfits. Such neutral iconicity reinforces the notion of a faceless, genderless, nameless, and nationless congregation of spirits of the kind that Kuo describes in the director’s notes to his 1998 production. As he kept listening and talking to the spirits after the original encounter at the Japanese Cemetery, Kuo writes, their voices grew in number and intensity. They became more complex, multilingual, near, and distant in time, their words more and more difficult to understand.138 In theatrical terms, these monochrome presences are resonant with Gao Xingjian’s theory of the neutral actor (zhongxing yanyuan), which originated in the playwright’s observation of xiqu.139 The notion of a transitional identity between the

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Fig. 5.3 A Two Tables Four Chairs (2T4C) stage set materializes as the spectral double of One Table Two Chairs (1T2C) in the finale of The Spirits Play (2011 version), codirected by Sat¯o Makoto and Danny Yung (Courtesy of Zuni Icosahedron)

performers and their roles suits the portrayal of spectres in a state of limbo that cannot or refuse to let go. Yang handles a white sheet to variously suggest the manifestation of a ghost, the materiality of a corpse, a repository of tears, and a sacred ceremonial precinct for the display of ritual offerings. Sun is swathed in a black drape to resemble a dark demon, particularly when he opens his mouth wide in a grotesque masklike grimace and his vocal tonality shifts from a kind of lamentation to arcane groans and yowls. If anything, Yung appears to draw more from Kuo’s stage directions than from his actual script. The actor’s trance-like gesturality seems to reference the description of the spirits that follows the narration of the Can/Xiang legend in Kuo’s play: ‘Their mouths are open but no sound is heard’. They are shocked

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into stillness; then the stillness turns into severe trembling, finally leading them to emit an almost animalistic cry — as if their inner souls have been stirred and a long-locked beast of the wild is finally unleashed.140

Such atavistic viscerality reaches a point of paroxysm in the ensemble scene that closes the performance. This final sequence appears to reprise an equally hallucinatory tableau of ‘negative epiphany’141 in Kuo’s text when the spirits undress to expose their tattooed bodies: They show a lightness like spirits, an awesomeness like ghosts, an honesty like children, a savagery like beasts. And their personalities have been reduced to a basic commonality of primal instinct.142

In Yung’s rendition of Kuo’s instructions, an otherworldly concert of intertwining murmurs, laments, howls, wails, shrieks, and laughter resounds across the dark empty space as if the spirits’ raw emotions were seeping through the performers’ flesh and vocal chords. Projections of excerpts from the Heart Sutra (Xinjing ), one of the core scriptures of Mahayana Buddhism, heighten the ritualism of this scene while leading the performance towards its denouement, as the spirits are gradually pacified, and their negative feelings purified. A haunting recitation of the sutra is heard, as well, at regular intervals throughout the performance, accompanied by water sound effects and the rhythmical beat of the wooden fish.143 Madhu returns in the finale, chanting and dancing on the tables at the centre of the stage while Shimizu and the kunqu actors sit in a line at the front, each displaying the vocal technique that is distinctive of their performance form. While the text of the sutra runs along the white edge of the raised stage, the back screen projections shift to a multi-coloured spectrum of blue, red, purple, white, and black characters that replicates the crepuscular chromatics of the final scene in Kuo’s original, also invoked in Sat¯o’s first half through the rope symbolism. Black dominates the scene: only the performers’ shadows can be discerned on an empty dark stage saturated with haunting vocalizations. The shadows and voices multiply when the casts of both parts convene downstage, so that the two tables, four chairs, and eight actors produce a complete image of theatrical doubling. Tropes of ghosting and doubling are amplified in the 2012 version, which also presents more overt associations of the theatre stage with a ceremonial site. The evocative potency of hauntological imagery and haunted

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locations is made more complex because of the accent laid on suggestive platial indicators in the textual projections of this second half of the production. As elucidated above, the back screen hosts an accumulation of compound words containing the Chinese character chang (site, place), which appear individually or in sequences—fading in and out, dissolving, and breaking into fragments. Hypnotic sutra chanting and the distorted sound of a zither (zheng ) that reverberates like a cascade of shattering glass supplement the projections at various points. These keywords trace a progression from the time-space of the performance (juchang ) through the geopathic sites of wartime atrocity, to the square (guangchang ) of the 1989 protests in Beijing. The production highlights the ritualization of the theatrical space as a place of remembrance for the martyrs of Tiananmen Square, in that it presents Shimizu and Xu as two Mothers and Yang and new cast member Matsushima Makoto as two Fathers. Yung has openly designated such characterization as emblematic of the activist group of parents and relatives of the June Fourth victims known as the Tiananmen Mothers.144 The reference to China’s recent history is evident in a ky¯ ogen-like intermezzo whose jocular tone deviates considerably from the overall sombreness of the production.145 It is, of course, ironic that at the inception of this comic number, in which Shimizu, Yang, and Sun engage in a lighthearted physical routine, the keyword ‘officialdom’ (guanchang ) comes up onto the back screen. On the one hand, this seems to allude to an absence of institutional gravity in dealing with the legacy of the massacre. On the other hand, it draws attention to the somewhat farcical nature of the hybrid system of ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ endorsed by the communist leadership in Beijing, which values economic liberalization but rejects political transparency. The satirical intent becomes obvious when the chang compounds start changing rapidly on the back screen—to the tune of a pop-rock rendition of ‘The Internationale’— to enumerate an array of materialistic interests in the market (shichang ), business (shangchang ), casinos (duchang ), and love affairs (qingchang ). These and other mundane occupations that appear in this sequence reflect consumerist China’s hedonistic pursuits and the debasement of all things sacred since the sweeping economic restructuring that ensued in the aftermath of the 1989 events. For most of the performance, Sun sits quietly at the back of the stage with his head swathed in a black veil and a n¯ o-style mask placed next to him. He impersonates a deity that witnesses to successive attempts by

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the Mothers and Fathers to memorialize their offspring. Tang Qin, too, lingers on the sides to deliver additional vocals in the choral scenes, when all actors howl and cry in unison, and to give voice to the agony of the parental archetypes that the performers embody. Consistent with Yung’s characteristically deconstructive approach to indigenous genres, movement and vocals often become disassociated, so that one actor provides the choreographic sequences and another the vocal parts. For example, Xu holds a white cloth bundle on her first appearance as if she were cuddling an infant. Suddenly, she tosses it violently to the ground. Tang starts wailing intermittently while Xu’s movements suggest that she is lamenting the death of her child. The stage proceedings in this instance seem once again to reference a passage in Kuo’s original stage directions wherein the delirious Mother ‘moans and cries like an animal who has lost her young […] as if calling the wandering spirits’ and pleading them to return to their loved ones—to ‘go home’.146 Tang’s arcane wails, disturbingly interpolated by manic laughter, complement another scene in which Yang lays the white cloth onto the floor to demarcate an area for ritual practices before proceeding to lie onto it like a corpse, and then to cover his body with it to look like a ghost. As in the 2011 version, white sheets and black veils are assigned the task of mourning devices. Additionally, the repurposing of frayed old gowns and the grotesque expressivity of the masks—modelled after those featured in n¯ o plays about supernatural beings—render the performers’ painful physiognomics all the more rigorous and arresting. The hauntological value of stage objects is amplified in this version, as Yung’s production script (“Lingxi xiabanchang juben/The Spirits Play Script, Second Half,” dated 23 October 2012) characterizes the closing cacophony of ensemble vocalizations as an act of communication with the gods (tongshen), and the double table-and-chairs set as an altar, or ‘table for the gods’ (shenzhuo). In the finale, Sun arranges the two tables on the stage while Xu begins to frantically wipe their surface as if attempting to erase the dirt of the past. She then lies onto the table while the other performers hover around it. The ambivalent force of the Can/Xiang dyad seems to descend onto the masked actors-shamans as the projection states: ‘ritual ground’ (daochang ). Yang wears two masks—one on his face and one at the back of his head—so that his stage self becomes split ‘between the human and the non-human […] between the gods and the demons’.147 It is a congregation of spirits, or perhaps a conjuring by the parents of their children’s wandering souls. The projected text then

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switches to ‘slaughterhouse’ (tuchang ). The performers vacate the stage but leave their spectral gowns behind, scattered on the floor near the vacant tables and chairs, as material emblems ‘of death’s power and life’s vulnerability’ and ‘site[s] to which ghosts return again and again’.148 ‘Square’ (guangchang ) comes up next—first as a single static character, and then accelerated, intensified, and multiplied ad infinitum to fill the entire screen. The multi-voiced chorus of wails, howls, and laughter climaxes before subsiding slowly, as the text of the Heart Sutra starts running in the background. The white Chinese characters that compose the sacred script swirl as they turn into snowflakes, to signal the ultimate cathartic stage of ritual purification and spiritual enlightenment. The kun-n¯ o version not only adapts contemporary haunted dramaturgy but also invokes the classic theatrics of revenants that come back ‘in the name of justice’.149 Its spectropoetics is harnessed through casting and production design, and by a radical dissection of ghosted performance conventions to contribute a critical spectropolitics of the present. It thereby affirms the rhetorical invocation of the Derridean spectre ‘as the paradigmatic deconstructive gesture’.150

Comparative Violence and Cross-Strait Spectralities: The Mother Hen Next Door As with the kun-n¯ o adaptation, The Mother Hen Next Door (2010) and The Mother Hen Next Door: A Tribute (2012) channel the spectrotheatrics of The Spirits Play by cross-referencing the fraught memories of national atrocity of two converging chronotopes: ‘Taipei, 1947’ and ‘Beijing, 1989’. The pain of the victims of Japanese wartime militarism is geopathologically relocated onto the open wounds of 2/28 and June Fourth. Resonating on many levels with the 38th Parallel series surveyed in the previous chapter, the plays seek to unearth hidden and often hindered narratives through inter-Asian historical cross-comparison as they expose geopolitical instability and the ghostly invisibility of undocumented microhistories. The collaboration originated in an intercultural Creative Lab organized by a team of TTRP alumni in Singapore in August 2009 under the moniker Traditions & Editions Theatre Circus (TETC; Wai chuantong youyi tuan). Eight TTRP alumni from Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Japan, India, Mexico, and the Philippines were tasked with devising individual responses to a multilingual production of The Spirits

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Play directed by Kok Heng Leun (Guo Qingliang), the Artistic Director of Drama Box (Xiju he), with a cast of six TTRP graduates.151 Several Lab participants related Kuo’s text to histories of institutional atrocity in their homelands. Hung Chit-wah, from Hong Kong, addressed June Fourth in her Cantonese solo, May I Ask? (Cing man), whereas the Taiwanese Hung Pei-ching chose 2/28 as the keystone of her motherland’s modern history of violence in the English-Mandarin Faceless (Wuyan; aka An Eye for an Eye Will Turn the World Blind).152 The pair’s research on the play continued in the context of a workshop they attended in Malaysia in September 2009 before eventually co-writing a full-length Cantonese-Mandarin script, which they also directed and performed. EX-Theatre Asia (EX-Yazhou jutuan) produced The Mother Hen Next Door for the 3rd Taipei Fringe Festival in September 2010 while TTP and the Taipei-based Performosa Theatre (Yanmosha jutuan) coproduced its updated version, The Mother Hen Next Door: A Tribute, for the Kuo Pao Kun Festival 2012. The play later travelled to the 5th Taipei Fringe Festival in September 2012 and to the Macau City Fringe Festival in November of the same year. The Mother Hen plays draw on the core myths and motifs of Kuo’s text to chronicle the predicament of the tormented spirits of an elderly Mother (Hung Chit-wah) and of a young female Reporter (Hung Pei-ching). The two women are stuck in a spectral limbo at a desolate train station where the souls of the deceased wait to embark on a journey that will erase all memories of their past and lead them to the afterlife. As with the waters of the river Lethe in Virgil’s Aeneid, the soup the spirits are made to drink on this journey ‘cleanses the souls that are to be reincarnated so that they may go “unmemoried”’.153 But the Mother and the Reporter hesitate to board the train (Fig. 5.4). Over the course of five nights that unfold over a prologue and four scenes, they recollect a protest that occurred during their lifetime. The unnamed protest resulted in large-scale violence and caused the yet unexplained disappearance of the Mother’s son. Nightmarish visions of those shocking events keep haunting them, and the lack of closure prevents their souls to transit to the next incarnation. However, while the Mother is determined to remember and relentlessly waits for the spirit of her possibly deceased child to turn up, the Reporter seems desperate to forget and move on.154 As with the kun-n¯ o adaptation, Mother Hen harnesses the double function of the theatre as a ghostly medium and a retainer of memory.155

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Fig. 5.4 The Mother (Hung Chit-wah, left) and the Reporter (Hung Peiching, right) wait for the train to the afterlife in The Mother Hen Next Door (2010) (Courtesy of Performosa Theatre)

Spectrality is central to the plays in terms of dramaturgy and characterization and with respect to the ghostliness of harrowing past experiences that keep haunting the present. As in the kun-n¯ o version, the spirits’ incomplete existences are indications of unprocessed mourning, traumatic response, and quest for justice. The two spectres are determined to avenge wrongs, unearth long-buried secrets, and unveil the skeletons in the closet of official history. The performers and the characters they portray are tangible incarnations of ‘collective points de repère’—catalysts of cultural memory and embodied vehicles for the evocation of landmark historical occurrences.156 Moreover, both productions commemorate Kuo Pao Kun, the departed creator of the original spectral dramaturgy, hence are haunted on multiple levels. Likewise, tropes of travel and journeying define the kun-n¯ o adaptation and the Mother Hen plays in equal measure. Both foreground the journey as a form and production mode since they are episodic—devised through stages, stations, and destinations—and adapted to the different locations

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they traverse. Relational movement is constitutive of both projects, as the former travels through Tokyo, Yokohama, Nanjing, Hong Kong, and Singapore, and the latter from Singapore to Taipei and back, via Macau. Following Bourriaud’s definition of the ‘time-specific’157 artwork in journeyform, these collaborations respond to time-place specificity to the extent that they resonate with significant historical chronotopes, their format and concept are intrinsic to distinct performance sites and temporalities, and they arise from the specific occurrence of Kuo’s death anniversary. An understanding of the notion of journey as ‘the overstep between two symbolic geographies’158 lends a thematic kernel to both productions. Both involve the trope of travel as travail (French for ‘labour’, ‘hardship’, ‘trouble’) and cast the transient spirits as travailleurs —travellers through suffering.159 Both present travel as a transitional and transgressive ‘voyage across a liminal space (a threshold, a bridge or a o adaptation enacts a ritual procession from the crossroad)’.160 The kun-n¯ mortal realm to ‘the other shore’ (paramita) of Buddhist enlightenment, whereas Mother Hen’s juxtaposition of the spirits’ longing for transcendence and their physical immobility foregrounds the (non-)journey as a cypher for traumatic displacement and psychic nonsynchronicity. As suggested above, the island where the tormented spirits roam in Kuo’s play is likely an allegory for Singapore under Japanese Occupation, yet it may as well be a signifier for Taiwan. Worth noting in this context are Kuo’s visits to the former residence and burial site of General Nogi Maresuke (1849–1912) during his 1997 Japanese sojourn. Nogi was a senior commander during the massacre at Port Arthur (1894) in the first Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895), who later served as Governor-General of Taiwan from 1896 to 1898. Thus, the brutality perpetrated by the Imperial Japanese Army on the island’s inhabitants and their own countrymen in The Spirits Play may possibly allude to comparable acts of interand intra-ethnic violence suffered by the Taiwanese at the hands of both the foreign colonizer and the Chinese Nationalist forces that relocated to the island from the mainland after the war—primarily 2/28 and the ensuing period of political repression known as the White Terror.161 Unlike June Fourth in China, 2/28 has been incorporated into Taiwan’s official mnemonic archive since the lifting of Martial Law in 1987. However, Hung Pei-ching notes in her TETC Lab journal that those tragic events are inexorably fading into vicarious memory for many young Taiwanese, as the older generations who lived through those dark years gradually pass away.162 Although 2/28 has left an indelible mark on

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the Taiwanese collective unconscious and is routinely commemorated in designated spaces of remembrance such as the 2/28 Peace Memorial Park in Taipei, many former sites of historical barbarism have now become invisible memorials—insignificant coordinates on the island’s cartography of violence. Places that were once theatres of mass burials and executions have been normalized as spaces of the everyday: streets, squares, gardens, and other public areas that no longer bear any sign of their former violent semantics. It follows that Taiwan’s platial memory—the memory of these haunted places as lieux de mémoire and physical mementoes of violence—is being progressively neutralized and zeroed out of history. Hung’s eagerness to re-experience the trauma of 2/28 vicariously may be understood in the context of a tendency, among the younger generations of Taiwanese, to revisit their country’s violent past in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square crackdown of 1989 in mainland China.163 In her study of 2/28 fiction, Sylvia Lin quotes Maurice Blanchot’s observation that the descendants of the victims of disaster are ‘obligated to fill in the blank spaces with their own words and imagination, to find their own way back to the past that has been denied them—to remember what they did not know’.164 Lin further notes that while most of those who perished and vanished in the White Terror persecutions were men, fictional reconstructions of the atrocities tend to place female survivors at the centre of the narrative as ‘testimonial figures and a source for unearthing historical injustice’.165 This is the case of the Mother Hen collaboration. The primal scene of this injustice, however, remains unnamed in both versions. Yet it is unmistakably construed as a conflation of 2/28 and June Fourth. Indications of the former are more prominent in the 2010 production, wherein the protest is doubly retold by the spirits—from the perspective of the victims—and by a succession of voice-overs that relate the sanctioned account of the incident in the rhetorical lingo of state media and detail the suppression of the ‘riot’ (baodong ), the persecution of intellectuals, the silencing of dissent, and the consequences of Martial Law. Accordingly, the Mother’s narrative regularly alternates Mandarin, the official language, and Cantonese, her native language, to offset the dry facts of officialdom with her affective truths. The 2012 version likewise blurs the chronotopic boundaries between Taipei and Beijing, 1947 and 1989, by entwining one violent act with another to reveal the cyclic return of the repressed through endless multiplication of historical atrocity. But it alludes more explicitly to June Fourth and to the plight of the Tiananmen Mothers. It chronicles a

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democratic anti-government resistance that took place ‘on the square’ (guangchang de kangzheng ) twenty years before, and gives accounts of sit-ins, hunger strikes, institutional violence against ‘our children’ (women de haizi), unexplained disappearances, and drifting souls brimming with anger and regret—still upset at the misrecognition of the atrocities that ended their life so violently and prematurely. The most overt hint at factual occurrences is the recurring numeral, ‘2864’ (er ba liu si), clearly a double inscription of the dates of the two incidents. For the Reporter, this number marks the demise of people who mattered to her when she was alive and whom, in death, she is struggling to forget. The evocative figure is mentioned repeatedly in conjunction with a wounded young man who saved the Reporter from persecution and, likely, death during the protest; both were detained in a hospital where 2864 was his patient number. Eventually, the young man turns out to be the Mother’s lost—and late—child, so that 2864 comes to identify not only her son but ‘everyone’s son’ (renhe ren de erzi), and what she is looking for comes to represent ‘what many people are looking for’, as the 2010 unpublished play script indicates. The veracity and magnitude of the violence occurred on those fateful dates are, nonetheless, relentlessly unwritten, doubted, dismissed, refuted, and refashioned to underscore the manner in which, for decades, both governments in Taipei and Beijing have disguised the truth about the nature and scale of the upheavals.166 As it emerges from the women’s conversation, official history holds no comprehensive records of those occurrences, meaning that countless unsanctioned microhistories have been made invisible, and technically non-existent. Mother Hen dramatizes spectrality as both a signifier of hauntology and a cypher for concealment, for embodied experience that is forcedly removed from public discourse, hence from social memory. Spectrality is conceptualized as the intentional and institutionalized exorcism of episodes of brutality inflicted by a nation-state on its own citizenry—the silent victims of invisible violence who are also made invisible by historical suppression. It is no accident that the People’s Republic of China has been nicknamed ‘the People’s Republic of Amnesia’,167 whose defining memory of democide has been reduced to a phantasmal non-event ‘wherein a bloody confrontation is rendered invisible, stripped of truth and re-created in rumor, imagination, and allegory’.168 Forced oblivion and public secrecy intertwine dialectically with the excavation of forbidden

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and often forgotten suffering that triggers the spectral return of proscribed (counter-)narratives onto the haunted stage of history. The production history of the Mother Hen plays gestures at the interChinese geopolitics of liang ’an sandi since partners from Hong Kong and Taiwan came together to devise a story which, essentially, speaks of their homeland’s relationship to China. While Taiwan was separated from the mainland, Hong Kong was reunited. In both cases, geopathic anxiety is induced by movement of people and shifting of borders, namely, by circumstances of travel and transition. Both cases reveal an attempt to articulate national identity within a transnational Sinosphere that is increasingly conditioned by the mainland’s economic and political leverage. From this perspective, one might envision the Taiwan Strait as a haunted stage for traumatic dramas of separation—or forced reunion— wherein ‘bodily kinship and emotional citizenship’ are negotiated performatively, as Suk-Young Kim has argued of the Korean Demilitarized Zone.169 As with the limbo station in the play, this incomplete transitional space is ‘defined by ontological temporariness and invaded by […] ghosts of the past’.170 At the same time, Mother Hen counterpoises the overbearing clout of China in the political performances of liang ’an sandi by positioning Hong Kong and Taiwan voices within a heteroglossic network mediated by the nation-city of Singapore. The production’s conceptual countercartography appeals to the discourse of archipelagic relationality in a bid to resist the China-centric epistemological binary that sets islands and non-sovereign territories against mainlands and motherlands, hence is fundamentally ‘structured by hierarchies of value, as much as size: presence/absence, sufficiency/insufficiency, positivity/negativity, completeness/lack’.171 Hung Chit-wah notes in her production ‘travelogue’ that she and her creative partner, Hung Pei-ching, ‘were separated in two lands’ and collaborated remotely during the first writing phase in 2010, whereas the second instalment was reworked over three months they spent together in Singapore.172 Perhaps because of this separation, the earlier script deals with the politics of Hong Kong, China, and Taiwan more overtly than the 2012 revision, wherein national history is invoked as a gateway to exploring and experiencing universal questions of truth and ‘humanity’—of the meaning and memory of being human.173 Hung hints, however, at the incompleteness of the project’s transregional geopolitics since its travels through the Sinosphere from Taipei to Singapore and back, via Macau,

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are haunted by the absence of China: ‘[T]he question really is, “When will the Mother Hen actually stop flying?” Maybe one day, when it has flown to Beijing, then its journey would have come to a complete resolution’.174 It is profoundly ironic that the PRC government has attempted to appropriate the memory of Taiwan’s 2/28 as a ‘just action’ in the democratic struggle against authoritarianism while actively suppressing any commemoration of its own domestic violence.175 But as long as the public discourse surrounding June Fourth remains silenced, and talk of Taiwan taboo, Mother Hen is unlikely to set foot on Chinese soil. ‘Absent’ China is, nonetheless, present as a monstrous figure of history and a symbolic site of trauma. Visually, the Mother Hen of the title summons the cartographic contours of the mainland that looms from ‘next door’ over the smaller Sinophone territories. The graphic design of the production’s promotional poster and other paratextual materials conveys such symbolism by highlighting the hen-shaped silhouette of China as Taiwan and Hong Kong’s domineering neighbour. Semantically, the English phrase ‘mother hen’ foregrounds the PRC’s intrusive presence and self-perception as the Mother(land) of a renegade child, Taiwan, and a recalcitrant prodigal son, Hong Kong.176 As the 2010 script indicates, the hen symbolizes ‘authority (those who hold the power)’ and is made accountable for the histories—and herstories—of violence that the collaboration scrutinizes. With her obdurate pursuit of truth still decades after the event, and into the afterlife, the Mother in the Mother Hen plays is far more evocative of China’s Tiananmen Mothers than of Kuo’s Japaneseinspired maternal archetype in The Spirits Play. Allegorically, the Mother Hen appears as the terrifying character of a fairy tale that the missing son told his Mother shortly before disappearing and, as it turns out, to the Reporter during the protests. Thanks to this shared memory, the Mother and the Reporter—mutually hostile and suspicious at first—warm up to each other as if they were mother and child, vicariously acting as one another’s lost kin. While symbolizing division and dread, the hen also lends a connecting bridge between two generations, two tragedies, and, possibly, two sides of the Taiwan Strait. The spectre of the cannibalistic monster Can haunts the Mother Hen adaptations in the guise of a giant hen that is loved for her glistening feathers and her ability to lay golden eggs and imitate the cockcrow at dawn. Nonetheless, she develops an enormous appetite and starts eating everything that stands in her way, including her parents, her spouse, her offspring and, finally, her own self, until only her gaping mouth is

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left. In the Mother’s narrative, the fable of the self-destructive hen interweaves with the popular legend of Aunt Tigress (Hu gupo), wherein an evil spirit disguised as an old woman gnaws on the bones of naughty children at night. The most straightforward interpretation for the Mother’s tales is a national allegory of ravenous China ‘swallowing’ Hong Kong and Taiwan to the point of historical irrelevance—of a mother(land) that frightens instead of fostering her youngsters. As previously noted of Can, however, the metaphor of a self-consuming beastly creature also entreats more universal and unsettling visions of nationalistic self-annihilation—of nations forfeiting their citizenry in the name of state security, and ogreish mother(land)s devouring their progeny. The fabled creature ‘is invoked to bear not only on the monstrosity of human experience at a certain moment but also on the moral urgency of making sense of the monstrous’.177 As an antidote to the Mother’s negative mythology, the Reporter tells of a self-sacrificing bird that died to save a village from a drought—clearly a quotation of the salvific Xiang in The Spirits Play. To her, this story proves the importance of foregoing the individual (xiao wo) for the benefit of the collective (da wo). But the Mother dismisses the notion of ‘collective self’ as merely a mask that hides the genuine nature of the power elites that manipulate official history and public discourse—the face of a deceitful nation-state. Mythology and storytelling function, therefore, as both memory-keeping devices and counter-discursive vehicles of institutional critique. The monstrous hen appears again in a recurrent nightmare of the Reporter wherein the giant creature slashes her head off and sucks her brain. This is an evident trope for brainwashing, coercive amnesia, and techniques of enforced forgetting, or ‘lethotechnics’.178 In one such oneiric sequence, the hen attempts to kill and devour the Reporter but the latter pulls her own heart out voluntarily to offer it to the hen, in an obvious intimation of selfless loyalty. As the hen holds the Reporter in a motherly embrace, the young woman stabs her with the same bloodstained dagger that the hen was holding against her just before. The hen smiles, as she cries and bleeds. The Reporter licks the hen’s tears and blood in a cleansing and comforting gesture. This sequence exposes the complex love–hate relationship between nations and citizens at times of unrest. Or, if one takes the hen as a signifier for China’s attitude towards Taiwan and Hong Kong, it may as well imply an ambivalent co-dependence between

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the mainland, the island, and the former British colony. The overlapping and interchange of the women’s memories and personal narratives underscore the production’s intention to chart historical correspondences and underscore the cyclic—and ultimately universal—character of historical monstrosity through a layering of traumatic experience across localities.179 From the perspective of transtextual genealogy, Mother Hen delves into tropes of memory and historical responsibility that feature prominently in Taiwanese 2/28 fiction (what Michael Berry calls ‘2/28’s literary canon of violence’),180 not least because of its potent evocation of the spirit of Lu Xun’s madman, his fixation on intra-ethnic cannibalism, and his frantic call—in the classic novella, ‘A Madman’s Diary’ (Kuangren riji, 1918)— to ‘save the children’. Berry quotes a passage from Taiwanese novelist Wu He’s Remains of Life (Yusheng, 2000) stating that ‘the inherent nature of what a “massacre” entails is always the same, […] a massacre involves a fundamental betrayal of life by life itself’; its nature is ‘inhuman, cannibalistic’.181 The Mother Hen plays can, furthermore, be comprised within the canon of June Fourth fiction that has surfaced predominantly in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and transnational Sinophone writing.182 The basic (in)action, iconic characterization, and minimalistic setting of Mother Hen reverberate, as well, with Beckettian motifs, as noted in some reviews of the production.183 Waiting for Godot immediately springs to mind: two wandering souls on an endless metaphysical journey, a lanky tree, a shabby bench by a ‘waiting station’ (denghou zhan), a couple of tattered suitcases, a desolate location. The Mother has been lingering in this liminal no man’s land for what appears to be an eternity, forever waiting for her child and certain that ‘he surely will come today’, as the 2012 script indicates. The Reporter seems determined to leave her mortal suffering behind as soon as the next train arrives. Yet she never leaves. The disquieting and yet comforting presence of an invisible third character ridden with symbolic resonances—the hen, like Godot—looms over the two spirits, inexorably. Once the protest’s repressed histories have been resurrected and the two women have finally rescued, recorded, and relieved themselves of the burden of memory, they do eventually bid farewell to one another. Or do they? The Mother seems willing to board the train and forget, at last, while the Reporter walks towards a halo of light and keeps searching for the truth. But their destination is never certain. Consistent with Chaudhuri’s framing of Waiting for Godot as a geopathic drama that

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deals with ‘the failure of homecoming’, the Mother and the Reporter suffer from the ‘victimage of location’. Yet, like Beckett’s characters, they are not accorded the ‘heroism of departure’184 because of their inability to ‘go home’—as The Spirits Play’s restless souls bemoan compulsively.185 Additional parallels can be drawn between the allegorical signification of the Mother Hen as a merger of attributes originally ascribed to the Can/Xiang dyad and of the ambivalent ritual properties assigned to the ‘modern myth’ of Godot as both a malignant force and a redeemer.186 The hen is depicted as a victimizer, but occasionally also as a victim and a comforter. The production features two evocative sound effects: one is the whistling of the nocturnal ghost train that takes the lingering souls to the afterlife, and the other is the morning cockcrow—yet another signifier for the hen—that announces a time of rest and temporary relief for the spirits. Once night falls, they must wake and confront unfinished matters from their previous lives that cause them unspeakable pain. Therefore, they look forward to hearing the cockcrow, but they are also terrified by the hen’s oneiric appearances. Like Godot, the hen is the mythical symbol of a daimonic potency that ‘arrives as a false messiah, sometimes as an evil or negative force to be exorcised, but sometimes, too, as an authentic means to salvation’.187 As David Der-wei Wang writes of the Taowu, the giant hen resides in an ambiguous moral zone where ‘the inhumanity of the past’ struggles with ‘the hope of its eradication in the future’.188 The Reporter denies involvement in the tragic events that keep haunting the Mother and pretends not to know the young man pictured in the old ‘talismanic photograph’189 that the Mother carries on her body. However, it becomes increasingly apparent that those events affected the young woman much more than she wants to acknowledge and that she remembers far more than she initially admits. Worth noting is the engagement of intermediality as an antidote against disappearance and a conduit of prosthetic memory. Alison Landsberg describes prosthetic memory as ‘a new form of public cultural memory’ that is constructed and circulated through technologies such as screen-based media and photography.190 Exposure to media-induced representations, narratives, and imagery assists the internalization of historical occurrences that the beholder has neither eye-witnessed nor experienced first-hand and yet affect their ‘subjectivity and politics’,191 along with the constitution of an imagined community and a sense of shared identity. The prosthetic formation of memory is especially resonant in the context of June Fourth as the first case of globally televised barbarism in Chinese history and,

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as such, closely linked to the construction of transnational iconographies and collective memorials across and beyond the Sinosphere. One way Mother Hen engages such forms of mediated and acquired (post-)memory to foreground tropes of spectrality and forced amnesia is the deployment of photographs, picture frames, and media recording devices (a photo camera and a tape recorder) as signifying stage properties. These testimonial objects do not only ‘carry memory traces from the past’ but ‘also embody the very process of its transmission’.192 History that has been disputed, distorted, and disguised or that the producers, performers, and audiences of the plays may not have lived through is prosthetically reconstructed and performatively re-enacted by way of material and intermedial post-mnemonic interactions. Both women carry battered suitcases crammed with evocative objects that denote historical testimonies—‘important things and records from their life, or things that they cannot forget’. These material signifiers, which include a photograph, a diary, a photo camera, a tape recorder, old letters, clothes, notes, and other personal possessions, are described in the script as ‘tattered and incomplete’ remains (yiwu) that look ‘like they went through a war’. They are indications of an incomplete mnemonic record, of traumatic removal and unprocessed grief. The Mother suffers from ‘a crisis of representation’ that allows her neither to process the traumatic experience as memory nor to obliterate it.193 As she asserts: ‘I can neither remember nor forget about it’. The Reporter devoted herself to recording the protest when she was living and so, in death, she carries a pen and a notebook to collect evidence of historical realities that were made invisible and store them in the memory archive that her suitcase symbolizes. An avid photographer, the Mother’s son was also a bearer of truth during the protest. The old camera found in the suitcase is the sole remaining proof of his actual existence and a tangible testimony to the power of images to memorialize events. Likewise, the tape recorder assists the exercise of memory while also comforting the Mother as she listens to her son’s favourite tune, which makes the Reporter uneasy in her struggle to forget about past horrors. The Mother seizes the Reporter’s suitcase to pry into the secrets of her worldly existence and to prevent her from leaving the station before admitting to the truth—that she was involved in the ‘movement’ (yundong ) and that she knew her son. She painstakingly evades the older woman’s probing questions and seeks—literally and figuratively—to hide the contents of her hurtful baggage. As the Mother alleges at one point,

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the atrocity of the past has yet to be vindicated ‘because of people like you, who dare not face it and choose to forget, to escape, to lock everything up in a suitcase, so that nobody will ever know’. As a signifier of a hidden archive and a store of historical truth, the suitcase eventually discloses a Pandora’s box of horrific revelations and hallucinatory recollections: ‘Young men lying in pools of blood’, ‘heads hanging from trees’, endless piles of corpses, rotting burning flesh, and the vision of an agonizing infant covered with worms in a stifling room full of putrefying bodies.194 As the women peek inside the suitcase, it is as if the moving image of history, or its filmic impression, were running right before their eyes (Fig. 5.5). Memory is reconstructed cinematically through shared storytelling and image-making. Flashbacks, soundtracks, voiceovers, and montages of non-linear sequences superimpose and fade in and out of focus in the women’s mind’s eye to enable a mutual embrace of each other’s affective histories, remembrances, and pain as one’s own. At last, the Mother reminisces the night of her son’s death, when she secretly carried his corpse back home and took a memorial photograph

Fig. 5.5 Battered suitcases represent traumatic past memories in The Mother Hen Next Door: A Tribute (2012) (Courtesy of Performosa Theatre)

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next to his violated body. She takes an empty gilded frame out of her suitcase, and she and the Reporter place their faces behind it so that it looks like they are being pictured together. This manner of recontextualization of the portrait—or else, ‘of outcontextualisation, as contexts are multiplied and rendered a matter of apparent choice or selective framing’195 —enables the Mother to recalibrate the horrific imprint of her son’s final photographic impression. The neutralization of traumatic memory by reframing and ‘freezing’ its subjects ‘creates a dimension in which the future perfect of the photographic image—this will have been—may be suspended, manipulated and reworked to become the past perfected’,196 in other words, the perfectly simulated memory of a happy household. An absent family is made vicariously present by harnessing the materiality of testimonial objects such as the camera and the vacant frame as ‘memorial devices’ in performance.197 As Rosalind Krauss notes, the camera ‘is an agent in the collective fantasy of family cohesion, and in that sense the camera is a projective tool, part of the theater that the family constructs to convince itself that it is together and whole’.198 The empty picture frame stands for the forced invisibility of the victims who have been zeroed out of focus and removed from the frame of public history. Likewise, the absent image therein constitutes a spectral reminder of the Derridean ‘generations of ghosts […] who are not present’ but keep demanding justice199 (Fig. 5.6). The invocation of photography underscores the hauntological functions of both the photographic medium and of theatrical performance to witness reality, bear truth, and retain memory.200 As with the theatre stage, ‘[p]hotography supplements, and even supplies, memory, too, with capacities beyond those of the characters for remembering and narrativising; as such it is charged with attesting to or revising personal and political history’.201 The generational conflict between the obstinate Mother and the seemingly oblivious Reporter foregrounds a conflict between the duty of commemoration and the right to (self-)enforced forgetfulness. The dialectics of remembering and forgetting that the two women embody teases out the ideological intricacies of the science of amnesiology as the examination of cultural oblivion not as a natural miscarriage of memory but as an induced misconstruction.202 In the context of historical remembrance and official orchestration of collective silence, amnesiology turns, therefore, into an extension of agnotology—‘the study of ignorance making, the lost and forgotten’.203

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Fig. 5.6 An empty picture frame serves as a memorial device against the spectralization of violent national histories in The Mother Hen Next Door: A Tribute (2012) (Courtesy of Performosa Theatre)

The Mother clings to the past obsessively and refuses to let go until the truth is revealed and justice is made. In contrast, the Reporter is eager to ride the train of forgetfulness and be relieved from her hurting memories. Not only she is intensely scarred by the carnage she witnessed during the protest, but she is also struggling to make sense of her own mother’s perceived betrayal for reporting her to the authorities in a frantic attempt to save her from sure death, yet forcing her to hide for the rest of her days. In her case, forgetting is not ‘necessarily a failing’ or a reflection of the nation-state’s regulatory amnesia but ‘is constitutive in the formation of a new identity’.204 However, this is not a Ricoeurian ‘happy forgetting’; it is forgetting that refuses to forgive.205 The Mother needs an audience for her posttraumatic storytelling; she needs someone that can listen to her stories. The Reporter seems impatient to leave but always returns to the Mother. Both resolve to board the train ‘tomorrow’, in a hopeful future. Yet, haunted by their traumatic experience, both keep on living an incomplete spectral existence ‘in the past continuous’.206

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Connected to the dialectics of remembering and forgetting are the women’s distinctive responses to trauma. Consistent with the distinction between terror and horror that Adriana Cavarero outlines in her treatise on modern violence, Horrorism, one might argue that the brutality of the repression has terrorized the Reporter, whereas the Mother has been left horrorized. Cavarero explains that the etymology of the word ‘terror’ suggests physical motion and a dynamic reaction to fear; terror means ‘flight from violent death’.207 In life, the Reporter escaped atrocity and so, in death, she is fleeing from its mnemonic returns. Forgetting is her answer to the terror of the past. In contrast, the Mother incarnates the static response that characterizes the etymology of horror. Horror induces ‘a state of paralysis’ and powerless stasis, a sense ‘of feeling frozen […] in the face of a form of violence that appears more inadmissible than death’.208 Fearing the death of one’s child—essentially, a death against nature—might be one such form of unconceivable barbarism. This rift in the natural course of human life also explains the Mother’s recourse to storytelling and the supernatural as healing mechanisms for overcoming an incommensurable trauma. Cavarero associates ‘the instinctual mobility’209 of terror to the human disposition for survival and ‘the physics of horror’210 to conditions of dismemberment and defacement—carnage, mass killings, and atrocities inflicted on defenceless beings. Accordingly, one may argue that the Mother articulates a horrorized response to the ‘unassimilated nature’ of her trauma, for she is frozen by the memory of what she does not know— of an unexplained disappearance or death that haunts and paralyzes the survivor.211 The Mother refuses to board the Lethean train of oblivion that will eradicate her uncomfortable recollections because forgetting does not feel to her like a release (jietuo). Stuck in a stagnant limbo, the Mother demands remembrance but refuses to mourn. As Avery Gordon maintains of the Argentinian Mothers of Plaza de Mayo and may equally apply to China’s Tiananmen Mothers, the Mother’s resigned acceptance of mourning would amount to submitting her memories to the sanitized rites of ‘false reconciliation’ sanctioned by the nation-state, hence to relegating her trauma—and her child—to a dead past. But for her child’s suspended history to remain current, her memories must live.212 The neglected narratives of horror and injustice that inhabit the significant chronotopes of post-war East Asia haunt its current geopolitics—a spectropolitics—like ghosts that gather around the open wounds of the region’s unfinished pasts. Far from being inert historical matter,

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the living histories which are played out within those dynamic timespaces return to unsettle the performances of East Asia as susceptible to renegotiation and reimagining. To invoke the Derridean spectre yet again, those minor transnational histories resurface in the fraught present as congregations of revenants and arrivants to repossess the past and reclaim a still undetermined future. As Heonik Kwon has argued of the Cold War, the lingering anxieties and traumatic remains that surround those landmark events keep trickling through the fissures of sanctioned historiographies in a protracted ‘process of decomposition’.213 Disassembled, demystified, and deconstructed through performative re-enactment, those suspended existences—neither memorialized nor forgotten, neither present nor bygone—persist as liminal spectropoetic entities on the haunted stages of East Asia.

Notes 1. Burials ceased in 1973. The site was named a memorial park—the Japanese Cemetery Park (Ribenren mudi gongyuan)—in 1987. 2. Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 2006 [1993]), xviii. 3. Ibid. 4. Kuo Pao Kun, “The Spirits Play: Talking to the Spirits,” in Guo Baokun quanji di liu juan — pinglun/The Complete Works of Kuo Pao Kun Volume Six: Commentaries, ed. Sy Ren Quah and Beng Luan Tan (Singapore: World Scientific, 2007), 278. 5. Ibid. 6. Derrida, Spectres, xviii. 7. Ibid. 8. ‘To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’, Adorno writes in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber, 9th repr. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997 [1967]), 34. 9. David Der-wei Wang, The Monster That Is History: History, Violence, and Fictional Writing in Twentieth-Century China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 188. 10. Kuo, “The Spirits Play: Talking to the Spirits,” 279. 11. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993), 148. 12. See Richard Schechner, Between Theatre and Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985); Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor: University of

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13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21.

22.

23. 24.

25. 26. 27.

28.

Michigan Press, 2001); and Alice Rayner, Ghosts: Death’s Double and the Phenomena of Theatre (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). On the spectral turn in theatre and performance studies see Rachel Clements, “Ghosts,” Contemporary Theatre Review 23, no. 1 (2013): 26–28; Mary Luckhurst and Emilie Morin, eds., Theatre and Ghosts: Materiality, Performance and Modernity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Derrida, Spectres, 10. Carlson, Haunted Stage, 2. Clements, “Ghosts,” 28. Rebecca Schneider, Theatre & History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 29. Carlson, Haunted Stage. Carole Faucher, “As the Wind Blows and Dew Came Down: Ghost Stories and Collective Memory in Singapore,” in Beyond Description: Singapore Space Historicity, ed. Ryan Bishop, John Phillips, and Wei-Wei Yeo (London: Routledge, 2004), 196. On the notion of point de repère (‘point of reference’, ‘landmark’) see Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, ed. and trans. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Carlson, Haunted Stage, 7. Derrida, Spectres, 11. Sat¯ o has been the Artistic Director of Za-Koenji since its inauguration in 2009. Previously, he was Artistic Director of Setagaya Public Theatre in Tokyo (1997–2000). Kuo founded The Practice Theatre Ensemble (Shijian huaju tuan) in 1986, renamed as The Theatre Practice in 1997. His elder daughter, Kuo Jian Hong (Guo Jianhong), took over as co-Artistic Director (with Wu Xi) after his death in 2002 and as sole Artistic Director since 2006. The Cantonese titles of the productions are Gaak lei ge daai mou gai and Gaak lei ge daai mou gai—sap nin zai. Geli (Gaak lei) is the Cantonese equivalent of the Mandarin gebi, ‘next door’, and ge is equivalent of the grammatical particle de in Mandarin. Derrida, Spectres, 224. Kunqu, n¯ o, and koodiyattam were proclaimed Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO in 2001. Jingju was listed in 2010. Carlson, Haunted Stage, 20. Derrida, Spectres, 78. Journey’s cast included Matsushima Makoto, Shimizu Kanji (Tokyo), Xu Sijia, and Yang Yang (Nanjing), who also appear in the 2012 version of The Spirits Play. Derrida, Spectres, 245.

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29. Colin Davis, “Hauntology, Spectres and Phantoms,” French Studies 59, no. 3 (2005): 379. 30. Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, new ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008 [1997]), 8. 31. Ibid. 32. Bert O. States, Dreaming and Storytelling (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 119. 33. Wang, Monster That Is History, 187. 34. Kuo and his wife, dancer/choreographer Goh Lay Kuan, founded the Singapore Performing Arts School (SPAS) in 1965, renamed Practice Theatre School (PTS) in 1973 and Practice Performing Arts School (PPAS) in 1984. Kuo and Thirunalan Sasitharan launched the Theatre Training and Research Programme (TTRP) at the PPAS in 2000. 35. Ke Siren [Quah Sy Ren], Xiju bainian: Xinjiapo huawen xiju 1913–2013 (Singapore: Xijuhe; Xinjiapo guojia bowuguan, 2013), 154. 36. Xinjiapo huayu huaju tuanti, Xinjiapo huayu huaju tuanti lianhe zhuban di yi jie xiju ying (Singapore: Xinjiapo huayu huaju tuanti, 1983). 37. Di’er jie huayu xiju ying zhuanji bianweihui, ed., Maixiang duoyuanhua xiju: Di’er jie huayu xiju ying zhuanji (Xinjiapo: Xinjiapo Chaozhou bayi huiguan wenjiao weiyuanhui chubanzu, 1988). 38. Gao Xingjian, “The Coffin Is Too Big for the Hole: Dilemma of the Modern Man,” trans. Kong Kam Yoke, in Kuo Pao Kun, Images at the Margins: A Collection of Kuo Pao Kun’s Plays (Singapore: Times Books International, 2000), 72. 39. Ke [Quah], Xiju bainian, 156. 40. Suibi Nanyang, “Shijian xiju ying — Rong Nianzeng deng san Gangtai zishen juchangren lai Xin kaijiang,” Suibi Nanyang, May 16, 2010, accessed February 2, 2017, http://www.sgwritings.com/viewnews_ 33363.html. 41. Yu Qiuyu, “The Temptations of Kuo Pao Kun,” trans. Lee Chee Keng, in Kuo Pao Kun: And Love the Wind and Rain/Guo Baokun — fengfeng yuyu you yi sheng, ed. Kian Woon Kwok and Han Wue Teo (Singapore: Cruxible, 2002), 52. 42. Han Laoda, “Kuo Pao Kun and Xiangsheng in Singapore,” trans. Han Wue Teo, in Kwok and Teo, Kuo Pao Kun: And Love the Wind and Rain, 95. 43. Paul Rae and Alvin Lim, “Nameless, Sexless, Rootless, Homeless: Performance in a Transnation State,” in Contemporary Southeast Asian Performance: Transnational Perspectives, ed. Laura Noszlopy and Matthew Isaac Cohen (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), 164.

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44. Guo Baokun [Kuo Pao Kun], “Huayu huaju de xin tansuo,” in Guo Baokun quanji di qi juan—lunwen yu yanjiang /The Complete Works of Kuo Pao Kun Volume Seven: Papers and Speeches, ed. Sy Ren Quah and Beng Luan Tan (Singapore: World Scientific, 2008), 78. 45. Yeo, Wei-Wei, “Of Trees and the Heartland: Singapore’s Narratives,” in Bishop, Phillips, and Yeo, Beyond Description, 19. 46. Ibid., 21–22. 47. Ibid., 22. 48. Kuo Pao Kun, “Uprooted and Searching,” in Quah and Tan, Guo Baokun quanji di qi juan, 172–79. 49. Yeo, “Of Trees,” 22. 50. Rong Nianzeng [Danny Yung] and Lai Shengchuan, “Juchang, wenhua, chuangyi chengshi: Gangtai liangwei xiju mingjia duitan,” Zaobao zhoukan/zbWEEKLY 847, February 29, 2004, 6. 51. Kuo Pao Kun, “A Reflection on Theatre in Asia: One Voice from Singapore,” in Quah and Tan, Guo Baokun quanji di qi juan, 199. 52. Rae and Lim, “Nameless,” 165. 53. Kuo, “Reflection,” 203. 54. Ibid., 207. 55. Ibid., 205. 56. Kuo Pao Kun, “The Spirits Play,” in Two Plays by Kuo Pao Kun: Descendants of the Eunuch Admiral and the Spirits Play, ed. C. J. W.-L. Wee and Lee Chee Keng (Singapore: SNP Editions, 2003), 89. For the Chinese version see Kuo, “Lingxi,” in Guo Baokun quanji di san juan — huawen xiju 3: 1990 niandai/The Complete Works of Kuo Pao Kun Volume Three: Plays in Chinese 3, the 1990s, ed. Sy Ren Quah and Cheng Lui Pan (Singapore: World Scientific, 2009), 183–215. 57. Kuo, “Spirits,” 82. 58. Ibid., 91. 59. Ibid., 95. 60. Ibid., 106. 61. Ibid., 103. 62. Ibid., 96. The crane is a symbol of happiness and longevity in East Asian cultures and considered a national treasure in Japan, where it also stands for hope, peace, and healing. It signifies home in The Spirits Play. 63. Ibid., 110. Original emphasis omitted. 64. Kuo Pao Kun, “Keynote Address at the Southeast Asian Theatre Seminar on War,” in Quah and Tan, Guo Baokun quanji di qi juan, 184. 65. Kuo, “Spirits,” 87. 66. Ibid., 76. 67. Kuo, “Keynote,” 184. 68. Kuo Pao Kun, “Challenges to Asian Public Intellectuals: Asia Leadership Fellow Program 1997 Report,” in Quah and Tan, Guo Baokun quanji di qi juan, 238.

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78. 79. 80.

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82.

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84.

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Kuo, “Keynote,” 185. Ibid., 186. Ibid., 187. Kuo, “Spirits,” 76. Kuo, “Challenges,” 236. Kuo and Sat¯ o met in 1996 when Sat¯ o directed a Japanese production of Kuo’s Descendants of the Eunuch Admiral. Ibid. Ibid., 243. Wang, Monster That Is History, 1. On the Kuo-Lu Xun connection, see Janadas Devan, “Reading Kuo Pao Kun Loud and Clear,” in Kwok and Teo, Kuo Pao Kun: And Love the Wind and Rain, 55–58. C. J. W.-L. Wee, “Introduction: Kuo Pao Kun’s Contemporary Theatre,” in The Complete Works of Kuo Pao Kun Volume 4: Plays in English, ed. C. J. W.-L. Wee (Singapore: World Scientific, 2012), xxiii. Ibid., xxix. Kuo Pao Kun, “‘Lingxi’ jieyuan,” in Quah and Tan, Guo Baokun quanji di liu juan, 239. Kuo Pao Kun, “War and Violence, History and Memory,” in Guo Baokun quanji di ba juan — fangtan/The Complete Works of Kuo Pao Kun Volume 8: Interviews, ed. Sy Ren Quah and Beng Luan Tan (Singapore: World Scientific, 2012), 191. On The Spirits Play and its reception, see Wee, “Introduction” and Ke Siren [Quah Sy Ren], “Geren yu jiti de douzheng — lun Guo Baokun ‘Lingxi’ zhong de yiyi, xiangxiang yu xianshi,” Xianggang xiju xuekan 5 (2005): 405–12. Tadashi Uchino, Crucible Bodies: Postwar Japanese Performance from Brecht to the New Millennium (London: Seagull Books, 2009), 110. Two different versions of Ong’s adaptation with Singaporean and Japanese performers, The Spirits Play: 6 Movements in a Strange House, were performed on 17–20 August 2000 at The Battle Box, Fort Canning Park and on 25–26 August at the Victoria Theatre in Singapore. It was renamed Dreamtime for the performances at Morishita Studios, Tokyo, in November–December 2001. Huang Shuhuai, Kuo Jian Hong, Liu Xiaoyi, and Lim Chin Huat, “Examining the Modern and Traditional in ‘One Table, Two Chairs’,” trans. Wang Liansheng, The Practice Journal 3 (2013): 4–5. Flee by Night is one of the two extant acts of Li Kaixian’s The Precious Sword (Baojian ji). The protagonist, Lin Chong, is a character from the fourteenth-century novel, Water Margin (Shuihu zhuan), attributed to Shi Nai’an (1296–1372). The first version of Yung and Ke’s 1T2C experimental adaptation premiered in Oslo in 2004. On 1T2C in kunqu and Flee by Night see Fu Jin, “Yi zhuo er yi de meixue/The Aesthetics of

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85.

86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91.

92.

93. 94.

95.

96.

97. 98.

99.

100.

One Table and Two Chairs,” in Yeben/Flee by Night, ed. Wang Xiaoying (Nanjing: Jiangsu fenghuang kexue jishu chubanshe, 2015), 96–110. Performance descriptions in this section are based on Wang Tingxin’s report, “Tuijin chuantong xiju baohu yu chuangxin de minjian liliang — Xianggang, Nanjing, Dongjing guoji ‘kun neng yanjiu’ xueshu yantaohui ceji,” Yishu baijia 2 (2012): 87–93. Rayner, Ghosts, xxxiii. Ibid., xxxii. Ibid., xxxiii. Ibid. Ibid., 133. The lines quoted in this paragraph are adapted from the published English-language script of The Spirits Play (Kuo, “Spirits”) with additional translation by the author of original text by Sat¯o, as cited in Wang, “Tuijin,” 89. This projected text is adapted from Yung’s English-language script of Flee by Night (March 2010 version). See Danny Yung, ed., Shiyan Zhongguo, Shixian juchang /Experimenting China, Realizing Theatre (Hong Kong: Zuni Icosahedron E+E, 2010), 163–65. Ibid., 154. Zuni Icosahedron, “Flee by Night Press Release,” August 7, 2015, accessed February 7, 2017, http://www.zuni.org.hk/new/zuni/ web/upload/press/1851flee%20by%20night%20-%20pressrelease% 2020150807revised_1-eng.pdf. Rossella Ferrari, “Asian Theatre as Method: The Toki Experimental Project and Sino-Japanese Transnationalism in Performance,” TDR: The Drama Review 61, no. 3 (2017): 141–64. Zhonghua renmin gongheguo guowuyuan xinwen bangongshi, “Zhongri jing, kun, neng yishujia lianhe yanyi ‘Lingxi’,” Guowuyuan xinwen bangongshi wangzhan, November 22, 2011, accessed November 7, 2018, http://www.scio.gov.cn/zhzc/35353/35354/Document/ 1508284/1508284.htm. Deng Huagui, “Kuawenhua yanyi — Guo Baokun jingdian zuopin ‘Lingxi’,” Zaobao xianzai/zbNOW, October 16, 2012, 8. David G. Goodman, “Satoh Makoto (1943–),” in The Columbia Encyclopedia of Modern Drama, vol. 2, ed. Gabrielle H. Cody and Evert Sprinchorn (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 1193. Quoted in The Theatre Practice, Guo Baokun jie — xunzhao Guo Baokun daolan shouce di er ban/Kuo Pao Kun Festival 2012—In Search of Kuo Pao Kun Festival Guide, 2nd ed. (Singapore: The Theatre Practice, 2012), 29. Zuni Icosahedron and Za-Koenji Public Theatre, Lingxi/ The Spirits Play (Singapore: The Theatre Practice, 2012).

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101. Ibid. 102. Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 39. 103. Zuni and Za-Koenji, Lingxi. 104. Fu Jin, “Hong Kong: The Opportunities for Intangible Cultural Heritage Transmission,” in Asian Performing Arts: From the Traditional to the Contemporary/Yazhou biaoyan yishu: Cong chuantong dao dangdai, ed. Danny Yung, Jessica Yeung, and Yuewai Wong (Hong Kong: Zuni Icosahedron, 2013), 218. 105. Han Yonghong, “Wangzhe de yiyu,” in Xiju xianchang: Xinjiapo dangdai huawen juzuo xuan II, ed. Ke Siren and Guo Qingliang (Singapore: Xiju he; Bafang wenhua chuangzuoshi, 2010), 370. 106. Una Chaudhuri, Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 5. 107. Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations 26 (1989): 7–24. 108. Analysis in this section is based on the production scripts and video recordings of the performances held at the Hong Kong Cultural Centre Studio Theatre on 28 November 2011 and at The Joyden Hall Bugis + in Singapore on 28 October 2012. 109. Chaudhuri, Staging Place. 110. Kuo, “Uprooted,” 177–78. 111. James Reilly, “Remember History, Not Hatred: Collective Remembrance of China’s War of Resistance to Japan,” Modern Asian Studies 45, no. 2 (2011): 466. 112. Zuni and Za-Koenji, Lingxi. 113. Rana Mitter and Aaron William Moore, “China in World War II, 1937– 1945: Experience, Memory, and Legacy,” Modern Asian Studies 45, no. 2 (2011): 237. 114. Reilly, “Remember History,” 465, 472. 115. Ibid. 116. Akiko Hashimoto, The Long Defeat: Cultural Trauma, Memory, and Identity in Japan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 8. 117. Ibid., 8–9. On Sino-Japanese politics since 1972, see He Yinan, “Forty Years in Paradox: Post-Normalisation Sino-Japanese Relations,” China Perspectives 4 (2013): 7–16. 118. Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei, “Guilt, Nostalgia, and Victimhood: Korea in the Japanese Theatrical Imagination,” New Theatre Quarterly 29, no. 2 (2013): 185–200. 119. Tadashi Uchino, “After Three Years of the ICH Project: In Search of Ways for Restoring the Power of Theatre to Speak with the Dead,” in Yung, Yeung, and Wong, Asian Performing Arts, 298. 120. Ibid.

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121. Ibid., 295. 122. Kuo, “Uprooted,” 175. 123. Schneider, Theatre & History, 30. On the nexus of performance, memory, and the embodied archive, see Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). 124. Kuo, “Spirits,” 107. 125. D¯ omoto Masaki, “Dialogue and Monologue in N¯ o,” in N¯ o and Ky¯ ogen in the Contemporary World, ed. James R. Brandon (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1997), 145. For the English-language script, see “Fujito,” trans. William Ritchie Wilson, Monumenta Nipponica 29, no. 4 (1974): 439–49. 126. Lucy Nevitt, Theatre & Violence (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 22. 127. Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove Press, 1958 [1938]), 101. 128. Noel Witts, Tadeusz Kantor (London: Routledge, 2010), 11. 129. Wang, Monster That Is History, 187. 130. Kuo, “Spirits,” 110. 131. Michael Berry, A History of Pain: Trauma in Modern Chinese Literature and Film (Columbia University Press, 2008), 300. 132. Ibid. 133. Artaud, Theatre and Its Double, 102. 134. Ibid., 90. 135. Tan (Sanskrit: raga; greed, attachment), chen (Sanskrit: dvesha; hatred, aversion), and chi (Sanskrit: moha; delusion, ignorance) are designated as the ‘three poisons’ (san du), or primary afflictions, in Mahayana Buddhism. 136. Michal Kobialka, “Introduction: Of Borders and Thresholds,” in Of Borders and Thresholds: Theatre History, Practice, and Theory, ed. Michal Kobialka (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 3. 137. Rayner, Ghosts, 115. 138. Kuo Pao Kun, “‘Lingxi’: Canyu di er jie Xianggang huawen xiju jie yanchu,” in Quah and Tan, Guo Baokun quanji di liu juan, 245. 139. See Gao Xingjian, “Juzuofa yu zhongxing yanyuan,” in Meiyou zhuyi (Hong Kong: Tiandi tushu youxian gongsi, 1996), 253–66. 140. Kuo, “Spirits,” 113. 141. Wee, “Introduction,” xxv. 142. Kuo, “Spirits,” 113. 143. The sutra’s full title is Bore boluomiduo xinjing (Sanskrit: Prajñ¯ ap¯ aramit¯ ahr.daya), literally, ‘The Heart of the Perfection of Wisdom’.

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144. Yung confirmed this point in a conversation with the author on 13 September 2016 in Berlin. He also mentions the Tiananmen Square connection in his Fukuoka Arts and Culture Prize 2014 acceptance speech. See Fukuoka Prize, The Fukuoka Prize 2014 Annual Report, 18, accessed March 15, 2017, http://fukuoka-prize.org/en/library/report/ pdf/report2014.pdf. On the Tiananmen Mothers see Louisa Lim, The People’s Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 105–32. 145. Ky¯ ogen is a Japanese comic theatre genre that developed alongside n¯ o. Traditionally, ky¯ ogen plays are performed as interludes between n¯ o pieces. 146. Kuo, “Spirits,” 103, 106. Original emphasis omitted. 147. Ibid., 106. Original emphasis omitted. 148. Rayner, Ghosts, 132, 136. 149. Derrida, Spectres, xviii. 150. Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, “Introduction: The Spectral Turn,” in Spectral America: Phantoms and the National Imagination, ed. Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 4. 151. Adeline Chia, “United in Spirits,” The Straits Times, July 23, 2009, n.p. 152. Traditions & Editions Theatre Circus Ltd., The Spirits Play and Creative Lab by TETC (blog), accessed November 8, 2017, http://thespiritplay. blogspot.co.uk/. Both Hungs are TTRP graduates. 153. Liedeke Plate, “Amnesiology: Towards the Study of Cultural Oblivion,” Memory Studies 9, no. 2 (2016): 145. 154. Analysis in this section is based on the scripts and video recordings of the EX-Theatre Asia production of The Mother Hen Next Door at Guling Street Avant-garde Theatre in Taipei on 7 September 2010 and of the TTP/Performosa Theatre coproduction of The Mother Hen Next Door: A Tribute at the Stamford Arts Centre in Singapore on 7 March 2012. 155. Carlson, Haunted Stage, 2. 156. Faucher, “As the Wind Blows,” 196. 157. Nicolas Bourriaud, The Radicant, trans. James Gussen and Lili Porten (New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2009), 79. 158. Carmen Andra¸s, “The Poetics and Politics of Travel: An Overview,” Philologica Jassyensia 2, no. 2 (2006): 163. 159. Ibid., 160–61. 160. Ibid., 163. 161. On 2/28 see Lai Tse-han, Ramon H. Myers, and Wei Wou, A Tragic Beginning: The Taiwan Uprising of February 28, 1947 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991); Stefan Fleischauer, “Perspectives on 228: The ‘28 February 1947 Uprising’ in Contemporary Taiwan,” in Taiwanese Identity in the Twenty-First Century: Domestic, Regional and Global Perspectives, ed. Gunter Schubert and Jens Damm (London: Routledge, 2011), 35–50.

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162. Hung Pei-ching, “Pei Ching—Black Angel with a Suitcase,” The Spirits Play and Creative Lab by TETC (blog), August 13, 2009, accessed November 8, 2017, http://thespiritplay.blogspot.co.uk/2009/08/peiching-black-angel-wth-suitcase.html. 163. See Berry, History of Pain, 211. 164. Sylvia Li-chun Lin, Representing Atrocity in Taiwan: The 2/28 Incident and White Terror in Fiction and Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 7. 165. Ibid., 180. 166. This is comparable to Taiwanese novelist Wu He’s ‘de-writing’ of 2/28— as per Michael Berry’s definition (History of Pain, 244)—in the short story ‘Investigation: A Narrative’ (Diaocha: xushu, 1993). 167. Lim, People’s Republic of Amnesia. 168. Berry, History of Pain, 11. 169. Suk-Young Kim, DMZ Crossing: Performing Emotional Citizenship along the Korean Border (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 8. 170. Ibid. 171. J. K. Gibson-Graham, Islands: Culture, Economy, Environment, Second Joint Conference of the Institute of Australian Geographers and New Zealand Geographical Society, January 28–31, 1998, Hobart, New Zealand Geographical Society Conference Series 19, quoted in Elaine Stratford et al., “Envisioning the Archipelago,” Island Studies Journal 6, no. 2 (2011): 116. 172. Hung Chit-wah, “Can The Mother Hen Fly? The Tour of The Mother Hen Next Door: A Tribute and Its Travelogue,” The Practice Journal 2 (2013): 29. 173. Ibid. 174. Ibid., 30. 175. Lawrence Chung, “70 Years on, Taiwan’s Crushed Uprising Still Echoes in Beijing and Taipei,” South China Morning Post, February 28, 2017, accessed November 7, 2017, http://www.scmp.com/news/china/ policies-politics/article/2074662/70-years-taiwans-crushed-uprisingstill-echoes-beijing. On the 70th anniversary of 2/28 in 2017, Beijing orchestrated a series of commemorative events that sparked controversy in Taiwan. See Cary Huang, “When Will Beijing Have the Courage to Mark June 4 and Other Tragedies of Its Own Making?” South China Morning Post, March 1, 2017, accessed November 7, 2017, http:// www.scmp.com/print/comment/insight-opinion/article/2075113/ when-will-beijing-have-courage-mark-june-4-and-other?utm_source=& utm_medium=. 176. ‘Mother hen’ defines ‘a person who sees to the needs of others, especially in a fussy or interfering way’. Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd ed., s.v. “Mother Hen”.

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177. Wang, Monster That Is History, 11–12. 178. Plate, “Amnesiology,” 147. 179. Wang, Monster That Is History. The 2012 version reinforces the notion of the universality of historical monstrosity by incorporating allusions to the New York City 9/11 attacks. 180. Berry, History of Pain, 185. 181. Ibid., 247. 182. On June Fourth fiction, see also Belinda Kong, Tiananmen Fictions Outside the Square: The Chinese Literary Diaspora and the Politics of Global Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012). 183. Zhou Wenlong, “Ping ‘Geli ge da muji — shinian ji’ dengdai Guotuo shi qingjing xia de maodun jueze,” Zaobao xianzai/zbNOW, April 10, 2012, 8. 184. Chaudhuri, Staging Place, xiii. 185. Kuo, “Spirits,” 106. 186. Katherine H. Burkman, The Arrival of Godot: Ritual Patterns in Modern Drama (Rutherford: Associated University Presses, 1986), 33. 187. Ibid., 30. 188. Wang, Monster That Is History, 188. 189. Annette Kuhn, “Memory Texts and Memory Work: Performances of Memory in and with Visual Media,” Memory Studies 3, no. 4 (2010): 305. 190. Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 2. 191. Ibid. 192. Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer, “Testimonial Objects: Memory, Gender, and Transmission,” Poetics Today 27, no. 2 (2006): 355. 193. Joshua Hirsch, Afterimage: Film, Trauma, and the Holocaust (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004), 15–16. 194. Descriptions and quotes in this paragraph are from the 2010 version of the script. In the 2012 version, the horrific visions of carnage are presented as the Mother’s recollections and the Reporter’s suitcase is empty, possibly to signify the latter’s determination to retain no memory of those disturbing experiences in her life. 195. Celia Lury, Prosthetic Culture: Photography, Memory and Identity (London: Routledge, 1998), 3. 196. Ibid. 197. Rayner, Ghosts, xxiii. 198. Rosalind Krauss, “A Note on Photography and the Simulacral,” October 31 (1984), 56. 199. Derrida, Spectres, xviii.

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200. Joel Anderson, Theatre & Photography (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 23. 201. Ibid., 33. 202. Plate, “Amnesiology,” 144. 203. Robert N. Proctor and Londa Schiebinger, eds., Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), vii. 204. Paul Connerton, “Seven Types of Forgetting,” Memory Studies 1, no. 1 (2008): 59, 62. Original emphasis omitted. 205. Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 500. 206. Kim, DMZ Crossing, 14. Kim makes this observation in the context of Korean films that address the trauma of national division and family separation. 207. Adriana Cavarero, Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence, trans. William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009 [2007]), 5. 208. Ibid., 7–8. 209. Ibid., 5. 210. Ibid., 7. 211. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 18. 212. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 115. 213. Heonik Kwon, The Other Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 33.

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———. “Keynote Address at the Southeast Asian Theatre Seminar on War.” In Guo Baokun quanji di qi juan, edited by Sy Ren Quah and Beng Luan Tan, 184–87. Singapore: World Scientific, 2012. ———. “Lingxi.” In Guo Baokun quanji di san juan — huawen xiju 3: 1990 niandai/The Complete Works of Kuo Pao Kun Volume Three: Plays in Chinese 3, the 1990s, edited by Sy Ren Quah and Cheng Lui Pan, 183–215. Singapore: World Scientific, 2009. ———. “‘Lingxi’: Canyu di er jie Xianggang huawen xiju jie yanchu.” In Guo Baokun quanji di liu juan, edited by Sy Ren Quah and Beng Luan Tan, 245–46. Singapore: World Scientific, 2012. ———. “‘Lingxi’ jieyuan.” In Guo Baokun quanji di liu juan, edited by Sy Ren Quah and Beng Luan Tan, 239. Singapore: World Scientific, 2012. ———. “The Spirits Play.” In Two Plays by Kuo Pao Kun: Descendants of the Eunuch Admiral and the Spirits Play, edited by C. J. W.-L. Wee and Lee Chee Keng, 69–119. Singapore: SNP Editions, 2003. ———. “The Spirits Play: Talking to the Spirits.” In Guo Baokun quanji di liu juan, edited by Sy Ren Quah and Beng Luan Tan, 278–79. Singapore: World Scientific, 2012. ———. “Uprooted and Searching.” In Guo Baokun quanji di qi juan, edited by Sy Ren Quah and Beng Luan Tan, 172–79. Singapore: World Scientific, 2012. ———. “War and Violence, History and Memory.” In Guo Baokun quanji di ba juan — fangtan/The Complete Works of Kuo Pao Kun Volume 8: Interviews, edited by Sy Ren Quah and Beng Luan Tan, 191–92. Singapore: World Scientific, 2012. Kwok, Kian Woon, and Han Wue Teo, eds. Kuo Pao Kun: And Love the Wind and Rain/Guo Baokun — fengfeng yuyu you yi sheng. Singapore: Cruxible, 2002. Kwon, Heonik. The Other Cold War. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Lai Tse-han, Ramon H. Myers, and Wei Wou. A Tragic Beginning: The Taiwan Uprising of February 28, 1947. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991. Landsberg, Alison. Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Lin, Sylvia Li-chun. Representing Atrocity in Taiwan: The 2/28 Incident and White Terror in Fiction and Film. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Lim, Louisa. The People’s Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Luckhurst, Mary, and Emilie Morin, eds. Theatre and Ghosts: Materiality, Performance and Modernity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

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Lury, Celia. Prosthetic Culture: Photography, Memory and Identity. London: Routledge, 1998. Mitter, Rana, and Aaron William Moore. “China in World War II, 1937–1945: Experience, Memory, and Legacy.” Modern Asian Studies 45, no. 2 (2011): 225–40. Nevitt, Lucy. Theatre & Violence. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Nora, Pierre. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire.” Representations 26 (1989): 7–24. Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London: Routledge, 1993. Plate, Liedeke. “Amnesiology: Towards the Study of Cultural Oblivion.” Memory Studies 9, no. 2 (2016): 143–55. Proctor, Robert N., and Londa Schiebinger, eds. Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008. Quah, Sy Ren [Ke Siren]. “Geren yu jiti de douzheng — lun Guo Baokun ‘Lingxi’ zhong de yiyi, xiangxiang yu xianshi.” Xianggang xiju xuekan 5 (2005): 405–12. ———. Xiju bainian: Xinjiapo huawen xiju 1913–2013. Singapore: Xijuhe, Xinjiapo guojia bowuguan, 2013. Quah, Sy Ren, and Beng Luan Tan, eds. Guo Baokun quanji di liu juan — pinglun/The Complete Works of Kuo Pao Kun Volume Six: Commentaries. Singapore: World Scientific, 2007. ———. Guo Baokun quanji di qi juan — lunwen yu yanjiang /The Complete Works of Kuo Pao Kun Volume Seven: Papers and Speeches. Singapore: World Scientific, 2008. Rae Paul, and Alvin Lim. “Nameless, Sexless, Rootless, Homeless: Performance in a Transnation State.” In Contemporary Southeast Asian Performance: Transnational Perspectives, edited by Laura Noszlopy and Matthew Isaac Cohen, 163–90. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010. Rayner, Alice. Ghosts: Death’s Double and the Phenomena of Theatre. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Reilly, James. “Remember History, Not Hatred: Collective Remembrance of China’s War of Resistance to Japan.” Modern Asian Studies 45, no. 2 (2011): 463–90. Ricoeur, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting. Translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Schechner, Richard. Between Theatre and Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985. Schneider, Rebecca. Theatre & History. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

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Sorgenfrei, Carol Fisher. “Guilt, Nostalgia, and Victimhood: Korea in the Japanese Theatrical Imagination.” New Theatre Quarterly 29, no. 2 (2013): 185–200. States, Bert O. Dreaming and Storytelling. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. Stratford, Elaine, Godfrey Baldacchino, Elizabeth McMahon, Carol Farbotko, and Andrew Harwood. “Envisioning the Archipelago.” Island Studies Journal 6, no. 2 (2011): 113–30. Suibi Nanyang. “Shijian xiju ying — Rong Nianzeng deng san Gangtai zishen juchangren lai Xin kaijiang.” Suibi Nanyang, May 16, 2010. Accessed February 2, 2017. http://www.sgwritings.com/viewnews_33363.html. Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. The Theatre Practice. Guo Baokun jie — xunzhao Guo Baokun daolan shouce di er ban/Kuo Pao Kun Festival 2012—In Search of Kuo Pao Kun Festival Guide, 2nd ed. Singapore: The Theatre Practice, 2012. Traditions & Editions Theatre Circus Ltd. The Spirits Play and Creative Lab by TETC (blog). Accessed November 8, 2017. http://thespiritplay.blogspot. co.uk/. Uchino, Tadashi. “After Three Years of the ICH Project: In Search of Ways for Restoring the Power of Theatre to Speak with the Dead.” In Asian Performing Arts: From the Traditional to the Contemporary/Yazhou biaoyan yishu: Cong chuantong dao dangdai, edited by Danny Yung, Jessica Yeung, and Yuewai Wong, 295–99. Hong Kong: Zuni Icosahedron, 2013. ———. Crucible Bodies: Postwar Japanese Performance from Brecht to the New Millennium. London: Seagull Books, 2009. Wang, David Der-wei. The Monster That Is History: History, Violence, and Fictional Writing in Twentieth-Century China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Wang Tingxin. “Tuijin chuantong xiju baohu yu chuangxin de minjian liliang — Xianggang, Nanjing, Dongjing guoji ‘kun neng yanjiu’ xueshu yantaohui ceji.” Yishu baijia 2 (2012): 87–93. Wee, C. J. W.-L. “Introduction: Kuo Pao Kun’s Contemporary Theatre.” In The Complete Works of Kuo Pao Kun Volume 4: Plays in English, edited by C. J. W.-L. Wee, xi–xxx. Singapore: World Scientific, 2012. Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew. “Introduction: The Spectral Turn.” In Spectral America: Phantoms and the National Imagination, edited by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, 3–17. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004. Witts, Noel. Tadeusz Kantor. London: Routledge, 2010. Xinjiapo huayu huaju tuanti. Xinjiapo huayu huaju tuanti lianhe zhuban di yi jie xiju ying (Singapore: Xinjiapo huayu huaju tuanti, 1983).

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Yeo, Wei-Wei. “Of Trees and the Heartland: Singapore’s Narratives.” In Beyond Description: Singapore Space Historicity, edited by Ryan Bishop, John Phillips, and Wei-Wei Yeo, 17–29. London: Routledge, 2004. Yu Qiuyu. “The Temptations of Kuo Pao Kun.” Translated by Lee Chee Keng. In Kuo Pao Kun: And Love the Wind and Rain, edited by Kian Woon Kwok and Han Wue Teo, 51–53. Singapore: Cruxible, 2002. Yung, Danny, ed. Shiyan Zhongguo shixian juchang /Experimenting China, Realizing Theatre. Hong Kong: E+E Zuni Icosahedron, 2010. Yung, Danny [Rong Nianzeng], and Lai Shengchuan. “Juchang, wenhua, chuangyi chengshi: Gangtai liangwei xiju mingjia duitan.” Zaobao zhoukan/zbWEEKLY 847, February 29, 2004, 3–6. Zhonghua renmin gongheguo guowuyuan xinwen bangongshi. “Zhongri jing, kun, neng yishujia lianhe yanyi ‘Lingxi’.” Guowuyuan xinwen bangongshi wangzhan, November 22, 2011. Accessed November 7, 2018. http://www. scio.gov.cn/zhzc/35353/35354/Document/1508284/1508284.htm. Zhou Wenlong. “Ping ‘Geli ge da muji — shinian ji’ dengdai Guotuo shi qingjing xia de maodun jueze.” Zaobao xianzai/zbNOW, April 10, 2012, 8. Zuni Icosahedron. “Flee by Night Press Release,” August 7, 2015. Accessed February 7, 2017. http://www.zuni.org.hk/new/zuni/web/upload/press/ 1851flee%20by%20night%20-%20pressrelease%2020150807revised_1-eng.pdf. Zuni Icosahedron, and Za-Koenji Public Theatre. Lingxi/The Spirits Play. Singapore: The Theatre Practice, 2012.

CHAPTER 6

Epilogue: Out of Asia—Transnational Chinese Theatres’ Global Itineraries

This study has explored the notion of transnational Chinese theatres as a practice, theory, and method of performance production arising from mobile networks of collaboration across the East Asian Sinosphere. It has argued that the contemporary proliferation of transborder practices attests to the inadequacy of analytical frameworks bounded by national histories and nation-state geopolitics, underscoring the effectiveness of historicizing Sinophone performance cultures as inherently transnational. The key concepts underpinning this project—transnationalism, interculturalism, collaboration, networks, journeys, rhizomes—have shaped the theatrical histories of the Chinese-speaking region and foregrounded their constitutive plurality at least since the putative origins of modern spoken drama in the foundational chronotope, ‘Tokyo, 1907’. Since their inception, Chinese-language theatres have been informed by patterns of transnational mobility unfolding within the time-spaces of multiple cities and multiple embodiments of Chineseness. Since their inception, they have been intercultural, nomadic, and rhizomatic. The analysis conducted in this volume has proposed that a relational understanding of collaborative performance as mobile and rhizomatic assists the destabilization of classic or canonical perspectives on interculturalism, otherwise described as ‘hegemonic’.1 The symbiosis of rhizomatic interculturalism and minor transnationalism supports the decolonization of the discourse on Asia as both a geopolitical formation

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and a conceptual entity, and of Asian theatres as its performative reverberations. As non-hierarchical, counter-genealogical, and embodied modes of intercultural collaboration, transnational Chinese and Asian theatres subscribe to a poetics and politics of transvergence that privilege acentred formations, horizontal alliances, and itinerant patterns of production and circulation of performances in journey-form. The previous chapters have chronicled multiple inflections of transing in performance work where transmediality and transtextuality assist the articulation of critical notions of transnationalism to foreground geopathological anxieties while also resonating with debates concerning the ontological/hauntological impermanence of live performance vis-à-vis mediatization, (re-)mediation, and intermediality. The combined formulation of transnational Chinese theatres, rhizomatic interculturalism, and performance in journey-form has intersected with the exploration of theatrical productions invested in seminal time-spaces—or significant chronotopes—of traumatic history that keep haunting politics, identities, and relationships in the present. Performative responses to these mnemonic landmarks link the discourse of minor transnationalism with theorizations of (trans-)Asia as method as cross-referential frameworks that can facilitate people-based interactions by circumventing normative epistemologies and embracing ‘relational comparison’.2 This kind of work elucidates the potential of what I define elsewhere as ‘Asian theatre as method’3 to prompt a transformative shift towards ‘decolonization, deimperialization, and de-cold war’4 of societal processes, knowledge regimes, and affective structures through performance. The formulation of an Asia-focused methodology through the example of Nanjing’s Toki International Arts Festival in ‘Asian Theatre as Method’ and the case studies surveyed in this volume has brought into relief the key role of participant-led, small-scale microfestivals that target discrete linguistic, ethnic, or political groups as hotbeds of critical transnationalism.5 More systematic research on festivals from the perspective of collaboration—as facilitators of sustained embodied relationships rather than transitory showcases—would bestow the mapping of transnational Chinese theatres with additional depths and dimensions. This inquiry should not necessarily confine itself to the kind of experimental and grassroots work that has been the primary concern of this volume but may also pay attention to mainstream commercial phenomena and institutional platforms that participate equally in the demarcation of the Sinophone and Asian theatrical transnations.

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As this study has repeatedly demonstrated through foregrounding national traumatic history as a trigger for transnational collaboration, the national constitutes a far from negligible presence in the region’s theatrical imaginings. Yet its transnational latitudes provide a vigorous source of ‘transgressive imagiNation’, namely, a channel whereby artistic representation ‘exceeds, challenges, demystifies, or transcodes the components of national identity’.6 In other words, the transborder scope of the performance collaboration, or of the transnational microfestival, enables theatremakers to ‘recast the narratives of nationhood that form the bedrock of their own countries’7 and entertain ‘cultural dialogues about community-building in both transnational and national terms’.8 This project has underscored the significance of networked modes of production and circulation primarily in the context of Sinophone East Asia. I have briefly touched upon initiatives such as those by Asia Meets Asia to connect collaborators from North/Northeast and South/Southeast Asia with Central Asian and Middle Eastern practitioners. Zuni Icosahedron’s extension of the 1T2C model to the Belt and Road region since the 2017 Hong Kong Belt Road City-to-City Cultural Exchange Programme and Grass Stage’s excursions to India and Africa are also noteworthy in this respect.9 The Shanghainese ensemble’s predisposition for touring off the mainstream circuit of large-scale metropolitan venues and international festivals suggests a critique of the global(izing) performing arts industries. Likewise, their propensity to favour partnerships in peripheral sites and ‘low-density’10 platforms invested in the social realities of local communities affirms the significance of grassroots coalitions between minor transnational actors in the emergent economies of the Global South. This brings me to a tentative reflection that I submit in conclusion to this study to propose that the performance trans-actions which are constitutive of transnational Chinese and Asian theatres may encompass not only movement through and across but also beyond geopolitical Asia, hence gesturing towards models of transcontinental and transpacific (trans-)Asian theatricalities. Such magnified perspective validates the extension of the conceptual scope of this volume to comprise networks that interweave Asian performance cultures with those of Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America—among other localities—along East-South, South-East, and South-South vectors. The epistemological framework of Asia as method could thus converge productively with critical perspectives on the Global South and the Transpacific to attain a more inclusive mapping of the dimensions and directions of transnational collaboration.

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An expanded definition of trans-Asian theatricalities might embrace both voluntary grassroots alliances between practitioners in the postcolonial Global South—what one might otherwise describe as ‘transcolonial’11 performance solidarities—and the creative ramifications of national policies and institutional strategies. In the context of the Sinosphere, meaningful routes of investigation would include the cultural repercussions of governmental initiatives such as PRC economic investments in Africa, the Belt and Road Initiative, and the renewed intensification of trade along the Silver Way,12 the Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa (BRICS) partnership, and the ROC’s New Southbound Policy, among others. A magnified view on the rhizomatic ramifications of the ‘trans-’ in trans-Asia harnesses the de-nationalized methodologies that are inherent to the trans-Asian approach in the investigation of localized articulations of global issues and societal matters of universal concern. Trans-Asian theatricalities thus conceived hinge on a wide spectrum of conjugations of performative trans-actions taking place along fluid vectors of collaboration that unfold across nations (transnational), cultures (transcultural), languages (translingual; translational), and (post-)colonial histories (transcolonial). In virtue of their intrinsic mobility and liquid constitution, the transnational narratives charted out in this volume are inevitably fragmented, episodic, and open-ended. Rather than static configurations, one should grasp these theatrical interactions as clusters of ever-shifting connections—and of equally meaningful disjunctions—in historiography, practice, and theorization. Yet by means of these connections, as much as through the fissures and gaps between their constitutive fragments, it is conceivable to envision an expanded cartography that intervenes both inside and outside established routes of trans-Chinese and trans-Asian theatricalities to trace new geometries and geographies—shapes and spaces, patterns and places—of yet unexplored encounters. Shu-mei Shih’s inspiring proposition to approach comparative studies relationally, by combining Édouard Glissant’s theory of Relation (with a capital ‘R’)13 with the methods of integrative world history advanced by Joseph Fletcher and André Gunder Frank resonates with this project’s attempt to gesture at the prospect of a ‘horizontally integrative history’14 of the Sinophone theatres’ intercultural performances. Shih considers the significance of global networks to propose a non-Eurocentric paradigm for the investigation of ‘macrohistory’—including the history of cultural production—‘in a horizontal fashion across different geographical locations in terms of structures, simultaneities, and interrelations, as opposed

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to predominant studies of vertical continuities of national histories’.15 Accordingly, unlike the compartmentalized verticality of national historiographies that look at theatrical developments chronologically and within a single locality, a horizontally integrated view of Sinophone performance cultures captures the synchronicity and interconnectedness of events unfolding across distinct and yet entwined spatiotemporal sites. Shih’s identification of Eurocentric exceptionalism as the root of the vertical comparative model echoes both Chen Kuan-hsing’s critique of ‘the West as method’16 and the disputed teleology of transnational avantgardism interrogated in this volume in the context of hegemonic versus rhizomatic intercultural paradigms. As Shih maintains, the invocation of the exceptionalist hypothesis has generated either displacement (‘the East is too hard to know’) or verticalization (‘the East is the past of the West’) in comparative studies.17 This exclusionary/evolutionary approach confines comparison within an immutable hierarchy, whereas the integrative historical perspective illuminates relation as a transformative intervention.18 Likewise, the study of Sinophone theatres as simultaneous interactions within a spatialized historical horizon holds the potential to disclose an expanded relational vision of seemingly isolated people and practices as bearing upon the same archipelagic formation and to appraise their performances as much in their distinctiveness as in their interconnectedness.

Notes 1. Daphne P. Lei, “Interruption, Intervention, Interculturalism: Robert Wilson’s HIT Productions in Taiwan,” Theatre Journal 63, no. 4 (2011): 571–86. 2. Shu-mei Shih, “Comparison as Relation,” in Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses, eds. Rita Felski and Susan Stanford Friedman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013): 79–98. 3. Rossella Ferrari, “Asian Theatre as Method: The Toki Experimental Project and Sino-Japanese Transnationalism in Performance,” TDR: The Drama Review 61, no. 3 (2017): 141–64. 4. Chen Kuan-hsing, Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 212. 5. Christina S. McMahon, Recasting Transnationalism through Performance: Theatre Festivals in Cape Verde, Mozambique and Brazil (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 5. 6. Peter Hitchcock, Imaginary States: Studies in Cultural Transnationalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 9. 7. McMahon, Recasting, 8.

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8. Ibid., 2. 9. In addition to performing Lu Xun 2012: A Madman’s Diary in Bangalore (see Chapter 4), Grass Stage collaborated with the Mumbai-based company QTP to present Unsettling Stones (Bu an de shitou) in Mumbai and New Delhi in October 2012. On Africa see Zhao Chuan, “Zai shijie de ling yi duan: Gangguo xiju, Zhongdong xiju, ji Riben dangdai juchang qianshe,” Yishu pinglun 5 (2011): 28–34. 10. McMahon, Recasting, 21. On ‘density’ and festivals see Willmar Sauter, “Festivals as Theatrical Events: Building Theories,” in Festivalising! Theatrical Events, Politics and Culture, eds. Temple Hauptfleisch, Shulamith Lev-Aladgem, Jacqueline Martin, Willmar Sauter, and Henri Shoenmakers (New York: Rodopi, 2007), 17–25. 11. Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih, “Introduction: Thinking through the Minor, Transnationally,” in Minor Transnationalism, eds. Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 11. 12. Peter Gordon and Juan José Morales, The Silver Way: China, Spanish America and the Birth of Globalisation, 1565–1815 (London: Penguin, 2017). 13. Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997 [1990]). 14. André Gunder Frank, ReORIENT: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 255. 15. Shih, “Comparison,” 82. 16. Chen, Asia as Method, 216. 17. Shih, “Comparison,” 82. 18. Ibid., 83–84.

References Chen Kuan-hsing. Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Ferrari, Rossella. “Asian Theatre as Method: The Toki Experimental Project and Sino-Japanese Transnationalism in Performance.” TDR: The Drama Review 61, no. 3 (2017): 141–64. Frank, André Gunder. ReORIENT: Global Economy in the Asian Age. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997 [1990]. Gordon, Peter, and Juan José Morales. The Silver Way: China, Spanish America and the Birth of Globalisation, 1565–1815. London: Penguin, 2017.

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Hitchcock, Peter. Imaginary States: Studies in Cultural Transnationalism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003. Lei, Daphne P. “Interruption, Intervention, Interculturalism: Robert Wilson’s HIT Productions in Taiwan.” Theatre Journal 63, no. 4 (2011): 571–86. Lionnet, Françoise, and Shu-mei Shih. “Introduction: Thinking through the Minor, Transnationally.” In Minor Transnationalism, edited by Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih, 1–23. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. McMahon, Christina S. Recasting Transnationalism through Performance: Theatre Festivals in Cape Verde, Mozambique and Brazil. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Sauter, Willmar. “Festivals as Theatrical Events: Building Theories.” In Festivalising! Theatrical Events, Politics and Culture, edited by Temple Hauptfleisch, Shulamith Lev-Aladgem, Jacqueline Martin, Willmar Sauter, and Henri Shoenmakers, 17–25. New York: Rodopi, 2007. Shih, Shu-mei. “Comparison as Relation.” In Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses, edited by Rita Felski and Susan Stanford Friedman, 79–98. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. Zhao Chuan. “Zai shijie de ling yi duan: Gangguo xiju, Zhongdong xiju, ji Riben dangdai juchang qianshe.” Yishu pinglun 5 (2011): 28–34.

Index

A Abbas, Ackbar, 90, 92 actor-network-theory (ANT), 42 adaptation, 10, 21, 23, 36, 53, 99, 172, 181, 210, 211, 221, 224, 228, 229, 231, 232, 236, 238, 245–248, 252 Afghanistan, 181, 182, 184 Africa, 35, 283, 284, 286 agnotology, 258 allogenesis, 57, 58. See also xenogenesis amnesia, amnesiology, 21, 22, 165, 178, 228, 253, 256, 258, 259. See also memory Anami Korechika, 226 Ang, Ien, 11, 49 Anti-Rightist Movement (1957–58), 55 appropriation, 34, 40, 44 archipelago, 2, 14, 105, 115, 122, 181, 251, 285

Artaud, Antonin, 164, 173, 196, 236, 239 artist-traveller, 57, 118, 120, 121, 220. See also homo viator; journey-form Asia, 3, 4, 8–12, 16, 21, 22, 26, 35, 38, 39, 43, 53, 59, 85, 113, 114, 140, 142, 143, 153–155, 163, 179, 182, 186, 187, 208, 214–216, 219–221, 225, 226, 229, 281, 283 Asia as method, 9, 10, 20, 22, 154, 155, 186, 220, 282, 283 Asia ICH Performing Arts Forum, 222. See also Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) Asia Meets Asia (AMA), 20, 42, 141, 142, 149, 178–183, 185, 198, 283 Asian Art Festival, 215, 221 Asian Chinese Playwrights’ Conference, 214

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 R. Ferrari, Transnational Chinese Theatres, Transnational Theatre Histories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37273-6

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INDEX

Asian Council for People’s Culture (ACPC), 144, 148 Asian Cultural Vision Journey Festival, 114 Asian Madang Theatre Festival, 140, 143, 145, 147, 148, 196 Asianness, 11, 13, 38, 47, 53. See also identity Asian People’s Theatre Festival Society, 143, 192 Asian theatre, 10, 36, 39, 182, 282 Asia Pacific Little Theatre Festival (APLTF), 180, 198 assemblage, 2, 13, 20, 37, 40, 41, 45, 47, 48, 51, 52, 115, 122, 162, 169, 182, 187 Assignment Theatre, 140, 143, 147, 148, 188 avant-garde, avant-gardism, 35–37, 60, 152, 181, 285 B Bakhtin, Mikhail M., 16, 17, 40 Bangalore, 185, 286 Bangkok, 109, 226 Bangladesh, 180, 181 Bangladesh Centre for Asian Theatre, 181 Barba, Eugenio, 181 barrier, 118–121, 142, 153, 159 Beckett, Samuel, 254, 255 becoming, 9, 15, 43, 45, 162, 172 Beijing, 17, 50, 80, 82, 85, 87, 93, 94, 98, 99, 101, 102, 106, 107, 109, 110, 114, 116, 119, 120, 123, 144, 147, 148, 176, 188, 192, 210, 212, 213, 215, 228, 243, 249, 250, 252 ‘Beijing, 1989’, 20, 22, 210, 245. See also significant chronotope; Tiananmen Square protests (1989)

Beijing opera. Seejingju Beijing People’s Art Theatre (BPAT), 146, 213, 214, 220 Beijing renmin yishu juyuan. See Beijing People’s Art Theatre (BPAT) ‘Beijing-Taipei, 1945’, 20. See also China–Taiwan relations; significant chronotope benshengren, 156, 175, 178 Berlin, 19, 107, 112–116 Berry, Michael, 16, 17, 126, 254 BeSeTo Theatre Festival, 7 Bharucha, Rustom, 43–45, 59–61 Biaoyan gongzuofang. See Performance Workshop Biji juchang. See Notebook Theatre Binan jieduan. See Emergency Stairs Bingtang hulu jushe. See Candied Fruits Theatre Society Black Box Exercise, 113, 119 Black Slave’s Cry to Heaven, 1 Black Tent Theatre 68/71 (BTT), 38, 143, 221, 226 Boal, Augusto, 143, 144, 146, 147, 181 Body Phase Studio, 140, 147, 152, 184 body, theory of, 151, 152 body without organs, 164, 196 border, 2–4, 6–8, 11, 35, 38, 51, 53, 58, 71, 76, 118, 119, 142, 158, 159, 161, 164, 166, 169, 182, 233, 240, 251 border-crossing, 41, 72, 73, 118, 158 Bourdieu, Pierre, 117 Bourriaud, Nicolas, 4, 9, 18, 48, 49, 51, 53, 54, 63, 109, 117, 118, 220, 248 Braidotti, Rosi, 52 Brecht, Bertolt, 143, 147 bridge, 118, 119

INDEX

Brook, Peter, 34 Bu an de shitou. SeeUnsettling Stones

C Cai Mingliang. See Tsai Ming-liang Cai Xichang. See Tsoi, Hardy Cambodia, 148, 182, 183 Candied Fruits Theatre Society, 144 Cantonese (language), 12, 22, 90, 92, 94, 100, 104, 181, 210, 246, 249 Caotaiban. See Grass Stage Carlson, Marvin, 210 Cavarero, Adriana, 260 Chair (short film), 74 Chairs Part Two, 89 Chaishi jutuan. See Assignment Theatre Chan, Bonni, 107 Chan, Cedric, 110 Chang Soik, 143, 146, 149, 189 Chan Ping-chiu, 107 Cha Shao-Kwong, 220 Chaudhuri, Una, 17, 196, 227, 254 Chengdu, 18, 54, 56, 58, 109, 120 Chen Guangxing. See Chen Kuanhsing Chen Kuan-hsing, 9, 10, 20, 154, 156, 160, 178, 186, 285 Chen Yanyin, 87, 119 China, 1, 2, 4, 5, 8, 12, 13, 16, 17, 21, 23, 36, 46, 50, 53, 55, 56, 72, 73, 75, 77, 80, 81, 84, 89, 91, 96, 97, 99–103, 106, 110, 112, 115, 120, 121, 129, 131, 140, 142–145, 147, 149–152, 154, 156–160, 162, 169, 170, 173, 174, 186, 187, 192, 207, 213–215, 219, 224, 225, 228, 238, 243, 249, 251–253, 260 China-centrism. See Sinocentrism

291

China-Hong Kong-Taiwan relations, 80, 122. See also inter-Chinese relations China–Taiwan relations, 20, 155 Chinese Communist Party (CCP), 191 Chinese drama. See Chinese-language theatres Chinese Drama Camp (Singapore), 21, 213 Chinese Drama Festival, 7 Chinese-language, 3, 11, 213 Chinese-language theatres, 81, 213, 281 Chinese Nationalist Party, 95, 157 Chineseness, 11–13, 25, 26, 46, 47, 49, 53, 75, 81, 89, 99–101, 103, 106, 157, 175, 215, 281. See also identity Chinese opera. Seexiqu Chinese-speaking. See Chineselanguage Chinese spoken drama, 1, 81, 151, 281 Chinese theatre. See Chinese-language theatres Chin, Miranda, 82 Choi Yan-chi, 82, 87 Chomdhavat, Peeramon, 110 choreopolice, 153 choreopolitics, 151, 193 Choy, Christine, 110 chronotope, 2, 14, 16, 17, 20, 36, 77, 86, 87, 90, 101, 102, 210, 212, 224, 245, 248, 281. See also significant chronotope chuanju, 110 Chu Hak. See Zhu Ke Chuma, Yoshiko, 82 Chumley, Dan, 148 Chun Doo-hwan, 191

292

INDEX

Chung Chiao, 143, 144, 148, 149, 152, 171, 173, 175, 177, 188, 189, 197 Chunliu she. See Spring Willow Society Chu Sau-man. See Chu, Virginia Chu, Virginia, 198 city, 6, 7, 24, 281 as frontier zone, 6 networks of, 6, 7 city-to-city, 6, 41, 142, 179, 222 Clash Theatre Group, 130, 140, 171, 179, 180, 184, 198 Cloud Gate Theatre, 79 Cold War, 3, 16, 20, 112, 140, 141, 147, 153, 156, 159–161, 163, 168, 172, 173, 175, 176, 178, 187, 261 collaboration, 3, 5, 7, 14, 41, 283 city-to-city, 7, 113 inter-Asian, 10, 43 intercultural, 2, 4, 5, 9, 18, 19, 22, 33, 34, 37, 39, 40, 42, 48, 58, 71, 122, 182, 222, 282 language of, 41 trans-Asian, 18, 33, 38 transnational, 3, 6, 9, 15, 16, 72, 141 colonialism, colonization, 12, 40, 52, 86, 146, 150, 156, 178, 182, 187 comparison, 20, 34, 37, 38, 150, 178, 186, 187, 285 Eurocentric, 35, 60 inter-Asian, 221, 245 as relation, relational, 10, 14, 86, 155, 158, 185, 221, 282, 284 transnational, 20 vertical model of, 285 contact nebulae, 2, 23, 142 contact zone, 19, 23, 40, 61, 109

cross-strait relations. See China–Taiwan relations cross-strait system, 156 Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), 56, 157 Curran, Sean, 107

D Da ducao. SeePoisonous Weeds Dagong qingnian yishutuan. See New Workers Art Troupe Dai Guangyu, 55 DA·M Theatre, 178, 180, 184 Deboo, Astad, 110 de-cold war, 10, 155, 178, 182, 282 decoloniality, 10–12 decolonization, 10, 40, 43, 155, 182, 281, 282 deimperialization, 10, 155, 182, 282 déjà disparu, 86, 90, 92 Deleuze, Gilles, 9, 14, 18, 34, 45, 47, 49, 50, 63, 164, 196 Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPKR). See North Korea Deng Xiaoping, 81 Derrida, Jacques, 207–211 deterritorialization, 6, 10, 37, 48, 57, 162 dialogism, 4, 33, 39, 40, 73, 87, 119, 226 diaspora, 17, 38, 46, 81, 183 diplomacy, 88, 106 cultural, 6, 107, 179 informal, 88, 96, 112, 179, 225 inter-Asian, 140 directionality of art, 37, 114 dislocation, 17, 56, 77, 142 DMZ. See Korean Demilitarized Zone Drama Box, 246 ducao. Seepoisonous weeds

INDEX

E East Asia, 2, 11, 14, 16, 20, 72, 73, 141, 142, 147, 150, 154, 162, 168, 171, 187, 261, 281, 283 East Asia People’s Theatre Network (EAPTN), 19, 141–143, 148, 149, 181, 187 East/South, the, 35, 36, 43 as construct, 34, 35 East, the as construct, 59, 74, 122, 186, 285 ecology (performance), 11, 15, 47 networked, 15 Edward Lam Dance Theatre, 127 Emergency Stairs, 123 Eurocentrism, 35, 285 exchange, 162 city-to-city, 41, 114, 222, 225 cultural/intercultural, 33, 39–41, 44, 73, 97, 114, 180, 222 East–East, 9 East–South, 9 embodied, 40 inter-Asian, 2 nation-to-nation, 6 place-to-place, 6, 142 South–South, 9 Experimental Shakespeare:King Lear, 50 Expo 2010 (Shanghai), 225 Japan Pavilion, 225 EX-Theatre Asia, 246

F Fan Di’an, 93 February 28 Incident (1947), 20, 22, 157, 210, 248 Feichang Lin Yihua. See Edward Lam Dance Theatre Fei Dawei, 55 Fernandez, Steven P.C., 183

293

Festival of Vision (Hong Kong/Berlin), 19, 112–116, 122 festivals, 7, 51, 72, 85, 113, 114, 142, 145–147, 180, 185, 282, 283 Fischer-Lichte, Erika, 36 Flee by Night , 222–224, 265, 266 Foucault, Michel, 166, 169 Freire, Paulo, 144, 192 Fueda Uichiro, 229 Fu Hongzheng, 214 Fujisawa Asajir¯ o, 1 Fujito, 231, 232, 236 Fung, Ernest, 115, 124 Fung, May, 77, 115 Futabatei Shimei, 218

G Gao Xingjian, 130, 213, 240 Ge Dali, 106 Gekidan Kaitaisha, 45, 111 Geli ge da muji. SeeMother Hen Next Door, The Geli ge da muji – shinian ji. SeeMother Hen Next Door, The: A Tribute geming yangbanxi. See revolutionary model plays geopathology, 17, 21, 50, 64, 160, 161, 167, 196, 212, 227, 254 Glissant, Édouard, 14, 284 Global South, 22, 283, 284 Gogoi, Robijita, 184 grassroots, 6, 20, 50, 81, 88, 96, 141, 143–145, 157, 160, 171, 178, 179, 181, 187, 189, 191, 225, 226, 282–284 Grass Stage, 20, 55, 140, 142–147, 149–152, 171, 178, 184, 185, 190, 192, 198, 283, 286 Guangzhou, 108, 144, 148 Guattari, Félix, 9, 45, 47–50 Guo Baokun. See Kuo Pao Kun

294

INDEX

Gwangju, 20, 140, 146–150, 158, 162, 166, 167, 169, 172, 174, 176, 177, 191, 196 ‘Gwangju, 1980’, 20. See also Korean Democratization Movement (1980); significant chronotope Gwangju Uprising. See Korean Democratization Movement (1980) H Hakka, 175, 197 Halbwachs, Maurice, 262 Hanasaki Setsu, 183 Handover of Hong Kong (1997), 50, 54, 71, 85, 86 Hanoi, 180, 183 hauntology, 21, 90, 209, 211, 226, 250 He Duoling, 55 He Duoling Open Studio, 54 Heinu yutian lu. SeeBlack Slave’s Cry to Heaven Heixiang zuoye. SeeBlack Box Exercise heteroglossia, 12, 40, 41, 50 heterotopia, 166, 167 He Xiuping. See Ho, Pia He Zuo’an juchang. See Left Bank Theatre historiography, 81, 284 history of Chinese-language theatres, 81, 284 integrative, 284, 285 h¯ ogan biiki, 229 Hoklo (Hokkien, Minnanese), 194 homo viator, 51, 118, 220. See also artist-traveller; journey-form; viatorization Hong Jiehua. See Hung Chit-wah Hong Kong, 4, 5, 7, 8, 19–22, 40, 41, 50, 56, 58, 72–75,

77–89, 93, 94, 96, 97, 99–103, 108–110, 112–116, 119, 120, 122, 129–131, 140, 143, 144, 147–149, 178, 180, 183–186, 188, 192, 198, 209, 210, 213–215, 221, 222, 225, 228, 233, 245, 246, 248, 251–254, 267 ‘Hong Kong, 1997’, 18, 86, 87, 90, 101, 102. See also Handover of Hong Kong (1997); significant chronotope Hong Kong Arts Development Council, 120 Hong Kong Belt Road City-to-City Cultural Exchange, 39, 89, 283 Hong Kong International Video Art Exhibition, 77 Hong Kong Repertory Theatre, 213 Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China. See Hong Kong Hong Peijing. See Hung Pei-ching Ho, Oscar, 86 Ho, Pia, 74, 77, 82, 131 Horrorism, 260 huaju, 36, 214 huaju. See Chinese spoken drama Huang Chenghuang, 79 Huang Cheng-huang. See Huang Chenghuang Huang Zuolin, 214 Huanxu juchang. See Huanxu Theatre Huanxu Theatre, 79 huawen. See Chinese-language Huawen xiju jie. See Chinese Drama Festival huayu. See Chinese-language Huayu xiju ying. See Chinese Drama Camp (Singapore) huayu yuxi. See Sinophone; Sinophone, the

INDEX

Hu Enwei. See Woo, Mathias Hung Chit-wah, 22, 210, 246, 251 Hung Pei-ching, 22, 210, 246, 248, 251 Huoniao dianying hui. See Phoenix Cine Club hybridity, 7, 40, 99, 100 I identity, 7, 11, 14, 46, 49, 50, 73–75, 79, 86, 89, 91, 93, 94, 98–100, 105, 106, 117, 118, 154, 156–158, 167, 169, 174, 175, 179, 215, 226, 240, 251, 255. See also Asianness; Chineseness imperialism, 9, 41, 52, 140, 147, 150, 153, 178, 186, 187, 221 cultural, 40, 50, 146, 161 theoretical, 12, 36 Imperial Japanese Army, 183, 218, 248 India, 110, 182, 186, 221, 245, 283 Indonesia, 221 In Search of Modern China/Hong Kong: An Exchange Project on Experimental Theatre, 72 Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH), 222 Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity Promotion and Development Project, 222 Integrated Performing Arts Guild (IPAG), 182, 183 inter-Asia, 43, 187 inter-Asian referencing, 10, 38 inter-Chinese relations, 50, 92, 106 interculturalism Asian, 4, 18, 39, 58 canonical, 34, 36, 58, 281 cartographies of, 37, 43 classic, 34–36, 38, 39, 122, 281 cosmetic, 34

295

critical, 35, 43 geographies of, 9, 34, 44, 122 geometries of, 9, 34, 44 hegemonic, 41, 43, 58, 281, 285 networked model of, 5, 12, 34, 41, 42, 49, 115 politics of, 40 rhizomatic, 4, 12, 22, 34, 38, 45, 47, 48, 72, 122, 215, 281, 282, 285 theory of, 4, 18, 33, 35, 122 violence of, 40 interculturality. See interculturalism intercultural theatre. See interculturalism inter-imperiality, 12. See also Sinophone, the intermediality, 89, 92, 101, 107, 123, 162, 255, 282 inter- (prefix), 9 intertextuality, 21, 23, 211, 231 interweaving performance cultures, 46 Iran, 180, 181 Iraq, 180, 181 Iwabuchi, Koichi, 9, 38

J Jakarta, 226 Japan, 1, 2, 5, 11, 19, 21, 79, 142, 143, 159, 177, 180, 186, 188, 192, 199, 207, 208, 218–221, 225, 226, 228–230, 245, 264 Japanese Cemetery Park (Singapore), 208, 261 Japanese Empire (1895–1945), 142 Japanese (language), 12, 181, 210, 234 Japanese Occupation of Singapore (1942–45), 21, 207, 225 Japanese theatre, 1, 23, 36, 38, 80, 143, 226, 229

296

INDEX

Jiangsu Performing Arts Group Kun Opera Theatre, 221 collective, 247 Jiangsu sheng yanyi jituan kunju yuan. See Jiangsu Performing Arts Group Kun Opera Theatre jingju, 120, 211, 229, 231, 232, 234, 262 Jin juchang. See Theatre du Pif Jinnian ershimianti. See Zuni Icosahedron Jit, Krishen, 213, 221 Joh Seong-joo, 110 journey, 1, 2, 4, 6, 10, 13, 14, 22, 33, 51–53, 57, 74, 75, 81, 86, 88, 89, 100, 102, 103, 109, 119, 121, 148, 159, 178, 208, 215, 224, 246–248, 252, 254 journey-form, 4, 18, 51, 53, 54, 58, 86, 105, 106, 108, 115, 118, 248 performance in, 4, 18, 19, 51, 72–74, 118, 121, 141, 142, 150, 183, 184, 212, 220, 282 journeying. See journey Journey (short film), 74 Journey to the East series, 19, 36, 42, 53, 71–74, 77, 78, 85, 86, 92, 96, 97, 99, 101, 109, 112–115, 118–120, 122, 142, 211 From Beijing to Hong Kong…A True Beginning , 80 From Hong Kong to Beijing , 80 Here Here There There, 77, 82 Hong Kong–Taipei, 79 Ideogram, 75, 76, 121 Journey 2000 1T2C , 109, 112 Journey 99, 106, 107 Journey to the East 1997 , 50, 85 Journey to the East 1998, 102 Morphology, 76 Past Events , 75

Question/Problem, 75, 76 Yellow Springs , 81 juchang , 174, 227, 243 June Fourth. See Tiananmen Square protests (1989)

K kabuki, 36 Kantor, Tadeusz, 236 Kapok Theatre, 144 Ke Jun, 222, 223 Khoo, Eric, 102 Kim Dae-jung, 159 Kim Jong-il, 159 Kim Nam-ju, 149 Kok Heng Leun, 246 Kokushoku Tento 68/71, Kuro Tento. See Black Tent Theatre 68/71 (BTT) koodiyattam, 211, 229, 232, 262 Korea, 2, 142, 148, 159 Korean Armistice Agreement (1953), 20, 155, 188 Korean Demilitarized Zone, 20, 251 Korean Democratization Movement (1980), 20, 145, 147, 149, 157, 162 Korean (language), 12 Korean Peninsula, 20, 140, 147, 153, 154, 159, 165, 176. See also Overcoming the Division System (ODS) division of, 150 division of/partition of, 16, 20, 154, 155, 160 Korean People’s Theatre Association (KPTA), 143, 149 Korean theatre, 23, 80, 146 Korean War (1950–53), 20, 140 Kun opera. Seekunqu kunju. Seekunqu

INDEX

kunqu, 21, 36, 210, 211, 222, 223, 226, 229–232, 234, 235, 242, 262, 265 Kuo Jian Hong, 222, 262 Kuomintang (KMT). See Chinese Nationalist Party Kuo Pao Kun, 19, 21, 22, 36, 40, 78, 123, 207, 210, 213, 214, 222, 234, 247 Kuo Pao Kun Festival (2012), 210, 222, 225, 246 Kwan, Stanley, 19, 87, 89–92, 96, 104, 108 Kwon, Heonik, 140, 261 ky¯ ogen, 222, 243, 269 Kyrgyzstan, 182

L Lai Shengchuan. See Lai, Stan Lai Sheng-chuan. See Lai, Stan Lai, Stan, 19, 50, 79, 102, 103, 120, 213, 220, 221, 227 Lam, Edward, 19, 74, 77, 87, 98–103, 111, 120, 127 Lam Yik-wah. See Lam, Edward Lanling jufang. See Lanling Theatre Workshop Lanling Theatre Workshop, 213 Latin America, 35, 283 Latour, Bruno, 24, 42–44 Lau, Freeman, 82 Lau, Tats, 82 Lee, Hugh. See Lee Kuo-hsiu Lee Kang-sheng, 104 Lee Kuo-hsiu, 19, 79, 87, 94, 96 Lee Teng-hui, 95 Lee Woon-wah, 213 Left Bank Theatre, 79 Lei, Jane, 106, 110 Lei, Lawrence, 123 lethotechnics, 253. See also memory

297

liang ’an sandi, 3, 23, 80, 98, 115, 213, 251 liang ’an sidi, 3, 23 Li Baochun, 123 Li Denghui. See Lee Teng-hui lieu de mémoire, 227. See also memory Li Guoxiu. See Lee Kuo-hsiu Li Jiakun, 55 Li Jiayao, 214 Li Kaixian, 222, 224, 265 Li Liuyi, 87, 98, 100, 101, 123 Lin Chun, 93 Lingdong kongjian. See Living Stories Lingxi. SeeSpirits Play, The Lingxi – fuwei wanghun de jidian. SeeSpirits Play, The: Rituals to Soothe the Unsettled Spirits Lin Kehuan, 80, 98, 99, 125, 221 Lin Liankun, 220 Lin Xi, 108 Lin Yihua. See Lam, Edward Lin Zhaohua, 19, 80, 81, 87, 93, 99, 102, 120, 126, 130 Lionnet, Françoise, 6 Li Shutong, 1 Little Asia Theatre/Dance Exchange Network, 7 Little Theatre Movement (Taiwan), 189 Liu Ching-min, 214 Liu Jiakun, 54, 55 Liu Jingmin. See Liu Ching-min Liu Suola, 82, 107 Liu Xiaoyi, 88, 222 Liu Yang, 142, 150, 188 Living Stories, 147 Li Xianting, 54, 55 Li Yiming, 120 Li Yuanhua. See Lee Woon-wah Lücheng. SeeJourney (short film) Lu Jingruo, 1 Lung, Edwin, 110

298

INDEX

Luxiang quan. SeeVideo Circle Luxiang quan yanchu. SeeVideo Circle Performance Lu Xun, 149, 175, 184–186, 192, 220, 254 Lu Xun 2008, 184 Lu Xun 2012: A Madman’s Diary, 185, 286 Luying taiq. See Videotage Luying zhuo. SeeVideotable M Macau, 4, 23, 85, 106, 109, 113, 123, 248, 251 Macau Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China. See Macau madang , 146 madangguk, ˘ 146, 147, 191 Madhu, Margi, 229, 238, 242 Malaysia, 245, 246 Mandarin (language), 12, 22, 90, 100, 104, 175, 181, 210, 220, 234, 246, 249 Mao Zedong, 55, 64, 75, 176, 197 map, mapping, 11, 14, 15, 35, 38, 47, 48, 51, 73, 77, 88, 114, 118, 121, 122, 171, 215, 236, 282–284 Martial Law (Taiwan), 16, 20, 22, 81, 157, 167, 175, 248 Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, 222, 262 Matsushima Makoto, 110, 229, 243, 262 memoropolitics, 21, 228 memory, 90, 98, 148, 157, 208, 209, 212, 223, 228, 246, 256–258 collective, 18, 91, 141, 142, 218 cultural, 18 platial, 238, 249

prosthetic, 18, 255 trans-Asian, 14, 21, 212 Meng Jinghui, 19, 50, 106, 107, 109 method Asia as, 9, 10, 20, 22, 154, 155, 186, 220, 282, 283 Asian body as, 153 Asian theatre as, 282 Mignolo, Walter, 10, 11 Military Demarcation Line (MDL), 155, 159, 163, 169 Mindanao, 182 minjian, 144–146, 156, 179, 184, 189, 191, 197, 225 East Asia, 20, 171 minjung , 145, 147, 165 minjokguk, ˘ 190 minjungguk, ˘ 190 minzhong , 145, 146, 191 xiju, 147 Mizoguchi Y¯ uz¯ o, 186, 199 Mnouchkine, Ariane, 34 mobility, 2–4, 9, 18, 22, 36, 48, 51, 53, 72, 74, 76, 78, 82, 86, 99, 120, 142, 162, 183, 260, 281, 284. See also movement; travel Mo, Comyn, 77, 82 Mok, Augustine ‘Gus’. See Mok Chiu-yu Mok Chiu-yu, 143, 144, 147–149, 192, 198 Mother Hen Next Door, The, 22, 42, 210, 245, 246, 269 Mother Hen Next Door, The: A Tribute, 22, 211, 245, 246, 269 movement, 5, 6, 15, 17, 44–49, 51, 53, 54, 73, 83, 105, 120, 142, 222, 248, 251, 283 democratization, 145, 147, 158, 190 inter-Asian, 2

INDEX

social, 16, 50, 141, 143, 144, 148, 185, 188, 189. See also mobility; travel Mo Zhaoru. See Mok Chiu-yu multiculturalism, 215 multilingualism, 40, 41, 104 multiplicity/multiplicities, 2, 7, 9, 13, 14, 19, 37, 47, 49, 52, 57, 121, 122, 169 Mumbai, 109, 110, 286 Mumian jutuan. See Kapok Theatre N Namoodak Movement Laboratory, 143, 149 Nanjing, 21, 120, 121, 123, 210, 212, 214, 221, 222, 225–228, 248, 262, 282 ‘Nanjing, 1937’, 210. See also Nanjing Massacre (1937); significant chronotope Nanjing Massacre (1937), 21, 210, 228 nationalism, 14, 17, 145, 178, 219, 228 methodological, 3 nation, nation-state, 2, 3, 5–8, 12, 17, 37, 51–53, 84, 96, 100, 114, 154, 157, 159, 178, 187, 208, 212, 215, 217, 219, 220, 228, 229, 237, 238, 250, 253, 259, 260, 281, 283 network, 4, 11, 13, 72, 122, 212 of collaboration, 5, 6, 33, 37, 42, 44, 51, 281 of intercultural performance, 2, 34, 42, 184 minor-to-minor, 33, 38, 60 society, 6 trans-Asian, 5, 18, 38, 40, 71, 141, 178 transnational, 3

299

New Delhi, 286 New Formosa Blind People’s Theatre, 199 New Workers Art Troupe, 144 Nilu, Kamaluddin, 183 Nishimura Takao, 222, 223, 229 n¯ ogaku, 222 Nogi Maresuke, 248 nomad/nomadism/nomadology, 14, 45, 51–53, 64 North Korea, 140, 155, 163 Notebook Theatre, 79 n¯ o theatre, 21, 36, 152, 210, 232–234 Novak, Marcos, 9, 57, 58, 65 O ¯ Ohashi Hiroshi, 178, 180 one country, two systems, 19, 88. See also Handover of Hong Kong (1997) One Table Two Chairs (1T2C), 19, 39, 43, 72, 78, 85, 87–89, 105, 107, 109, 110, 112, 113, 117, 118, 120, 123, 181, 182, 211, 221–223, 232, 240, 265, 283 Ong Keng Sen, 19, 41, 102, 104, 120, 221, 265 Osanai Kaoru, 1 Ou Ning, 55 Overcoming the Division System (ODS), 20, 155, 156, 165, 170, 171 P 38 th Parallel Still Play, 20, 140, 142, 146, 149, 151, 153, 154, 157, 158, 162, 171, 172, 175–178, 196 38 th Parallel in Taipei, 20, 140, 149, 171–178, 196, 199 Pacific War (1941–45), 140, 208

300

INDEX

Paik Nak-chung, 20, 155, 157, 165 Panmunjom, 149, 188 ‘Panmunjom, 1953’, 20. See also Korean Armistice Agreement; significant chronotope Pappa Tarahumara, 39 Park Ho-bin, 110 Park In-pae, 144 Pau, Ellen, 77, 103, 108, 115, 124 people-based, 146 people-based/people-led/people-topeople. Seeminjian People’s Republic of China (PRC). See China people-led, 145 people’s theatre, 20, 140, 143, 144, 146–149, 152, 181, 189, 190. See also minjung, minjokguk; ˘ minjungguk; ˘ minzhong, xiju performance in journey-form, 52, 54, 83, 108, 120, 157, 177 Performance Workshop, 79, 123, 214 Performosa Theatre, 246, 269 Philippines, 182 Philippines Educational Theatre Association (PETA), 143, 144, 148, 189, 192, 198 Phoenix Cine Club, 77 photography, 74, 255, 257 Ping Chong, 81, 102, 103, 109 Pingfeng biaoyanban. See Ping Fong Acting Troupe Ping Fong Acting Troupe, 79 Pi San, 195 platiality, 167, 227, 249 ‘poetics of Relation’, 46. See also Glissant, Édouard point de repère, 209, 247, 262. See also memory Poisonous Weeds , 18, 54–58 postcolonialism, 2, 8, 40, 41, 74, 118, 152, 182, 183, 209, 284

Practice Theatre Camp, 214 PRC–ROC relations. See China–Taiwan relations Professional/Amateur:Contemporary Cultural Exchange Programme, 54 Pun Tak-shu, 74, 77, 82 Pyongyang, 20, 50

Q Qu Xiaosong, 82

R radicant, the, 9, 18, 48, 49 as identitarian metaphor, 49 as model of collaboration, 44, 48 Rajagopal, K., 104 reconciliation, 157, 169, 178, 260 grassroots/minjian/people-based, 225 informal processes of, 17, 155 relational aesthetics, 13, 43, 48 relational antagonism, 43 relation/relationality, 2–4, 6, 8, 11, 13, 14, 20, 22, 33, 34, 38, 39, 43, 45, 46, 49, 51, 58, 60, 71, 76, 79, 81, 85–89, 96, 101, 102, 104, 105, 109, 110, 112, 122, 169, 174, 176, 179, 186, 225, 239, 251, 284, 285 embodied, 33, 73, 74, 179 poetics of, 6 Ren Baoxian, 214 Renlei feiwuzhi wenhua yichan tuiguang ji fazhan xiangmu. See Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity Promotion and Development Project renmin, 146, 191 Republic of China (ROC). See Taiwan

INDEX

Republic of Korea (ROK). See South Korea Reviving Subalternity: Resisting Assimilation and Destruction of Civilization/Genocides , 182 revolutionary model plays, 56 rhizome, the, 9, 10, 14, 18, 45–50, 52, 56, 57, 122, 162, 169, 215 as intercultural model, 44, 48 Ridgway, Matthew, 176 Rong Nianzeng. See Yung, Danny root, 34, 36, 46–48, 51, 52, 215, 285 as identitarian metaphor, 11, 46 root-tree, 46, 47. See also rhizome, the

S Sakai, Naoki, 9 Sakurai Daiz¯ o, 143, 147–149 Salimi, Mahmoud, 184 Sanbaxian youxi. See38 th Parallel Still Play Sancheng xiju gongtongti. See TaipeiShanghai-Hong Kong Tri-City Co-Body Theatre Festival San Francisco Mime Troupe, 143, 148 Sat¯ o Makoto, 19, 21, 36, 38, 123, 210, 211, 220, 221, 223, 225, 226, 229, 234 semionaut , 51, 109. See also artist-traveller; homo viator; journey-form Seoul, 20, 50, 109, 148, 149 Setagaya Public Theatre, 220 Shakespeare’s Wild Sisters Group, 111 Shanghai, 1, 20, 87, 88, 102, 103, 107, 108, 120, 140, 143, 144, 148–150, 154, 157, 162, 176, 184, 185, 213, 214 Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre (SDAC), 146

301

Shanghai huaju yishu zhongxin. See Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre (SDAC) Shashibiya de meimeimen de jutuan. See Shakespeare’s Wild Sisters Group Shenti qixiang guan. See Body Phase Studio Shenzhen, 103, 109, 110, 121, 221 Shih, JJ, 87, 98 Shih, Shu-mei, 6, 12, 14, 284 Shijian juchang. See Theatre Practice, The Shijian xiju ying. See Practice Theatre Camp Shimizu Kanji, 222, 223, 229, 238, 239, 242, 262 Shimizu Shinjin, 111 shingeki, 1 shinpa, 1 Shi Ruiren. See Shih, JJ Shiu Tan, Margaret, 87 Shiyan Shashibiya zhi Li’er wang. SeeExperimental Shakespeare: King Lear Shuitian buluo gongzuoshi. See Waterfield Theatre Shuiyue jinghua. SeeWater Moon Mirror Flower Shum, Jim, 74, 77, 124 Sichuan opera. Seechuanju significant chronotope, 16, 18, 22, 54, 105, 158, 238, 260, 282 Singapore, 4, 5, 7, 11, 16, 17, 19, 21, 22, 40, 45, 102, 104, 113, 123, 207, 208, 210, 212–215, 218, 220, 222, 225, 226, 228, 238, 245, 248, 251, 265, 267, 269 ‘Singapore, 1942–45’, 210. See also Japanese Occupation of Singapore (1942–45); significant chronotope

302

INDEX

Singapore Arts Festival, 220 Sinitic languages, 4, 12 Sino-British Joint Declaration (1984), 71, 88 Sinocentrism, 154 Sino-corporealities, 12 Sino-Japanese relations, 21, 23, 228, 248 Sinophone, 3, 5, 8, 9, 11, 19, 22, 36, 46, 52, 72, 79, 80, 98, 102, 185, 252, 254, 283 cultural production, 2, 3, 12, 284 performance cultures, 1–3, 12, 281, 285 theatre historiography, 15, 81, 213, 285 theatres, 3, 4, 12, 15, 81, 85, 213, 214, 221, 284, 285 Sinophone, the, 12 Sinosphere, 2, 3, 5, 11, 79, 85, 104, 117, 213, 251, 256, 281, 284 Siu King-chung, 115, 119 Song Dong, 109 Sook Ching (1942), 218 Sorgenfrei, Carol, 36, 229 Southeast Asia, 3, 5, 9, 72, 102, 180, 207, 213, 283 South Korea, 5, 11, 16, 20, 50, 140, 144, 145, 148–150, 155, 156, 158, 161, 163, 176, 180, 197 Sovanna Phum Company, 182 spectrality, 22, 210, 212, 227, 232, 233, 237, 247, 250, 256 spectropoetics, 21, 209, 211, 245, 261 spectropolitics, 21, 209, 212, 245, 260 spectrotheatrics, 22, 245 Spirits Play,The, 21, 36, 41, 53, 123, 208, 210–212, 219–226, 229, 231, 244–246, 248, 252, 253, 255, 262, 264–266

Spirits Play, The: Rituals to Soothe the Unsettled Spirits , 21, 210, 222, 225 Spring Willow Society, 1 Star,The, 77, 83, 84 Sun Jing, 229, 240 Sun Society, 147 T Taibei 38 duxian. See38 th Parallel in Taipei Taipei, 20, 22, 50, 79, 80, 85, 87, 88, 102, 108, 109, 123, 140, 143, 147–149, 157, 162, 171, 172, 174, 176, 180, 182–185, 188, 195–197, 199, 210, 212, 226, 248–251, 269 ‘Taipei, 1947’, 20, 22, 210, 245. See also February 28 Incident (1947); significant chronotope Taipei-Shanghai-Hong Kong Tri-City Co-Body Theatre Festival, 171 Taiwan, 2, 4, 5, 7, 8, 16, 19–21, 23, 46, 50, 72, 73, 79–81, 86, 95–98, 101, 102, 120, 122, 140– 144, 147, 148, 150, 152, 154, 156–162, 167, 169, 173–176, 178, 180, 183, 186, 188, 189, 192, 194, 195, 210, 213, 214, 220, 245, 248, 251–254 Taiwaneseness, 156, 157, 167, 175 Taiwanese (language)., 175. See also Hoklo (Hokkien, Minnanese) Taiwan minzhong jutuan. See Taiwan People’s Theatre Taiwan People’s Theatre, 189 Taiwan Strait, 23, 80, 103, 140, 154, 156, 158–160, 163, 169, 178, 197, 251, 252 Taiyang jushe. See Sun Society Takeuchi Yoshimi, 20, 154, 186 Tang Guangming, 165, 171

INDEX

Tang Qin, 229, 244 Tang Shikang. See Tong, Tom Tang Shu-wing, 110, 121 Tang Xianzu, 239 Teater Mandiri, 221 Terauchi Hisaichi, 218 Tessenkai N¯ogaku Kensh¯ uj¯ o. See Tessenkai Noh Theatre Laboratory Tessenkai Noh Theatre Laboratory, 222 thanatopolitics, 164 Theatre du Pif, 107 theatre of action, 152, 189, 198 Theatre of Silence, 147, 148 Theatre Practice, The, 40, 123, 210, 213, 262 Theatre Training and Research Programme (TTRP), 215, 245, 263, 269 Tiananmen Mothers, the, 231, 243, 249, 252, 260, 269 Tiananmen Square protests (1989), 17, 20–22, 74, 99, 121, 157, 210, 227, 249 Tian Mansha, 110 time-space. See chronotope Tiphayakul, Paritat, 110 Toki International Arts Festival, 123, 225, 282 Tokyo, 1, 20, 21, 23, 45, 109, 110, 116, 148, 178, 180, 183–185, 198, 210, 215, 219, 221, 222, 225, 228, 229, 238, 248, 262, 265 ‘Tokyo, 1907’, 2, 16, 281. See also significant chronotope Tong Sze-hong. See Tong, Tom Tong, Tom, 171, 179, 180, 199 Traditions & Editions Theatre Circus (TETC), 245, 248 trans-Asia/trans-East Asia, 284

303

as method, 4, 9, 10, 282 trans-Asian theatricalities, 284 transborder/transborderness, 3–5, 8, 13, 34, 85, 120, 154, 157, 178, 281, 283 trans-Chinese theatricalities, 284 transcolonialism/transcoloniality, 284 transcontinental (trans-)Asian theatricalities, 22, 283 transculturation, 23 trans-ing. See transtranslation, 23, 41, 42, 118, 234 translingualism, 13, 284 transmediality, 13, 73, 87, 101, 107, 108, 115, 128, 176, 282 transnational Chinese cinemas, 13 transnational Asian theatres, 5, 10–12, 18, 40, 43, 45–47, 73, 282, 283 transnational Chinese theatres, 2–13, 16–20, 22, 23, 33, 37, 40, 41, 43–47, 49–54, 58, 63, 73, 76, 80, 118, 119, 121, 122, 211, 213, 222, 281–283 transnationalism, 5, 7, 8, 72, 73, 142, 282 Asian, 4 from below, 50 minor, 6, 9, 50, 187, 281, 282 traversing, 17 transpacific (trans-)Asian theatricalities, 22, 283 transperformance/transperforming, 8 trans- (prefix), 8, 9, 13, 25, 74, 76, 283, 284 transtextuality, 13, 73, 176, 282 transvergence, 6, 9, 15, 18, 22, 25, 34, 57, 282 transversality, 9, 15, 22, 25, 33, 45, 47, 48, 73, 122, 212 transversals, 2, 9, 25, 38, 43

304

INDEX

trauma, 17, 53, 71, 142, 158, 176, 209, 249, 252, 258, 260, 272, 283 travel, 2, 15, 18, 19, 51, 52, 76, 78, 102, 109, 120, 142, 148, 150, 159, 177, 212, 247, 248, 251 poetics of, 4, 142. See also mobility; movement tree, 47, 178, 254 as identitarian metaphor, 11, 46 Tribute, 211, 222, 223 Tsai Ming-liang, 19, 102, 104 Tsoi, Hardy, 221 Tsong Pu, 87, 121 Tsubouchi Sh¯ oy¯ o’s Literary Society, 1 Tung Chee-hwa, 92 U Uchino, Tadashi, 39, 41, 230 U, Eddy, 80 Unbearable Dreams series Unbearable Dreams , 180, 184 Unbearable Dreams 2, 180, 182, 199 Unbearable Dreams 3, 183 Unbearable Dreams 4: Lost Home, 184 Unbearable Dreams 5: Return, 184 Unbearable Dreams 6: Hope, 184 Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1 Under Lu Xun Banner: Body Experience in East Asia, 184 Unsettling Stones , 286 V viatorization, 51, 142, 148, 162, 183 Video Arts of China: Collaboration and Creativity, 108, 112, 119 Video Circle, 19, 42, 72, 115, 117, 119, 128, 129 Video Circle Performance, 118

Videotable, 77, 124 Videotage, 77, 82, 103, 129 Vietnam, 180, 182 Vietnamese (language), 181

W Wai chuantong youyi tuan. See Traditions & Editions Theatre Circus (TETC) waishengren, 95, 156, 160, 175, 178, 195 wall, 142, 168 Wang, David Der-wei, 237, 255 Wang Jianwei, 55, 87, 93, 120, 130 Wang Jing, 120 Wang Molin, 19, 80, 147, 149–153, 163, 171, 173, 177, 180, 188, 189, 195, 199 Wang Mo-lin. See Wang Molin Waseda New Theatre, 198 Waseda Shin Gekij¯ o. See Waseda New Theatre Waterfield Theatre, 182 Water Moon Mirror Flower, 39 Wei Ying-chuan, 19, 102, 104–106, 108, 111 Wei Yingjuan. See Wei Ying-chuan Wen Hui, 55 wenming xi, 36 West, the, 122 as construct, 10, 59, 186, 285 as method, 33, 285 dislocation of, 9, 10, 18, 33, 37, 43 Western-centrism, 10, 18, 33–36, 38, 155 West/North, the, 35, 37, 43 as construct, 33, 36, 43 White Terror (Taiwan), 20, 22, 157, 162, 173, 210, 248, 249 Wong, Antony, 108, 109 Wong Chi-fai, 77, 115

INDEX

Wong, Duncan, 115 Wong, Gus, 74 Wong Kar-wai, 92 Wong, Paul, 102, 104 Wong Shun-kit, 87, 102, 103 Woo, Mathias, 82, 108, 109, 125, 128 Woo Yan-wai. See Woo, Mathias World War II. See Pacific War (1941–45) Wu Jingji. See Wu Jing-jyi Wu Jing-jyi, 213 Wu Man, 107 Wu Wenguang, 19, 87, 93, 104, 109, 120 Wuyan tiandi jutuan. See Theatre of Silence Wu Zhuoliu, 127

X xenogenesis, 58. See also allogenesis Xia Chun, 214 Xianggang Bolin dangdai yishu jie. See Festival of Vision (Hong Kong/Berlin) Xie Shaoguang. See Cha Shao-Kwong Xiju he. See Drama Box Xin baodao shizhangzhe jutuan. See New Formosa Blind People’s Theatre Xing. SeeStar, The xingdong juchang. See theatre of action Xin gongren yishu tuan. See New Workers Art Troupe Xin Zhongguo shiyan lüyou – Zhonggang shiyan xiju fazhan jiaoliu jihua. SeeIn Search of Modern China/Hong Kong: An Exchange Project on Experimental Theatre Xiong Yuanwei, 110, 214, 221

305

xiqu, 19, 36, 78, 87, 88, 91, 92, 100, 101, 104, 106, 107, 112, 118, 182, 214, 240 Xu Sijia, 229, 239, 262 Xu Tan, 108 Xu Zheng, 107

Y Yang, Daniel S.P., 213 Yang Dechang. See Yang, Edward Yang, Edward, 19, 50, 87, 94, 96, 97, 102 Yang Shipeng. See Yang, Daniel S.P. Yang Yang, 229, 240, 262 Yanmosha jutuan. See Performosa Theatre Yasen No Tsuki, 143, 147, 148, 188 Yazhou ICH biaoyan yishu luntan. See Asia ICH Performing Arts Forum Yazhou minzhong xiju jie xiehui. See Asian People’s Theatre Festival Society Yazhou quyu huaren juzuojia yantaohui. See Asian Chinese Playwrights’ Conference Yazhou wenhua shiye lücheng yishu jie. See Asian Cultural Vision Journey Festival Yeben. SeeFlee by Night Yeung Chi-kuk, 107 Yi zhuo er yi. See One Table Two Chairs (1T2C) Yi zhuo liang yi. See One Table Two Chairs (1T2C) Yizi. SeeChair (short film) Yizi (er). SeeChairs Part Two yuanzhumin, 175 Yunmen wuji. See Cloud Gate Theatre Yu, Louis, 87, 106, 109, 125 Yu Qiuyu, 213 Yu Weikang. See U, Eddy

306

INDEX

Yung, Danny, 18, 21, 36, 39, 41, 43, 54–57, 71, 74, 75, 77, 79–81, 87, 92, 96, 102, 103, 106–109, 115, 119, 123, 124, 129, 210, 211, 213, 214, 221, 224–226, 239 Yung, Ning-tsun. See Yung, Danny

Z Za-Koenji Public Theatre, 210, 222 Zhang Chunxiang, 229 Zhang Xian, 102, 104, 105, 107, 108, 146, 150, 171–173 Zhang Yingchuan, 54, 57 Zhao Chuan, 55, 142, 146, 147, 149, 150, 154, 170–172, 184, 185, 188, 199 zhezixi, 87 Zhiyi. SeeTribute Zhong-gang-tai relations. See ChinaHong Kong-Taiwan relations

Zhongguo lücheng. SeeJourney to the East series Zhongguo luxiang yishu zhi hezuo yu chuangzuo. SeeVideo Arts of China: Collaboration and Creativity Zhong Qiao. See Chung Chiao Zhuang jutuan. See Clash Theatre Group Zhuan–ye–yu — dangdai wenhua jiaoliu huodong. SeeProfessional/Amateur: Contemporary Cultural Exchange Programme Zhuhuan guoji yishu jie. See Toki International Arts Festival Zhu Ke, 213 Zhu Ming, 110, 112 Zhu Xiuwen. See Chu, Virginia Zuni Icosahedron, 18, 19, 36, 39–42, 50, 55, 71–73, 76–79, 86, 103, 107, 108, 110, 120, 124, 125, 127, 129, 181, 210, 221, 283