Transnational Performance, Identity and Mobility in Asia: Iris H. Tuan and Ivy I-Chu Chang

TRANSNATIONAL
PERFORMANCE,
IDENTITY AND
MOBILITY IN ASIA
Edited by
Iris H. Tuan and
Ivy I-Chu Chang
Transnational Performance, Identity
and Mobility in Asia
Iris H. Tuan • Ivy I-Chu Chang
Editors
Transnational
Performance, Identity
and Mobility in Asia
Editors
Iris H. Tuan Ivy I-Chu Chang
National Chiao Tung University National Chiao Tung University
Jhubei, Hsinchu, Taiwan Hsinchu, Taiwan
ISBN 978-981-10-7106-5 ISBN 978-981-10-7107-2 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7107-2
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Acknowledgments
This book is the outcome of the nine contributors’ academic research

projects funded by various research institutions. In particular, the editors
of this book, Iris H. Tuan and Ivy I-chu Chang are grateful to the Ministry
of Science and Technology, R.O.C, Taiwan Top Universities Strategic
Alliance (TTUSA), National Chiao Tung University, and Hakka Affairs
Council.
In addition, all of the contributors’ affiliations are appreciated.
Sincere thanks to Sara Crowley-Vigneau, Connie Li, and the editorial
board at Palgrave Macmillan, the publishing crew, and the Palgrave team,
for their superb professionalism. We are most grateful to the anonymous
peer reviewers’ kind and expert reviews. We also want to express our grati-
tude to our research assistants Sarah Shin-Tsz Lu and Edison Li who
helped us reformat the articles, index, and put together photo illustra-
tions. Deepest gratitude to our husbands, partners, soul mates, children,
friends, and colleagues who encouraged us to finish our jobs and sup-
ported our work.
v
Contents
1 Encountering the Alienated Self: Hip-Hop Jingju

Chasing Chinese Wind in Contemporary
Legend Theatre’s 108 Heroes 1
Ivy I-Chu Chang
2 Translocal Mobility: Hakka Opera Betrayal Inspired by

Shakespeare’s Lost Play Cardenio 19
Iris H. Tuan
3 Is Universality Possible in Content and Pedagogy?

Les Misérables as an Etude Series for the School
Drama Curriculum 39
William Huizhu Sun
4 Crossing the Sea: The Ishinha Theater Company’s

Geographical Trail 53
Yasushi Nagata
5 Lila or Mela? Richard Schechner’s “Play”

of the Ramlila of Ramnagar 69
Tsu-Chung Su
vii
viii Contents
6 Korean Diaspora and the Moebius Strip: Sung Rno’s

Yi Sang Counts to Thirteen and Transnational
Avant-Garde Theater 91
Esther Kim Lee
7 Noda Hideki’s The Bee and Being Transnational/

Intranational 105
Yoshiko Fukushima
8 Disequilibrium: Disability, Gender, and Belonging

in Mahesh Dattani’s Tara and Manjula
Padmanabhan’s Harvest 123
Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren
9 The Orient on Ice: Transnational Cultural

Portrayals by Asian and Asian American
Figure Skaters 143
John B. Weinstein
Index159
List of Contributors
Ivy I-Chu Chang in Performance Studies at New York University with

distinction, is currently a professor and the former provost of National
Chiao Tung University. She was a visiting scholar and Fulbright scholar at
New York University in 2006 and 2011–12; a recipient of MOST Grant
(1997–2019), Mackay Canadian Studies Award, and Asian Cultural
Council Award. Her articles and essays have appeared in A&HCI journals
such as The Drama Review, Research in Drama Education, and Concentric.
She is the author of monographs including Remapping Memories and
Public Space: Taiwan’s Theater of Action in the Opposition Movement and
Social Movements from 1986 to 1997 (1998); Queer Performativity and
Performance (2010); and Global Time-Space, Bodies and Memories: Taiwan
New Cinema and its Influence (2015). She is also a creative writer who has
won many national literary awards in novel, novella, short story, play, and
poetry.
Yoshiko Fukushima received her Ph.D. at NYU’s Performance Studies.
She is currently Full Professor of the College of Social Sciences and
Humanities and Liberal Studies Program Coordinator at University of
Hawaii at Hilo, teaching Japanese literature, theater, film and perfor-
mance, cultural, and feminist theory courses. She is the author of Manga
Discourse in Japanese Theater: The Location of Noda Hideki’s Yume no
Yūminsha (Kegan Paul 2003; Routledge 2005) and many articles and
book chapters of modern and contemporary Japanese theater. She is cur-
rently finishing her second book focusing on comedy actresses in wartime
Japan.
ix
x List of Contributors
Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren Director of Folded Paper Dance and Theatre,

focuses her collaborative endeavors on building cross-cultural networks
and new forms of dance laboratories. Recent projects include Traveling
Architectures (2017 Hong Kong), Water in Kerala: Art, Performance,
Science (2015 in Kochi and Kollam, India), and Pier Windows (2014
Hong Kong). She is the author of two books and many articles; a former
editor of Theatre Topics; and has taught a range of theater, dance, and
performance studies courses at the University of Washington—Bothell,
Macalester College, and the Hong Kong University of Science and
Technology.
Esther Kim Lee is a Professor in the School of Theatre, Dance, and
Performance Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is
the author of A History of Asian American Theatre (2006), which received
the 2007 Award for Outstanding Book given by Association for Theatre
in Higher Education and the editor of Seven Contemporary Plays from the
Korean Diaspora in the Americas (2012). From 2013 to 2014, she was the
Chief Editor of Theatre Survey, the flagship journal of the American
Society for Theatre Research. Her latest book is The Theatre of David
Henry Hwang (2015).
Yasushi Nagata is a Professor of Theatre Studies, Graduate School of
Letters, Osaka University. He specializes in Russian Avant-garde theater
and finished the doctoral course in Theatre Studies of Meiji University in
1988. He has published many articles on theater historiography, intercul-
tural theater, acting method, and production analysis on modern and con-
temporary Russian and Japanese theaters in many anthologies such as
Adapting Chekhov, The Local meets the Global, Theatre and Democracy in
English, and also The Age of Avant-Garde, The Theory of Japanese Arts,
Performance in Post-modern Culture in Japanese. He edited a recent book
Kabuki and Russia in Revolution (Shinwa Sha, Tokyo). His recent interest
is in contemporary inter Asian theater movement, esthetic, performances,
and its historiography. He is a convenor for the IFTR Asian Theatre
Working Group. He has also served as president of the Japanese Society
for Theatre Research.
Tsu-Chung Su in Comparative Literature at the University of
Washington, US, is a Professor of English at National Taiwan Normal
University. He was a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University in 2002–3, a
Fulbright Scholar at Princeton University in 2007–8, and a Visiting
List of Contributors
xi
Scholar at Aberystwyth University in 2012–13. His areas of interest

include Greek tragedy, Shakespeare, modern drama, theater history, dra-
matic theory and criticism, performance studies, Nietzsche and his French
legacy, and theories of hysteria and melancholia. He is the author of two
monographs: The Writing of the Dionysian: The Dionysian in Modern
Critical Theory (1995) and The Anatomy of Hysteria: What It Is, with Some
of the Kinds, Causes, Symptoms, Representations, & Several Critiques of It
(2004). His recent publications include essays on Antonin Artaud,
Eugenio Barba, Peter Brook, Jerzy Grotowski, Richard Schechner, and
Robert Wilson. He is currently working on a book project on Antonin
Artaud.
William Huizhu Sun is a Professor at the Shanghai Theatre Academy;
consortium editor, TDR; vice president, Network for Higher Education
in the Performing Arts (UNESCO UNITWIN & ITI). Ph.D,
NYU. Publications include: Theatre in Construction and Deconstruction,
Conflicts on Stage and Clash of Civilizations, What to Imitate? What to
Express?, Social Performance Studies, Reinventing Western Classics as
Chinese Opera; 180 Chinese/English papers. Play/Chinese operas China
Dream, Tomorrow He’ll Be Out of the Mountains, Shalom Shanghai, Chiang
Kai-shek’s Banquet, Ling Oedipus, Hedda, Miss Julie and Xu Guangqi and
Matteo Ricci, and so on seen in twenty countries. Created Chinese opera
series Confucius Disciples and rhymed drama series Les Miserables.
Iris H. Tuan is a Professor of the Department of Humanities and Social
Sciences at National Chiao Tung University (NCTU). Iris H. Tuan was a
visiting scholar chosen by Taiwan Top University Strategic Alliance
(TTUSA) to do research for one year (2012–13) in the Department of
English and Fairbank Center at Harvard University. Tuan’s selected pub-
lications include the papers published by Asian Theatre Journal (A &
HCI) published by University of Hawaii Press and Theatre Topics by Johns
Hopkins University Press, among other excellent journals and books, such
as Intercultural Theatre: Adaptation and Representation. Tuan’s book
chapter “Taiwan” on Taiwanese Women Playwrights, has been accepted to
represent Taiwan in the book entitled International Women Stage Directors
by University of Illinois. Tuan was Director of Chinese Theater Association
(2011–12), a recipient of the 2007, 2008, 2011, 2012, and 2013 NCTU
Outstanding Research Awards, and is Supervisor of the Taiwan Shakespeare
Association (2017–). Tuan’s book, Taiwan Contemporary Theater, was
awarded NCTU’s Scholarly Book Award (2009). Iris H. Tuan received
xii List of Contributors
her Ph.D. in Theater in 2005 from UCLA. She writes prolifically on issues

of culture, gender, and representation in theater, film, opera, literature,
and arts. Tuan’s current research is on transnational Asian and Asian
American performance studies. She also teaches courses on theater per-
forming arts, Broadway musicals, visual culture, cultural creative industry,
film studies: drama genre, and so on. She completes her 9th book titled
Translocal Performance in Asian Theatre and Film (Springer Nature
2018).
John B. Weinstein is Dean of the Early Colleges at Bard College, as well
as Associate Professor of Chinese and Asian Studies at Bard College at
Simon’s Rock. He earned a Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Cultures
from Columbia University. A specialist in modern and contemporary
Chinese and Taiwanese theater, he is the editor and co-translator of Voices
of Taiwanese Women: Three Contemporary Plays. In addition, he is a com-
petitive adult figure skater in men’s singles and ice dancing. He has won
gold medals nationally at the US Adult Figure Skating Championships
and internationally at the Gay Games.
List of Figures
Fig. 1.1 In Contemporary Legend Theatre’s 108 Heroes (2007)

premiered at Taipei Art Festival, they add comic and erotic
elements that have seldom been seen in jingju performance 8
Fig. 1.2 In the scene of “Wu Song Slaughters Tiger,” the slaughtered
tiger reappears as a cartoon figure which embodies Wu Song’s
repressed libido in a seduction scene 9
Fig. 1.3 The runway in Contemporary Legend Theater’s 108 Heroes II
(2011), which functions as a huge mirror reflecting the dancing
actors12
Fig. 1.4 In the scene “Xunyang Tower,” Wu Hsing-kuo performs a
ribbon dance with a demonstration of calligraphy, toying with
Chinese Wind (Zhongguo Feng) and the androgynous body 13
Fig. 2.1 The encounter scene. The actress Tsao, Fanh-Jung in the male
role of Hsing-Yuan. Chen, Chih-Hou in the female role of
Yi-Hsiang. Betrayal. National Theater in Taipei. 2014.
(Photo: Zom-Hsing Hakka Opera Troupe. Courtesy of
Photographer Liang, Chao-An) 24
Fig. 2.2 The scene in the Peach Blossom Valley. The actress Tsao,
Fanh-Jung in the male role of Hsing-Yuan. Chen, Chih-Hou
in the female role of Yi-Hsiang. Betrayal. National Theater in
Taipei. 2014. (Photo: Zom-Hsing Hakka Opera Troupe.
Courtesy of Photographer Liang, Chao-An) 26
Fig. 2.3 Scene Three: Know each other. Chang, Yen-Li in the role of
the Princess. Su, Kuo-Ching in the role of Shi-Yuan. Betrayal.
National Theater in Taipei. 2014. (Photo: Zom-Hsing Hakka
Opera Troupe. Courtesy of Photographer Liang, Chao-An) 27
xiii
xiv List of Figures
Fig. 2.4 Scene Five: No regret. The actress Tsao, Fanh-Jung in the male
role of Hsing-Yuan. Chen, Chih-Hou in the female role of
Yi-Hsiang. Chen, Szu-Peng in the role of Old Man. Hu,
Chen-Yu in the role of General Ke. The chorus of the army.
Betrayal. National Theater in Taipei. 2014. (Photo: Zom-Hsing
Hakka Opera Troupe. Courtesy of Photographer Liang,
Chao-An)28
Fig. 2.5 Two couples’ weddings in the end. Chang, Yen-Li in the role of
the Princess. The actress Tsao, Fanh-Jung in the male role of
Hsing-Yuan. Chen, Chih-Hou in the female role of Yi-Hsiang.
Su, Kuo-Ching in the role of Shi-Yuan. Betrayal. National
Theater in Taipei. 2014. (Photo: Zom-Hsing Hakka Opera
Troupe. Courtesy of Photographer Liang, Chao-An) 29
Fig. 3.1 Graduate students and recent alumni of the Shanghai Theatre
Academy, in a scene from Les Misérables, a classroom drama
etude, for middle school students to watch and to act in later.
Left to right: Cosette (Qin Ziran), Jean Val Jean (Ding
Hui), Mme. Thenarnier (Zhang Shuhui), Thenarnier (Ren
Siyuan)44
Fig. 3.2 Sixth graders of Wenhua Elementary School in Weifang,
Shandong Province, in a scene of Les Misérables, a classroom
drama etude 50
Fig. 4.1 M6 Road of Sea. A chimney stack of ruin copper refinery is at
the right. (Taiwan no, Haiiro no Ushi ga Senobi wo Shita Toki,
2010. Inujima, Okayama Prefecture; Photo Courtesy of
Yoshikazu Inoue) 58
Fig. 4.2 Poster Design, Taiwan no, Haiiro no Ushi ga Senobi wo Shita
Toki. Japan and Korea are at the bottom, Philippines at the
center, Bali and Java are at the top of the map. 61
Fig. 4.3 Ruin of the copper refinery, Inujima. (Photo Yasushi Nagata) 63
Fig. 5.1 Gods/actors/svarupas getting ready. (Photo by Tsu-Chung Su) 73
Fig. 5.2 Svarupas (from the left Lakshmana, Rama, and Sita) at rest for
darśan (seeing the divine image). (Photo by Tsu-Chung Su) 74
Fig. 5.3 Sadhus—devout participants at the Ramnagar Ramlila. (Photo
by Tsu-Chung Su) 74
Fig. 5.4 The presence and patronage of the Maharaja of Banaras on an
elephant. (Photo by Tsu-Chung Su) 75
Fig. 5.5 An evening scene of Ravana at his Lanka palace. (Photo by
Tsu-Chung Su) 75
Fig. 5.6 Monkey masks on display. (Photo by Tsu-Chung Su) 76
Fig. 5.7 Monkey soldiers played by ordinary boys. (Photo by Tsu-
Chung Su) 76
List of Figures
xv
Fig. 5.8 The use of performance-enhancing effigies. (Photo by Tsu-

Chung Su) 77
Fig. 5.9 The use of performance-enhancing effigies. (Photo by Tsu-
Chung Su) 77
Fig. 5.10 Attentive women in the audience. (Photo by Tsu-Chung Su) 78
Fig. 5.11 Audience, religious participants, tourists, and vendors of all
kinds surrounding the performance site, testifying to the
co-existence of lila and mela. (Photo by Tsu-Chung Su) 79
Fig. 7.1 Glyn Pritchard as Ogoro’s Son, Kathryn Hunter as Ido, and
Hideki Noda as Ogoro’s Wife. The Bee (The London/English
version). Theatre Tram. 2007. (Copyright: NODA MAP.
Photo: Yakou Masahiko) 112
Fig. 7.2 Glyn Pritchard as Ogoro’s Son, Kathryn Hunter as Ido and
Hideki Noda as Ogoro’s Wife. The Bee (The London/English
Fig. 7.3 Hideki Noda as Ogoro’s Wife and Kathryn Hunter as Ido. The
Bee (The London/English version). Theatre Tram. 2007.
(Copyright: NODA MAP. Photo: Yakou Masahiko) 113
Fig. 7.4 Natsuko Akiyama as Reporter, Ryōhei Kondō as Reporter,
Kazuyuki Asano as Reporter, and Hideki Noda as Ido. The Bee
(The Japanese version). Theatre Tram. 2007. (Copyright:
NODA MAP. Photo: Yakou Masahiko) 116
Fig. 7.5 Ryōhei Kondō as Ogoro’s Son, Hideki Noda as Ido and
Natsuko Akiyama as Ogoro’s Wife. The Bee (The Japanese
Introduction: Transnational Performance,
Identity, and Mobility in Asia
Abstract This book investigates the representative international perfor-

mances in the age of globalization from the vantage point of emerging
dialogues on transnationalism, and intercultural politics of difference. This
book consists of nine chapters written by theater professors and
professionals.
Ivy I-chu Chang investigates how Contemporary Legend Theatre’s
hip-hop jingju in 108 Heroes of Water Margin I and II, adaptations from
a Chinese classical, attracts young audiences, creating a cultural
phenomenon.
Iris H. Tuan traces the origin of Shakespeare and John Fletcher’s lost
play Cardenio, from Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixode, Lewis Theobald’s
Double Falsehood, RSC version, and to Stephen Greenblatt and Charles
Mee’s adaptation, and then comments on Hakka Opera Betrayal.
William Huizhu Sun develops theater pedagogy for Chinese elemen-
tary and secondary schools by using Les Miserables as an etude series for
the school drama curriculum with his team from the Shanghai Theatre
Academy.
Tsu-Chung Su explores Richard Schechner’s “play” or his rendering of
the mythopoetic and fantastic ritual display.
Yasushi Nagata chooses the production Taiwan no Ushi to explore not
only the history but also the “geography” of Asian theater.
Esther Kim Lee analyzes the production of Yi Sang Counts to Ten to
address the gap of the Korean American perspective absent in Korea.
Yoshiko Fukushima investigates how Noda Hideki’s play The Bee uses
techniques of interculturalization to explore transnational issues.
xvii
xviii INTRODUCTION: TRANSNATIONAL PERFORMANCE, IDENTITY, AND…
Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren argues that arts making amplifies factors of

social and cultural vulnerability and belongingness in relation to twenty-
first-century transnational South Asian disability theaters.
John B. Weinstein uses the examples of Chinese and Chinese American
competitors in ladies’ figure skating in the 1990s to describe how they
used Oriental cultural elements in winning World Championships.
Each chapter explores the intriguing performance(s) in Asia, either of
Asian or Asian American cultural heritages.
Keywords Transnationalism • Performance • Identity • Mobility

• Asia, Cultural heritage
This book investigates the representative international performances in

the age of globalization from the viewpoint of emerging dialogues on
transnationalism, and intercultural politics of difference. Each of the nine
chapters explores the intriguing performance(s) in Asia, either of Asian or
Asian American cultural heritages.
In Chap. 1, Ivy I-chu Chang investigates how Contemporary Legend
Theatre’s hip-hop jingju in 108 Heroes of Water Margin I and II, adapta-
tions from a Chinese classical, attracts young audiences, creating a cultural
phenomenon. Chang probes into crucial questions: interweaving hip-hop
and “Chinese Wind” (zhongguo feng) into an eclectic concert-like perfor-
mance. Will the Chinese or Taiwanese audience’s encounter with the
Chinese symbols and images that have been mixed with Western pop
music and Japanese Ukiyo-i (wooden painting) costumes give them a sense
of déjà disparu and reengage them in a cultural past that has never been
and is yet to come?
In Chap. 2, Iris H. Tuan traces the origin of Shakespeare and John
Fletcher’s lost play Cardenio, from Stephen Greenblatt and Charles Mee’s
adaptation, to the Hakka Opera Betrayal. Betrayal (Taipei 2014) was
inspired by Shakespeare’s Cardenio and staged by Zom-Hsing Hakka
Opera Troupe. Tuan argues that while theatrical mobility may exist in dif-
ferent adaptations, the glocalization of theater can integrate translocal cul-
tures and theatrical performing methods. In comparison, Shakespeare and
Fletcher’s Cardenio focuses on the homoerotic male friendship echoing
Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixode; while the Hakka Opera Betrayal
emphasizes brotherhood, filial piety, loyalty, and heterosexual love.
INTRODUCTION: TRANSNATIONAL PERFORMANCE, IDENTITY, AND…
xix
In Chap. 3, William Huizhu Sun exemplifies his methodology and

experience in developing theater pedagogy for Chinese elementary and
secondary schools. Using Les Miserables as an etude series for the school
drama curriculum, Sun and his team at Shanghai Theatre Academy found
that a new paradigm of theater pedagogy via collective imitation for all
schools is more likely to be implemented in China than in the West.
In Chap. 4, Tsu-Chung Su explores Richard Schechner’s “play” or his
rendering of the mythopoetic and fantastic ritual display. Based on his own
field trip, Su interrogates the impact of the Ramnagar Ramlila on Schechner
and critically examines his formulation of performance theory as a case of
intercultural border-crossings and encounters. Su also investigates the
complex interrelationships between lila and mela, and between religious
rituals and performances in everyday life.
In Chap. 5, Yasushi Nagata explores not only the history but also the
“geography” of Asian theater. Nagata chooses the production Taiwan no,
Haiiro no Ushi ga Senobi wo Shita Toki, (When a Taiwanese Grey Cow
Stretched in English, hereinafter referred to as Taiwan no Ushi), written by
Yukichi Matsumoto and produced by the Ishinha theater company in
2010, as his case study. Nagata argues that the play not only depicted Asian
geography in the story but actually presented the performance on a small
island, Inujima in Seto Island Sea, prospecting a new conception of theater
production. He emphasizes that theater productions have been recognized
as problematic not only because of their aesthetics, but also due to the
cultural and social identities of their practitioners and spectators.
In Chap. 6, Esther Kim Lee discusses the production of Yi Sang Counts
to Ten. The play, written by Korean American playwright Sung Rno, was
directed by American director Lee Breuer and produced in Seoul, Korea
in 1998. Sung Rno presents a surrealistic play inspired by translations of
the poems by Yi Sang, a Korean surrealist poet who died in 1937. The
production was heralded as a meaningful coming together of three experi-
mental artists of different generations and backgrounds. From a Korean
American’s perspective, Lee examines the production in the context of
Korean as well as transnational avant-garde theater to explore how Sung
Rno creates a theatrical imagination of modern Korea through linguistic
and visual poetry onstage.
In Chap. 7, Yoshiko Fukushima discusses the Japanese leading play-
wright/director/actor Noda Hideki’s play of the macabre, The Bee. The
play was co-written by the Irish playwright Colin Teevan, inspired by the
Japanese novelist Tsutsui Yasutaka’s short story. Its English version was
xx INTRODUCTION: TRANSNATIONAL PERFORMANCE, IDENTITY, AND…
premiered at Soho Theatre, London, in 2006 by Noda with British actors,

and the all-Japanese cast version at Theatre Tram, Tokyo in 2007. In
2012, and the play toured worldwide. Noda’s intercultural performance
examines memories, history, and the cruelty of human beings, using the
light, playful, and fast-paced theatrical style that is atypical of Japanese
theater. Fukushima investigates how Noda uses techniques of intercultur-
alization to explore transnational issues and questions why his play still
preserves the “very Japanese” elements as described by the audiences
overseas.
In Chap. 8, Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren investigates what she provision-
ally calls “translocal intimacies” in relation to twenty-first-century transna-
tional South Asian disability theaters. Collective forms of art making,
especially in the projects that cut across national, socio-cultural, and artis-
tic boundaries, often generate a politics of practiced intimacy that can lead
to new states of belonging within and across differences. These emergent
practices rely on that activation of artistic exploration and production that
engenders dynamic, shifting, and tenuous encounters with ones’ many
selves, fellow performers, and the expanded community partners and audi-
ences. Arts making amplifies factors of social and cultural vulnerability and
belongingness.
In Chap. 9, John B. Weinstein uses the examples of Chinese and
Chinese American competitors in ladies’ figure skating in the 1990s to
notice that they used Oriental cultural elements to win World
Championships. He points out that non-Western cultural influences in
figure skating performances did not have a great presence until 1995
world champion Chen Lu of China and 1996 world champion Michelle
Kwan of the US engaged in cultural portrayals beyond pure Euro American
movement and visual images. Weinstein comments that the two women’s
figure skating choreography still drew a lot from Oriental performances,
which are intermediated by Western dance forms, and that their perfor-
mances were only “in character” within cultural portrayal limits.
Transnational Performance, Identity, Mobility in Asia explores the
interesting and prominent performance in the hope of inspiring readers to
think about the emergent transnational theatrical hybridity that reflects
diverse aesthetics of memory, identities, and cultural mobility practices
through transnational and translocal boundaries.
National Chiao Tung University Iris H. Tuan

Hsinchu, Taiwan Ivy I-Chu Chang
CHAPTER 1
Encountering the Alienated Self: Hip-Hop

Jingju Chasing Chinese Wind
in Contemporary Legend Theatre’s
108 Heroes
Ivy I-Chu Chang
Abstract Wu Hsing-kuo and Contemporary Legend Theatre’s 108 Heroes

of Water Margin I (2007) and 108 Heroes of Water Margin II (2011),
adaptations from a Chinese classical by Shi Nai’an (施耐庵 1296–1372),
Outlaws of Water Margin, combine jingju (a national theatrical form in
Taiwan), hip-hop, rock and roll, and Western total theater, attracting a
large young audience who have never attended jingju theater. This chapter
investigates how Wu and the Contemporary Legend Theatre’s innovation
of jingju have been entangled with Chinese or Taiwanese nationalism; and
how 108 Heroes of Water Margin I and II attract young audiences, creating
a cultural phenomenon. Chang probes crucial questions: interweaving hip-
hop and Chinese Wind (zhongguo feng) into an eclectic concert-like perfor-
mance, will the Chinese or Taiwanese audiences’ encounters with the
Chinese symbols and images that have been mixed with Western pop music
I. I.-C. Chang (*)

National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan
© The Author(s) 2018 1

I. H. Tuan, I. I.-C. Chang (eds.), Transnational Performance, Identity
and Mobility in Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7107-2_1
2 I. I.-C. CHANG
and Japanese Ukiyo-i (wooden painting) costumes give them a sense of déjà
disparu and reengage them in a cultural past that has never been and is yet
to come? Will the performance outflank the pace with a subject always on
the point of disappearing or emerging? Will the replication machine appeal-
ing to the Asian market produce the symbols of the real and short circuit
the vicissitude?
Keywords Jingju • Hip-hop • Chinese Wind • Contemporary Legend

Theatre • Asian theater • Brecht
Encountering the Alienated Self

by and Through the Foreign
Since the mid-twentieth century, the innovation of traditional Asian the-

ater has often been driven by two impulses: one is to utilize Western can-
ons like Shakespeare as a cultural capital to showcase Asian performance
on a global stage; the other is to appropriate elements from Asian or
Western popular culture in order to rejuvenate traditional Asian theater,
bringing it closer to young people and quotidian lives. Paradoxically, as
many innovators look up to Western theater or popular cultural symbols
and icons to trigger their creative potential, they often look for novelty
from foreign cultural forms and ideas that have originated and grown
from their own cultures and then returned as what Anthony Tatlow calls
“an alienating echo or transmutation of undeveloped inherent possibili-
ties” (Tatlow 2001, p. 78). This can be exemplified by the experience of
those Asian theater artists who seek recourse to Western avant-garde
directors such as Brecht, Grotowski, and Artaud whose fundamental
methods have been respectively inspired or reinforced by Chinese jingju,
Indian kathakali, and Balinese ritual.1 Similarly, for those who appropriate
elements from Western or Asian popular culture, they might encounter
their cultural past that has already been reimagined and recycled through
foreign eyes in the “simulacra and simulation machine” (Baudrillard 1988,
pp. 164–84) of cultural industries. In the postmodern “time–space com-
pression” (Harvey 1990, p. 284), the uncanny feeling of encountering
one’s alienated self is sometimes not so much a sense of déjà vu as what
Ackbar Abbas calls the sense of déjà disparu: “the feeling that what is new
and unique about the situation is already gone, and we are left holding a
handful of clichés, or a cluster of memories of what has never been” (Abbas
1997, pp. 25–6).
ENCOUNTERING THE ALIENATED SELF: HIP-HOP JINGJU CHASING… 3
Wu Hsing-kuo (吳興國) and the Contemporary Legend Theatre’s

(CLT) (當代傳奇劇團) innovation of jingju have made palpable the afore-
mentioned two impulses. Beginning in the mid-1980s, Wu and the CLT
utilize Western canons such as Shakespeare as a vehicle to make their jingju
productions more universally appealing to the global stage and international
theater festivals. For instance, The Kingdom of Desire (《慾望城國》), an
adaptation from Macbeth, premiered in 1986. From 1990 to 2005, The
Kingdom of Desire made thirteen worldwide tours—with the government’s
handsome sponsorship—in prominent international theater festivals or
national theaters to promote jingju as a Chinese cultural paradigm through
Shakespearean story that seemed more familiar to Western audiences.2
The vicissitude and jingju innovation of the CLT have been entangled
with the transition from Chinese nationalism to Taiwanese nationalism
during Taiwan’s socio-political change. In Taiwan, jingju innovation often
arouses controversy and resistance because it has long been regarded as
the national theatrical form intertwining cultural identity, national pride,
and nationalist sentiment. Since the KMT (Kuomintang) government was
defeated by the Communist party and withdrew from the mainland China
to Taiwan after the 1949 Civil War, the KMT government’s national cul-
tural policies of protecting jingju have been a double-edged sword. On
the one hand, jingju has been sustained to promote Chinese nationalism
through the Ideological State Apparatuses and government sponsorship.
On the other hand, within an enclosed institution and system, jingju has
been preserved in such a rigid form that it has been so far away from
quotidian lives. Turning to the 1970s, jingju has been a vehicle to pro-
mote Taiwan’s image as “cultural China” on a global stage, since Taiwan
had encountered unprecedented political and diplomatic set back and lost
its international political stage to the People’s Republic of China. The
CLT and their jingju innovations based on Shakespearean adaptations
were sponsored generously by the government to perform on the global
stage to promote Taiwan as the true heir of Chinese culture.
However, turning to 1996, the year Lee Teng-hui was elected as presi-
dent, Taiwan’s government put Taiwanese nationalism into the cultural
policies and practices, and then the CLT encountered increasing difficul-
ties in receiving grants. Besides, they had no full-time actors and hence
had to cooperate with the actors of Guoguang Opera Company. However,
at that time Guoguang had to carry the mission of vernacularizing jingju
by frequently performing in temple squares, schools, and local communi-
ties, rendering those repertoires that promoted Taiwanese consciousness
4 I. I.-C. CHANG
and the stories of Mazu (媽祖 Taiwanese goddess), Zheng Chenggong

(鄭成功 a Ming-dynasty general pioneering the settlement in Taiwan, also
known as Koxinga), and Liao Tianding (廖添丁 an anti-Japanese hero
during Japanese colonization) (Lu 2006, p. 202).
In December 1998, Wu and his wife Lin Hsiu-wei frustratedly
announced the disbanding of their troupe. In 2000, Wu was invited by
Ariane Mnouchkine to teach the workshop in the Theatre de Soleil. Wu
produced a twenty-five-minute solo performance titled Lear Is Here, an
adaptation of King Lear, to incorporate various jingju role types and act-
ing skills. This was later expanded to a ninety-minute performance, win-
ning international acclaim comparable to Kingdom of Desire in various
theater festivals (p. 207). With his interest and passion in jingju innova-
tion rekindled by Mnouchkine and Western audiences, Wu reopened the
CLT after he had returned to Taiwan. The CLT’s story explicates the
jingju innovators’ alienation from their own artistic identity by the inter-
vention of Ideological State Apparatuses while reencountering their alien-
ated self by rediscovering their own values through the foreign.
Turning to the twenty-first century, with the rising of China as a strong
economic and political entity, “Chinese Wind” pop music (zhongguo feng
(中國風), meaning Chinese style) (Groenewegen 2011, p. 26) becomes
big hits in Asian markets, especially People Republic China (PRC)-based
Chinese markets. In response, Wu and the CLT begin looking inward to
Chinese classics and chasing the rising Chinese Wind in their jingju inno-
vation in order to attract young actors and audience. Either adapting
Shakespeare or chasing Chinese Wind, they have encountered the cultural
Other or their alienated self through “foreign eyes,” recycling the cultural
symbols and icons that have already been reimagined and hybridized
through the simulacra and simulation machine of cultural industries.
In particular, Wu and the CLT’s 108 Heroes (《水滸 108》) I and II,
which were respectively premiered at the 2007 Taipei Art Festival and the
2011 Hong Kong Art Festival, have been regarded as their new contribu-
tions to jingju innovation. These two works, which adapt a fourteenth-
century Chinese classical novel, The Water Margin (《水滸傳》, also
known as Outlaws of Water Margin), combine jingju, hip-hop, rock and
roll, and total theater, attracting a great number of young audience mem-
bers who have never stepped into a jingju theater—thus turning hip-hop
jingju into a cultural phenomenon. As the collaborators interweave hip-
hop jingju and Chinese Wind into an eclectic concert-like performance,
will the Chinese or Taiwanese audience’s encounter with the Chinese
symbols and images that have been mixed with Western pop music and
Japanese Ukiyo-i (wooden painting) costumes give them a sense of déjà
disparu and reengage them in a cultural past that has never been and is
yet to come? Will the performance outflank the pace with a subject always
on the point of disappearing or emerging? Will the replication machine
that appeals to an Asian market produce symbols of the real and short
circuit the vicissitude?
Making Hip-Hop jingju a Fashion: Wu Hsing-Kuo’s

Adaptation of The Water Margin
In 108 Heroes: Tales from “The Water Margin” (Part I) (《水滸 108》
2007) premiered in Taipei Art Festival and 108 Heroes: Tales from “The
Water Margin” (Part II) (《水滸 108 II 忠義堂》 2011) premiered in
Hong Kong Art Festival, Wu Hsing-kuo collaborated with a Hong Kong
pop singer, Chau Wa-kin (周華健, also known as Emil Chau), and a
Taiwanese novelist, Chang Ta-ch’uen (張大春), to adapt a Chinese classi-
cal novel by Shi Nai’an (施耐庵 1296–1372), rendering the story about
brotherhood and heroism of the rebellious outlaws who escape the royal
court’s persecution. The CLT’s experimental hip-hop jingju of 108 Heroes
I and II is part of Wu’s “Youth Series” aiming at jingju rejuvenation for
young people. Prior to 108 Heroes, Wu had already started his project in
1997 by abridging scenes from a Chinese classic The Romance of the Three
Kingdoms (abridged) (《三國演義》) for children in the form of educa-
tion theater. After that, Wu collaborated with pop singer Chau Wa-kin to
produce Hip-Hop Opera: A Play of Brother and Sister (《兄妹串戲》) in
which they incorporated hip-hop music to the actors’ singing and dancing
with a collage of the most popular scenes from the most popular reper-
toire of jingju, aiming at promoting young actors and attracting young
audience.
Chasing the Rising Trend of Chinese Wind

in the Asian Market
In 108 Heroes, the theme songs are composed by Chau Wa-kin, who mixes
jingju and Chinese Wind: he composes his songs in the form of pop music
based on Western introduced harmony and song structure rather than the
fixed tune patterns like Xipi (西皮), Erhuang (二簧), and percussion in
6 I. I.-C. CHANG
jingju—despite that he still mixes the elements of these tune patterns into
his music composition with much more freedom. As a matter of fact, prior
to 108 Heroes, anticipating the rising trend of Chinese Wind in Asian cul-
tural industry, Chau had already started adopting the elements of Chinese
poetry and music in his 1989 song “The Legend of Widow’s Village” (〈寡
婦村〉). Jeroen Groenewegen observes that Chinese Wind songs incorpo-
rating classical Chinese lyrics took shape in the 1990s, as China was trans-
forming into a competitive economic and political entity in the new global
structure; they mushroomed in 2000 as Taiwanese pop star Jay Chou (周
杰倫) broke through with a combination of R&B romantic ballad and
tough hip-hop. In 2001, Chou made Chinese Wind a trend when his sec-
ond album Fantasy (《范特西》) sold millions of legal units in Taiwan
and Hong Kong. Chou developed Chinese Wind further in Eight
Dimensions (《八度空間》2002) with “Chineseness” disproportionally
featured in the visual imagery and album reviews. Jay Chou’s big hit “Blue
and White Porcelain” (〈青花瓷〉2007) could perhaps best exemplify the
culminating Chinese Wind songs (Groenewegen 2011, p. 26).
In general, the Chinese Wind imagines a greater China centering
around the People’s Republic of China. Both the music and lyrics are
hybrids of Chinese and the West, based on Western introduced harmony
and song structure with the lyrics exploring Chinese traditional themes
and classical poetry. Groenewegen points out the characteristics of Chou’s
Chinese Wind songs:
Musically, the Chinese Wind employs instruments such as the erhu ([二胡]
fiddle), the guzheng ([古箏] zither), the yangqin ([揚琴] dulcimer), and
various flutes. Melodies from folksongs and opera sometimes appear in
intros and a few tracks are pentatonic, but on the whole, Western-introduced
harmony and song structures prevail. In terms of lyrics, Chou’s lyricist
Vincent Fang [方文山] explores ‘traditional’ themes such as martial arts,
antique furniture, calligraphy, porcelain, medicine, and historical events and
persons. The lyrics contain ancient sayings, archaic-sounding neologisms
and sometimes quotations from classical poetry. (p. 26)
Groenewegen quotes Fei Wang and Jay Chou to point out that, “The
Chinese Wind asserting (PRC-Centered) Great China eased access to
state-owned media and venues in the PRC” (p. 26). In Asian markets and
the PRC-centered Great China area, Jay Chou’s Chinese Wind songs have
remained big hits for decades, creating the Chinese Wind cultural phe-
nomenon. For instance, his second album Fantasy (《范特西》2001) has
sold 1.7 million legal units (allegedly one out of ten sold copies is legal
while nine are pirated); his third album Eight Dimensions (《八度空
間》2002) has sold 2.20 million legal units; his eighth album On the Run
(《我很忙》2007), which contains the song “Blue and White Porcelain”
(〈青花瓷〉), has sold 1.7 million legal units; and at the release of his
twelfth album Opus 12 (《十二新作》2012) Chou’s team announced that
the total sales of a series of Chou’s albums over the decade were allegedly
24 million legal units (https://read01.com/zh-tw/68yexg.html#.
WZIrNv0fBMk.lineme).
Chau Wa-kin, one of the pioneering composers and singers of Chinese
Wind songs, breathes Chinese Wind into the theme songs of 108 Heroes as
he takes more freedom to mix Chang Ta-ch’uen’s Chinese poetry, jingju
singing and percussion, hip-hop, and electronic rock and roll. The Chinese
Wind song is best exemplified by the theme song “Going into the
Underworld” (〈走風塵〉) accompanying the festive concert-like perfor-
mance in Act Three, “Hijacking the Convoy of Birthday Gifts” (〈生辰綱〉).
There is unbounded joy when the wind is cool.

Drinking thirty six [sic] thousand jars of wine in a hundred years.
Gulping, on average, a jar a day who do you think is crazier?
Getting drunk in one year three hundred and sixty days.
In darkness, there are deeper feelings and longer days. (English translation
by CLT)
In this scene, Chao Gai (鼂蓋) leads the bandits of Liangshan Marsh to
intoxicate and hijack Yang Zhi (楊志), the escort of the convoy of valuable
birthday gifts to the royal family. Getting drunk heartily, the bandits and
soldiers turn their fierce fighting into a carnival. They sing and dance in a
circle, displaying their stunning jingju acrobatics mixed with hip-hop and
break dance. They wobble their bodies, whirling and straddling horizon-
tally with their legs wide apart in mid-air and then standing on one foot
and slowly toppling flat backwards onto the ground like zombies—a spe-
cific jingju movement termed jiangshi (僵屍).
Staging Hip-Hop Jingju with Unprecedented Erotic

and Comic Scenes
Intriguingly, playwright Chang Ta-ch’uen reinforces the characters’ psy-

chological complexity and dramatic tension by adapting the most popular
tales from the original novel through the method of Western total theater.
In Act Four, “The Timely Rain” (〈及時雨〉), Prosecutor Song Jiang (宋江)
8 I. I.-C. CHANG
nicknamed “timely rain,” a chivalrous hero in need, always places brother-

hood and friendship over the relationship between husband and wife.
Song’s contradiction between brotherhood and marriage is staged with
split scenes and cross-dialogue that simultaneously parallel Song’s meeting
with a Liangshan bandit on the stage left and his wife’s adultery with
another guy on the stage right. Most noteworthy, the erotic and comic ele-
ments never seen in conventional jingju have been added to the adultery
scene. Song’s wife, Yan Xijiao (閻惜姣), and her adulterer, Zhang Wenyuan
(張文遠), both sit on a high back chair with their bodies overlapped and
entangled while Yan’s bare legs are crossing over Zhang’s shoulders and
Zhang is fondling her from toes to thighs, accompanied by jingju percus-
sion (Fig. 1.1).
Fig. 1.1 In Contemporary Legend Theatre’s 108 Heroes (2007) premiered at

Taipei Art Festival, they add comic and erotic elements that have seldom been seen
in jingju performance
Another noteworthy alteration is playwright Chang’s innovation of the

popular tale of “Wu Song Slaughters Tiger” (〈武松打虎〉) from a psycho-
analytical perspective as he symbolically and metaphorically transforms the
tiger into Wu Song’s alter ego. Wu Song, a household name with superior
martial art skills, slaughters a ferocious tiger, which has haunted and
attacked the village people. However, even after its death, the tiger still
lurks behind Wu Song, following him wherever he goes. In particular, the
tiger appears as Wu Song’s alter ego when he can hardly resist the tempta-
tion of his licentious sister-in-law, Pan Jinlian (潘金蓮). During the absence
of Wu Song’s brother, Wu Dalang (武大郎), Pan attempts to seduce her
brother-in-law by all means. When Pan is leaning towards Wu Song and
pouring wine for him, the tiger appears as a cartoon figure between them,
trying to hold their hands and draw them closer to each other. Sometimes
the tiger peeps over their shoulders (Fig. 1.2); sometimes it tugs its head
from under the crotch of Wu who embarrassedly presses it behind as if
repressing his libido. All of a sudden, as the tiger pretends to fondle Pan’s
breasts, Wu, tricked by the tiger, immediately holds Pan tightly upon his
chest to protect her. Almost as soon as he kisses her has he abruptly pushed
her away, as if he suddenly wakes up.
More humorous elements were added to the death of Wu Dalang, Wu
Song’s brother, who has been poisoned by his promiscuous wife. Wu Dalang
is comically performed by a jingju clown-like character. He d emonstrates
Fig. 1.2 In the scene of “Wu Song Slaughters Tiger,” the slaughtered tiger reap-
pears as a cartoon figure which embodies Wu Song’s repressed libido in a seduc-
tion scene
10 I. I.-C. CHANG
the difficult clowning skills by walking with crouching steps, a body move-
ment specific to the clown: taking a crouching position, he moves forward
by kicking his legs outward with his heels lifted to create a dwarflike figure.
Without being aware of his wife’s flippant intimacy with her adulterer,
Ximen Qing, Wu Dalang is flattered by his wife’s unusual attention, delight-
fully drinking the poisonous wine served by her. Performing death, the
clown playing Wu Dalang jumps onto a table, adopting a crouching posi-
tion in a Brechtian tableau, putting his own face within a black-ribbon frame
usually seen in Taiwanese funeral portrait. Later, Wu Song seeks revenge for
his dead brother, chasing and slaughtering the Western-costumed, dandy-
like Ximen Qing. Meanwhile, the actors playing the dead brother and the
tiger step aside from their roles to act as audience members, commenting on
the characters’ fighting and picking up from the floor a banana peel that has
distracted them from enjoying the slapstick.
Pantomime, Manga Characters, Versatile Narrator,

and Brechtian Alienation
In addition to jingju, hip-hop, pantomime, and tango are incorporated

into the martial contest, adding humorous elements to the performance.
In Act Six, “Shizi Hillside” (〈十字坡〉), Wu Song, accompanied by Lu
Zhishen (魯智深), is exiled for his revenge killing. As they pass the tavern
of Sun Erniang (孫二娘), Wu Song is mistakenly attacked by Sun, a fero-
cious revenge-seeking female who randomly attacks and chops up male
patrons to make buns with human flesh. Wu and Sun fumble and fight in
the dark as each other’s mirror image. To the varied beats of cymbal per-
cussion, they enact tiptoes, minced steps, large strides, jumps, turns, and
somersaults like two ninjas. Sometimes they pause as each other’s shadows
with one standing on one foot on the table and the other underneath the
table. Then they both end up dancing on the table, alternating between a
duel of jingju martial arts and a duet tango with the music changing from
jingju cymbal percussion to tango music accordingly. After Sun Erniang
kicks hard at Wu Song’s crotch, Wu covers his crotch with both hands,
moving in a Michael Jackson-style moon walk varied with jingju strides.
Eventually Wu and Sun are acquainted after fighting with each other and
then they join the Liangshan heroes together.
In 108 Heroes, the exaggerated geometric shape of the costumes and
headdresses designed by Sara Lai (賴宣吾) make those actors look like
manga characters. Wu Hsing-kuo speaks of the costume design:
Our ideas of costume design come from Japanese wooden painting

(Ukiyo-i), which had been influenced by Chinese painting of Tang Dynasty
and later influenced the Western Impressionist painting [ … ] We have to
look for any possibilities to correspond with the concept of modern arts.
(Hou 2007, E7)
Wu’s comment exemplifies the traveling of culture through time and

space, during which we have encountered our cultural past through the
foreign. Furthermore, the hybridization involves “glocalization” and
time–space compression as well. To act in the heavy costumes, some actors
have to borrow the elements of Taiwanese hand puppet theatre in their
performance (Hou, E7).
Intriguingly, a narrator, Lin Wen-pin (林文彬), combines the effect of
Brechtian narrator and the versatility of epic narrating (jiangshi 講史) and
ballade singing in Chinese folk arts. Here the narrator is utilized as a strat-
egy of postmodern collage and pastiche of different performance styles to
highlight the aesthetics of incongruity instead of creating political valence.
He introduces the characters, narrates history and stories, and gives com-
ments in diverse forms of folk art: jingyun dagu (京韻大鼓 storytelling in
Beijing dialect with drum accompaniment), Suzhou pingtan (蘇州評彈
combining Suzhou dialect storytelling and ballad singing), juban kuaishu
(竹板快書 bamboo clapper ballad), and so on. On and off, like a Brechtian
narrator, he breaks the illusion of the fourth wall, commenting on the
plot, characters, or contemporary society. Sometimes the characters step
out of their roles, addressing contemporary issues of brand-name con-
sumer products or extinct animals.
In a subversive atmosphere near the end of the play, all the actors are
rock and rolling and somersaulting on the trampoline between the L-shape
stage and the audience, displaying the rebellious spirit of youth. Then the
pages from the disassembled book of 108 Heroes: Tales from “The Water
Margin” are literally falling from the ceiling, scattering all over the stage
like snowflakes. The narrator appears, chanting “There is a Liangshan
Marsh in everybody’s mind.” Then he invokes Shi Nai-an, the novelist of
the original The Water Margin in the fourteenth-century Ming Dynasty,
“Shi Nai’an, you freed the 108 Heroes, but how can a story teller re-
capture them?” The narrator’s question and interrogation seem to convey
playwright Chang and director Wu’s self-skepticism and criticism of their
own impossible mission in jingju adaptation and innovation.
12 I. I.-C. CHANG
Toying with Chinese Symbols and Wu Hsing-kuo’s

Androgynous Body
In 108 Heroes II (2011), premiered at the Hong Kong Art Festival, they
construct in the orchestra area an acrylic runway—like a fashion show
catwalk—which functions as a huge mirror reflecting the dancing actors
(Fig. 1.3). Wu, Chow, and Chang take a more daring attempt to eclecti-
cally hybridize jingju, hip-hop, and rock and roll, and reinforce their toy-
ing with the Chinese cultural symbols, chasing the increasingly rising
trend of Chinese Wind in Asia. Martial artists rock and rolling to the pop
music suddenly freeze in Brechtian tableau to signal Song Jiang’s flash-
back; an electronic guitar player in contemporary costume appears among
a crowd dancing with their torsos swinging in rock and roll tempo and
their legs performing the jingju “horse step” (馬步).
The most poetic scene, toying with Chinese cultural symbols, is
“Xunyang Tower” (〈潯陽樓〉). In this scene, Wu Hsing-kuo as Song Jiang
wearing a long skirt wields a pair of two-meter long ribbons and writes
Fig. 1.3 The runway in Contemporary Legend Theater’s 108 Heroes II (2011),
which functions as a huge mirror reflecting the dancing actors
Fig. 1.4 In the scene “Xunyang Tower,” Wu Hsing-kuo performs a ribbon

dance with a demonstration of calligraphy, toying with Chinese Wind (Zhongguo
Feng) and the androgynous body
Chinese calligraphy with his body and the ribbons interwoven as one
(Fig. 1.4). Wu’s long skirt and ribbon dance—a dance usually rendered by
a dan (female)—allow him to go cross the dichotomy between
male/masculinity and female/femininity in conventional jingju perfor-
mance. Dancing on the transparent and glistening acrylic floor, Wu appears
to be gliding on Xunyang lake, the backdrop of the story. Tracing his dance
movement, Chinese poetry written in calligraphy is projected onto the
wall-sized screen superimposed with a Chinese landscape painting, which
reflects his mindscape. In Act Seven “Luotian Sacrificial Ceremony” (〈羅天
大醮〉) and Act Eight “Chrysanthemum Reunion” (〈賞菊集群英〉), which
both play with Chinese symbols and borrow the elements of funeral ritual,
Liangshan heroes get together to mourn for their dead brother Chao Gai
and also to discuss whether they should consent to the cooption by the
imperial court. The atmosphere is sad and solemn, overshadowed by the
ghost of Chao Gai. In the end, all of the heroes freeze like a monument in
Brechtian tableau with snowflakes fluttering around them in the air. The
14 I. I.-C. CHANG
only moving figure is a female, Sun Erniang, who is singing an eulogy and
placing a chrysanthemum on each hero’s chest.
Chinese Symbols and Chinese Wind: Theatrical

Poetics and Historical Displacement
The theatrical poetics made possible by Wu’s interplay with Chinese Wind
songs and Chinese symbols allegorically reflect Wu’s journey to jingju
innovation. In the past, Wu had looked outward from Western canons for
dramatic conflicts, complicated plot, and dialectic relationships between
characters, audience, and actors in order to compensate for the “lack” of
jingju. Now he is looking back at the poetics and lyricism from Chinese
literary tradition and rituals in search of a reflective and lyrical inner self.
Historically, for the jingju performers and Taiwanese audience members
of 108 Heroes, looking back at one’s lyrical inner self through Chinese
Wind and Chinese symbols might be an experience of déjà disparu—a
reengagement with a cultural past that has never been and is yet to come,
and an interaction with the symbols and images to produce the real but to
short circuit the vicissitude. The Chinese symbols and images of the CLT
repertoire in different periods embody the history and memories of the
Taiwan people’s entangled and troubled relationship with the imaginary
“China.” Previously, the Chinese symbols and images were circulated
within the nation-state structure, with the CLT repertoire as one of the
pedagogical, to promote Taiwan as the true heir of Chinese culture in con-
trast to Communist China, which was turned topsy-turvy by the Cultural
Revolution and its aftermath. For the people of Taiwan, who live in a cul-
tural landscape that has undergone multiple colonization by the Dutch,
Spanish, Chinese, and Japanese over hundreds of years as well as the strong
influence of the US since the 1950s, their cultural identities are always
already hybrid, and the imaginary Chinese cultural past materialized
through the jingju performers’ archival bodies and costumes is not neces-
sarily related to quotidian lives and does not necessarily seem more familiar
than those symbols and images of Western theater. Turning to the twenty-
first century, corresponding with the rising power of “Great China” and
the trendy Chinese Wind songs in the Asian market, the Chinese Wind and
Chinese symbols demonstrated in 108 Heroes are Chinese and Western
hybrids recycled through a transnational structure and Western cultural
production methods. They reengage Taiwan’s audience with a handful of
clichés and a cluster of memories of the once seemingly familiar Chinese

cultural past that has been alienated by the rising Taiwanese nationalism
and Taiwanese consciousness, outflanking a (Chinese nationalist) subject
that is always on the point of disappearing or emerging.
On the global stage, the hip-hop jingju of 108 Heroes exemplifies the
impulse and practice of the traditional Asian theater innovators who incor-
porate Western popular culture to rejuvenate the fossilized theater and
attract a young audience. In order to be globalized, either hip-hop or
jingju has to eliminate its cultural specificity in order to appeal to the eyes
of the cultural Other. In the new age of global Asian, Chinese Wind para-
doxically recycles the nostalgia and the negation of the imaginary Chinese
cultural past through new theater and media technology in keeping up the
pace with a disappearing or emerging (nationalist) subject on the move.
The innovative jingju simultaneously embracing Chinese Wind and
Western hip-hop also reflects the irresistible power of the Western mass
culture. Stuart Hall points out the influence of American-oriented global
mass culture on all cultural forms through media technology in the wake
of globalization (Hall 1997, p. 178). Insofar as the “homogenization” of
either American-oriented global mass culture or the national cultural form
is “never absolutely complete” (p. 178), the eclectic Asian theater like the
hip-hop jingju of 108 Heroes might carve into transnational interstices
between the global and the local, which creates a “Third Space” that
“challenges our sense of the historical identity of culture as a homogeniz-
ing, unifying force, authenticated by the originary Past” (Bhabha 1997,
p. 37). On the other hand, in a postmodern time–space compression, the
hip-hop jingju of 108 Heroes promoting rebellious spirit and brotherhood
alongside fashions and styles appealing to Chinese Wind, Americanophilia
and Japanophilia might provide the young people with a temporary utopia
across temporal and geopolitical boundaries in which they celebrate their
prismatic and mosaic old and new identities. Nevertheless, the Chinese
Wind that has occurred concomitantly with the rising China as the key
player of the global power game might also project onto the imagined
transnational community a nationalist desire to surpass the geopolitical
boundaries of China. In other words, in the global disjuncture and cul-
tural flow, Chinese Wind might succeed “English eyes” and American
popular culture to become a new “ethnicity” (Hall 1997, pp. 174–8) that
will be disseminated and magnified by the cultural industry as a cultural
hegemonic power in the upcoming wake of globalization. Under such
circumstances, jingju, like Shakespearean works, will become an eclectic
16 I. I.-C. CHANG
cultural form for us to imagine the Chinese global landscape. Insofar as

the homogenization by Chinese cultural hegemony is never absolutely
complete, cultural forms like jingju will become a platform to negotiate
“Chineseness” from different loci, further glocalized into the popular cul-
ture in different locales in the world and hence enriching its meanings and
repertoire through hybridization.
Notes
1. Beginning in the 1980s, it has been largely Brecht, Grotowski, and Western
drama artists’ interest in Chinese and Asian theater that has inspired many
Chinese spoken drama artists to look back at their own legacies and explore
the possibilities of integrating some more expressive styles of sung drama
into spoken drama. See Sun and Fei (1996, p. 189).
Similarly, following the lifting of the Martial Law in 1987, Taiwan’s the-
ater artists freely hybridized the aesthetics and methods of Western directors
such as Grotowski Brecht, Artaud, and Robert Wilson with Chinese and
Taiwanese traditional operas, and indigenous rituals in a great variety of
experiments, which impinged impact on both spoken drama and traditional
operatic theater. See Chung, Alternative Aesthetics and Politics.
2. From 1990 to 2005, the worldwide tour of Kingdom of Desire includes the
UK, France, Germany, Spain, Netherland, China, Singapore, Japan, Hong
Kong, and Korea. See Lu (2006, p. 8).
Works Cited
Abbas, Ackbar. 1997. Hong Kong Culture and the Politics of Disapprance.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesoda Press.
Baudrillard, Jean. 1988. Selected Writings. Ed. Mark Poster, 166–184. Stanford:
Stanford University Press. 1999-01-11. [online] Available at: http://web.stan-
ford.edu/class/history34q/readings/Baudrillard/Baudrillard_Simulacra.
html. Accessed 4 Sept 2013.
Bhabha, Homi. 1997. The Location of Culture. London/New York: Routledge.
Brecht, Bertolt. 1994. Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic. Ed.
John Willet. New York: Hill and Wang.
Chung, Ming-der. 1992. Alternative Aesthetics and Politics. Dissertation,
Performance Studies Department at New York University.
Groenewegen, Jeroen. 2011. The Performance of Identity in Chinese Popular
Music. Leiden: University Press.
Hall, Stuart. 1997. The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity. In
Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives, ed. Anne
McClintock, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat, 173–187. Minneapolis: University

of Minnesota Press.
Harvey, David. 1990. Time-Space Compression and the Post-Modern Condition.
In The Condition of Post Modernity, 284–307. Oxford: Blackwell.
Sun, William, and Faye Fei. 1996. China Dream: A Theatrical Dialogue Between
East and West. In The Intercultural Performance Reader, ed. Patrice Pavis,
188–195. London: Routledge.
Tatlow, Antony. 2001. Shakespeare, Brecht, and the Intercultural Sign. Durham:
Duke University Press.
Chinese References
Hou, Yanqing. 2007. No Tiger Fighting After Drinking: Chang Ta-ch’uen and
Wu Hsing-kuo Talk About 101 Heroes of Water Margin. United Daily,
September 30, E7. [侯延卿記錄整理。〈酒後不打虎:張大春、吳興國的水滸
經〉。《聯合報》。2007年9月30日,E7版。]
Liao, Chun-cheng. 2011. Wu Hsing Kuo, Chang Ta-chuen, and Chou Wah-kin’s
Second Cooperation in 101 Heroes of Water Margin II: When Jingju Meets
Rock and Roll. PAR 222: 20–23. [廖俊逞。〈吳興國、張大春、周華健二度混
搭上梁山—《水滸108II─忠義堂》京劇尬搖滾〉。《PAR表演藝術》。222
期 (2011年06月): pp. 20–3。]
Lu, Chien-ying. 2006. The Contemporary Legend of Wu Hsing-kuo. Taipei: Tianxia.
[盧健英。絕境萌芽:吳興國的當代傳奇。台北市:天下。2006。] Program of
108 Heroes. Program of 108 Heroes Part II.
Shi, De-yu. 2007a. Review of CLT’s 108 Heroes. PAR 179 (November): 51–51.
[施德玉。〈評當代傳奇劇場《水滸一○八》〉。《PAR表演藝術》第179期
(2007年11月): p. 51。]
———. 2007b. The Explosive Power of CLT: An Impression of 108 Heroes. Yìshù
xı̄nshǎng 3(6): 99–100. [施德玉。〈當代傳奇的”爆”發力-觀看《水滸108》有
感〉。《藝術欣賞》3.6 (2007): pp. 99–100。]
Wu, Yue-lin. 2012. The Subjectivity Swung Between Tradition and Innovation: A
Restudy of Contemporary Legend Theater,1986–2011. Dissertation, Chung
Cheng University. [吳岳霖。《擺盪於創新與傳統之間:重探「當代傳奇劇
場」(1986–2011)》。國立中正大學中國文學系暨研究所, 2012。]
Video
108 Heroes: Tales from “The Water Margin.” I [Adapted from Shi Nai-an’s The
Water Margin.] Contemporary Legend Theatre. DVD.
CHAPTER 2
Translocal Mobility: Hakka Opera Betrayal

Inspired by Shakespeare’s Lost Play Cardenio
Iris H. Tuan
Abstract This chapter traces the origin of Shakespeare’s lost play Cardenio,
and comments on the Hakka Opera Betrayal. Lewis Theobald claimed that
his Double Falsehood was adapted from William Shakespeare and John
Fletcher’s lost play Cardenio. The Hakka Opera Betrayal (2014, Taipei) is
inspired by Shakespeare’s lost play Cardenio and is staged by Zom-Hsing
Hakka Opera Troupe. The Hakka performance script takes references from
Betrayal, the Chinese translation by Ching-Hsi Perng and Chen Feng,
inspired by Cardenio in English written by Stephen Greenblatt and Charles
Mee. It is performed in Hakka language with Hakka music, features
Taiwan’s local culture, and is presented by Hakka Opera, similar to the
stylization of Chinese Jingju. I argue that, while theatrical mobility may
exist in different adaptations, glocalization can integrate translocal cultures
and theatrical performing methods. The issues of culture, sex, marriage,
betrayal, madness, and interculturality are explored in cultural mobility by
referring to the locals in Shakespeare’s other plays. By tracing the trade-
mark of Shakespeare’s authenticity, the intertextuality of Shakespeare’s
Cardenio and Greenblatt and Mee’s adaptation are explored. Comparably,
Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Cardenio focuses on the homoerotic male
I. H. Tuan (*)
National Chiao Tung University, Jhubei, Hsinchu, Taiwan

20 I. H. TUAN
friendship echoing Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixode, while the Hakka

Opera Betrayal emphasizes brotherhood, filial piety, loyalty, and hetero-
sexual love.
Keywords Cardenio • Betrayal • Shakespeare • Glocalization

• Hakka Opera
The motivation for writing on Shakespeare’s Cardenio in this work was

initiated during my research (2012–2013) at Harvard University, where I
read Gregory Doran’s book Shakespeare’s Lost Play: In Search of Cardenio.
Similar to Arjun Appadurai’s concept of “scapes,” in the critical anthology
Land/Scape/Theater, Una Chaudhuri’s notion of geopathology “in
translocal social action” (Fuchs and Chaudhuri 2002, p. 8) also links
scape, land, and locals to theater. In the process of glocalization, cultures
are translocalized to enrich theater performing arts. Influenced by Stephen
Greenblatt’s view in Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto, I argue that cultural
mobility manifested in locals, and theatrical mobility occurs in different
adaptations of Cardenio. The issues of nature, human nature, and inter-
textuality are manifested in the Hakka Opera Betrayal (2014, Taipei).
Multiple Adaptations of Cardenio

According to the records, Shakespeare and Fletcher’s lost play Cardenio
was performed by the King’s Men in 1613. In 1727 in England, Lewis
Theobald claimed that he had found the manuscript of Shakespeare and
Fletcher’s missing play.1 Theobald asserted that he used it to serve for his
adapted play Double Falsehood; or The Distressed Lovers. Unfortunately, the
claimed Shakespeare and Fletcher manuscript was burned along with all
the books and papers in 1808 in the Covent Garden Playhouse. The major
difference between Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s novel Don Quixote
and Theobald’s Double Falsehood is that Theobald cut the divergence of
the Innkeeper’s telling the subplot story to focus on the main story of
Cardenio.
In 2003 Cardenio was more radically adapted by Greenblatt and Mee.
Greenblatt and Mee’s 2008 adaptation was performed by the American
Repertory Theater near Harvard University in Boston. This adaptation is
not based on anything close to Shakespeare and Fletcher’s original
Cardenio. In contrast, Doran’s Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) version
TRANSLOCAL MOBILITY: HAKKA OPERA BETRAYAL INSPIRED… 21
is closer to Shakespeare’s Cardenio, but still largely based on Double

Falsehood. In my view, Greenblatt and Mee’s adaptation transforms the
local story of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s Don Quixote (a scene from
which inspired Shakespeare) in Spain, into an American performance by
changing the setting to Italy. Greenblatt initiated the Cardenio Project
with the aim of adapting Cardenio in different countries, I think, in trans-
mutation and transformation.
The Cardenio Project and Cultural Mobility

Greenblatt supported Mee’s idea of (re)making the project to encourage
script adaptations.2 He then launched the Cardenio Project, to promote
research on Shakespeare’s lost play Cardenio.3 He called for the playwrights
and directors in the other participating countries to radically adapt
Shakespeare’s Cardenio to reflect their country’s local culture. According to
Greenblatt, cultures, “even traditional cultures, are rarely stable or fixed.” In
this e-era, filled with digital cloud databases and big data, media speed up
cultural mobility. Glocalization of culture is the trend. As Greenblatt indi-
cates in Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto that: “Second, mobility studies should
shed light on hidden as well as conspicuous movements of peoples, objects,
images, texts, and ideas. … Fifth, mobility studies should analyze the sensa-
tion of rootedness” (Greenblatt 2010, pp. 250–3). Greenblatt is concerned
with how cultural mobility takes place during script adaptation. If a local
story is transposed to a story at a different time and space in a different cul-
tural background, under certain assumption, preoccupation, constraint, and
convention, then what change does the story have? To respond to his own
concerns, Greenblatt used his Mellon Foundation grants to invite several
playwrights and troupes in different countries to adapt the story of Cardenio.
By the end of 2013, this story had been adapted into several versions in dif-
ferent countries, including Japan (2006), India (2007), the US (2008),
Egypt (2008), Croatia (2008), Spain (2008), Brail (2009), Turky (2010),
Poland (2010), Serbia (2011), South Africa (2011), and Taiwan (the
Chinese Opera style version entitled Betrayal in July 2013, and Betrayal, the
Hakka Opera version in May 2014).
In the abovementioned countries, the different adaptations are per-
formed through various theatrical presentations. For example, stage per-
formance, experimental theater, mixed puppetry, Chinese Opera, Hakka
Opera, and so on. Each version demonstrates that, under cultural mobil-
ity, theatricalizing Shakespearean script via glocalization can portray a uni-
versal theme through local culture.
22 I. H. TUAN
Cardenio, Adaptation, Intertextuality
Plot of Shakespeare’s Cardenio

Before comparing it with the Hakka Opera Betrayal, let’s first understand
the plot of Cardenio—taken by Shakespeare and Fletcher from Part One
of Cervantes’ Don Quixote as follows.
The same title character Cardenio and his beloved Luscinda grow up
together. They plan to get their fathers’ permission for their marriage.
However, before Cardenio can mention it, he’s forced to leave home to
serve in the nobleman’s court. Cardenio becomes close friends with Don
Fernando, the nobleman’s son. Fernando has seduced the humble girl
Dorotea by his promise of marrying her but, afterwards, he abandons her.
On his way home, Fernando hears Cardenio praising how beautiful his
love Luscinda is. At first glance Fernando immediately falls in love with
Luscinda. Fernando intentionally betrays Cardenio by sending him away
under the pretense of buying horses for him. Once Cardenio is gone,
Fernando asks Luscinda’s parents for her hand in marriage. No matter
how much Luscinda protests, due to the socially advantageous marriage
match, Fermando gets her parents’ consent.
In despair, Luscinda writes to Cardenio. He hurries back to try to stop
the wedding, but arrives just in time to witness the marriage ceremony.
When he, from behind a curtain, sees Luscinda give her hand to the
treacherous Fernando, Cardenio’s despair is so great that he runs away.
Unfortunately, he doesn’t see Luscinda faint at the critical moment. A
note is discovered in Luscinda’s bodice, disclosing her intention to stab
herself to demonstrate her refusal. Fernando rushes out in a rage and
Luscinda escapes to hide in a convent.
Not knowing this, Cardenio, losing hope, wanders in his madness
through the Spanish Sierra Morena mountains. Dorotea, the woman
Fernando had seduced and abandoned, receives the news about his
attempted marriage to Luscinda. Angrily, Dorotea searches for Fernando.
I think Dorotea’s actions in Cardenio are similar to those of Julia in
Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona. Dorotea, like Julia and other
Shakespearean heroines, dresses herself as a boy for her safety and conve-
nience. As a lone woman she is still vulnerable to danger in the mountains,
but she escapes an attempted rape by pushing her attacker over a cliff.
Then she flees to the Sierra Morena, where Cardenio is wandering aim-
lessly in a state of madness, and the two storylines, and narratives of
Cardenio and Dorotea, neatly weave together.
After six months, Fernando finds out that Luscinda is hiding in the
convent and orders his men to abduct her. Meanwhile, in the mountains
Cardenio and Dorotea have encountered each other. When Dorotea tells
Cardenio that Luscinda did not marry Fernando he is so joyous that he
recovers his sanity. Cardenio and Dorotea start to head back. They rest at
an inn, where a priest discovers a story among the innkeeper’s collections
and reads it aloud to the patrons. The story is about Anselmo, who asks
his best friend Lothario to try to seduce Anselmo’s newlywed wife in order
to test her virtue and determine whether she really loves him. However,
Lothario falls in love with his friend’s new wife and betrays Anselmo.
Eventually, the love triangle ends in despair and death, a tragedy. This
interlude story told at the inn (cut by Theobald), becomes the main plot
in Greenblatt and Mee’s American adaptation.
In Shakespeare’s version, Fernando and Luscinda (who was kidnapped)
also happen to arrive at the same inn. Dorotea blames Fernando for his
betrayal and mistreatment. Fernando is publicly shamed, so he finally
agrees to marry Dorotea, Cardenio is able to marry Luscinda, and the
story ends in joy and happiness.
In my view, Shakespeare and Fletcher design the ending of their
Cardenio similarly to the ending of the four lovers in A Midsummer
Night’s Dream, and, as in most fairy tales, they all live happily ever after.
Now that we understand the different Cardenio stories, from Spain to the
UK to the US, let’s go across the geographical boundary to Asia to explore
Taiwan Hakka Opera Betrayal.
The Hakka Opera Betrayal

Betrayal (2014, Taipei) was performed by the Rong Hsin Hakka Opera
Troupe. (Fig. 2.1) Artistic Director: Tseng Yung-I. Director: Chen Le.
Playwrights: Rong Hsin Hakka Opera Troupe’s Playwright Team (taking
reference of Perng Ching-His and Chen Feng’s Chinese script.) Music
design: Cheng Rong-Hsin. This Asian performance is inspired by Stephen
Greenblatt and Charles Mee’s Cardenio.
Greenblatt and Mee’s Cardenio is loosely based on the eighteenth-
century English writer and playwright Lewis Theobald’s Double Falsehood.
Theobald’s Double Falsehood is claimed by himself, and believed by
many scholars, to be adapted from Shakespeare and Fletcher’s lost play
Cardenio.4 George Doran, Chief Associate Director of the RSC, in the
book Shakespeare’s Lost Play: In Search of Cardenio, concludes that “though
24 I. H. TUAN
Fig. 2.1 The encounter scene. The actress Tsao, Fanh-Jung in the male role of
Hsing-Yuan. Chen, Chih-Hou in the female role of Yi-Hsiang. Betrayal. National
Theater in Taipei. 2014. (Photo: Zom-Hsing Hakka Opera Troupe. Courtesy of
Photographer Liang, Chao-An)
fascinating, Theobald’s Double Falsehood doesn’t work as a play, and would

need substantial rewriting to make it viable” (2012, p. 9).
Theoretical Frame
This chapter analyzes, interprets, and comments on this Hakka Opera,
imbued with Taiwan’s local culture, in the theoretical frame of intercul-
turalism, cultural mobility, and glocalization. Cultural mobility flows
within the interaction of different cultures as it is represented in intercul-
tural performances, manifested in the Hakka Opera Betrayal. Shakespeare
and Fletcher’s Cardenio is derived from the Spanish novel of Miguel de
Cervantes’ Don Quixode. Thus, from Spain to the UK, cultural flows
cross from Cervantes’ theme on chivalry to Shakespeare’s motif on male
friendship. I think that nature as background reflects local human nature

in cultural mobility, with motion and flows in translocality. Glocalization5
= globalization + localization. it is thinking globally while acting locally—
global localization; with emphasis on the close combination of globaliza-
tion and localization, that is, marketing global brands by understanding
and matching them to the local culture. The local Taiwanese diverse the-
atrical performing style in intercultural performances such as the Hakka
Opera Betrayal shows the other kind of faithfulness, brotherhood, filial
piety, loyalty, and mutual love in heterosexuality.
Local Hakka Features and Visual Exotica

The Hakka Opera production of Betrayal drew on Hakka features and
visual exotica to evoke a Chinese setting. Hakka language, culture, and
music are simultaneous markers of both a cultural authenticity and an
imagined exoticism. The foreign ambiance was constructed outside of
Shakespeare’s text and Greenblatt and Mee’s script through the use of
Hakka Opera stylization and Hakka music. Although Hakka Opera styl-
ization is similar to Jingju, it is different in that it is performed in Hakka
language, the minority local dialect, and Hakka music is played. Unlike
the English RSC version of Cardenio, which “relegated the sounds of the
Spanish language and music to the periphery, marginalizing the represen-
tation of hispanidad by invoking it primarily through an un-integrated
aural landscape” (Gatta 2013, p. 185), the Hakka Opera Betrayal illumi-
nates the impact of embodiment and glocalization on the Rong Hsin
Hakka Opera Troupe’s desire for an authentic Hakka culture in Taiwan.
Comparison
In contrast to Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Cardenio, where the girl runs
away, it is the man, the elder son, who is kidnapped and then manages to
run away in the Hakka Opera Betrayal. As Christopher Hicklin in “Girls
on the Run: Love’s Pilgrimage, The Coxcomb, and Double Falsehood” indi-
cates, “A theme shared by these three plays is the repercussions of broken
marriage promises, which degrade not only the lovers involved but also
the binding social conventions of friendship and hospitality” (2013,
p. 73). The Hakka Opera Betrayal emphasizes the broken marriage prom-
ise and binding social conventions of royalty and filial piety, but breaks
26 I. H. TUAN
through the limitation with mutual love and helping each other accom-
plish their dreams.
Unlike Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Cardenio or Greenblatt and Mee’s
Cardenio, the theme of the Hakka Opera Betrayal asks two questions.
First, what does Betrayal betray? Secondly, is it possible that Betrayal
makes the other kind of faithfulness?6 The synopsis of Betrayal is that the
elder son Hsing-Yuan of the domain ruled by King South was kidnapped
by an old man in the Peach Blossom Valley on the day before his marriage
to Princess Orchid—a union ordered by the king of Dragon to establish a
political ally. In the beautiful Peach Blossom valley, Hsing-Yuan falls in
love with the pretty innocent girl Yi-Hsiang (Fig. 2.2).
In the royal court, Hsing-Yuan’s younger brother Shih-Yuan substi-
tutes for his elder brother to comfort Princess Orchid. And the two acci-
dentally fall in love with each other (Fig. 2.3). The reason for the
kidnapping is that the old man in the Peach Blossom Valley intends to get
revenge upon Hsing-Yuan’s father for his adopted daughter Yi-Hsiang,
who turns out to be the princess of Red Sparrow Kingdom before her
country was defeated by King South a long time ago. The old man (as the
Fig. 2.2 The scene in the Peach Blossom Valley. The actress Tsao, Fanh-Jung in
the male role of Hsing-Yuan. Chen, Chih-Hou in the female role of Yi-Hsiang.
Betrayal. National Theater in Taipei. 2014. (Photo: Zom-Hsing Hakka Opera
Troupe. Courtesy of Photographer Liang, Chao-An)
Fig. 2.3 Scene Three: Know each other. Chang, Yen-Li in the role of the
Princess. Su, Kuo-Ching in the role of Shi-Yuan. Betrayal. National Theater in
Taipei. 2014. (Photo: Zom-Hsing Hakka Opera Troupe. Courtesy of Photographer
Liang, Chao-An)
previous general of Red Sparrow Kingdom) wants to ignite war between

King South and King of Dragon. Failing to do so, the old man wishes to
kill Hisng-Yuan but is stopped by his adopted daughter Yi-Hsiang
(Fig. 2.4).
In my view, although the two brothers betray the original king’s order
and the patriarchy’s tradition in which the elder son should inherit the
kingdom, Betrayal ends happily with the two young couples marrying for
love and choosing their careers and life by faithfully following their hearts.
The elder son, Hsing-Yuan, gives up the throne to marry Yi-Hsiang, the
woman he loves, and retreats to live in the village peacefully for the rest of
his life without ruling the kingdom (Fig. 2.5).
It is not easy to do so. For it is a kind of betrayal to the Chinese patri-
archy system. In Chinese patriarchy and feudalism, usually a father passes
28 I. H. TUAN
Fig. 2.4 Scene Five: No regret. The actress Tsao, Fanh-Jung in the male role of
Hsing-Yuan. Chen, Chih-Hou in the female role of Yi-Hsiang. Chen, Szu-Peng in
the role of Old Man. Hu, Chen-Yu in the role of General Ke. The chorus of the
army. Betrayal. National Theater in Taipei. 2014. (Photo: Zom-Hsing Hakka
Opera Troupe. Courtesy of Photographer Liang, Chao-An)
his kingdom to his first-born son. In historical approaches and cultural

studies, the Hakka Opera Betrayal adopts the primogeniture, the system
of the elder son inheriting the kingdom, which works in the historical
background for both Shakespeare’s time in the Elizabethan period and in
the traditional feudalism of Chinese culture as well.
The theme of betrayal here is different from Greenblatt and Mee’s
American Cardenio, in which the bridegroom Anselmo asks Will, the best
man and his best friend, to seduce his new bride Camila. While the rest of
the people, including Will and Camila, are busy rehearsing the play for the
wedding, Anselmo falls in love with Susana, his college friend and a wed-
ding guest, while driving her around as a tour guide. At the same time,
during the rehearsals, Camila and Will also fall in love. As Doris, Camila’s
sister, sharply and cynically says:
Fig. 2.5 Two couples’ weddings in the end. Chang, Yen-Li in the role of the
Princess. The actress Tsao, Fanh-Jung in the male role of Hsing-Yuan. Chen,
Chih-Hou in the female role of Yi-Hsiang. Su, Kuo-Ching in the role of Shi-Yuan.
Betrayal. National Theater in Taipei. 2014. (Photo: Zom-Hsing Hakka Opera
Troupe. Courtesy of Photographer Liang, Chao-An)
What?
What lunacy is this?
The reward for betrayal
Is to live happily ever after? (Act Two p. 162)
To everyone’s surprise, it turns out that those who betray are rewarded by
finding the one they love unexpectedly, and possibly living happily ever
after.
In a comparison with the American and RSC versions, which portray the
bridegroom and the bride breaking their marital promises, the Hakka
Opera Betrayal focuses on Chinese traditional ideology and personal
dilemma. The elder son Hsing-Yuan should obey the king’s order to marry
Princess Orchid for political union and inherit his father’s title to rule his
domain according to Chinese loyalty to the emperor and filial piety to obey
the patriarchal tradition. However, Hsing-Yuan would like to give up the
30 I. H. TUAN
throne to marry Yi-Hsiang, the girl he loves, and follow his nature to seek
happiness by living in the countryside. Luckily, his younger brother’s tal-
ents are more suitable for ruling the kingdom and both Shih-Yuan and
Princess Orchid love each other. The unfaithful toward the patriarchal sys-
tem turns out to be faithful to human nature to follow one’s heart.
In performance, the two young male role types and the two young
female role types (雙生雙旦) represent an eastern Taiwan Hakka version
inspired by Shakespeare and Fletcher’s English version and Greenblatt and
Mee’s American version but with Hakka Opera stylization. The role of
Princess Orchid is played by Actress Yen-Li Chiang, who is mature enough
to play the lead female role with a royal elegance. In contrast, the other
female role, Yi-Hsiang, is played by a young actress in order to aptly show
her naïve innocence. It’s special to allow an actress to play one of the two
brothers (the actress Tsao, Fanh-Jung in the male role of Hsing-Yuan),
but not strange in the Hakka Opera troupe where a lot of male roles are
played by actresses.
In terms of set design, like the royal house and the forest in Shakespeare’s
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, there are two major settings in the Hakka
Opera Betrayal—one is the living room in the noble house, and the other
is the Peach Blossom Valley. Scene Three “To Get Acquainted with Each
Other” is staged with one red table and two red high chairs, following the
Chinese Beijing Opera tradition of one table and two chairs (一桌二椅).
In this scene, when the younger brother meets Princess Orchid, lighting
(with blue light projected on the background screen calligraphy drawing
of pine and cypress within red pillars) symbolizes the romantic atmosphere
and emerging love between the two protagonists.
The Hakka Opera Betrayal shows Hakka culture visibly on stage. Hakka
Opera music supports the milieu and adds emotion to the plot. Hakka
Tea-Picking Tune (客家採茶調), Hakka Flat Monotonous Music (客家平
板音樂), and Hakka Eight Sounds (客家八音) are the major features in
Hakka Opera that are distinct from Xipi and erhuang melodies in tradi-
tional Chinese Beijing Opera music.
In terms of audience response, one of the audience members in the
after-show seminar said that for her “the Hakka music in some part sounds
similar to Kunqu Opera and the lyrics are similar to the quotations of
some Chinese classical poetry.”7 Professor Cheng Ron-Hsin, Music
Designer, replied that “Hakka music was originated from the ancient
music type. Hakka Opera, Chinese Beijing Opera and Kunqu Opera all
can use Chinese classical lyrics, such as Tang Hsien-Tsu’s famous poetry
lyrics in The Peony Pavilion.”8 Cheng, in Taiwan Hakka Opera Research,
indicates that: “Script, form, performance, language, music, dance, and
every theater element in Chinese traditional opera Xiqu has a fixed styliza-
tion system as constraint. In intercultural adaptation, it is necessary to
look for the balance between Shakespeare’s plays and Xiqu” (my transla-
tion, 2016, p. 388).
This chapter interprets the case study of the Hakka Opera Betrayal and
I argue that theatrical mobility exists in different adaptations while cul-
tures in the translocality and theater performing methods add into the
glocalization in view of cultural mobility. Thus, from Spain to the UK,
culture flows from Cervantes’ chivalry to Shakespeare’s change in making
Cervantes’ minor character Cardenio the major protagonist. At the same
time, from the US to Taiwan, cultural mobility changes from Greenblatt
and Mee’s Harvard Repertory Theatre version’s focus on the marriage test
to the Hakka Opera Betrayal focus on the other kind of faithfulness,
brotherhood, filial piety, loyalty, and mutual love in heterosexuality.
In gay studies, unlike “Shakespearian emphasis on the homoerotic
potential of male friendship in the early scenes” (Griffiths 2013, p. 104), I
notice that the original distinctive concern with Cardenio and Fernando’s
“intimate” friendship makes way for the brothers’ sibling brotherhood in
this Hakka Opera performance. According to Huw Griffiths,
That we only have the belated testimony of Double Falsehood, which enacts
its own cross-temporal processes of adaptation, identification, love, and
rejection, is part of theater’s testimony to the palimpsestic text of early mod-
ern male sexuality. (2013, pp. 105–6)
In Double Falsehood, Theobald’s adaptation eighteenth-century adapta-

tion sidelines the male philia homoerotic potential. Playwright John
Fletcher veers away from Shakespearean focus on potential male intimacy
and homosexuality. In contrast, in Taiwan’s Hakka Opera adaptation,
there is neither homoerotic hint nor homosexuality, only heterosexuality.
The younger brother does not betray his elder brother to marry Princess
Orchid. On the contrary, his substitution for his elder brother to marry
her by his own will resolves the whole play in terms of dénouement/reso-
lution in Aristotle’s Poetics.
32 I. H. TUAN
Intertextuality, Story/Story-within-the Story

Intertextuality fills Cardenio as it does Shakespeare’s other plays. For
example, the theme of male friendship is presented in the characters of
Don Quixode and his servant Sancho Panza in Cervantes’ Don Quixode,
Othello and Cassio (or perhaps Iago) in Shakespeare’s Othello, Don
Fernando and Cardenio in Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Cardenio, and
Anselmo and Lothario in Greenblatt and Mee’s Cardenio. Besides, the
fictional story-within-the-story—in both Cervantes’ Don Quixode and
Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Cardenio, the tale the priest finds in a book
and reads loudly to the company at the inn—becomes the main plot story
in Greenblatt and Mee’s Cardenio.
A lot of changes have been made to the cultural mobility and theatrical
mobility in these texts. In Cervantes’ Don Quixode, Anselmo’s story has a
tragic ending to make it a contrast to the happy ending of Cardenio’s
story. However, in contrast, in Greenblatt and Mee’s Cardenio, Anselmo’s
story has a happy ending but Cardenio’s story ends in misery as a “break
off” (Greenblatt and Mee 2013, p. 85).
I think the structure of the story-within-the story in Cardenio echoes
both the structure of the long novel of Cervantes’s Don Quixote and
Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Cardenio. The story-within-the-story in
Greenblatt and Mee’s Cardenio is also reminiscent to the Mouse Trap
scene performed by the troupe in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Moreover, in a
comparison of Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Cardenio and Greenblatt and
Mee’s Cardenio, the frame of the story-within-the -story is aptly opposite.
In the former, the inside story—the story-within-the story—the priest’s
telling of the story at the inn in Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Cardenio is the
main plot; the outside play in Greenblatt and Mee’s Cardenio, where
Anselmo tests his new bride Camila’s virtue by asking his friend Will to
seduce her to see if she is faithful to him. Here the inside play within the
outside main play—the story-within-the story—is Cardenio, Will, Camila,
Alfred, and the wedding guests rehearsing within the wedding
celebration.
Nature, Human Nature, and Performativity

Both Shakespeare and Fletcher’s play and Greenblatt and Mee’s Cardenio
are also related to the theme of nature and human nature. Nature plays a
major role in Shakespeare’s many plays, such as the forest of Arden in As
You Like It, in which the woods near Athens where the four lovers’ com-
plex love quartet occurs and Fairy King Oberon and Fairy Queen Titania’s
quarrels take place in A Midsummer Night’s Dream; the Spanish mountain
range of Sierra Morena where Cardenio, having been driven mad, lives in
Shakespeare’s Cardenio; and the farmhouse in Umbria in Italy where the
wedding takes place in Stephen and Mee’s modern American Cardenio.
In contrast to nature, the class and social hierarchy that powerfully
force Cardenio to obey the order to serve in court allow Cardenio’s
socially superior aristocracy friend Don Fernando to send him away, and
make Luscinda’s parents agree to their marriage against her will.
Concerning human nature, the symbols of betrayal and madness echo in
several of Shakespeare’s plays, such as The Tempest, King Lear, As You Like
It, and so on. Human nature traits of betrayal, male friendship, love, jeal-
ousy, greed, sex, and the desire for class-climbing and wealth are abundant
in Cardenio.
Lives, players, and theater are intertwined. The motif of players in life
and theater in Shakespeare’s Hamlet is echoed in Greenblatt and Mee’s
Cardenio:
Alfred: Yes. Yes, it’s true.

We’re travelling players, that’s all.
Travelling players, all of us, in a sense.
Luisa: …
It may be we should have known
Our own lives have been so transformed by the theatre.
Alfred: Oftentimes we forget
what an impact it can have.
We think, Luisa and I,
It’s just a play
just an evening in the theatre
just a piece of light entertainment
and then it turns out
so often
it finds its way into someone’s soul.
(Act Two pp. 169–170)
Human nature is inter-connected with the concept that we are players on

the stage of life. The nature of the pretty scenery and the nature of playing
our roles in our daily lives are intertwined. Judith Butler’s theory of
34 I. H. TUAN
erformativity, “gender is the repetition of stylized acts”, can explain the

p
transgender, and male and female impersonation roles in theater
performance.
The Locales
The natural locales play a significant role in Shakespeare’s lost play,
Cardenio, and in many of his other plays. For example, the island where
Milan Duke Prospero stays for many years to wait for his revenge upon his
enemies and then forgive and reconcile with them in The Tempest is analo-
gous to nature. Nature serves as the background to comfort the moods of
human beings and exaggerate the situation about human nature, such as
King Lear’s rage in the storm. The psyche of playing the roles in real life
and in theater are inter-changeable by using the metaphor to express natu-
ral human emotion. For instance, Alfred quotes what Hamlet says to the
troupe players when asking the actors to read the lines and perform:
Aflred: …
but use all gently;
for in the very torrent, tempest,
and, as I may, the whirlwind of passion,
you must acquire and beget a temperance
that may give it smoothness. (Act One 85)
Aflred’s suggestion of the gentle performative way to express human emo-

tions, even in extreme conditions like torrent and tempest, by using nature
metaphors explains the connection between nature, human nature, and
acting.
Nature serves as the background in Greenblatt and Mee’s Cardenio. In
Act One, the stage directions state: “We are on the stone terrace in front
of a stone farmhouse in Umbria. Olive trees, flowers, vines. Comfortable
outdoor chairs scattered on the terrace. Party sounds from inside the
house” (2013, p. 15). The locales in Shakespeare’s Cardenio are several
places both in the city and in the country, including the Sierra Morena
mountains. When Cardenio misunderstands that his beloved Luscinda has
agreed to marry his betraying friend Fernando, he runs to the Sierra
Morena mountains, wandering like a lunatic. Cardenio’s madness scene is
similar to that of King Lear on the heath in the storm.
Madness demonstrates the psyche of human nature in Shakespeare’s

King Lear, Hamlet, and Cardenio, and in Greenblatt and Mee’s Cardenio.
For example, in Greenblatt and Mee’s Cardenio, Rudi, the carpenter char-
acter who builds the stage, likes to act and he plays the multiple roles in a
one man solo show:
Rudi: I build them a good stage

Solid, strong, honest, simple,
What happens?
Everyone goes crazy.
And why?
Because
The play:
It is not all in one coherent psyche.
But, if you have the one man show
Everything is perfect.
One actor.
To put on THE WHOLE SHOW. (Act Two 148–155)
In my view, Rudi’s playing multiple roles in his one actor’s solo show is
similar to the actions of the main male lead character Max in The Producer
before the intermission (where he puts on the whole show by briefly play-
ing the multiple roles to emphasize the core of each scene). The difference
is that Rudi also speaks as a commentator and chorus to play the roles in
his interpretation, while Max (played by Nathan Lane) uses satire on what
happens in his earlier Broadway get-rich-quick scheme. He would like his
new Broadway musical to be a flop, so that so he might make money.
However, accidentally, it is a huge success praised highly by critics and
audiences. He recollects the whole process in the prison after his arrest for
fraud in a funny performative way.
Conclusion
From the perspective of translocal mobility, this chapter has interpreted
the glocalization of the Hakka Opera Betrayal, explores the intertextuality
of Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Cardenio compared with Greenblatt and
Mee’s loose American adaptation. The concepts of culture, sex, marriage,
betrayal, and madness are stimulated in the theoretical frame of intertex-
tuality, cultural mobility, and translocality. We see translocal mobility, from
36 I. H. TUAN
the US to Taiwan, from Greenblatt and Mee’s marriage promise test to

the Hakka Opera Betrayal focus on the other kind of faithfulness, brother-
hood, filial piety, loyalty, and mutual love in heterosexuality. Cultural
mobility of different adaptations from Shakespeare’s Cardenio occurs
from Spain to the UK, to the US, to several countries such as Japan, Egypt,
Taiwan, and out onto the world stage. Ideas flow in landscapes. As Stephen
Greenblatt points out, “most scholars energetically grappled with brave
new theories of hybridity, network theory, and the complex ‘flows’ of peo-
ple, goods, money, and information across endlessly shifting social land-
scapes” (2010, p. 1).
The flows of people, and information are related to translocality. While
we go on the journey of Shakespearean research, travelling land and sea,
we travel through the locales in Shakespeare’s plays to trace the trademark
of Shakespeare’s authenticity. Not just cultural mobility, but also theatrical
mobility exists in different adaptations, while different cultures in translo-
cality and theater performing methods add variety to glocalization. Nature
as the background reflects human nature in the locales in cultural mobility,
along with motion and flow in translocality.
Notes
1. Cervantes’s novel was translated into English by Thomas Shelton and pub-
lished in 1612. When Shakespeare and Fletcher’s play was first performed in
1613, Cervantes’s novel translated into English “must have been a literary
sensation in London.” (Stephen Greenblatt, “Theatrical Mobility” in
Cultural Mobility, p. 80).
2. Greenblatt at Harvard University in the perspective of cultural mobility pro-
pels the global theater interactive project on the multiple different adapta-
tions and performances of researching Shakespeare’s lost play Cardenio. The
website of the (re)making project http://www.charlesmee.org/about.
shtml.
3. The theme of male friendship and sexual betrayal appear in Shakespeare’s
plays many times from his early Two Gentlemen of Verona to the late Two
Noble Kinsmen.
4. Charles Hamilton in “Some Words of Thanks” gratefully expresses: “The
Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon, a long-time friend to
all bardolaters; the Huntington Library, an old haunt of mine when I was a
graduate student at U.C.L.A. in the late 1930s, and who generously pro-
vided a photocopy of a manuscript epistle by John Fletcher that enabled me
to identify his script; the British Museum Library, professor of the original
manuscript of Cardenio or The Second Maiden’s Tragedy” (1994, p. 258).
5. The concept of glocalization, posted by Margaret Rouse, is: “in a global

market, a product or service is more likely to succeed when it is customized
for the locality or culture in which it is sold. For example, the international
fast food chain McDonalds illustrates the concept of glocalization by
changing their menus to appeal to local palates and customs.” Retrieved
from http://searchcio.techtarget.com/definition/glocalization. Accessed
February 27, 2015.
6. As playwrights Peng and Chen said in the Introduction of their collaborative
Chinese script.
7. She attended the International Shakespeare Conference in Taipei, and spoke
after watching the premiere at the National Taiwan University.
8. Cheng’s reply in the after-show seminar. My translation from Cheng’s reply
in Chinese into English.
Works Cited
Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Bourus, Terri, and Gary Taylor. 2013. The Creation & Re-Creation of Cardenio:
Performing Shakespeare, Transforming Cervantes. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Chauhuri, Una, and Elinor Fuchs, eds. 2002. Land/Scape/Theater. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press.
Cheng, Zom-Hsing. 2016. Taiwan Hakka Opera Research (《臺灣客家戲之研
究》). Taipei: Kuo-Chia Press.
Doran, Gregory. 2012. Shakespeare’s Lost Play: In Search of Cardenio. London:
Nick Hern Books.
Gatta, Della Carla. 2013. Performing Spanish Culture Through Flamenco:
Aurality and Embodiment in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Cardenio. In
The Creation & Re-Creation of Cardenio: Performing Shakespeare, Transforming
Cervantes, ed. Terri Bourus and Gary Taylor, 185–196. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Greenblatt, Stephen. 2010. A Mobility Studies Manifesto. In Cultural Mobility: A
Manifesto, 250–253. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Greenblatt, Stephen, and Charles Mee. 2013. Cardenio. With Chinese translation
by Ching-Hsi Perng. Taipei: Bookman Books.
Griffiths, Huw. 2013. ‘Shall I Never See a Lusty Man Again?’: John Fletcher’s
Men, 1608–1715. In The Creation & Re-Creation of Cardenio: Performing
Shakespeare, Transforming Cervantes, ed. Terri Bourus and Gary Taylor,
95–107. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Hakka Opera Betrayal. DVD. 2014. Zom-Hsing Hakka Opera Troupe.
38 I. H. TUAN
Hamilton, Charles. 1994. William Shakespeare and John Fletcher Cardenio or The
Second Maiden’s Tragedy. Colorado: Glenbridge Publishing Ltd.
Hicklin, Christopher. 2013. “Girls on the Run: Love’s Pilgrimage, The Coxcomb,
and Double Falsehood.” The Creation & Re-Creation of Cardenio: Performing
Shakespeare, Transforming Cervantes. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Perng, Ching-Hsi, and Chen Feng. 2013.《背叛=Betrayal》. Taipei: Hsueh-Shen
Bookstore.
Saavedra, Miguel de Cervantes. 2011. Don Quixode. Trans. Tom Lathrop.
New York: Penguin.
Theobald, Lewis. 2009. Shakespeare, William. Double Falsehood or The Distressed
Lovers. A Play. Whitefish: Kessinger Publishing.
CHAPTER 3
Is Universality Possible in Content

and Pedagogy? Les Misérables as an Etude
Series for the School Drama Curriculum
William Huizhu Sun
Abstract Lately the universal value of Western classics has been questioned
repeatedly. A number of Western politically correct schools of thought
insist that all classics must be reinterpreted for local, political, and cultural
needs. Some Chinese argue that universality is a veil to cover Westerners’
intention to replace China’s own culture. This chapter, focusing on theater
education for all school children, however, stresses the importance of
universality over localization or individualization. Unlike the inevitably
local politics, pre-college education is an institution that needs universality
most, regardless of its socio-political context. The reason why no country,
even no city, has made theater courses available to all schools, is that “edu-
cational theater” is often too localized/individualized. Western-style edu-
cational theater largely shuns sophisticated plays but relies mainly on
children’s improvisational creation. A forty-minute lesson can engage only
the smartest few to really create something, which is at best rudimentary.
W. H. Sun (*)
Shanghai Theatre Academy, Shanghai, China

40 W. H. SUN
Music education, in contrast, can teach every child in every school to sing/
play good music, because it uses universally accepted scores/lyrics as the
basic textbook.
Modeled after music pedagogy, my team at Shanghai Theatre Academy
has begun, since 2014 with dozens of elementary and secondary schools,
a pilot project to implement theater courses in the school curriculum,
using a series of short rhymed plays based on Les Misérables and other clas-
sics as an etude series to be seen and then enacted by children as the first
step of their theater education. I believe that both theater and education
are based on imitation. And traditional Chinese theater, still more popular
than Western-style drama in today’s China, is initially taught to student
actors through collective imitation—similar to most music classes. That’s
why a new paradigm of theater pedagogy for all schools is more likely to
be implemented in China than in the West, using some Western classics
seen by the Chinese as universally appealing.
Keywords Universality • Drama class • Music model • Etude • Rhyming

drama, collective imitation
Improvisation Versus Scripted Drama: Necessity

for Universally Appealing and Practicable
Drama Etudes
In recent years, the universal value of the Western literary canon has been
questioned for various reasons. Some Western politically correct schools of
feminism, deconstructionism, post-colonialism, and so on insist that all
classics must be reexamined for the local needs of politics and culture.
Some Chinese theoreticians argue that so-called universality is only to veil
Westerners’ intention to destroy China’s own culture. This chapter, how-
ever, stresses the importance of universality, instead of localization or indi-
vidualization, in the context of drama education in schools. Unlike politics,
which is always local, education is an institution that needs universality the
most in almost any society. It is not only the natural science textbooks that
are made of universally accepted materials, most social science and human-
ity courses are also about universal values. It is well known that drama and
theater are crucial in helping students to develop their humanistic values
IS UNIVERSALITY POSSIBLE IN CONTENT AND PEDAGOGY? LES… 41
and expressive, communicative competency. Yet, so far, there is not one

country, or even a single city, that has made drama or theater courses
accessible to all students the same way that music courses are offered.
Why?
Westerners have invented various kinds of educational theater peda-
gogy, for example, Theatre in Education (TIE), Drama in Education
(DIE), and so on. In lieu of sophisticated play scripts for collective perfor-
mance, these instruction methods depend mostly on students’ personal
situations and feelings, explored and presented through improvisational
excises. They are often too localized and too individualized to be the
medium to engage all of the dozens of students within a lesson lasting
only forty minutes or so. I began advocating theater education in 2002
when I published writings in China’s newspaper opinion pages and aca-
demic journals. Yet, ten years later, seven years after my school, the
Shanghai Theatre Academy (STA), opened China’s first university pro-
gram in school theater education, I realized that the Western-style of edu-
cational theater, also known as creative drama, which we were trying to
import to teach our students, could not really benefit every student in
class. It therefore could not be used to convince any school principal to
put theater into their curriculum. School principals, and students’ parents
as well, are usually very curious about what children will be performing in
a drama class. This really depends on the play scripts used. But, in TIE or
DIE play scripts are always missing, especially in the beginning, because
they focus on the game-like process rather than on the performance to be
seen by any audience. Without some form of presentable result, not even
a script as a blueprint, it is almost impossible to convince any school prin-
cipal or parent to squeeze a new subject into the already extremely crowded
curriculum designed mainly for students to prepare for high school and
college entrance examinations.
Having seen the impossibility of the important mission, I asked my col-
leagues to encourage STA students to write short classroom plays, then
select and improve the best ones, before offering them for children to
perform in some experimental pilot drama classes. To my huge surprise, I
did not see a single satisfying play by any students, after waiting for more
than two years. Even though we told all the students who were interested,
including those who were majoring in playwriting and theater education,
that our preference was for short—fifteen-minute long—adaptations of
classical stories, they just could not produce anything that would be a suit-
able textbook play for school children to perform. It suddenly dawned on
42 W. H. SUN
me that school textbook materials are in fact very difficult to choose or

write, simply because their users are juveniles and entitled to help and pro-
tection by society. That is why in every country there is some kind of gov-
ernment authority of education responsible for creating and authorizing
the school curriculum and its corresponding guidelines for various text-
books. In the early years of the Republic of China, about a hundred years
ago, most elementary school textbooks were written by such renowned
literati as Cai Yuanpei (Minister of Education, President of Peking
University), Zhang Yuanji (Founder of the Commercial Press, modern
China’s most important cultural institution and publisher of the majority of
textbooks), Tao Xingzhi, Ye Shengtao, and Feng Zikai. No school would
ever allow students to create textbooks for reading, history, or music classes.
By the same token, in drama classes the teacher should also give students
good textbooks selected and/or created by established scholars/artists.
Compared to textbooks for reading and music, it is much harder to find
the right materials for drama classes. The key factor is length. The forty-
minute, or so, class time limit determines that each text piece should not
be too long. Established writers often write short stories and essay as well
as long novels, and there are enough music compositions, especially songs,
which last for only a few minutes. Yet almost all classical plays are too long
for students to study and perform in class. Having failed to find suitable
short plays from the existing canon, we had to write new plays for the
students. In order to make them appealing to the largest number of
schools and students nationwide, the best choices are still the classics. In
China even classics may have problems when they are considered as class
materials. For example, Romeo and Juliet could easily be the first choice in
Western schools, yet a fourteen-year-old girl’s love story would make
many Chinese principals and parents frown. Out of all the world literary
classics we discussed, Les Misérables is the most universally liked and
embraced one, hence the most suitable story for our Chinese school etude
plays. The reasons are threefold. First, the novel encompasses a long time
period with countless stories, including children’s, and therefore will be
particularly interesting to school children. Second, it has had many stage
and film adaptations, which makes its name a household one. Third, it is
one of the few literary works that can overcome the generation gap and
appeal to older people in power as well as to young people, hence guaran-
teeing green lights all the way from the bottom to the top.
I led my team of graduate students in a task to select from the novel
stories we deemed most interesting to school children, and dramatize
them into five short plays, each about twenty-five minutes in length. Then
we toured schools with performances by professional actors graduated
from STA’s Departments of Acting and Directing. During the after-show
discussions, students usually said they not only enjoyed seeing the plays
but would also like to act in them. We then would ask them which scenes
and roles they wanted to do most. Based on our tours to more than two-
dozen schools, we have found that serious themes presented in comedic
ways are most appealing to students. For example, in the first play, Jean
Valjean has stolen Bishop Myriel’s silver ware and sneaks out, only to run
into two policemen right away. The ensuing “fighting in the dark” is a
comic parody of the famous Beijing opera Crossroad (Sanchakou). The
regretful Jean does not use his full strength, therefore gets caught after
only a few rounds of the fight. Myriel comes out after hearing the tumult
and exonerates Jean by saying that the silver ware had been given to him
as a present. The award-seeking policemen do not buy that explanation
easily, arguing that the poor convict does not deserve such luxurious uten-
sils. Myriel further explains that he deliberately gave Jean, who had known
no table manners, the classy utensils to teach him a decent man’s “way of
meal and life.” After that, in another comic scene, he even asks his maid to
show the cops how he teaches Jean to eat with the silver utensils clumsily.
Myriel’s words sound like his answers to the policemen’s questions, but
are in fact warnings to urge Jean never to do anything wrong again.
In order for all students to have opportunities to act, our dramaturgy
for this project is to avoid mass scenes and focus instead on scenes in which
every character has a clearly definable personality and sufficient number of
lines. Thus, even such nameless roles as the old cop, the young cop, and
the maid are among the students’ favorite characters, in some schools they
were ranked even higher than Jean and Myriel. Another example of the
students’ favorite stories is similarly comedic as well as serious: ten years
after the previous episode, Jean goes to find the inn and tries to save
Cosette from the greedy and abusive Thenardiers, whose shameless and
foolish bargaining tricks always make the audience laugh. In the mean-
time, Jean Valjean’s noble personality gets highlighted by contrast
(Fig. 3.1). At the end of this episode, we add a plot twist of Eponine want-
ing to go with Cosette and her “New Daddy.” And her father is willing to
let her go, given that Jean offers to pay a high price for her. But her
mother cries, scolds him, and finally stops her from leaving. This play has
only five strong characters, no walk-ons, which are often seen in school
44 W. H. SUN
Fig. 3.1 Graduate students and recent alumni of the Shanghai Theatre Academy,
in a scene from Les Misérables, a classroom drama etude, for middle school stu-
dents to watch and to act in later. Left to right: Cosette (Qin Ziran), Jean Val Jean
(Ding Hui), Mme. Thenarnier (Zhang Shuhui), Thenarnier (Ren Siyuan)
performances in order to involve a large number of students. This special

dramaturgy pre-emptively eschews the common problem of students
vying for the main roles and being unwilling to play speechless parts, and
offers every student a chance to learn to create a rounded character in a
given fictional circumstance.
Physicality and Rhyme: Unique Styles Intended

for Universal Feasibility
While we are determined to present universal values, we also try our best
to find special local forms of presentation that suit the Chinese students,
especially in the area of physical movement style influenced by Chinese
opera and martial arts. The aforementioned fighting in the dark between
Jean and the cops directly borrows from Beijing opera. Cosette’s routine
labor at the inn is now no longer washing dishes and cleaning the house as
in the novel but feeding chickens early in the morning, also borrowed
from a famous Beijing opera piece, Picking Jade Bracelet (Shi Yu Zhuo),
which starts with a young girl feeding imaginary chickens, combining
mime and dance. Even though there are no real chickens, young audience
members all understood the action and the two girls’ different personali-
ties it embodies: Cosette loves the little creatures whereas Enonine treats
them as mere playthings carelessly, even abusively. The fact that no realistic
set or props are seen on stage encourages the young spectators to use their
imaginations. In order to avoid a realistic setting of traditional “living
room drama” and to enable more physical actions, we decided at the
beginning of the project that most of the dramatic actions should take
place outdoors. Aside from Jean’s fight with the cops and Cosette and
Eponine feeding chickens, in other plays we set up scenes in which Fantine
fights the run-away ex-lover she has found in the street, Jean saves
Cosette’s boyfriend Marius via street barracks and sewers, and a disguised
Jean fends off Thenarthier outside the gate while Cosette and Marius’
wedding dance takes place inside. Judging from the feedback from young
audience members, the density of physical action is one of the major
attractions to them.
Nonetheless, the utmost important and original feature of this series of
short plays is in the language, more specifically, in the rhyming lines
throughout every play. This seems to be a very special feature unique to
the Chinese language, yet it may have some universal ramifications as well.
This almost unprecedented dramatic language can be seen to lie some-
where between the prose language of Western-imported spoken drama
and the verse of arias in Chinese opera. Verbally more rhythmic and poetic
than the spoken drama of prose language, entailing more physicality, the
rhymed lines highlight some theatrical extra-daily techniques, a key term
Eugenio Barba created in his seminal book The Secret of Performer: A
Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology (1991). To most students’ ears, the
condensed and rhythmic lines not only sound more vivid and fun, but are
also much easier to memorize when they play these roles. This is really
critical for them because there is very limited time to spend on a new sub-
ject due to the tremendous pressure from the national college entrance
examinations that focus on such major subjects as reading, mathematics,
and English.
Aside from this obvious reason, the deeper roots of the rhyming dra-
matic language are found in the history of Chinese language and culture.
Compared to most languages spoken by large populations, Chinese is
46 W. H. SUN
unique in that it has a huge number of syllables each of which is shared by

many written characters meaning different things. Still more are characters
that share the same rhymes. Therefore, rhyming is very easy, and rhymed
verse makes up a large proportion of the literary canon—almost synony-
mous to the term “literature” before the Song dynasty, which saw the
advent of full-length narrative literature. By comparison, poetry in ancient
Europe is understood in a broad sense, mostly not rhyming verse. The end
of most lines rhymed in the poetry of ancient China. Many unrhyming
works of prose were also of high literary quality, yet they were mostly
vehicles for philosophical and historical writings, for example, those of
Zhuang Zi and Sima Qian, whereas pure literature contained only rhym-
ing verse. Beginning in the Song dynasty, Chinese performers had two
narrative genres both containing large portions of rhymed verse qu (song),
developed from poetry into performance text—quyi (story-telling/sing-
ing) and xiqu (Chinese opera). For a long time in Chinese history rhyming
story-telling/singing played a crucial role in the popular culture. Before
sophisticated literary drama was fully established in the Yuan dynasty, it
was almost the only form of performing arts most Chinese people could
enjoy. Even after Yuan, this role was not much reduced in many places of
China because it was far easier and simpler to create and perform than
dramatic theater.
Yet, in the past hundred years or so, in the wake of introduction to the
“universality” of Western culture, almost all Chinese “new culture” advo-
cates began to look Westward, therefore negating all traditional Chinese
culture, especially the two literary genres based on rhyming verse—
Chinese opera was to be replaced by modern spoken drama, which must
not be sung or rhymed, and traditionally rhyming and metered poetry was
to be replaced by “new poetry” free to choose whether it rhymes or not.
Western literary theories began dominating China’s “new culture” circles,
while indigenous rhyming literature was looked down upon, even though
it still attracted grassroots people, especially those in the countryside. In
the wake of urbanization in the past few decades, Chinese arts and litera-
ture have become increasingly prose-like. Under the misleading influence
of Western avant-garde theories, drama was not only de-poetized to
become prosaic, but even de-literarized to become post-dramatic. Without
knowing the fact that at least 80–90 percent of the Western theatrical
scenes are still story-based mainstream theater, many Chinese theater peo-
ple are misguided in the belief that dramatic theater is dying and will soon
be replaced by visual images on stage, because we are entering a so-called
picture-reading era. A big, ironic surprise is that when we have just begun
to read pictures, an even newer era of reading texts on phones, QQ,
Twitter, and WeChat, for example, is already rushing in to inundate us
with content. Hamlet’s line, “Words, words, words,” which are about to
be abandoned by so many misled people, are quickly coming back like a
huge wave engulfing people. Since we cannot throw away words, and
modern-day texting had better be short and easy to memorize, rhythmic
rhymed verse will again stand out above prose. A deputy mayor type of
official of a medium-sized Chinese city made national news because he
read his 6,000-character-long annual government report to the city’s peo-
ple’s assembly in rhymed verse with one rhyme throughout, and in two
consecutive years (Xin Jing Bao 2015) While it may be right to say that
officials should not be so obsessed with rhyming verse as to use it in official
reports, this news story does show the unique appeal that rhyming words
have to many people.
Ironically, de-poeticized, prose-like literary style, which the Chinese
modernizers have generally embraced in the past hundred years or so, may
not necessarily be a good thing in the West. The word “prosaic” actually
means something banal and boring. There have been some Western lite-
rati who are particularly nostalgic about verse drama, and are deeply inter-
ested in reviving this virtually defunct genre. They believe that while the
descent of subjects and main characters from kings and noblemen to com-
moners reflects the social progress, the descent of language from verse to
prose, however, is artistically regretful. Verse does not necessarily belong
only to noblemen but should also be enjoyed by common people. Yet it is
very hard to write verse plays about modern life. T. S. Eliot’s The Cocktail
Party is one of the few exceptions. Most of his and his fellow advocates’
verse plays are set in ancient times, for example, his Murder in the Cathedral
and Christopher Fry’s The Lady’s Not for Burning. Taking both types into
consideration, one has to admit that the efforts to revive verse drama in
modern times have not been very successful so far. One of many reasons is
that, from my Chinese perspective, English and most other European lan-
guages are so hard to rhyme. Chinese language, however, is far easier to
rhyme and has a far longer and richer tradition of rhyming literature, even
though it was thrown away in the last century. It is more likely that Chinese
writers can revive modern verse drama, which their Western counterparts
have largely failed to do, if they stop being copycats of everything they see
in the West and recognize the unique features of the Chinese language.
One of the missions of our etude drama projects of Les Misérables, among
48 W. H. SUN
others, is to introduce to school children, now inundated by prosaic

literature in their daily life, some live rhyming language through watching
and acting in this new genre of rhyming drama.
Imitation and Creativity: Pedagogical Approaches

in the Classroom
The next and even harder question is how to teach all the students to act
in a classroom. Our answer is to learn from the universally successful music
model of collective imitation, since the textbook material we give the stu-
dents to practice is etude-like short verse plays. Many people do not
believe that drama can be taught that way because they are used to only
the one-on-one method of teaching Western dramatic acting, which is
impossible to implement in any school class of dozens of pupils within the
average forty-minute limit. Because of that, various kinds of “creative
drama” were invented. But those are only improvisational games, which
cannot result in sophisticated drama with rich characters that can help
children learn about profound humanity. The analogy of that kind of ped-
agogy is having school children compose music for themselves to sing or
play with instruments, which no sane school anywhere in the world would
allow to happen. (The only exception I know of is at the beginning of
China’s crazy Cultural Revolution in 1966–76 when some Red Guards
attacked and dismissed their teachers and took over in making up their
own teaching materials.) The infeasibility of teaching Western drama in
classes in China does not necessarily mean no dramatic alternative can be
found. Many people seem to have forgotten that drama and education
share the same psychological and behavioral roots in mimesis, which is the
theoretical cornerstone of Aristotle’s Poetics. According to Aristotle, that
teaching drama starts from imitation should be taken for granted. Is there
any place where drama is effectively taught through imitation? Yes, plenty.
Most traditional Asian theater forms are taught that way, not least in
China. Again, people often tend to forget, including many Chinese, that
China’s own indigenous theater tradition is various local forms of Chinese
opera, which is still the only theatrical form most Chinese people can often
see live if they are not living in Beijing or Shanghai, the only two cities
where one can find daily spoken drama performances. The teaching model
of Chinese opera, much like those in Western opera and ballet, is quite
similar to the music model, made up of many drills, which are imitations
of the masters on basic physical and vocal skills. Can this method be used
in school drama classes?
Yes, it can, if the etude plays have certain stylistic patterns like opera and
ballet, or like our rhyming drama Les Misérables, whose distinctively rhym-
ing and rhythmic language and heightened physical movement place it
stylistically between spoken drama and sung opera. A class of—thirty to
forty students can start to do the basic physical and vocal training together,
before being divided into four or five groups, each of which learns to enact
the set of roles in the same short play. In our training for school teachers
to become directors of these plays, we have gone through a process of
increasing standardization of vocal and movement patterns for a large col-
lective. The first training program in the summer of 2015 took seven full
days. The beginning warm-up session in the morning was still games taken
from the creative drama pedagogy, and often took more than ninety min-
utes. Quite a few trainees later questioned the value of those games that
were unrelated to the plays they had to then hurry to rehearse. Beginning
from the second training program, we have changed the content of the
morning warm-up session, filling it with vocal and movement patterns
extracted from the plays trainees are going to rehearse later. And those
patterns are edited in the universal rhythmic pattern of one to eight beats
as a round, and taught to the trainees to practice repeatedly for about
thirty to forty minutes. Thereafter they will teach their students in the
same way in a condensed timeframe. By increasing the collective drills and
reducing individual rehearsal time, gradually we have made our training of
teachers more and more effective and reduced the total length to three
days. This means that, similarly, as part of a proposed school drama cur-
riculum of one class session per week, in an eighteen-week semester a
teacher can teach his or her students, in several groups simultaneously, to
put on a short play of Les Misérables with every person playing a substantial
character or functioning as assistant director or stage manager. Recently I
visited Wenhua Elementary School in the medium-sized city of Weifang in
Shandong province, and saw a teacher teaching thirty-six groups in nine
classes to do the same play from Les Misérables (Fig. 3.2). Within quite a
tight time structure, all students I saw tried their best to put their own
understanding into the characters they were portraying, and learned a
great deal from doing so.
The pedagogy of teaching famous classical stories written in the form of
rhyming drama and performed in a maximally standardized style of pat-
terns may very well be an unprecedented, unique way of teaching drama
for school children. In experimenting with this new pedagogy, however,
we do not strive for its uniqueness or originality. Instead, we want to find
50 W. H. SUN
Fig. 3.2 Sixth graders of Wenhua Elementary School in Weifang, Shandong

Province, in a scene of Les Misérables, a classroom drama etude
a way that is universally workable and manageable for hundreds of millions

of Chinese school children and their teachers. If teachers from other coun-
tries are interested in our rhyming plays and the corresponding pedagogy,
as I have heard again and again in the past five years, that would be even
better. We would be pleased to expand our training program to include
international participants. This prospect is not unlikely because, while
modern Western drama has largely forsaken verse, in musical theater,
which is similar to Chinese opera, one can always see an indispensable por-
tion of verse. Shortly after our rhyming drama Les Misérables premiered, I
happily noticed that a hit Broadway show offers an extreme example of
verse musical. The hip-hop musical Hamilton uses a sort of verse through-
out, which is similar to our Les Misérables.
Our effort to seek and promote universality does not exclude attempts
to explore diversity or special local and personal flavors, as long as those
who want to do the plays differently follow the script and basic directorial
rules. If they can find extra time in addition to what is normally expected
from a regular school schedule, they are encouraged to try some unique
styles. So far, we have seen a rap version by six graders, an English rhymed
version by international students at STA, and a Chinese opera version is
being developed. In the mean time, we have also developed a few other
rhyming drama series, for example, The Old Man and the Sea (after
Hemingway), Confucius’ Disciples, Lu Xun’s Stories Revisited (based on
five stories from China’s foremost modern writer Lu Xun), and A
Horseman’s Magic (based on Tibetan folk tales). Sharing the same osten-
sible feature of rhyming lines throughout the play, each of them has a
distinct historical background, story focus, thematic implication, and tar-
get audience/actor group. The last part is, however, a tricky one that
defied our original ideas. We originally planned to conceive a sequence of
rhyming drama series as drama class textbooks based on students’ age and
education level in the secondary school system, which was what our grant
from the Shanghai Municipality’s Education Commission intended for.
Yet soon we realized that it was extremely difficult to place a play on the
right rung of the age and grade ladder. We had not expected such a wide
range of teachers and students to be interested in our Les Misérables when
we held a symposium and training program in 2016 and 2017 to showcase
our first two etude drama series Les Misérables and The Old Man and the
Sea. It was not only secondary school teachers who came, but also elemen-
tary school and kindergarten teachers. A few months after a teacher of first
graders in Beijing saw our performance in Shanghai, she showed us her
students’ performance of The Old Man and the Sea in her school’s audito-
rium when we toured to Beijing. Several kindergarten teachers came to
the following training camp in order to learn how to perform and stage Les
Misérables. Now the question for ourselves is, when we finalize our editing
of the textbooks, including play scripts, design and prop lists, teacher’s
manual, and detailed directorial notes later this year for the press, should
we allocate these plays to secondary students only, or should we leave the
age/grade preference open for teachers and students to decide?
This unexpected confusion gave us a great deal of trouble in complet-
ing our project’s annual grant reports because it delayed publication of
our textbooks, which were expected to be marked sequentially for certain
grades’ students. Nevertheless, it further strengthens our belief in the
universality of such classics as Les Misérables and The Old Man and the Sea.
The fact that we cannot pigeonhole those plays for specific groups of
people to watch and to perform demonstrates how universally appealing
they are. Many people do not want to wait for the plays to be allocated to
52 W. H. SUN
them. They want them now! This universality of classics is exactly what
we need to capitalize on, at least in schools where universal knowledge,
values, and skills are taught in almost all other regular classes except in
drama, which has not yet become a regular class exactly because it lacks
such universal content and pedagogy.
Works Cited
Barba, Eugenio, et al. 1991. The Secret of Performer: A Dictionary of Theatre
Anthropology. London/New York: Routledge.
New Beijing Paper (Xin Jing Bao). Feb. 12, 2015. Head of City People’s Assembly,
Yuncheng, Shanxi Province, Delivers Report in 6000 Character Five-Character
Poem, February 12.
CHAPTER 4
Crossing the Sea: The Ishinha Theater

Company’s Geographical Trail
Yasushi Nagata
Abstract In recent years, interdisciplinary research between theater

studies and geography has intensified as questions of theater identity and
culture arise. Analyzing and understanding theater in cultural and social
contexts has drawn more attention to the place the performance depicts,
where it is performed, and the geographical perspective from which it
operates. These concerns will form a useful viewpoint for rethinking
Asian theater in the twentieth century, when Asian countries were colo-
nized and national boundaries were redrawn repeatedly.
Here the chapter will pick up Taiwan no, Haiiro no Ushi ga Senobi wo
shita toki (When a Taiwanese Grey Bull Stretched Out), written by Yukichi
Matsumoto and produced by the Ishinha Theater Company in 2010. The
play describes the dreams and setbacks of the young Japanese who
embarked on the “Road of Sea” from the Japanese islands to Taiwan, the
Philippines, and the Indonesian Archipelago. The production describes
how the Road of Sea has played an important role in making an inter-
Asian network, and proposes how a theater production produces a sense
of geographical reality and notion that suggests a new approach with us—
Asian inter-theater experiments. The chapter will discuss the possibilities
Y. Nagata (*)
Osaka University, Osaka, Japan

54 Y. NAGATA
of the crossroads of theater studies and theater geography through this

production.
Keywords Theater geography • Intercultural theater • Japanese

immigrants • Theatre of sea • Yukichi Matsumoto
It seems to be meaningful today to explore not only its history but also the
“geography” of Asian theater. When looking at the hotly debated topic of
intercultural theater and its performances from the 1970s, we cannot dis-
count the cultural sensibilities of each region of Asia where the theater was
produced. We must also acknowledge the processes of encounters, nego-
tiations, or even conflicts between theatrical cultures in Asia. In addition,
theater productions have been recognized as problematic due not only to
their aesthetics but also to the cultural and social identities of their practi-
tioners and spectators.
While Edward Said explored in his brand-named book (Said 1978)
how Europe found its identity by confronting the Orient as the “Other”—
and accordingly it has been linked to contemporary postcolonial dis-
course—some theater practitioners, Eugenio Barba and Peter Brook, for
example, tried to theorize their experiments regarding interculturality as a
cultural condition of society and proposed to recontextualize the canoni-
cal flame of authentic European theater studies. It is suggestive that these
two theories coincided at approximately the same time in the 1970s. The
theories described that Asia was set up as an ideological site of the “Other”
on the one hand, and, on the other hand, an actual potential site for explo-
ration of a new perspective of theater studies using traditional rituals and
performances that were non-European. In conceiving of Asian theater, a
geographical configuration of Asia can be seen in these theories, though it
is unclear whether it is ideological or actual.
Subsequently, intercultural theater history, from Barba to Ninagawa,
has shown well how numerous productions have included the Asian per-
spective. We should also recall numerous productions in the commercial
theatrical arena, such as Broadway or the West End, which have described
or absorbed Asian motifs. Historically the US and the UK have accepted
enormous numbers of immigrants, and we know many productions
where immigrant Asian, Asian American, or Caucasian actors have played
Asian “stereotypical” roles, servants, butlers, Kung Fu instructors,
Japanese soldiers, Dragon Ladies, and so on. Though we could list such
productions set in Asian places—for example, The Teahouse of the August
Moon, Flower Drum Song, King and I and Miss Saigon—it’s important
CROSSING THE SEA: THE ISHINHA THEATER COMPANY’S GEOGRAPHICAL… 55
that these “intercultural” pieces were produced against a background of

civil rights movements of Asian or Asian American minorities.
Here, we try to expand the effects of Asian “places” as exhibited by
these intercultural experiments and to rethink the crossroads between the-
ater studies and geography. In recent years, interdisciplinary research
between theater studies and geography has intensified as questions of
identity and culture of theater arise. Needless to say, theater studies have
long incorporated the disciplines of history and literature; these studies
have created a major stream of theater research. However, a contemporary
view of theater studies has suggested that the place of performance is an
important factor. Joanne Tompkins described how “place” has recontexu-
alized performance itself and also that performance could reformulate our
perception of place and space (Birch and Tompkins 2012, pp. 1–4). With
such site-specific performances, Asian theater has also theoretically tried to
include geographical site into their works. There has been discussion
about some interdisciplinary points, such as Asian modernity, Asian post-
colonialism, or Asian theatrical geography. Some have suggested that
Asian modernity in particular could be discussed as “liquid modernity”
(Varney et al. 2013, p. 6), describing Asian theatrical trials through the
Asian cultural, social, and political changes of the last century. As such
discussions related to “Asian mobility” in population or national boarders,
Asian geographical concerns have also been explored. Analyzing and
understanding theater in cultural and social contexts in Asia, Amanda
Rogers has drawn more attention to the place the performance depicts,
where it is performed, and the Asian geographical perspective from which
it operates (Rogers 2015). These concerns will form a useful viewpoint for
rethinking Asian theater in the twentieth century, when Asian countries
were colonized and national boundaries were redrawn repeatedly.
Theatrical plays have a media-described geographical backbone run-
ning through them. Although it is not important to list the plays that have
depicted Asian geographies or location, Japanese theater history has shown
a rich index of works from the Meiji era. Otojiro Kawakami adapted
Othello into a play based on the Japanese colonization of Taiwan in 1903,
and Ogai Mori’s Purumula was set in Arabia and written in old Joruri
style in 1909. Kafu Nagai’s play Love in Strange Land (1909) was set in
the US and he criticized the Japanese modernization.
There were numerous plays of this kind written after the 1910s.
Yoshihiro Kohno depicted India and Islam through the gaze of romantic
exoticism in his Sarasen no Okyu (In a Saracen Court) in 1917, and we
must reference Ujyaku Akita’s series of plays on Japanese marginal places,
Tohoku and Hokkaido, in the 1910s. Akita described Tohoku and
56 Y. NAGATA
Hokkaido in his Tochi (Lands, 1917), Mittsu no Tamashii (Three Souls,

1918), Shonen no Shi (Death of a Boy, 1918), Kokkyo no Yoru (A Night at
the Border, 1920), and others as “Japanese Other,” that founded a modern
Japan as his intra-cultural approach. Kunio Kishida created a town in
French Indochina in his Ushiyama Hotel (1929) where he suggested a
conflicting perspective between home and exile. During the war, while
some communist or socialist playwrights such as Tomoyoshi Murayama
and Sakae Kubo depicted Chinese class conflict or labor campaigns with
sympathy for the Chinese comrade, non-socialist playwrights such as
Kaoru Morimoto had no other choice but to reflect national policies,
where Okinawa, China, or the Philippines were Japanese colonial sites.
After the war, Shuji Terayama, Juro Kara, and Makoto Sato repeatedly
described Manchuria, Korea, and China as their fantastical or/and actual
theatrical geography. Contemporary Japanese playwrights, such as Oriza
Hirata, Chon Uishin, and Keita Asari, among others, also follow this trend
and refer to Asian cities or Asian topics. Here we will pick up Taiwan no,
Haiiro no Ushi ga Senobi wo Shita Toki, (When a Taiwanese Grey Cow
Stretched, hereinafter referred to as Taiwan no Ushi), written by Yukichi
Matsumoto and produced by the Ishinha Theater Company in 2010. The
play not only depicts Asian geography in the story but actually presents
the performance on a small island, Inujima in Seto Island Sea, proffering
a new conception of theater production. We will discuss the possibilities of
the crossroads of theater studies and theater geography through this
production.
Taiwan no, Haiiro no Ushi ga Senobi wo Shita Toki

The Ishinha theater company was established by Yukichi Matsumoto in
1970 and currently still exists.1 It is rare for an underground company that
was established in the 1970s to still be a functional company today. This
particular company has a unique performance style. They are known for
decomposing dialogue into words, using a five or seven measure rhythm
with rap rhythms, and Osaka dialect, called “Jan Jan Opera” style. There
are approximately thirty players/dancers, with a well-controlled peculiar
character, and the play is often performed as a group. In addition, it is
characteristic for the company to construct a giant outdoor theater by
themselves. During this time, all of the actors and staff contribute to the
production of an individual play, which takes approximately one or two
months. Many of the performances are held at the Osaka Port or other
cultural places such as shrines, abolished schools, and Lake Biwa. It is also
one of a few theater groups that gives site-specific performances.
The production discussed here is Ishinha’s Part III of The Trilogy of the
20th Century. While different from Part I, Nostalgia, in 2006—where
Eastern Europe was the scene—and Part II, Kokyu Kika (Breath and
Machine in English) in 2008—set in South America—Part III is set in the
twentieth-century in Asia. The title When a Taiwanese Grey Cow Stretched
is taken from a poem by Uruguay-born French poet Jules Supervielle
(1884–1960) (Supervielle 1930).
After the two introductory scenes—M0 “Katachi” and M1
“Onokono”—the play starts in earnest with a narration of an unexploded
one-ton bomb that was made in the US and found in Osaka (Production
Note, 2010, p. 13). The narration continues to tell the origin of the Japan
Current. According to the narration, the Japan Current starts in Micronesia
and east Luzon in the Philippines and flows to the north along the east
coast of Taiwan before entering the East China Sea. The current flows to
the north of the Yaeyama Islands, mainland island of Okinawa, and the
Amami Islands. Its main current changes direction to the east around the
islands of Tanegashima or Yakushima. The current then continues to flow
into the Pacific Ocean, Kyushu, the east side of Shikoku, the Izu Islands,
and the Boso Peninsula. The narration says that the current leaves Japan’s
coasts and joins the North Pacific Ocean Current. The actors then turn to
the Japanese Archipelago islands with a rap rhythm—this is how the intro-
duction concludes. The Japan Current and Asian islands shown here lead
to a successive theatrical world, which is at the vertical axis of this play.
In the plays by Ishinha, characters do not experience conflict and
anguish in the traditional sense. Instead, groups of images and fragmented
episodes are combined through dialogue and imagery as the scenes pro-
ceed. In this play, the action is divided into fourteen scenes, numbered in
serial order M0 to M13. They begin with the end of the nineteenth
century and conclude at the end of World War II. The play weaves together
the descriptions of political affairs, military affairs, and the routine lives of
immigrant families. Furthermore, travelling from Japan to the Philippines
via Taiwan in the flow of the Japan Current, in the reverse current, or
alongside the current, the play depicts the historical and fictional events
that happened on this “Road of Sea.”
The typical expression is given in Scene Sixth, M6 Road of Sea. In this
episode, immigrants appear on the main stage (Fig. 4.1).
58 Y. NAGATA
Fig. 4.1 M6 Road of Sea. A chimney stack of ruin copper refinery is at the right.
(Taiwan no, Haiiro no Ushi ga Senobi wo Shita Toki, 2010. Inujima, Okayama
Prefecture; Photo Courtesy of Yoshikazu Inoue)
There is a ladder on stage left and on stage right. Women, with old
Japanese hair styles, appear to carry their trunks. The men and women
travel, mostly southward, from the cities of Taiwan, Keelung, Taipei,
Tainan, Gaoxiong, Luzon, Manila, Mindoro, Samal, Masbate, Panay,
Negros, Leyte, Palawan, Cebu, Dabao, and Mindanao, singing the names
of the islands and the cities of the Philippines in a rap rhythm. Between the
songs, the phrase from Seigo Nakano’s Bokoku no Sanga (Natural Scenery
of Lost Country) is spoken:
Where does the country where Confucius was born end? What is the current
situation of the Malays who once peacefully slept under the shade of the
trees? Who are the rear guard of the people where Buddha was born? Asia
must escape from its enslaved circumstances before all else. An Asia that has
freedom must be more solidly united. Asia is one.
We can interpret the women as being “Karayuki san,” that is, female
immigrants to South East Asian countries who are either married to men
living there or prostitutes. The men are perhaps Japanese emigrants to the
Philippines. They speak of the famous names of actual immigrants, for
example, Kojiro Nonami who came ashore on Thursday Island currently
Australian territory in 1877, Shigezo Minami who went across India with
ten craftsmen in 1893, and Chinami Iwamoto who immigrated to Siamese
(the former name for Thailand) with 32 colleagues in 1895 (Production
Note 2010, M6).
This scene is where the Asian theme is first performed in this play. Seigo
Nakano is a pre-war right-wing thinker and an Asianist. Needless to say,
Seigo Nakano’s aforementioned phrase is used not just to admire his Asian
idea, but to observe a part of history. This phrase is criticized by Ishinha’s
style of deliverance and the names of cities and historical description of
immigrants the actors speak on the stage.
The performance continues by depicting the immigrants on this Road
of Sea through to the end of World War II, with a narration of some frag-
mented historical facts about immigrants to Taiwan, including the fact
that the first lighthouse was built in Taiwan in 1904, and immigrants to
Indonesia.
In this play, Asia is described not only from the historical viewpoint of
modern Japan and through the eyes of the common people, but also from
a geographical view point, that is, the Road of Sea. For instance, scene M8
“Benguet” is about the Benguet Road in Luzon of the Philippines, which
was constructed by the many Japanese immigrants at the beginning of the
twentieth century. Scene M10 “Namioto” focuses on Hyakujiro
Yamaguchi, who moved to Saipan, ran a shop and an inn, and brought
prosperity to the Japanese town of Saipan. M12 “1945–2000” is a scene
describing Teruo Nakamura (Sunyon in Taiwanese), who originated from
the Takasago tribe in Taiwan but became a Japanese soldier during the
war. Unaware that the war had ended, Nakamura continued to live in the
mountains for some time. Through these scenes, this theatrical work tells
the history of modern Japan and at the same time illuminates that the
Road of Sea was part of that history and that of the Asian people.
The play’s theme has a relationship to stage architecture. As already
mentioned, members of the Ishima company construct a giant outdoor
stage, made up of nine small stages and a main stage, for their perfor-
mances. These nine stages are named I shima, Ni shima, Mi shima, Yo
shima, Go shima, Mu shima, Na shima, Ya shima, and Ku shima—numbers
one to nine in the old Japanese method of counting. Shima means island.
In short, these stages demonstrate that there are nine islands making up the
60 Y. NAGATA
main stage. In scene M11 “Shima no Katachi,” the Japanese immigrant

characters stand on these small islands and explain their loss of perspective
and where they are. It is in this scene that the play asks where the Japanese
people are positioned in the world, what Japanese identity is, and what
Japanese roots are.
Finally, we should consider that the poster for this production uses an
image of Asia, which is seen from the inverted side on the common world
map (Fig. 4.2).
This poster suggests symbolically the theme of the play; it is not a con-
ventional map of Asia, but it facilitates the idea of a road that respectively
connects many nations in unprecedented proximity within Asia by invert-
ing it on the world map. Here the production implies a pre-historical con-
nection in the seas of Asia and tries to return to the roots of Asia before
the establishment of nation states.
Seto Island Sea as Road to Asia

This play was actually performed on Inujima Island, a tiny island in the
Seto Island Sea of Japan. The performance produces a sense of reality and
a notion that the Road of Sea continues from the Philippines to the Seto
Island Sea, pointing out further roots of the current Japanese people.
This play was performed as part of the Setouchi International Art
Festival in 2010. The festival was held from July 19, 2010 through
October 31, 2010 on seven tiny islands in the Seto Island Sea over 105
days. The festival was held for the second time in 2013 and the third time
in 2016 as a triennial. The themes of the festival were “the vitalization of
the region” and “the restoration of sea.” The festival exhibited and pub-
lished sevety-six art works from seventeen countries and receieved a total
of 928,426 visitors (Executive Committee Setouchi Art Festival, 2010,
http://setouchi-artfest.jp/files/artworks-artists/archive/general-report,
2010. Pdf, date accessed 28 May, 2017).
The aim of this festival was to stop depopulation and weakening of
regional vigor in the Setouchi region, and to revitalize the region, which
has a history of prosperity as the main sea lane of marine traffic among
Japanese local regions, through the power of art. Mr. Takenori Manabe,
the chairman of the execution commission for the festival and the gover-
nor of Kagawa Prefecture, states that:
Fig. 4.2 Poster Design, Taiwan no, Haiiro no Ushi ga Senobi wo Shita Toki. Japan
and Korea are at the bottom, Philippines at the center, Bali and Java are at the top
of the map
62 Y. NAGATA
Left out of the process of high economic growth and suffering from depop-
ulation and aging, the Setouchi region is losing its island’s distinctiveness
and weakening its regional vigor. I believe that by bringing modern art to
the region, and by enabling the island’s residents to create something new
through the collaboration with artists and architects, the people in Setouchi
will be energized. That energy, in turn, may revitalize the island as well as
the Seto Island Sea region, enabling us to share the charms of the region
with the world. (Executive Committee Setouchi Art Festival 2010, Bijitsu
Shuppan Sha, pp. 23–4)
In the Seto Island Sea, before the festival, education industry company
Benesse Corporation constructed a museum and introduced modern
works of art from artists such as James Turrell to Naoshima Island. This
effort was widely hailed as a success, and, on the basis of this success, the
festival established the aim of regional revitalization by introducing art
and art projects to the neighboring six islands.
The Ishinha theater company played on the tiny Inujima Island—with
a current population of approximately 100 people—in the Okayama
Prefecture. On this island, there is a copper refinery that operated from
1909 to 1919; this refinery is now in ruins (Fig. 4.3).
The Inujima Island Art Project “Refinery” now uses this space for art
exhibitions. In 2002, Ishinha solely performed its work Kankara on
Inujima Island. Performing on a tiny island, where the legacy of modern-
ization remains in the form of a refinery, provides a means of connecting
the inherent history and culture of the island to theatrical performance. In
Kankara, the protagonist, a boy, happened to enter a group of refinery
workers in the Meiji era. By depicting his contact with a Korean who
resembled a dead close friend, modern Japanese history and individual
identity are juxtaposed with the pre-war cultural stratum of Inujima Island.
Similarly, with the aforementioned work Taiwan no Ushi…, there is the
idea of the Road of Sea from the Philippines to Japan, and the recounting
of events that took place in Asia in the first half of the twentieth century.
This production therefore becomes connected to the social background of
Inujima Island with depopulation in the sea around the island where the
play was performed and where its copper refinery was emblematic of
Japanese modernization. The history of immigration from Japan to the
Philippines, aggression, and the defeat of war are connected to the history
of the Inujima Island through the road of sea to the Japanese Sea.
Fig. 4.3 Ruin of the copper refinery, Inujima. (Photo Yasushi Nagata)
The Japanese avant-garde theater companies, including Ishinha, in the

1960s and the 1970s rarely participated in this kind of cultural event—at
least not in the art festivals that were led by the administration. In 1970
Matsumoto established Nihon Ishinha, the previous body of current
Ishinha, and started the performance that resembled Butho. At that time,
Matsumoto scarcely participated in cultural events that were led by public
authorities and the underground theater received no administrative financ-
ing. Instead, they had to produce and perform their works using their own
funds. However, since the 1980s, after Acts for Culture were established
in many prefectures,2 Japanese cultural policy has gradually begun to
change and, under new policy focusing on the construction of public
buildings, culture and arts centers and were constructed in every prefec-
ture. Now more than 2,000 culture centers exist in Japan, although they
were not fully utilized, and it was often pointed out that, even though they
existed, there were no works to be performed in them. Since 1990, the
movement granting aid to works and companies, not to buildings, has
gradually been intensifying. The national government has slowly appointed
money to the overall theater and arts business.
64 Y. NAGATA
In recent years, the national government has even provided aid money
to underground theaters. As part of the art festival held on Inujima Island
in 2010, Matsumoto and Ishinha also performed, help by grants from the
Japan Arts Council. This movement is becoming a common phenomenon
in contemporary Japan.
Next, we will consider organization of the theater company. The under-
ground theater of the 1960s was frequently characterized by closed sec-
tionalism. For instance, Tadashi Suzuki had a space on the second floor of
a tea house called Mon Cherie near Waseda University where he created
his works (Suzuki, Sympyousha 1982, pp. 78–80). Juro Kara and his circle
lived a poor, communal life, traveling between performances by truck
(Yamaguchi 1993). Although Ishinha had strong community at the time
of its establishment, this is now decreasing.
For example, let us examine the other two parts that make up The
Trilogy of the 20th Century and the actors in them. In 2006 Part I,
Nostalgia, whose theme was immigration to South America, there were
thirty-eight actors in total. Part II, Kokyu Kikai (Breath and Machine),
which followed in 2008, was set in Eastern Europe, there were again
thirty-eight actors. In Part III, Taiwan no Ushi …, there were only twenty-
six actors in total. Among these actors, twenty-five participated in the first
and second parts. In other words, most of the actors performed in both
the first and second parts, and only thirteen actors were added to the cast.
However, the number of actors who appeared both in the first and third
parts was fourteen, and there were twelve actors who played in the first
part that did not play in the third part. However, almost all of the thirteen
actors who newly participated in the second part also played in the third
part. Thus, some fourteen actors continuously played, but the same num-
ber of actors changed.
The above mentioned fact demonstrates that the company recruits
actors for each performance of a work, rather than the more usual process
of recruiting new actors for each production. Applicants must be between
eighteen and thirty years old, giving no eligibility to students. Other than
this requirement, no experience is required, except for a condition that the
successful applicants must participate in training in Osaka City.
It goes without saying that the high-ranking actors and staff have been
continuously engaged in the company and have been supporting the
Ishinha. However, as the company essentially recruits only young actors,
when a performance finishes many of them leave the company. However,
there is no image of the former sectionalism of old underground theater
cultures. There are aspects of a temporary group organization about this

company, where young actors belong to Ishinha by their own free will and
hope to participate in a performance. When that performance finishes,
they simply return to their own lives.
Taiwan no, Haiiro no Ushi ga Senobi wo Shita Toki, produced by Yukichi
Matsumoto, is a typical work that demonstrates a strong contradiction to
contemporary regional development in Japan. While Okayama Prefecture
has promoted “the vitalization of the region” and supported the festival,
the Ishinha theater company explored the path beyond such a moderniza-
tion of Japan to their roots and identity through the performance. As we
have seen, the performance also suggested the crossroad of contemporary
Japanese theater and Asian geography. Telling Japanese modern history,
the production describes how the Road of Sea has played important role
in creating inter-Asian networks, and proposes how a theater production
produces a sense of geographical reality and the new notion of Asian inter-
theater experiments.
Contemporary Geography of Asian Theater

After defeat in World War II, Japan recovered through the process of eco-
nomic reconstruction. At the same time, Japan was also being spiritually
reconstructed. Japan sought to establish a new post-war nation, and the
underground theaters in the 1960s did not promote the transplantation of
Occidental theater. Rather, they changed their direction and individually
sought the return of traditional Japanese culture. Their methods were
entirely different from each other, but, as a result, were deeply connected
to the establishment of a “post-war Japanese nation.”
It is well known that underground theater in the 1960s considered
modern European theater, which focused on the European “Spoken
Drama,” as borrowing from Europe, and advocated theater rooted in the
cultural context of the Japanese. Disregarding the idea of European drama
and theatrical composition, the Japanese underground theater tended to
find its inspiration from old or traditional Japanese cultural sources, and
produced its own works. They were inspired by Japanese mythology, folk-
lore, or traditional religious and cultural customs, and tried to incorporate
these sources into their plays and performances. However, it should be
confirmed that, at that time, they scarcely intended to portray a realistic
view of Asia as a non-Occidental region. One of the exceptions is Juro
Kara. In his Nito Monogatari (The Stories of Two Capitals) and Shin Nito
66 Y. NAGATA
Monogatari (The New Stories of Two Capitals), Kara brought a dynamism

to the Korean Peninsula and the Japanese Archipelago. The memory of
pre-war Japanese aggression towards the China Continent is often subli-
mated in his works. In those days, when many underground theater com-
panies, such as Terayama and Suzuki’s, hoped for and welcomed their
successes in Western Europe, Jokyo Gekijo (Situation Theater), led by
Juro Kara was one of the few companies that aimed to actually perform in
Asian cities. In 1972, Jokyo Gekijo performed Nito Monogatari in South
Korea under the martial law, Tiger of Bengal in Bangladesh, and Kaze no
Matasaburo in Palestine and the refugee camps in Lebanon and Syria. As
these productions have shown, in his manifesto (Kara, Gendai Shichosha
1972), that his passion for Asia is surging.
The global interest in and practice toward Asia are different these days.
The Cold War between the US and the USSR collapsed, and the Asian
geopolitical configuration became fluid. At the same time, globalization
spread and Asia’s image changed from one of stagnation and poverty, tra-
dition and nature, to one characterized by economic prosperity and
impressive tall buildings, a culture with an advanced information industry,
and a large market that supports the world economy. Asia is emerging and
cannot be utterly grasped by the Asianism of Seigo Nakano described ear-
lier in the production by Ishinha. “Asia” as a concept was produced and
established in Europe. However, contemporary Asia cannot be seen as a
counter-concept to Europe. Versatile connections and exchanges within
Asia have made the continent complicated and multidimensional.
In the production Taiwan no, Haiiro no Ushi ga senobi wo shita toki by
Ishinha, the return to the Japanese old cultural stratum that was main-
tained by the underground theater in the 1960s is not much felt. Instead,
the main theme of the Road of Sea is the what connects Indonesia and the
Philippines of Asia to Taiwan and Japan. The production told how
Japanese people travelled and migrated to Asia along the Road of Sea. This
is not a play about Japanese imperialism, rather it is a description of how
Asian geography of the sea has connected these Asian islands, cities, and
people. Here we could remind ourselves of how geography, Road of Sea,
has played an important role in Asian modern history and modern life.
Concurrently, the style of the actors’ performance sometimes reminds
us of Butoh as a genuine source of Japanese underground theater, and also
makes us imagine a kind of stateless narrative. As an art, narratives are
spreading, not only in Japan, but also in the whole region of Asia. At this
point, they make us feel the old strata of Asia, in this case, the Road of Sea
as Asian culture.
Notes
1. At first the name of the company was Nihon Ishinha Theater Company.
2. For Example, Tokyo and Akita-shi in 1983, Tsu-shi, Mie Prefecture in
1984, Yokosuga-shi in 1985, Kumamoto Prefecture in 1988, and many pre-
fectures and cities founded these kinds of Cultural Acts. The Basic Act for
Culture, Agency of Cultural Affairs, was enacted in 2001.
Works Cited
Annexory New Review, the World of Tadashi Suzuki. Shimpyousha, 1982.
Birch, Anna, and Joanne Tompkins, eds. 2012. Performing Site-Specific Theatre
Politics, Place, Practice. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Formal Guidebook of Setouchi International Art Festival 2010. Bijutsu Shuppan
Sha.
Kara, Juro. 1972. Nihon Rettou Nanka Undou no Mokushiroku. (Apocalypse
of Southward Movement from the Japanese Archipelago). Tokyo:
Gendaishicho-sha.
Rogers, Amanda. 2015. Performing Asian Transnationalisms Theatre, Identity
and the Geographies of Performance. Abingdon: Routledge.
Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon.
Supervielle, Jules. 1930. “Un boeuf gris de la Chine…” Le Forcat Innocent.
Taiwan no, Haiiro no Ushi ga Senobi wo Shita Toki. Production Note, the Theatre
Company Ishinha, Ishinha Archive, 2010.
Varney, Denise, Peter Eckersall, Chris Hudson, and Barbara Hattley, eds. 2013.
Theatre and Performance in the Asian-Pacific. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Yamaguchi, Takeshi. 1993. Akatento Seisyunroku. Rippu Shobo Publishing.
CHAPTER 5
Lila or Mela? Richard Schechner’s “Play”

of the Ramlila of Ramnagar
Tsu-Chung Su
Abstract As one of the intercultural theater pioneers, Schechner’s numer-

ous trips to India have enriched his performance theory and practice tre-
mendously. Of all the various topics on Indian performing arts, such as the
Natyasastra (the ancient Sanskrit treatise on performance), Indian rituals,
dance theaters, and rasaesthetics, Schechner has written extensively on the
Ramlila of Ramnagar, a thirty-one-day folk festival enacting the life of
Rama at Ramnagar—a city across the Ganga river from the Hindu spiritual
capital Varanasi. This chapter proposes to explore Schechner’s “play” or
rendering of the mythopoetic and fantastic ritual display—the Ramlila of
Ramnagar. Deeply impressed by his outlook on the festival, I attempt to
interrogate the impact of the Ramnagar Ramlila on Schechner and criti-
cally examine his formulation of performance theory as a case of intercul-
tural border-crossings and encounters. Finally, I look into the complex
interrelationships between lila and mela, and between religious rituals and
performances in everyday life. I argue that Schechner’s original and insight-
ful writings on the Ramlila of Ramnagar have helped redefine the param-
eters of contemporary performance.
T.-C. Su (*)
National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan

70 T.-C. SU
Keywords Richard Schechner • The Ramayana • The Ramlila of

Ramnagar • Play • lila • mela
As one of the intercultural theater pioneers who turned to India, Richard

Schechner has done a lot of fieldwork in India, which in turn has enriched
his performance theory and theater practice tremendously.1 His writings
derived from his Indian experiences have long and lasting influence on
the making of contemporary performance theory. This is evidenced by
Schechner’s words in his interview with Patrice Pavis, “What I saw and
began to study in India was certainly very influential on the work that I did
from around 1972 onwards” (1996, p. 44). Of all the various topics on
Indian performing arts—such as the Natyashastra (the ancient Sanskrit
treatise on performance), Indian rituals, dance theaters, and rasaesthetics—
Schechner has written extensively on the Ramlila of Ramnagar, a thirty-
one-day folk festival enacting the life of Rama at Ramnagar—a city across
the Ganga river from Varanasi, the Hindu pilgrimage city, and the spiritual
capital of India.2 For Schechner, the Ramlila of Ramnagar has a lot to offer.
It is a special kind of ritual performance, offering a wide array of fantastic
experiences to participants. “What those attending Ramlila experience,”
writes Schechner, “is a rich mix of texts: literary, dramatic, choreographic,
ritual, religious, popular, musical, spatial, and temporal … The crowds who
attend Ramlila join Rama on his journeys through the mythopoetic space
of epic India. As they follow, they identify with Rama: Ramlila is not a the-
atre of make believe but of hyperreality” (1993, p. 133). As a reader, I can
easily detect that the Ramlila of Ramnagar is dear to Schechner and his
writings on the cycle festival are crucial for us to understand his core think-
ing about ritual performance and his formulation of contemporary perfor-
mance theory.
What is Schechner’s “play” or rendering of the Ramlila of Ramnagar?
What is “hyperreal” in the Ramnagar Ramlila? Which aspects of the festival
are reckoned as essential features that help shape Schechner’s performance
theory? Does he appropriate and represent the Ramnagar Ramlila in a
decontextualized way or without taking the particularities of a specific his-
torical condition into consideration? Does he exploit Indian ritual perfor-
mance from his postmodern and postcolonial ethnocentric position? This
chapter explores Schechner’s “play” or rendering of the mythopoetic and
fantastic ritual display—the Ramlila of Ramnagar. It aims not just to inter-
pret Schechner’s thoughts by examining his discourses and the criticisms
LILA OR MELA? RICHARD SCHECHNER’S… 71
incurred, but also to map out their contexts as well, so as to lay bare both
Schechner’s discourse formation and his formulation of performance the-
ory as a case of intercultural border crossings and encounters. Finally,
I look into the complex interrelationships between lila (the outcome of
creative play by the divine absolute) and mela (secular gatherings, fairs,
and events). I argue that Schechner’s original and insightful writings on
the Ramlila of Ramnagar have helped redefine the parameters of contem-
porary performance.
Prologue: The Ramnagar Ramlila Is the Thing

Since 1972, Richard Schechner has been to India many, many times. At
one point of his life, he even said that “I expect that my sojourns to India
will never cease” (1983, p. xi). Over the years, he has seen many kinds of
Indian performance, such as “Ramlila, Raslila, Kathakali, Chhau, Jatra,
Kutiattam, Teyyam, Yakshagana, Bharata-natyam, Kathak, Odissi” (1983,
p. xi). Of these performance types, the one on which he has spilled much
ink is Ramlila, especially the Ramlila at Ramnagar. In 1976, The
Performance Group toured India with their Mother Courage. This enabled
Schechner to see, for the first time, portions of the thirty-one-day Ramlila
enactment of the Ramcharitmanas, Goswami Tulsidas’ late sixteenth-
century Hindi version of Valmiki’s more ancient Sanskrit Ramayana at
Ramnagar. In order to complete his research, he visited Ramnagar a num-
ber of times to do additional fieldwork. Later we learn that this festival has
occupied him for several decades onward. “This theatrical-religious-
political-social event is of great interest to me as a theatre person” (1983,
p. 287), writes Schechner—and he even recommended it to Indian theater
workers.
The Sanskrit word “lila” means that the universe is the play of form
which is multiple and in constant motion. The Ramlila of Ramnagar is a
festive folk play that enacts the life of Lord Rama played out at Ramnagar,
ending up in a ten-day battle between Lord Rama and Ravana, as described
in the Hindu religious epic the Ramayana. Held over thirty-one days
instead of the usual ten, the Ramnagar Ramlila is known for its elaborate
sets, moving dialogues, and visual spectacles.3 Drawing the largest audi-
ences of all the Ramlilas, it is often considered the most extensive and best
performed because it has the patronage of the Maharaja of Banaras who
resides in Ramnagar.
72 T.-C. SU
In the beginning of his article “Ramlila of Ramnagar: An Introduction,”

Schechner conjures up the uncanny story of Krishna’s mouth to illustrate
the impact of the Ramlila on him: “It is, approximately, something like
this with Ramlila. I look into its [Krishna’s] mouth and see there all there
is to be seen: but I cannot remember it” (1983, p. 238). The Ramnagar
Ramlila is ineffable for it is too great, too sacred, and too mysterious to be
described, expressed, or even to be remembered. It is thus “hyperreal” in
the sense that, according to Schechenr, it is “realer than the real” (1993,
p. 183). Since Rama, a king of Ayodhya, is the seventh avatar of the Hindu
god Vishnu and Lord Vishnu is one of the supreme gods in the Hindu
trimurti (triad or trinity) in which the cosmic functions of creation, main-
tenance, and destruction are personified by the forms of Brahma the cre-
ator, Vishnu the preserver, and Shiva the destroyer or transformer, the
Ramnagar Ramlila from the very beginning is invested with divine signifi-
cance and presence. To join the lila and follow Rama’s steps is to step
inside Vishnu’s body and take part in the divine universal play, “an experi-
ence of Vishnu-Rama presence that transcends the very theatrical practices
that bring the Rama of Ramlila into existence” (Schechner 1993, p. 183).
Even though the divine essence of the Ramnagar Ramlila is beyond
description and defies representation, and despite knowing full well that
the subject of the cycle festival is vast, covering themes from religious (lila,
devotional worship, pilgrimage, reincarnation, relationship between per-
former and role being performed), political (nationalism, kingship, the
secular government, patronage), artistic (effigy-making, epic poetry, the-
ater, performance), to social (mela, tourism, hospitality) dimensions,
Schechner—a scholar with unrelenting passion and inquisitive power—
tries all his might to investigate the Ramlila festival and intends to put all
of his findings and thoughts into words.
As Schechner himself makes clear, compared with Kathakali and other
classical dance and dramatic forms that have developed exquisite meanings
and powerful aesthetics “based on classical norms,” the Ramnagar Ramlila
appeals to him more because its aesthetic is “based on folk norms” (1983,
p. 287), in which he can find elements that interest him, such as myth,
audience participation, constructed and found environments, performers
at all levels of skill and involvement, and performances of great diversity
and power (1983, p. 287).
As the ritual lila goes on, the Rama story and the real world become
intermingled when the sound of the chanted strophes from the
Ramcharitmanas is followed by the spoken dialogues of the performers
portraying the many characters of the story. At this moment, the make-
believe of the svarupas (the divine characters personated by Brahman
boys)4 transforms to accommodate faithful beliefs of thousands of Indians
present who, in the midst of their journeys, are no longer pure audiences
but pilgrims, players, spectators, partakers, and worshippers all at the same
time. To a certain degree, the whole festival is itself “a pilgrimage center”
because many come to Ramnagar as pilgrims each year from great dis-
tances; among them are the sadhus—holy people as “permanent pilgrims”
who move “with the season from one holy place to another” (Schechner
and Hess 1977, p. 66).5 In other words, the cycle festival is a fascinating
lila played out at various site-specific grounds, geared for all kinds of audi-
ence–performer encounters, and generating multilayered meanings and
significances. In addition, it not only reinforces Schechner’s theories of
happening and environmental theater but also helps trigger new visions in
the formation of his performance studies enterprise.
Religious Aspects
Fig. 5.1 Gods/actors/svarupas getting ready. (Photo by Tsu-Chung Su)

Fig. 5.2 Svarupas (from the left Lakshmana, Rama, and Sita) at rest for darśan
(seeing the divine image). (Photo by Tsu-Chung Su)
Fig. 5.3 Sadhus—devout participants at the Ramnagar Ramlila. (Photo by Tsu-

Chung Su)
Political Aspects
Fig. 5.4 The presence and patronage of the Maharaja of Banaras on an elephant.
(Photo by Tsu-Chung Su)
Artistic Aspects
Fig. 5.5 An evening scene of Ravana at his Lanka palace. (Photo by Tsu-Chung Su)
76 T.-C. SU
Fig. 5.6 Monkey masks on display. (Photo by Tsu-Chung Su)
Fig. 5.7 Monkey soldiers played by ordinary boys. (Photo by Tsu-Chung Su)
Fig. 5.8 The use of performance-enhancing effigies. (Photo by Tsu-Chung Su)
Fig. 5.9 The use of performance-enhancing effigies. (Photo by Tsu-Chung Su)

78 T.-C. SU
Social Aspects
Fig. 5.10 Attentive women in the audience. (Photo by Tsu-Chung Su)

Fig. 5.11 Audience, religious participants, tourists, and vendors of all kinds sur-
rounding the performance site, testifying to the co-existence of lila and mela.
(Photo by Tsu-Chung Su)
The Ramlila of Ramnagar and Schechner’s

Performance Theory
For many reasons, India is not only very close to Schechner’s heart and
spiritual temperament but also extremely gratifying to his intellectual needs
and performance interests. He studied yoga, the Natyashastra, and the
training of the nine facial rasic expressions in Kathakali. Of all these con-
nections, Schechner’s initiation into Hinduism is an anecdote that should
not be ignored. The subtitle—“Jayaganesh and the avant garde”—of the
“Introduction” to Schechner’s The Future of Ritual: Writings on Culture
and Performance is very intriguing. Upon reading the “Introduction,” we
readers get to know that Jayaganesh is Schechner’s Hindu name after he
went through his Upanayana ceremony and was officially initiated into
Hinduism on July 7, 1976.6 At this moment, the sacred thread was laid
80 T.-C. SU
over his left shoulder and Sandal paste was applied to his forehead.
Eventually, he was given a small “Conversion Certificate” (1993, pp. 3–6).
With his newly acquired Hindu identity, he was able “to see temple dances
and ceremonies close up, to study architecture, especially as it pertained to
performance, and to participate in temple rituals” (1993, p. 3). Schechner
has resolved his inner contradiction7 and become “a Jewish Hindu named
Jayaganesh” (1993, p. 1), as he himself manifests. Deep down, while he
was still a Jew preserving the tefillin given to him at his bar mitzvah, he was
tied to Hinduism through not only the sacred thread but also “the efficacy
of ritual acts” (1993, p. 4). We can note here that “efficacy” is an impor-
tant key word in Schechner’s “efficacy—entertainment braid.” It is often
associated with ritual and the Upanayana ceremony that Schechner has
experienced is a rite de passage with liminal efficacy because it is linked to
transformed consciousness, “an absent Other,” and “symbolic time”
(Schechner 2003, p. 130) for Schechner himself.
In the 1970s and 1980s, around the time he was actively engaged in
investigating the Ramnagar Ramlila, Schechner, in close collaboration
with Victor Turner, developed an anthropology of performing arts. As a
result, his scholarship and his rendering of the cycle festival are quite in
tune with Turner’s theory of social dramas and anthropological approach
to performance. Schechner thinks that “Turner’s idea applies very well to
the Ramlila of Ramnagar—where a great myth has been translated into a
religious-aesthetic drama with many overtones of social drama” (1983,
p. 249). He then further elaborates: “For Ramlila the phases of the social
drama are: (1) breach—when Kaikeyi makes her claim on Dasaratha; (2)
crisis—Rama’s exile, complicated by the kidnapping of Sita; (3) redressive
action—the war against Ravana; (4) reintegration—the re-uniting of Rama
and Sita, the Bharata Milap re-uniting the four brothers, the coronation of
Rama, and Ramraj” (1983, p. 250). This Turnerian scheme may sound
oversimplified and idealized nowadays. Nevertheless, upon closer exami-
nation, Rama is indeed some kind of archetypal hero engaging different
stages of “play” and assuming his national, mythological, cultural, and
religious significances.
In the first chapter, “Approaches,” of his Performance Theory, Schechner
calls for a reexamination of the theories of the Cambridge anthropologists
such as Jane Ellen Harrison, Gilbert Murray, and Francis Cornford because
their work, though brilliant and insightful, is “speculative” and “limiting,”
and “no longer suits current perceptions of theater” (2003, p. 6). A
broader anthropological view of the interrelationship of all of human
beings’ public performance activities is needed—one that considers play,

games, sports, theater, and ritual as legitimate topics of performance stud-
ies. Schechner cites a number of writers in the social sciences whose work
suggests new approaches to theater analysis, such as Johan Huizinga’s
study of play in Homo Ludens (1938) that discusses features common to
games, sports, and theater; Martin Shubik’s mathematical or Eric Berne’s
transactional game analysis procedures that might be applied to theater
structure; and Erving Goffman’s quest for dramaturgy of everyday life and
ubiquity of performance in human activity in The Presentation of Self in
Everyday Life (1959) that analyzes social performances of face-to-face
interactions (pp. 21–24).
Adopting new anthropological lenses to scrutinize not only the epic nar-
rative structure, festival mise-en-scene, and each individual site-specific
happenings in the cycle but also the overall festival environments and the
flow of the communal religious event, Schechner analyzes the Ramnagar
Ramlila with a keen interest. What’s more, one can sense that the festival
endorses Schechner’s theory of happenings where random chances reign as
well as strengthening his belief in the environmental theater where site-
specific principles dominate the performance scene.8 Scattering throughout
the field of Ramnagar, there are simply too many things happening at one
time in the Ramlila, which offers multilayered texts and multisite-specific
performances, and together they weave a mythic vision of the world.
To examine Schechner’s intellectual background as a whole, we come to
know that his performance theory has gradually taken shape with the rise of
postmodernism and the end of humanism since the 1960s. All the time,
Schechner interrogates the notion of performance from a wide variety of
perspectives. It comes as no surprise that the monumental, unique, transient,
multifaceted, and multivalent character of the Ramnagar Ramlila can contrib-
ute to highlight and enrich the meaning of the term “performance” in
Schechner’s theater anthropology and his brand of performance studies. In
other words, Schechner’s performance thinking not only reveals a broad
spectrum of thoughts but also shows his firm alliance with postmodernism.
In his article “Performance Studies: The Broad Spectrum Approach,”
Schechner asserts that “performance—as distinct from any of its subgenres
like theatre, dance, music, and performance art—is a broad spectrum of activ-
ities including at the very least the performing arts, rituals, healing, sports,
popular entertainments, and performance in everyday life” (2004, p. 7). In
his eyes, the Ramnagar Ramlila is a typical broad-spectrum performance,
which includes a wide range of activities mentioned above. It exemplifies the
82 T.-C. SU
working together of all distinct genres and is a genuine “environmental the-

ater” to the utmost degree, in which arts and crafts, the sacred and the secu-
lar, spontaneous communitas and normative communitas, liminal rituals and
liminoid rituals, as well as efficacy and entertainment alike are most alive at
their ever-changing borders. Mercurial and porous, the Ramnagar Ramlila is
subject to change, change of the weather and the number of spectators, and
has gradually become a larger than life ritual performance, going beyond the
framework set by the social dramas in the first place.
During the festival, other than the chanting of literary text of Tulsidas’
Ramcharitmanas, there is also the performance text, namely the actual
mise-en-scene of the dialogues, the samvads, spoken during the perfor-
mance, which, according to Schechner, “are intended to translate the feel-
ings—the bhavas and rasas … —of the Ramcharitmanas into a spoken
language that ordinary people can understand” (1983, p. 239). Here
Schechner applies the notions of bhava and rasa discussed in the
Natyashastra to describe the effect of spoken dialogues in the Ramlila
festival. He later not only devised rasaboxes exercise based on the eight
fundamental emotions (rasas) in the late 1980s but also theorized the
interrelationship of the Natyashastra, rasic performance, Michael Gershon’s
neurobiological research, and the rasabox exercise in his 2001 article
“Rasaesthetics” published in The Drama Review.
In many ways, we can say that Schechner’s “play” or rendering of the
Ramnagar Ramlila has helped him chart the maps of performance studies,
reinforce his broad-spectrum perspective of performance, and further fertil-
ize his notion of the play in his performance studies project. His Ramlila
writing is an enactment of an in-depth and deeply-descriptive research and
exemplifies his active engagement and involvement in the so-called perfor-
mative turn—a paradigm shift in the social sciences and humanities that
impacts and involves such disciplines as anthropology, ethnography, archae-
ology, linguistics, ethnic studies, performance studies, and so on. As a result,
his Ramlila project changes performance knowledge frontiers and perfor-
mance research industries, reconfigures the global and the local, and prob-
lematizes the issues of intercultural universalism and (post)colonial justice.
Mela or Lila: A Critical Assessment

Schechner’s writings on the Ramlila of Ramnagar, often associated with his
interest in interculturalism from the 1980s onward, have come under
severe criticism. In Theatre and the World: Performance and the Politics of
Culture, Rustom Bharucha critiques Schechner’s performance discourse

about Ramlila and maintains that “religious festivals like the Ramlila cannot
be subsumed within the post-modern categories of thought adopted by
Schechner in his performance theory” (1993, p. 3). He goes on to point
out that Schechner puts too much emphasis on the environmental-
performative aspects and the social-economic functions of the festival at the
expense of the spiritual (1993, p. 29). As Bharucha elaborates, “Thousands
of Indians including villagers and vagrants, deprived of the basic necessities
of life, turn to the rituals in the Ramlila not merely for their theatrical vital-
ity (which should not be ignored), but for a spiritual guidance that invigo-
rates them to face their lot in life with some resilience and courage” (1993,
p 29). He concludes that Schechner’s “Ramlila is predominantly a mela,
and only fleetingly, a lila” (1993, p. 29). For Bharucha, Schechner’s per-
formance theory, for all its play and ambivalence, “upholds a methodology
and a vision of the world that must be termed ethnocentric” (1993, p. 3).
Moreover, his intercultural writing, Bharucha asserts, is a typical example
of self-preoccupation and self-glorification, which overpowers his represen-
tation of “other” cultures “by placing them in his own ‘map’ of post-mod-
ern performance” (1993, p. 28).
When we consider Bharucha’s and Schechner’s views together, each of
them seems to occupy an opposite pole of an intercultural spindle. While
Bharucha polemically vies for more focused study of intra-culturalism and
local culture on the one end, Schechner actively calls for more engagements
in intercultural theater, theory, method, and practice as well as firmly
endorses more transgressive and broad-spectrum approaches on the other.
In order to witness and verify what Schechner has described in his writings,
I embarked on my Ramnagar Ramlila pilgrimage and took part in the 2015
festival. Everyday around 5:00 p.m., I had to reach a specific site of the
Ramlila and then followed the flow of the crowd from site to site. While
sometimes I was sitting close to the theatrical action, most of the time I was
edged by the crowd to the side and forced to stand by the chorus, the
Ramayanis, at the very back of the performance space. As Anuradha Kapur
points out in her Actors, Pilgrims, Kings and Gods: The Ramlila of Ramnagar,
all the things one experiences are “the very stuff of the lila” and wherever
one happens to be one sees “some aspect of the performance because the
worlds of devotion, worship, business, and theatre interpenetrate” (p. 25).
My own personal observation coincides with Kapur’s viewpoint for what I
have witnessed testifies to the fact that the Ramnagar Ramlila is at once
about rasa (the juice, taste, flavor, and savoring of emotional involvement),
84 T.-C. SU
bhakti (devotional worship), rituals and healing, religious celebration and

lila, as well as about tourism and mela. The lila site is always surrounded by
the mela fairground; the lila time is constantly punctuated by the mela
break. It is quite evident that some features of the festival have become
prominent evidences to support Schechner’s “broad spectrum” scheme and
validate his postmodern performance theory. Nevertheless, it is equally true
that Schechner’s broad spectrum perspective and all-inclusive postmodernist
performance theory have been justified as a powerful framework through
which the Ramnagar Ramlila is presented and gets understood.
My thinking is that Bharucha’s critique is quite judgmental, if not fun-
damentalist. For me, Schechner’s attempt to capture the festival’s cosmic,
social, spatial, temporal, religious, and theatrical web is a balanced move,
combining the sacred and the secular, the mythic and the theatrical, and
the universal and the local all at the same time. His interpretation of the
Ramnagar Ramlila brings forth a special existence, which is not just a dou-
ble play shifting between lila and mela but a continuum between efficacy
and entertainment or a coexistence of at least four worlds: the world of the
divine and the spiritual, the world of ritual performance, the world of site-
specific theater, and the world of everyday life. That said, his conception
of the Ramlila is a lila–mela continuum, mixing devotion, meditation,
celebration, socializing, and tourism, “part religious obligation, part vaca-
tion” (Schechner 1993, p. 162).
Being a political activist and an heir of the social movements in the
1960s, Schechner is concerned about the past, the present, and the future
of the performing arts, and is always ready to engage other cultural tradi-
tions and initiate intercultural performances. He worked closely with
Victor Turner and followed in Jerzy Grotowski’s and Eugenio Barba’s
footsteps to India. He studied the Ramnagar Ramlila closely in order to
find out something more about “performance” from different perspec-
tives. Also, as is glaringly obvious, the notion of “play” plays an important
role in Schechner’s performance theory and features as the title of chapter
4, one of eight chapters in Performance Studies: An Introduction (Schechner
and Brady 2013). In that chapter—after attempting to define “What is
play?” and “What is playing?”—Schechner goes on to identify “some qual-
ities of playing” and list “seven ways to approach play.” Other than citing
major theorists’ interpretations of play, such as Clifford Geertz’s “deep
play,” Roger Caillois’ four types of playing, as well as the notions of paidia
and ludus, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s optimal state of inner experience—
flow, Johan Huizinga’s universal characteristics of play, Jacques Derrida’s
deconstruction, Nietzschean play, and so on, Schechner includes also the

notion of lila from the Indian philosophy and uses Ramlila to illustrate the
multi-layered implications of the concept. Thus, the play of maya–lila
plays an important role among all kinds of aforementioned notions of play.
Schechner uses the term lila to introduce the Indian world view that “the
gods in their lila made a world of maya,” an unsubstantial world of illu-
sion. He mentions the cycle play of Rama and discusses the Ramlila at
Ramnagar as one of the primal examples of play and playing, presenting
the playing of divine beings or cosmic forces. Schechner argues that “What
happens at Ramlila, Raslila, and Krishnalila is not make-believe. Different
orders of reality converge in the lilas” (Schechner and Brady 2013, p. 115).
For Schechner, the young boys, the svarupas (forms of gods), are not just
enacting the gods but also embodying them. They, under the play of
maya–lila, are at once the boys and the gods.
From the vision of the maya–lila world view, reality and experience are
mere networks of flexible constructions, dreams of dreams, unsettled rela-
tionships, transformations, and interactions. The Ramlila of Ramnagar,
irreducible in meaning and experience, is an extensive cycle of events that
offers its performers and spectators alike all sorts of ambivalences and real-
ities. Schechner draws a contrast between Western and Indian approaches
to playing and argues that “the Indian tradition of maya-lila rejects
Western systems of rigid, impermeable frames, unambiguous metacom-
munications, and rules inscribing hierarchical arrangements of reality”
(1993, p. 34).9 Schechner’s Ramlila project thus is exemplary of his critical
stance because, in addition to using the project to explore Indian folk
tradition that he values highly, his intention is to challenge and refashion
Western prevailing theatrical values. William S. Sax, in his article “The
Ramnagar Ramlila: Text, Performance, Pilgrimage,” endorses Schechner’s
view of multiple realities in the lilas and his exploration of the convergence
of text, performance, and pilgrimage in the Ramnagar Ramlila (1990,
p. 129–53). While maintaining that “lila is simultaneously a ‘theological,’
‘mythical,’ and ‘performative’ concept that has no apparent analogue
within the Judeo-Christian-Islamic traditions” (1990, p. 130), Sax empha-
sizes the fact that mnemis (faithful daily participants), sadhus, and occa-
sional spectators were all active participants because “the devotion and the
chanting of the mnemis, the presence and actions of the sadhus, and the
occasional, spontaneous acts of piety of more casual spectators, all contrib-
uted to the religiously charged atmosphere of the Ramlila” (1990, p. 149).
We can see that both Schechner and Sax identify with the doctrine of
86 T.-C. SU
“play” as developed in Hinduism. For both of them, the Ramnagar Ramlila

is at once a maya–lila and lila–mela performance where poetry, theater,
temple ritual, pilgrimage, tourism, and everyday life are inextricably
intertwined.
Again, in chapter 8, “Global and Intercultural Performances,” of
Performance Studies: An Introduction, Schechner conjures up Ramlila
again to illustrate tourist performances in the age of globalization.
Combining religious devotion and tourism, pilgrimage and sightseeing,
the Ramlila at Ramnagar, like many religious events in the world, is a mul-
tifaceted ritual. Take the Sandhya puja (daily prayer ritual) break (6–7:30
pm)—the time the Maharaja of Ramnagar performs his evening prayer—as
an example. During this time, as Schechner informs us, “the strict drama
of the Ramlila is relaxed into a mela: a great fair mingling the sacred and
the secular”—the sadhus dance and sing wildly; performers in costume
mingle with spectators; participants eat and gossip; food, toys, dyes, and
herbs are for sale; spectators approach the svarupas for darśan (seeing the
divine with reverence and devotion) by coming up and touching their feet
(1983, p. 270).
Even though Schechner is equipped with a postmodern mindset, for
me, he does not appropriate and represent the Ramnagar Ramlila in a
decontextualized way or without taking the particularities of a specific
historical condition into consideration. And he does not exploit Indian
ritual performance from a neo-colonialist or an ethnocentric position as
Bharucha is accusing. On the contrary, in his Ramlila writings, one even
can feel that Schechner “playfully” immerses himself in the flow and
vastness of the festival, enjoying himself in the constant shifts of lila and
mela mode. For example, in chapter 5—“Striding through the Cosmos:
Movement, Belief, Politics, and Place in the Ramlila of Ramnagar”—of
The Future of Ritual, Schechner writes about a special moment in which
time and space dilate during an extra-long three-hour Sandhya puja of
dasahara (remover of bad fate) after the defeat of Ravana: “Drumming
and singing swirl through the evening as nearby a sadhu dances so fiercely
that sweat soaks his saffron shirt from shoulders to hips (plate 5.14).
Where else does theatre, or religion, as generously dilate time and space so
that people can clearly, easily, and fully play their various roles?” (1993,
pp. 177–8). I find this passage quite memorable and moving.
To conclude, Bharucha often lashes out at intercultural artists/scholars
like Schechner for the reason that they fail to abide by “the ethics of rep-
resentation” (1993, p. 4). However, the problem is that when “the ethics
of representation” is used as a tenet of critique, it demands that we look at

the Ramnagar Ramlila through the perspective of authenticity or within
the framework of essentialism, because this ethics prescribes a set of attri-
butes which are necessary to examine the truthfulness and rightfulness of
Schechner’s Ramlila writing. Also, by taking Schechner to task for advo-
cating cultural tourism and for callous appropriation of Indian rituals as
Other, Bharucha immediately establishes himself as the rightful spokesper-
son of Indian culture and invests his discourse with an unchallengeable
but biased authority. Bharucha’s stand runs counter to Schechner’s vision
of performance that “performance is a wide range of activities” (1983,
p. xi), taking place “as action, interaction, and a relation” (2013, p. 30),
enacting an inter-event, exploring the liminal, and existing in-between. As
a broad spectrum and porous event, the Ramnagar Ramlila defies “the
ethics of representation” by allowing lila and mela to coexist, gods and
humans as well as the rich and the poor to mingle. The festival is impor-
tant to Schechner not because it fits squarely into his scheme of perfor-
mance theory, nor because it features prominently in several chapters of
his tour de force Performance Studies: An Introduction, but because it is
vast enough to extend beyond the norm of performance and occupy a vast
liminal space.
Epilogue: Play Is the Thing

Schechner is deeply impressed by the notion of lila as developed in
Hinduism. He knows full well that for the majority of Indian people for
most of the time, “reality is maya–lila” (2013, p. 15). It is particularly so
during the one-month Ramlila festival. The myth of Rama, Vishnu’s sev-
enth avatar, comes to life, and the gods take human forms and play in this
maya–lila world. Performers and spectators, pilgrims and tourists alike cel-
ebrate the physical presence of the gods amidst them. In Schechner’s ren-
dering, Ramlila an everyday reality mix. Lila and mela are not experienced
as two contradictory realities; rather, they intermingle. His approach to the
Ramnagar Ramlila is at once of the theological, the anthropological, and the
performative. In this chapter, I argue that what Schechner has experienced
and observed in the Ramnagar Ramlila did enrich his performance research
and broaden the horizon of the field of performance studies. He shows no
desire to master the mythopoetic Ramlila as “Other” culture, nor does he
completely ignore the festival’s spiritual, religious, and socio-cultural dimen-
sions. He is self-conscious that any fieldwork discourse runs the risk of gen-
88 T.-C. SU
eralization and tries his best to preserve the integrity and the multilayered
existence of the event. As he clarifies in “A Reply to Rustom Bharucha,”
“For all the hideous poverty in India there is a corresponding and extraor-
dinary strength and resourcefulness. In my writings over the years I have
ignored neither the poverty nor the resourcefulness” (1984, p. 251).
“Play” is the thing and interpretation is what counts. This chapter
focuses on examining Schechner’s “broad spectrum” interpretation of the
Ramlila of Ramnagar. Attention is especially paid to his “play” of the fes-
tival cycle, and his roles as a festival participant, a performing artist, a
theater scholar, and a border-crossing intercultural theater pioneer. Not
only does the focus of study observe the way he describes and presents his
experiences of the Ramlila of Ramnagar but also the way he formulates his
performance theory in the changing theoretical framework. Through his
accounts of Rama’s journey in the field of Ramnagar, Schechner has trans-
formed the Ramnagar Ramlila into a discursive journey. It is this fact of
Rama’s journey existing as a discursive event that manifests the efficacy of
this unique religious festival and testifies to the potency of intercultural
border-crossings, encounters, and interpretative plays.
Notes
1. In the field of theater and performance studies, there has been a prevailing
interest in India—especially in its culture, literature, ritual, philosophy, and
religion—in the last fifty years. Many Western theater practitioners—such as
Eugenio Barba, Jerzy Grotowski, Peter Brook, Phillip Zarrilli, Ariane
Mnouchkine, and Richard Schechner, to name only a few—have been drawn
to various forms of Indian theater and ritual performance. Many of them
went to India a number of times, embarking on their theater and religious
pilgrimages.
2. The articles written by Schechner, which deal with the Ramnagar Ramlila in
particular, are listed as follows: “Ramlila of Ramnagar: An Introduction” in
Performative Circumstances: From the Avant Garde to Ramlila (Calcutta:
Seagull Books, 1983), pp. 238–88; “Performance Spaces: Ramlila and Yaqui
Easter” in Performative Circumstances: From the Avant Garde to Ramlila
(Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1983), pp. 289–305; “Ramlila of Ramnagar” in
Between Theater and Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1985), pp. 151–211; “Striding Through the Cosmos: Movement,
Belief, Politics, and Place in the Ramlila of Ramnagar” in The Future of
Ritual: Writings on Culture and Performance (London: Routledge, 1993),
pp. 131–83.
3. The festive play is staged annually according to the Hindu calendar during
the auspicious period of Sharad Navratras, which marks the commencement
of the Autumn festive period, starting with the Dussehra festival and culmi-
nating on the festival of Vijayadashami day, which commemorates the vic-
tory of Rama over demon king Ravana. In 2015, the festival was held from
September 27 (Sunday) to October 27 (Tuesday). In 2016, it was celebrated
from September 8 (Thursday) to October 8 (Saturday).
4. Svarupas “means shape, form, appearance. Therefore when young brahman
boys playing the deities Rama, Lakshmana, Janaki, Bharata and Shatrughna
are called svarupas, it implies that they are in the shape, form and appearance
of god” (Kapur 2006, p. 12).
5. As Surinder Mohan Bhardwaj notes, “The number of Hindu sanctuaries in
India is so large and the practice of pilgrimage so ubiquitous that the whole
of India can be regarded as a vast sacred space organized into a system of
pilgrimage centers and their fields” (1973, p. 7).
6. Upanayana is a Hindu ritual of initiation, which marks the acceptance of a
student’s entrance to a school in Hinduism or spiritual knowledge by a
guru.
7. Schechner once wrote in his notebook: “I think about my initiation into
Hinduism. I am not cynical about it. And this lack of cynicism stirs contra-
dictions. Am I ‘betraying’ my Jewishness? I am attracted to Hindu
philosophy, especially the Bhagavad Gita, and what I know about the

Upanishads, and Hindu art, of course. And I want to go deeper—is this the
way?” (1993, p. 3).
8. Schechner explored the overlapping of theater and life in his “6 Axioms of
Environmental Theatre” and proposed a “continuum of theatrical events”
ranging from public occasions and demonstrations, through happenings
and environmental theater, to traditional theater (1994, p. xix–li).
9. For a detailed contrast chart between Western positivist and Indian maya–
lila approaches to playing, please consult page 35 of Schechner’s The Future
of Ritual.
Works Cited
Bhardwaj, S.M. 1973. Hindu Places of Pilgrimage in India. Delhi: Thomson.
Bharucha, R. 1993. Theatre and the World Performance and the Politics of Culture.
London: Routledge.
Geertz, C. 1973. Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture.
In The Interpretation of Cultures Selected Essays, 3–30. New York: Basic Books.
Goffman, E. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday.
Kapur, A. 2006. Actors, Pilgrims, Kings and Gods the Ramlila at Ramnagar.
Calcutta: Seagull Books.
90 T.-C. SU
Sax, William S. 1990. The Ramnagar Ramlila: Text, Performance, Pilgrimage.

History of Religions 30 (2): 129–153.
Schechner, R. 1983. Performative Ccircumstances: From the Avant-Garde to
Ramlila. Calcuta: Seagull Books.
———. 1984. A Reply to Rustom Bharucha. Asian Theatre Journal 1 (2):
245–253.
———. 1993. Striding Through the Cosmos: Movement, Belief, Politics, and
Place in the Ramlila of Ramnagar. In The Future of Ritual: Writings on Culture
and Performance, 131–183. London: Routledge.
———. 1994. Environmental Theater. New York: Applause Books.
———. 1996. Interculturalism and the Culture of Choice. In The Intercultural
Performance Reader, ed. P. Pavis, 41–50. New York: Routledge.
———. 2003. Performance Theory. New York: Routledge.
———. 2004. Performance Studies: The Broad Spectrum Approach. In The
Performance Studies Reader, ed. H. Bial, 7–9. New York: Routledge.
Schechner, R., and S. Brady. 2013. Performance Studies an Introduction. London:
Routledge.
Schechner, R., and L. Hess. 1977. The Ramlila of Ramnagar. The Drama Review
21 (3): 51–82.
Turner, V.W. 1974. Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human
Society. Ithaca: Cornell University.
CHAPTER 6
Korean Diaspora and the Moebius Strip:

Sung Rno’s Yi Sang Counts to Thirteen
and Transnational Avant-Garde Theater
Esther Kim Lee
Abstract This chapter discusses the production of Yi Sang Counts to

Thirteen. The play, written by Korean American playwright Sung Rno,
was directed by American director Lee Breuer and produced in Seoul,
Korea in 2000. Sung Rno presents a surrealistic play inspired by transla-
tions of the poems by Yi Sang, a Korean poet who died in 1937. The
production was heralded as a meaningful coming together of three exper-
imental artists of different generations and backgrounds. From Korean
American’s perspective, Lee examines the production in the context of
Korean as well as transnational avant-garde theater, where Sung Rno cre-
ates a theatrical imagination of modern Korea through linguistic and
visual poetry onstage.
Keywords Diaspora • Avant-Garde • Colonialism • Transnationalism

• Korea
E. K. Lee (*)
University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

92 E. K. LEE
On October 10, 2000, the play Yi Sang Counts to Thirteen by Sung Rno
became the first Korean American play to be produced in Korea. Directed
by the American theater director Lee Breuer, the play premiered at the
Seoul International Theater Festival, and it was later revived in 2009 in
Seoul at the historic Changgo Theater. The play is about the enigmatic
Korean poet Yi Sang, who is considered the first avant-garde writer in
Korea. In an interview with The Korean Theatre Review, Sung Rno
describes his play as an attempt to explore the mind of Yi Sang whose writ-
ing impressed him deeply (Son 2000, p. 88).1 When the play was pro-
duced in Korea, critics emphasized the significance of Lee Breuer’s
interpretation of Yi Sang’s story and did not give much attention to the
fact that the play was written by a Korean American or that it was the first
Korean American play to be produced in Korea. This paper examines
Rno’s Yi Sang Counts to Thirteen as a study of how modern Korean dias-
pora is made legible through transnational avant-garde theater with a
focus on what is excluded from that legibility.
The term diaspora signifies a sense of scattering and displacement as
well as adaptation and survival. At the same time, the diasporic experience
is dynamic and constantly changing. Social scientists Rhacel S. Parreñas
and Lok C. D. Siu write that being diasporic “requires continual repro-
duction of certain conditions and identifications” (Parreñas and Siu 2007,
p. 12). This chapter interprets Yi Sang Counts to Thirteen as a play about
the continual reproduction of the Korean diasporic conditions and identi-
fications. It argues that the critical reception of the play in Korea ignored
the diasporic perspective of the playwright and, instead, celebrated the
importance of having it directed by a major American director.
Yi Sang (1910–1937)
A self-described “genius,” Yi Sang was born in 1910, the same year that
Japanese colonization of Korea formally began. Yi was born Kim Hae
Kyong as the first of three children and grew up in Seoul.2 Although his
mother was an orphan, his father was educated and came from a middle-
class family. When his father was young, he worked in the printing office
of the King’s palace but lost three fingers in an accident. Images of physi-
cal dismemberment appear throughout Yi Sang’s writings, and many have
cited his father’s disability as a source. Disabled, Yi Sang’s father worked
as a barber as an adult and never regained the middle-class status. Partly
because of his parent’s hardship, Yi Sang was sent to live with his paternal
KOREAN DIASPORA AND THE MOEBIUS STRIP: SUNG RNO’S YI SANG… 93
uncle at the age of two. His uncle, who was the oldest son, was childless,
and he adopted Yi Sang to continue the paternal lineage of his family as
required by Confucius tradition. The move to his uncle’s house was appar-
ently traumatic, and Yi Sang would later write about the experience in a
nightmarish way. His biographers note that Yi demonstrated exceptional
talent in drawing and painting in school, and he wished to pursue art.
However, his uncle expected him to carry the responsibility of the oldest
son and find employment that was both prestigious and financially stable.
With his family’s pressure on his shoulders, Yi Sang enrolled in the
prestigious Kyung Sung Technical College at age sixteen to become an
architect. At the time, more than a decade into Japanese colonization, Yi
Sang had been educated in Japanese language at school. In his writings, he
lamented the experience of learning a language that his parents could not
understand. In 1929, he graduated first in his class with a degree in archi-
tecture and worked as a draftsman for the Japanese colonial government
(Kim, M. 2009, p. 12). It seems that, while attending college, he started
to use “Yi Sang” as a penname, as evidenced in the yearbook. According
to his sister, the name originated from misidentification started by Japanese
construction workers who thought Hae Kyong’s last name was Yi. “Sang”
means “mister” in Japanese, and instead of calling him “Kin-Sang” as Kin
is the Japanese pronunciation of Kim, they called him Yi Sang. Korean
definition of the word “yi sang” varies widely, and it can mean “strange,”
“ideal,” and “exceeding.” The exact reason for Yi Sang’s choice of pen-
name cannot be determined, but he began to publish under that name
starting in 1931. His poems were first published in architecture journals
such as Korea and Architecture, and his use of numbers, symbols, and
geographic shapes in his poems can be attributed to his background in
architecture and his choice of publication venue.
Yi Sang’s life took a drastic turn when he became ill with tuberculosis
and was forced to quit his job. While recovering at a hot spring resort he
met Geum Hong, a gisaeng or a courtesan, and fell in love. Yi Sang
returned to Seoul with Geum Hong, whom he credited for saving his life.
With the inheritance he received from his uncle, he opened a dabang, a tea
house, called Jebi (Swallow) with Geum Hong as the madam. At the time,
Geum Hong was twenty-one, and Yi Sang was twenty-three, although he
was said to look much older. The tea house attracted prominent and
emerging Korean writers and intellectuals, but it closed in two years due
to financial loss. During his tumultuous marriage with Geum Hong, Yi
Sang published poems and writings in newspapers and literary journals.
94 E. K. LEE
Some critics recognized the value of his experimental style, but most
found his poems scandalous and controversial.
After the destructive breakup with Geum Hong, Yi Sang married Byun
Dong Lim, who was the younger sister of a friend. After only three months
into the marriage, Yi Sang left for Tokyo by himself probably to experience
the city that was considered the cultural and intellectual mecca of Asia at
that time. He joined other Korean writers who were writing and working
in Japan, and it seems that he wanted to go to France after his stay in
Japan. The experimental writing style he was developing was influenced by
French Surrealism, and many writers saw Paris as a place that could give
them the opportunity to write more freely. However, after about four
months in Tokyo, Yi Sang was arrested and imprisoned charged with a
“Thought Crime.” His “crime” was being a Korean intellectual, who was
seen as suspicious and dangerous by the Japanese government. In prison,
his chronic tuberculosis worsened, and he died about a month later in a
hospital in Tokyo at the age of twenty-seven. He was cremated in Tokyo,
and his ashes were buried at Miari Cemetery in Seoul, although no one
knows exactly where.
Sung Rno and Yi Sang Counts to Thirteen

Sung Rno first encountered Yi Sang in Muae: A Journal of Transcultural
Production (1995), a journal that aimed to “present work that innova-
tively critiques and re-imagines aspects of Asian/diasporic cultures, societ-
ies, or agency, with a particular emphasis on Korea-related work and
issues.”3 As a US born Korean American who does not speak Korean flu-
ently, the only way he could read Yi Sang’s writings was through selected
translation. Rno was born in Minneapolis in 1967 to parents who came to
the US for graduate studies in the 1960s (Lei 2002, p. 292). As a college
student, Rno majored in physics and graduated with a BA from Harvard
University. But his desire for writing took him to a postmodern drama
class, which turned out to be an eye-opening experience. He received the
MFA in Creative Writing from Brown University, where he studied play-
writing with Paula Vogel. Like Yi Sang, Rno’s college education had more
to do with mathematics than with art, and both eventually moved toward
the integration of mathematical and structural concepts with poetic and
literary approaches.
Even before encountering Yi Sang, Sung Rno’s plays included many
references to numbers, physics, and machines. His first play, Cleveland
Raining (1995), features an old Volkswagen that can run on “emotional

loss” and float on water during a flood. Rno’s Gravity Falls from Trees
(1997) is about the shooting down of Korean Airlines Flight 007 in
August 1994 over Soviet airspace and features the character named Isaac
Newton. In the play, Rno makes a connection between human tragedy
and the physical law of gravity as an attempt to understand not only how
things happen but perhaps why they do. In wAve (2004), Rno dramatizes
an adaptation of the classical Greek tragedy Medea as a commentary on
hyper-mediatized twenty-first century and suggests that love may be
explained with Newton’s Scattering Theory of Waves and Particles from
quantum mechanics.
Rno states in the interview with Korean Theatre Review that reading Yi
Sang’s writings was “shocking” to him and describes them as mysterious
yet refreshing. To Rno, the writings were “free” to transcend the limits of
literature: “Yi Sang’s works are dark but fun, and fun yet there’s pain. I
was impressed with how darkness, humor, and pain could be expressed. I
have always wanted to deal with such expressions in my own writing” (Son
2000, p. 88). The play Yi Sang Counts to Thirteen was Rno’s attempt to
discover himself as a writer and to experiment with a non-realistic style of
playwriting. The play, in that sense, should be understood as an explora-
tion of how Yi Sang’s literary world can be represented onstage with char-
acters who are inspired by Yi Sang but created with Rno’s imagination.
The original script of Sung Rno’s Yi Sang Counts to Thirteen features
three characters: Blue, Red, and Green. According to the script, Blue
“could be the Korean Surrealist writer Yi Sang”; Red “could be his best
friend”; and Green “could be the woman both fall in love with. But these
are just guesses” (Rno 2012, p. 198). The conditional verb, “could,”
opens the possibility of the characters not being who they are described to
be. They could or could not be the character as described by Rno. Rno’s
character descriptions indicate from the onset that the play is not set in the
world of realism. What is certain, according to Rno, is the description of
Yi Sang, the Korean surrealist writer. The characters Blue, Red, and Green
may not or may not be real, but the people they may or may not represent
are. Yi Sang, his best friend, and the woman with whom both had relation-
ships were real people who lived in Korea in the early twentieth century.
The setting of the play underscores the layering of real and fictional
worlds and flattens the division between the 1930s and the early 2000s by
asking the audience to imagine a different kind of time and place. The script
indicates the time of the setting: “Imagine, in a mathematical- theatrical
96 E. K. LEE
sort of way, if you took the date 1937 and mapped it onto the present one.”
And the place is described: “Imagine a similar mathematical- theatrical
mapping in which Seoul circa 1937 was mapped onto New York City, with
all the memories and nuances of Mr. Yi Sang’s strange and twisted psyche”
(Rno 2012, p. 199). In the mathematical-theatrical setting, the characters
Blue, Green, and Red interact as friends, lovers, and even body parts.
Nothing dramatic happens in the play. The plot does not follow a linear
dramatic structure with characters that change over chronological time.
The play is structured with twenty short scenes, some of which are close
adaptations of Yi Sang’s poems and stories.
The play begins with Blue, who could be Yi Sang, staring at a burning
pot without realizing that there is no water inside. Green enters, points
out that there is no water in the pot, and pulls out a package of instant
ramen noodles. When Blue realizes that there is no water he gets worked
up and says “Someone stole my water!” (Rno 2012, p. 198). Blue throws
the noodles into the pot but decides to leave because he is hungry. When
he asks Green if she would like to go with him, she replies, “I have to
watch … There could be fire” (Rno 2012, p. 201). After Blue leaves,
Green pulls out a bottle of water from her pants and starts to drink “as if
she’s been dying of thirst,” as Rno notes in the stage direction. Just as she
starts to drink, Red walks in. According to the stage direction, Green
“plays along like Red is Blue, although there’s definitely something ‘off’
about him” (Rno 2012, p. 201). Red and Green pick up the conversation
Blue and Green had left off. Red is not happy that Green was hiding water
from him and asks for something to drink, perhaps a Diet Coke. Like
other experimental plays and what is commonly called the Theatre of the
Absurd, there is an internal logic to the absurd world of the play, and the
characters stay bounded by that internal logic.
Despite the confusion and conflation of Red and Blue in the first scene,
it is established in later scenes that Blue is indeed the poet Yi Sang, Green
is his lover/wife, and Red is his friend. Both men are in love with Green,
although they know she may not be the best woman for either of them.
The three characters are entangled in love, sex, violence, distrust, and
codependency, but they cannot escape from the world they find them-
selves in. The play ends with Blue talking directly to the audience and
telling the story of walking into Green’s room when she and Red were
together as lovers. Blue confesses to the audience that seeing them
together has affected and changed him. “My room has started to feel like
a prison. I try to write. I try to laugh. I try to taste. I try to remember. I
try to feel all sides of the world—that feeling when I had wings. That
indescribably delicious, joyous feeling” (Rno 2012, p. 244). But he real-
izes he has wings and laments that his poems are like “water slipping
through” his fingers. The play ends with Blue holding out his hand asking
the audience for a cigarette (Rno 2012, p. 245).
The main narrative structure of the play is based on Yi Sang’s short
story Nalgae (Wings), which is considered one of the poet’s signature
works. The story describes the poet’s life as a decrepit writer living with a
wife who has many secrets and lovers. The poet knows that the men who
visit his wife pay money to be with her, and he suspects that she may have
tried to kill him with sleeping pills. At the end of the story, the poet wishes
to grow wings and fly once more. The core story of Yi Sang Counts to
Thirteen is a familiar telling of a triangle love story about a man who is
betrayed by both his wife and best friend. But as a surrealist play, it reveals
a dimension of reality that exists in the subconscious and the unspoken.
Surrealist plays dramatize what cannot be expressed in realistic plays, and
what is important is not what is said and done onstage but what is implied
or left unexplained in silence and inaction. The world of a surrealist play is
like a dream state in which events and people do not make logical sense,
but the emotional and physical reaction to what unfolds is often more
intense and vivid than the conscious and rational reaction.
Like other surrealist plays, Yi Sang Counts to Thirteen warrants multiple
levels of interpretation which can range from a study of Blue as an Icarus
figure to a study of the characters as a commentary of Japanese colonialism
of Korea (Klasfeld 2001). For instance, critics have interpreted Yi Sang’s
Wings as a story of the Korean subject who is cheated and destroyed by
Koreans who sympathized with the Japanese colonizers, and the same
interpretation can be applied to Rno’s play. In fact, Lee Breuer’s interpre-
tation of the play in the 2009 revival focused on the historical context and
emphasized the trauma experienced by Koreans under the Japanese rule.
Lee Breuer and Sung Rno in Seoul

Lee Breuer is considered one of the top three directors in American avant-
garde theater and is recognized worldwide for his intercultural experi-
ments. He is known for collaborating with theater artists around the world
and for creating new types of theater with each project. He has received
almost all the major awards and recognitions a theater artist can receive in
a lifetime, and he continues to create works that “leave you in a daze,” as
98 E. K. LEE
one critic has put it. His work has been described as strange, singular, and
wondrous. It is perhaps not surprising that he was drawn to Sung Rno’s
work. Rno wrote Yi Sang Counts to Thirteen around 1998 and further
developed it in a workshop at Mabou Mines, a company co-founded by
Breuer. According to Rno, Lee Breuer came to watch the workshop Rno
directed and asked for a meeting.
Sung Rno, who was and still is a relatively unknown playwright in the
Korean theater industry, wanted to emphasize the broader topics of art and
existentialism from the perspective of a Korean American playwright.
However, Rno’s intention and perspective were not legible to the Korean
theater industry. Korean producers, critics, and audiences mostly focused
on the fact that a world-famous director of avant-garde theater was inter-
ested in Yi Sang. Marketing materials, program notes, reviews, and newspa-
per articles about the play highlight Lee Breuer’s name first and foremost
and mention Sung Rno as a side note. Sung Hee Choi, a theater scholar in
Korea, makes a regretful observation when she describes her first meeting
with Sung Rno in 2000. She writes, “The production [of Yi Sang Counts to
Thirteen] was noticed not because of the playwright’s ‘homecoming’ but
because it was directed by Lee Breuer, one of the top three experimental
theatre directors from the U.S.” (Choi 2012, p. 267). When Rno was cited
by critics, his education at Harvard University and Brown University were
inevitably noted, but no details were given to his dramatic oeuvre. If the
prestige represented by Rno’s Ivy League education was welcomed as a
successful story of a Korean immigrant family, Lee Breuer’s prestige
stemmed from his reputation as an avant-garde director. The prestige
embodied by Breuer is what James Harding calls “the immense cultural
prestige” that comes “when critics designate the marginalized as avant-
garde” (Harding 2010, p. 4). Even though Rno can be categorized as an
avant-garde playwright, the cultural prestige granted to Breuer by Korean
critics and audience was not extended to the Korean American playwright.
After the play was presented at the Seoul International Theater Festival
on October 10, 2000, Rno directed the US premiere on August 10, 2001
at the New York International Fringe Festival, where it received a Best
Overall Production Award. In 2009, when the play was revived in Seoul at
the historic Changgo Theater, many changes were made. The revival was
translated by Ahn Kwang-Jo who also produced the play, and with the
translation, the script changed significantly. First, the revised script includes
the fourth character who is a narrator and the poet Yi Sang. The play is
presented as the narrator’s internal imagination (Kim, K. 2009). Breuer
also made key directorial changes and made production more theatrical
and literal with design elements and acting choices. Breuer emphasized Yi
Sang’s troubled life under the oppression of Japanese colonialism and
directed the play as a story about the poet as a real person for the Korean
audience. What was missing in the 2009 Seoul production was Rno’s orig-
inal intention, which was expressed most clearly in the New York produc-
tion he directed. The gap between what was originally intended by the
playwright and the translated interpretation produced in 2009 in Seoul
was wide, and the Korean American perspective was absent in the critical
reception in Korea.
The “Mathematical–Theatrical” Mapping

and Transnational Avant-Garde Theater
I offer an analysis of the play in this section as an attempt to close that gap,
interpret the playwright’s perspective of Yi Sang, and articulate Rno’s
approach to avant-garde theater. As Rno has stated, Yi Sang Counts to
Thirteen is his exploration of Yi Sang’s mind. As the script indicates, the
play is a “mathematical–theatrical mapping” of 1937 Seoul and the turn of
the twenty-first century New York City. The play includes references to
numbers, including thirteen in the title and three characters. But the most
central mathematical reference is the Moebius strip, which functions like
another character in the play. As Red explains in scene 4, the Moebius strip
is created by twisting a strip of paper and connecting the ends. It creates
one surface from two, and there is no endpoint. In scene 4, Red moves in
a way that “looks like bad modern dance.” When Blue asks him what he is
doing, Red answers, “I’m trying to feel what it’s like to be a Moebius strip”
(p. 207). In scene 14, Blue plays with a Moebius strip, trying to “feel” what
it is like to be a Moebius strip. In “disgust” he breaks the strip and declares,
“There. You are no longer Moebius. I have freed you from the bonds of
Moebius … ness … ity. You are now a free strip of paper. Go forth, be
merry, and prosper” (p. 226). This god-like declaration of freedom is
granted to the strip of paper, but the characters are fated to live out their
function both theatrically and mathematically. Such fate is confirmed again
when Red tells Blue that the three of them are each a function in a math-
ematical equation: “It’s like you’re one function, she’s another function,
and the two of you can be graphed. See, it’s all very rational” (p. 227). And
of course, the names of the characters in primary colors emphasize their
reductive and abstract function bound by mathematical and natural laws.
100 E. K. LEE
If that law is the Moebius strip, which can be expressed in a mathemati-

cal equation, which world are the characters living in? First, we can conjec-
ture a kind of twisted mirroring effect. According to Rno, the setting of
the play should express Yi Sang’s “strange and twisted psyche” (p. 199).
In other words, the play can be interpreted as not only a play about the
famed poet but also about how he influenced the Korean American play-
wright, and it can be read as Rno’s mirroring of Yi’s work. The metaphor
of mirror occurs throughout Yi Sang’s poems, and in one of his most
famous poems, titled Mirror, the poet compares his “I” to the mirror’s
“I.” Here is a truncated version translated by Walter K. Lew as it appears
in the journal Muae.
Mirror
In a mirror there is no sound
There is probably no world so quiet
In the mirror also are my ears
Two pathetic ears are there unable to hear my words
In the mirror I’m left-handed
Lefty that can’t take my handshake—who doesn’t know how to shake hands
Because of the mirror I can’t touch the mirror’s I but if it were not a
mirror
How could I’ve ever done something like meet myself in a mirror […]
(Lew 1995, p. 85)
Sung Rno and Yi Sang are like the two “I”s who cannot shake hands,
divided by space and time. While the mirror has been a metaphor of the-
ater for centuries, Rno’s use of the mirror as inspired by Yi Sang is not
merely for the stage to reflect reality. In the world of the Moebius strip,
the mirroring is twisted like two parallel universes that are connected.
One way to illustrate the twisted reflection is through the examination
of how mundane objects and actions are dramatized. In the first scene, as
described earlier in this chapter, Blue wants to make ramen but lacks water.
Boiling water to make instant ramen at home is one of the most common
sights in Korea and perhaps a quintessential “Korean” mundanity. To give
another example, in scene 7, Green pours a can of Diet Coke into a cup in
an elaborate and hyper-sexualized ceremony. Green makes the mundane
task of pouring a soft drink into something similar to a Japanese tea cere-
mony. According to the Korean American theater scholar Ju Yon Kim, the
mundane, or what she calls the “embodied everyday,” is not a neutral term
(Kim, J. 2015, p. 19). Rather, the mundane can be made ambiguous
depending on the context. Blue’s attempt to boil a pot of ramen, a mun-
dane task, takes on a different meaning when the audience sees that his
wife Green has been hiding the water he needs to cook the noodles. In
extending Ju Yon Kim’s notion of the mundane, I would describe the
ramen scene as a moment of the twisted mundane. As I will explain fur-
ther, the twisted mundane is a key to understanding both Yi Sang’s writ-
ings and Sung Rno’s plays.
According to Myong-Hee Kim, a translator of Yi Sang’s poems in
English, the poet was in a “cultural vortex”: “the poet was pulled by the
old ways, in which a man wore his hair long and bunned up on top of his
head, and the new, in which a man wore short hair and Western clothing.
‘With my tuition my parents paid, I only learned words they don’t under-
stand,’ he wrote. This sense of himself existing at a juncture of history, or
not fitting in, of being lost, of ‘lostness’ permeates his work” (p. 19).
From the quotidian act of wearing hair in a certain way to everyday speech,
Yi Sang and the entire country of Korea had their lives twisted, inter-
rupted, and destroyed. Like the ramen noodle that burns in a waterless
pot, Koreans under the colonial rule of Japan had their mundane lives
violently taken away. The tragedy is worsened by the fact that it is Green,
the Korean wife, who is withholding the water. When Blue suggests that
he can “turn the pot off,” Green replies, “You can’t do that to noodles.
Reverse direction on them like that. Bad karma” (p. 201). Green is com-
plicit in interrupting Blue’s wish for a mundane and normal life, and she
implies that things that are set in course cannot be reversed. Blue gives up
and leaves the room, an act that reinforces his “lostness.”
Yi Sang lived a life in which the mundane could not be experienced, and
he was in a constant state of displacement. He was never at home both liter-
ally and metaphorically. The sense of displacement is dramatized by Sung
Rno both as a way to reflect Yi Sang’s life but also a way to represent
abstractly what I call the Korean diasporic condition. Just as Yi Sang’s life
was made strange at his own home in the early twentieth century, Sung
Rno tells us that the Korean American life is just as strange, twisted, and
displaced. When Blue tells the audience, “My room has started to feel like
a prison,” these words may be spoken by Yi Sang, Sung Rno, or any other
diasporic subject who experiences the loss of everyday normalcy in which
their room starts to feel like a prison. The theatrical–mathematical mapping
Rno dramatizes in his play is a commentary on modern Korean diaspora,
which includes his own sense of displacement and loss of mundanity.
102 E. K. LEE
Conclusion
I speculate that when he went to Korea to see his play produced, Sung
Rno found himself in his own Moebius strip. Perhaps like Yi Sang, Rno
never felt at home in the country he was born in or in the country his
parents taught him to call his “mother country.” The first Korean American
playwright’s play to be produced in Korea was upstaged by Lee Breuer
whose fame and reputation in Korea made it possible for the young play-
wright’s play to receive publicity in the first place. Overshadowed by the
“cultural prestige” of Breuer’s avant-garde theater, Rno’s own surrealist
play was not interpreted from the playwright’s perspective. While the play
should be read as a Korean American play about a modern diasporic con-
dition with transnational implications, the productions in Seoul focused
narrowly and literally on the tragic life of Yi Sang and the immediate his-
tory that affected him.
As an example of transnational avant-garde theater, the play is about
the Korean poet Yi Sang, who was influenced by French Surrealism of the
early twentieth century, and the poet’s story was imagined by Sung Rno,
an experimental playwright of Korean descent living in New York City.
Adding to the layers of transnational movements between different times
and places, the productions in Seoul were directed by Lee Breuer, who is
known as an innovator of intercultural avant-garde theater. Many things
have been gained from this instance of transnational avant-garde theater,
and Rno’s play made it possible for a Korean American play to be pro-
duced in Korea. While such gains should be fully acknowledged and
underscored, it is equally important to remember what was lost. Namely,
the Korean American perspective of the diasporic condition was not made
legible in the Seoul productions of Yi Sang Counts to Thirteen. Rno’s
avant-garde experimentation as a Korean American and Korean diasporic
playwright was not recognized in a production that privileged a different
kind of transnational avant-garde theater. Rno wrote a play about the tem-
poral and spatial conflation of Seoul circa 1937 and New York City of his
time and found inspiration from a poet who felt like a stranger in his own
house, but the production in Seoul was received as a notable illustration of
Breuer’s avant-garde theater. Like his characters, Sung Rno was caught in
a twisted world in which his “homecoming” was not the one he had imag-
ined it to be.
Notes
1. All translation of texts from Korean to English in this chapter are by the
author unless noted otherwise.
2. Kim is the surname. The biography of Yi Sang is drawn from Kim, M.
(2002, p. 16).
3. From the back inside cover, Muae: A Journal of Transcultural Production
(1995), New York: Kaya Production.
Works Cited
Choi, S. 2012. (Per)Forming at the Threshold: Diasporic Imagination in Korean
American Drama. Cross-Cultural Studies 26: 249–272.
Harding, J. 2010. Cutting Performances: Collage Events, Feminist Artists, and the
American Avant-Garde. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Kim, M. 2002. Crow’s Eye View: The Infamy of Lee Sang, Korean Poet. Washington,
DC: The World Works.
Kim, K. 2009. Wit and Paradox: Lee Breuer Directs Yi Sang Counts to Thirteen.
Performance & Theory 34: 228–235.
Kim, J. 2015. The Racial Mundane: Asian American Performance and the
Embodied Everyday. New York: New York University Press.
Klasfeld, A. 2001. Yi Sang Counts to 13 and Often I Find That I Am Naked.
[online] Available at: http://www.theatermania.com/new-york-city-theater/
reviews/08-2001/yi-sang-counts-to-13-and-often-i-find-that-i-am-na_1590.
html. Accessed 31 May 2017.
Lei, D. 2002. Sung Jung Rno. In Asian American Playwrights: A Bio-Bibliographical
Critical Sourcebook, ed. M. Liu, 292–297. Westport: Greenwood Press.
Lew, W., trans. 1995. Portfolio: Yi Sang (1910–1937). Muae: A Journal of
Transcultural Production 71: 74–149.
Mabu Mimes. Lee Breuer. [online] Available at: http://www.maboumines.org/
company/artistic-directors/lee-breuer-2/. Accessed 31 May 2017.
Parreñas, R., and L. Siu, eds. 2007. Asian Diasporas: New Formations, New
Conceptions. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Rno, S. 2012. Yi Sang Counts to Thirteen. In Seven Contemporary Plays from the
Korean Diaspora in the Americas, ed. E. Lee, 195–245. Durham: Duke
University Press.
Son, H. 2000. Interview with Playwright Sung Rno, Author of Yi Sang Counts to
Thirteen. The Korean Theatre Review 292: 88–89.
CHAPTER 7
Noda Hideki’s The Bee and Being

Transnational/Intranational
Yoshiko Fukushima
Abstract This chapter discusses the Japanese leading playwright/director/

actor Noda Hideki’s play of the macabre, The Bee. The play was co-written
by Noda Hideki and the Irish playwright Colin Teevan inspired by the
Japanese novelist Tsutsui Yasutaka’s short story. Its English version was pre-
miered at Soho Theatre, London in 2006 by Noda with British actors, and
the all-Japanese cast version at Theatre Tram, Tokyo in 2007. In 2012, the
play made a world tour including New York City, London, Hong Kong and
Tokyo. Noda, now known as intercultural performance facilitator in Japan,
began his intercultural collaboration in the Japanese version of The Red
Demon in 1996, performing with the British Actor Angus Barnette in the
role of the Red Demon. Noda went a step ahead of the older style of inter-
culturalization, not just becoming borderless by theatre but examining
memories, history and the cruelty of human beings using the light, playful
and fast-paced theatrical style, atypical of Japanese theatre. The chapter
investigates how Noda uses a globalized technique of interculturalization to
explore transnational issues by repeating the production of his plays in
Y. Fukushima (*)
University of Hawaii at Hilo, Hilo, HI, USA

106 Y. FUKUSHIMA
ultiple locations both in Japan and in the world and questions why his play
m
still preserves the “very Japanese” elements as described by the audiences
overseas.
Keywords Hideki Noda • Contemporary Japanese theater

• Transnational theater • Transgender theater • Translation
Introduction
The Bee (2006), inspired by Japanese novelist Tsutsui Yasutaka’s (1934–)
short horror story “Mushiriai” (Plucking at Each Other, 1976), was co-
authored by the Japanese playwright/director/actor Noda Hideki (1955–)
and the Irish playwright Colin Teevan (1968–). World audiences who saw
the 2012 reproduction described the play as “very Japanese,” regardless of
its universal themes, such as human cruelty and callousness (Noda et al.
2012, p. 40). Noda speculated that foreign audiences might have associated
his play with the violent image of Japanese pop culture. Tsutsui, who saw
both English language and Japanese language versions in Tokyo in 2012,
regarded the English version as more “neutral” because of the two protago-
nists’ transgender and transnational performances (Tsutsui 2012, p. 7).
Staging the two versions of The Bee is a captivating experiment to test
the transnational and “intranational” aspect innate in the play.1 According
to Japanese theater critic Ō tori Hidenaga, “being intranational” is “reveal-
ing the invisible border that we put around the nation [and] reaching to
differences inside the nation” (Ō tori 2012, p. 11). Intranational theater
recounts conflict inside the border where people live with hostility and
destruction. Meanwhile, transnational theater generates a variety of posi-
tive derivatives—such as cultural exchange, post-modernization, global-
ization, and intercultural collaboration—that deepen understanding of
complexity of one’s own and others’ culture and history.
This chapter investigates how Noda has explored transnational and intra-
national issues by staging two versions of The Bee and made progressed a step
further than Peter Brook’s Mahabarata style of interculturalization. The
author observed the dress rehearsal of the English version at the Setagaya
Public Theatre’s rehearsal room and attended the production of the Japanese
version in 2007 in Tokyo. The author also examined the recording of the
three productions: the English and Japanese versions (at Theatre Tram,
Tokyo, June 26–July 29, 2007) and the Japanese version (at Suitengu Pit,
Tokyo, 24 February to 11 March 2012) (Courtesy of NODA MAP).
NODA HIDEKI’S THE BEE AND BEING… 107
From Tokyo to London, and then to Tokyo

Noda began his theatrical career as the leader of the student troupe Yume
no Yūminsha (Dreaming Bohemian) (1976–92), which gained popularity
among young audiences due to the energetic style of performance that
included speedy dialogues and wordplay. The turning point was the
Emperor Showa’s illness in 1988. It raised a question for Noda—Why did
his young audiences have “no criticism against the Japanese emperor sys-
tem”? (Ō tori and Noda 2001, p. 113). Similar to Japanologist Norma
Field’s Japanese mother, Noda’s audience “believed the benign diagnoses
assiduously disseminated by the media … and made no attempt to recon-
cile [their] sympathy with the tenets of an antimilitarist socialism” (Field
1993, p. 19). After the death of the emperor, they just “thought of the
emperor as a sweet, vulnerable old man who reminded them of a teenage
idol who had recently committed suicide” (p. 24). This experience moti-
vated Noda to contrive a new transnational and intranational approach for
his audiences.
In the late 1980s, Noda’s troupe participated in the Edinburgh
International Festival with Nokemono kitarite (Decent of the Brutes, 1987)
and Hanshin (Half Gods, 1990) and the New York International Festival
of Arts with Suisei no shisha Jı̄kufurı̄to (Comet Messenger Siegfried, 1988).
Not all reviews were positive. The Village Voice’s theater critic Michael
Feingold regarded Noda’s troupe as being “just as another [1960s] old-
style celebration of teen age ant-establishment attitude, bright, and ener-
getic in the old way, also silly and mindless in the old way” (Feingold
1988). The main reason for failure was Noda’s use of untranslatable
Japanese wordplay. After the second Edinburgh Festival, Noda wrote that
foreign audiences could accept “neither traditional nor authentic” theater
from Japan (Hasebe 1993, p. 260). Participating in foreign productions
made him mull things over how to leave the “family-like community” built
by his audiences (Yomiuri Newspaper, Evening Edition, March 13, 1992).
After the dissolution of his troupe, Noda went to London to study
theater for a year. He joined the Lecoq method workshops2 by the Théâtre
de Complicite and Phillipe Gaulier and observed Simon McBurney at
Complicite giving the same directions to his actors as Noda done to his
actors: “Being playful!” “Light foot!” “Rhythm is important!” (Noda and
Ō tori 2006, p. 111). While performing with actors of different races and
ethnicities, learning their concerns about discrimination, racism and pov-
erty, and witnessing McBurney’s Marxist perspectives resonant with his
108 Y. FUKUSHIMA
audiences, Noda began thinking how he could transfer such an ideological

stance into Japan. Coincidentally, the Japan of the mid-1990s was experi-
encing dark domestic and international events—the Great Hanshin
Earthquake, the religious cult Aum Shinrikyō ’s Sarin Attack, the wars in
the Middle East and the Balkan, and the 9/11 attacks. The ominous
media images made their way into the Japanese living room and Noda’s
theater as its materials.
Noda’s new base, NODA MAP (1993–) adopted a dual production
system—regular productions at large theaters and experimental produc-
tions in small spaces called Extra Series (bangai kōen). Noda’s two trans-
national/intracultural plays—The Red Demon and The Bee—were both
created in a London workshop in the Extra Series. The Red Demon com-
prised four versions—Japanese (1996, 2004), Thai (1997, 1998, 1999,
2004), English (2003, 2004), and Korean (2005)—in Osaka, Tokyo,
Bangkok, London, and Seoul respectively. In the Japanese version, three
Japanese actors performed with British actor Angus Barnett in 1996 and
Austrian actor Johannes Flaschberger in 2004 in the role of the Red
Demon. Meanwhile the English version was created through the four
workshops held in London between 1998 and 2002.3 By contrast, The Bee
toured twice, 2006–7 and 2012. The 2006 premier was the English ver-
sion at Soho Theatre in London; then, the same English version and the
new Japanese version were produced at Theatre Tram in Tokyo. The 2012
world tour, with different casts, travelled to New York, London, Hong
Kong, and five Japanese cities. Noda developed the script by performing
the rough translation of Tsutsui’s short story with actors in the first two
London workshops. Noda then added his original scenes into it. Co-author
Teevan attended the third workshop and wrote the final script with Noda,
exchanging the manuscript repeatedly.4 In London, Noda encountered
collaborators for his physical theater “born at the crossing of body and
poetry” (Noda 2006, pp. 20–1). The London production of The Bee went
smoother than that of The Red Demon, because Noda was already known
in London’s theater community. Noda’s English language skills had
improved over ten years, which had made him feel comfortable directing
English-speaking actors (Senda 2012a, p. 8).
Noda began reading Tsutsui when a member of his high school theater
club mentioned to him Noda’s similarity to Tsutsui (Tsutsui and Noda
2007). The first production of the Extra Series—Shi (Death, 1995)—was
based on Tsutsui’s “Hashiru Toriteki” (The Sumo Wrestler Trainee) treat-
ing a sumo wrestler’s relentless chase for the two men to their death.
“Hashiru Toriteki” and The Bee’s original “Mushiriai” were both compiled
in the collection Metamorufosesu Guntō (Metamorphosis Archipelago,

1976). Noda’s idea of using “Mushiriai” was conceived when hearing the
US President George W. Bush’s speech after 9/11. He felt as if Tsutsui’s
world had become reality and thought that Tsutsui’s surrealistic horror
might go down well with the British audiences enjoying Monty Python’s
grotesque humor (Uchida 2009, p. 33).
The Bee is about Ido, a “salaryman” (Japanese businessman) who fears
bees. When he comes home, his wife and six-year-old son have been taken
hostage by an escaped convict, Ogoro. The insensitive TV reporters sur-
round Ido and ask him to perform the role of tragic father in front of the
camera. Frustrated by the police’s ineptness, Ido suggests the detective,
Dodoyama, that he should meet Ogoro’s stripper wife and ask her to tell
Ogoro to release his wife and child. But the negotiation fails. Ido steals a
gun belonging to Anchoku, a policeman, and takes Ogoro’s wife and son
hostage. The two kidnappers, Ido and Ogoro, begin cutting a finger off
each other’s son and wife. As Ogoro’s son and wife die, Ido begins cutting
his own fingers and is killed by bees.
Noda directed this macabre play in both the transnational English ver-
sion and the mononational Japanese version. Both versions were similar
but, as will be discussed, gave the two different sides of the tale.
The English Version (2007)

In the English version, the British actress Kathryn Hunter plays the role of
Ido. Three other actors, one Japanese and two British, appear in multiple
roles: Noda plays Ogoro’s wife and Reporter; Tony Bell plays Dodoyama,
TV Director, King of Chef, and Reporter; and Glyn Pritchard plays Anchoku,
Ogoro, Ogoro’s son, and Reporter. The speedy transformation of the char-
acters played by the same actor weakens the identity of each character.
Hunter’s Ido and Noda’s Ogoro’s wife are transgender performances.
Hunter, Bell, and Pritchard play the roles of Japanese transnationally.
The stage is kept dimly lit. The orange-red floor, made of shiny acrylic
material, has the color of blood. The stage is divided into the front and
the back by a two-way mirror. The mirror separates the inside of Ogoro’s
house where the hostages are from the outside where the police and the
media are huddled together. The mirror turns transparent when the
actors play past events in flashback and current events outside the house.
Thus, the audiences are able to see the multiple-layered reality—the
happy smile of the chef on the TV cooking show accelerates Ido’s cruelty,
for example.
110 Y. FUKUSHIMA
The English version displays a blurring of gender, race, and class i dentities.
Inside Ogoro’s house, there is Edward Said’s “complex hegemony” of the
Occident and the Orient (Said 1979, p. 5). The only Japanese actor, Noda,
appears in a female role and confronts three British actors in a male role,
which represents the masculine Occident dominating the feminine Orient in
three ways. First, there is a gender switch of the two protagonists—a female
Ido wearing dark-colored male business suits and a male Ogoro’s wife in a
short black slip dress and flower-patterned gown. Second, there is an ethnic-
ity switch with a Japanese “salaryman” being played by a British female actor
while a Japanese wife is played by a Japanese male actor. Lastly, British Ido
is from the elite class while Japanese Ogoro is from the lower class. The
police and the media are all males in business suits representing white-collar
workers (except for undercover Anchoku and jail escapee Ogoro). Portrayed
as exotic, sensual, and subservient, Ogoro’s wife doubles the Orientalist
image of the nationality-unidentified Asian stripper in the West.5 Threatened
by Ido with the gun, she dances a seductive striptease to the 1970s hit song
adapted from Khatchaturian’s “The Sabre Dance” with Orientalist motifs.
Hunter’s perfect actress-trained British English is contrasted with Noda’s
English with a Japanese accent. Hunter’s voice is articulate and powerful
while Noda’s high-pitched tone is soft and gentle. Noda’s acting is not so
much stylized as kabuki’s onnagata but portrays femininity using feminine
posture and timid, downcast eyes. Noda’s female role contains the codified
beauty of onnagata.
In The Bee, a number of stage props are created in the kabuki’s “mitate”
style—the way of using a substitution resembling the intended object
(Nagatsuka 2012, p. 44; Uchida 2012, pp. 32–3). It originates from the
“ludic spirit” of the visually- (and musically-) oriented “manga discourse”
in Japanese traditional literary and performing genres (Fukushima 2003
[2005], pp. 61–2). It was transhistorically identified as the major feature
of the 1980s shō gekijō . The Bee leaves behind Noda’s 1980s trademark,
wordplay; instead, playing is achieved with mitate props, such as linked
rubber bands as substitutes for police line tape, news reporters’ micro-
phones, and soba noodles. Ido, trapped among three reporters’ rubber
band microphones, finds rubber band police tape around his house. At the
table outside, Dodoyama sharpens pencils using an electric pencil sharp-
ener, whose bee-buzzing noise irritates Ido. Dodoyama’s pencils become
chopsticks when eating soba and dumbbells when exercising. Inside, Ido
plays a monster with long nails and fangs for Ogoro’s son, holding pencils
in the hand and the mouth. The son’s fingers are pencils while the wife’s
fingers are chopsticks. The ominous sound of snapping pencils and
chopsticks echoes in the auditorium. At night, a craft paper roll becomes
a pillow, and its pulled-out paper a bed sheet. Ido tears off a piece of paper
from the roll to make an envelope for the cut-off fingers.
Noda’s playing is also found in the use of stage space. When Anchoku
drives Ido to Ogoro’s house wearing black sunglasses, the two chairs on
stage right become their car seats. Anchoku’s erratic driving is mimed by
Ido. He sings a 1970s Japanese cabaret commercial song in Japanese and
tells Ido a sexist joke: “Women! Goddamned bitches! / Here, why have
they got legs? / So they can walk from the bedroom to the kitchen” (Noda
and Teevan 2006, p. 31). Ido politely bows to Ogoro’s wife with his hands
on the floor and asks for her help, but she rejects him. What irritates Ido is
not the wife’s rejection but Anchoku’s sexist attitude towards her. Losing
his temper, Ido hits Anchoku with the baseball bat and steals his gun. Noda
does not use mitate for props associated with violence—such as the base-
ball bat, the gun, and the knife.
Anchoku, Ogoro, and Ogoro’s son are played by the same actor, Glyn
Pritchard. Pritchard’s rapid transformation is stunning. When Ido and
Ogoro’s wife remove an unconscious Anchoku from the house, only his
shoes are thrown offstage. Anchoku remains on the floor, grabs the base-
ball cap on the paper roll son, puts it on his head and transforms himself
into Ogoro’s son. Pritchard acts while sitting and crawling on the floor
when playing the role of the child. When the son transforms into his father,
he takes off his cap, picks up a phone receiver and stands up to talk with
Ido. This transformation technique accentuates family love by fortifying
the father–son bonding. Ogoro is a good father who never forgets his loo-
kalike son’s birthday present. Ido loves his son deeply, too. When Ido hears
his son’s screams of pain over the phone, he shouts in Japanese “Yamete!”
(Stop!) as if possessed by his son’s spirit. When Ido cuts Ogoro’s son’s
finger, Ogoro’s wife brings a music box for him, which plays the music of
Swan Lake. Like Swan Lake’s Siegfried, Ido cannot save his loved ones. The
motherly love of Ogoro’s wife is demonstrated by her staying in the house
for her son. Her son always sleeps beside her—in the Japanese style of chil-
drearing, mothers often sleep with their six-year-old child.6
To celebrate first cutting Ogoro’s son’s finger, an intoxicated Ido
dances to “My Way”—a very popular karaoke song for Japanese middle-
aged “salarymen”—while Ogoro’s wife and son crawl in anguish on the
112 Y. FUKUSHIMA
floor lit red with stage lights. The song reduces their workplace stress and
celebrates their accomplishment. Noda reveals an eerie parody of daily
rituals of a salaryman amidst the violence of the kidnapping. There is a
crossover of the two families in Ido’s mind. The husband and the wife
wake up; the husband goes to the bathroom to wash and shave his face;
the wife irons his jacket with the tin pot (by mitate), puts it on the hus-
band, and cooks breakfast for him; while eating breakfast, a detective
delivers his son’s finger; the husband cuts the other son’s finger, puts it in
the envelope, and has it delivered by the detective; the husband shows his
clenched fist, takes off his jacket, and sleeps with the wife. In the scene of
finger cutting, the humming chorus of Puccini’s Madame Butterfly plays,
which draws attention to its Orientalist framework (Uchida 2009,
pp. 37–38). Ogoro’s wife and son are the doubles of Madame Butterfly
and her son. Abandoned by an American naval officer Pinkerton, Madam
Butterfly cuts her own throat. In The Bee, the British Ido rapes and kills
the Japanese Ogoro’s wife (Figs. 7.1, 7.2, and 7.3).
Fig. 7.1 Glyn Pritchard as Ogoro’s Son, Kathryn Hunter as Ido, and Hideki
Noda as Ogoro’s Wife. The Bee (The London/English version). Theatre Tram.
2007. (Copyright: NODA MAP. Photo: Yakou Masahiko)
Fig. 7.2 Glyn Pritchard as Ogoro’s Son, Kathryn Hunter as Ido and Hideki
Noda as Ogoro’s Wife. The Bee (The London/English version). Theatre Tram.
2007. (Copyright: NODA MAP. Photo: Yakou Masahiko)
Fig. 7.3 Hideki Noda as Ogoro’s Wife and Kathryn Hunter as Ido. The Bee (The
London/English version). Theatre Tram. 2007. (Copyright: NODA MAP. Photo:
Yakou Masahiko)
114 Y. FUKUSHIMA
The Japanese Version (2007)

The Japanese version focuses on paper—a traditional aspect of Japanese
material culture. In the black empty stage, the huge piece of brown craft
paper is hanging like a photo studio backdrop from the back of the ceiling
to the stage front. The stage is lit much brighter than in the English version.
Once the actors start performing on top of the paper, it looks like a three-
dimensional book or more like Japanese gekiga (dramatic picture manga for
older teens). Dialogue delivery among the media and the police reminds us
of the 1970s news and police shows on Japanese TV. The acting is a deviant
of the 1980s shōgekijō style. Stage lights create the sharp and soft edged
shadows of the actors on the paper in the Film Noir style. As the play pro-
gresses, the stage becomes darker and darker. Lighting changes the color of
the wall to a reddish brown when Ido begins cutting Ogoro’s son’s finger.
All cast members are Japanese. Transgender and transnational perfor-
mance is not featured. Noda plays the role of Ido in dark grey business suits
wearing a pair of glasses; Asano Kazuyuki plays Policemen, Detective
Dodoyama, TV Director, and King of Chef; and Ryō hei Kondō plays
Policeman, Anchoku, Ogoro, Ogoro’s son, and Reporter. The only female
actor, Natsuko Akiyama, plays Ogoro’s wife, Policeman, and Reporter. Ido
first meets policemen wearing white shirts with a black tie and black pants;
the signifier is their Japanese policeman’s cap. Soon, they go behind the
craft paper raised a few feet on the front side of the stage, take off the caps,
and transform themselves into TV reporters. Their fists are microphones
when interviewing Ido and their bent elbows their cameras. The reporters
dance around Ido and keep up with his fast-paced talk to get the scoop.
The Japanese actors resemble robot-like “salarymen.” Ido says that his
wife, whom he met at a college’s culture festival, was “not a bad woman”
(Noda 2012, p. 70), but not that he “loves her” as in the English version
(Noda and Teevan 2006, p. 17).
Dodoyama appears in a beige (a more common color in Japanese TV
police shows, rather than the dark blue of the English version) trench coat.
Dodoyama is a parody of the classic Japanese TV detective, telling the story
of Ogoro’s escape in a Japanese anime style. The shadows of live actors
appear on the paper backdrop like the shadows behind a Japanese shōji
screen. In the scene where Anchoku drives Ido to Ogoro’s house, three
wires pull up the floor section of the paper backdrop to expose the empty
black floor. Arriving at Ogoro’s house, Anchoku pushes the invisible door
buzzer and tears through the door projected on the paper. Similar to the
kabuki’s gandō gaeshi’s scenery change technique, the room-sized paper
flips down and turns into the floor. The inside of Ogoro’s house appears.
On the paper wall of the room, the images of the toilet skylight, the TV, and
the door are projected. When Ogoro’s wife closes invisible storm doors, she
folds the three edges of the paper as if she is making large-sized origami. A
TV reporter cuts out the skylight from outside and pushes his head through
it to get an interview with Ido. From the TV screen cutout, Asano appears
in the roles of Detective, Reporter, TV Director, and TV Chef, changing his
costumes and props. In the Japanese version, the bee is a ten-foot projection
in color on the paper wall, which looks like the Toho’s Mothra.
Gender hierarchy—strong male and weak female—is intensified when
portrayed by Noda’s male husband and Akiyama’s female wife. Akiyama
wears a short slip like Noda in the English version. But her Japanese female
body internalizes her biologically and drives her to follow a normative struc-
ture of Japanese gender (see Senda 2012b, p. 94). Akiyama represents
Japanese femininity through the male gaze, directed by the Japanese male
director Noda. Akiyama is a “passive, invisible, unspoken subject” and that
remains her role—a commodity in the strip club where “the male spectator
[is] an active subject” (Dolan 1991, p. 2). She is “neither the subject nor the
Other” but “a difference from the economy of binary opposition, itself a ruse
for a monologue elaboration of the masculine” (Butler 1999, p. 25). She
negotiates Judith Butler’s gender performativity and consents submit to
Ido’s control. Striptease, as Liepe-Levinson argues, is “[i]mplicit in erotic-
sexual play (that is, specifically in situations of mutual consent or fantasy), the
roles of the desirer and the one who is being desired” (Liepe-Levinson 1998,
p. 31). Akiyama’s wife becomes the victim of the “erotic surrender and con-
trol” (p. 31). Due to this surrender, she does not produce maternal screams
of sorrow for her son, unlike Noda’s wife in the English version. Akiyama’s
wife lacks resistance against Ido’s masculinity and loses the defiant and
demurring gaze against Ido that Noda’s wife can cast. Noda’s wife is a theat-
rically created “transsexual,” in other words, Butler’s “fantasized body”
(1999, p. 90), and consciously embodies femininity through his acting skills.
Ido in the Japanese version can be identified “with the male hero in the
narrative.” It is inevitable to question if Noda, or more precisely all hetero-
sexual males in this world, might possess the potential of becoming Ido if
placed in such an extreme situation. Masters and Johnson write that, “het-
erosexual fantasy of erotic desire for males and females is … not only to be
the object of another's desires and attentions, but to be sexually overcome
or even ravished by the opposite sex” (Liepe-Levinson 1998, p. 31;
McCutcheon 1989, p. 48). Noda’s Ido is the representation of hegemonic
masculinity, which is escalated into sexual harassment against Ogoro’s wife.
116 Y. FUKUSHIMA
Meanwhile, Hunter’s Ido controls Ogoro’s wife but cannot sexually harass
her because Hunter shares the same gender as the wife (Iwaki 2007).
Furthermore, Ido in the Japanese version gains an accomplice from the
masculine corporate culture, Dodoyama delivering cut-off fingers. His face-
less shadow behind the paper permeates eeriness into the auditorium.
In the Japanese version’s phone conversation scene between Ogoro and
his wife, the wife yells at him knowing that he murdered a prison guard.
Angry Ogoro’s double appears in the same room and slaps his wife. The
scene hints at Ogoro’s preexisting domestic violence. Ido in the Japanese
version says, “My neighbors have thought I am a quiet husband” (Noda
2012, p. 83). He does not self-claim what kind of person he is and becomes
ferocious. Noda’s directing conveys the immaturity of the two husbands in
the Japanese version—their feet, during a temper tantrum, flattening their
son’s birthday present. Ogoro’s wife, frightened and powerless, stares at
them from the back of the stage, holding her son in her arms.
The Japanese version ends by wrapping everything into the huge craft
paper—everything becomes trash (Figs. 7.4 and 7.5).
Fig. 7.4 Natsuko Akiyama as Reporter, Ryō hei Kondō as Reporter, Kazuyuki
Asano as Reporter, and Hideki Noda as Ido. The Bee (The Japanese version).
Theatre Tram. 2007. (Copyright: NODA MAP. Photo: Yakou Masahiko)
Fig. 7.5 Ryō hei Kondō as Ogoro’s Son, Hideki Noda as Ido and Natsuko
Akiyama as Ogoro’s Wife. The Bee (The Japanese version). Theatre Tram. 2007.
(Copyright: NODA MAP. Photo: Yakou Masahiko)
The Birth of Hidekian Style

The motif of the bee in Noda’s play was not in Tsutsui’s original. Ido was
a hardworking “salaryman,” working like a hataraki bachi (literally, work-
ing bee). Ido, Noda explained, “tried to control everything but couldn’t
control one small insect [trapped in the house]” (Kadoda 2012, p. 43).
Noda’s question to his audience was why was Ido afraid of the bees?
Because he was unable to control everything through violence, hence he
failed. Noda’s idea was not far from Martin Luther King Jr’s statement:
“violence … brings about momentary success … [but] never brings per-
manent peace” (King 1964).
Tsutsui’s “Mushiriai,” inspired by the Korean Japanese Kwon Hyi-ro’s
kidnap and murder case in 1968, provided Noda with the 1970s fear
against never-ending violence in reaction to the anti-AMPO (Japan–US
Security Treaty) protests. Kwon’s incident was also an early example of the
media and police violence in Japan (Tsutsui and Noda 2007). The TV
“wide shows” showed Kwon speaking live at the crime scene, and Japan’s
118 Y. FUKUSHIMA
public broadcaster NHK aired the two policemen’s apology for their
racially discriminatory comments against Kwon. Drawing directly from
Tsutsui’s original, Ido states his manifesto for the birth of evil:
I begin to feel that I am more in control

Than anytime previously in my life;
I’d no aptitude for being a victim.
And that’s why I have decided
To step outside, go the way of the criminal (Noda and Teevan 2006, p. 57).
Noda applied this reversal from victim to criminal and Foucauldian

power and domination to the post 9/11 conditions for his audiences. In
the 2012 production pamphlet, the actor Asano explained that the play’s
“exchanges of meaningless retaliations … mirrored how the world became
after 9/11 and U. S., under the banner of ‘the war on terror,’ invaded
Afghanistan and Iraq” (Sawa 2007). Shifting Tsutsui’s 1970s framework
to the 1990s, Noda criticized the post-9/11 world in an allegorical style.
In the play, Ido represented an American torturing suspected Middle
Eastern prisoners, while Ogoro signified a Middle Eastern terrorist kid-
napping US civilians.
As Ō tori argued, Noda’s theater was “not documentary theatre” (Ō tori
2001, p. 194). Carole Martin’s list of theatrical forms of documentary
theater—“verbatim theatre, reality-based theatre, theatre-of-fact, theatre
of witness, tribunal theatre, nonfiction theatre, restored village perfor-
mances, war and battle reenactments, and autobiographical theatre”—
does not fit for Noda’s theater (Martin 2013, p. 5). Ō tori instead called it
“documentary fiction,” where the audience could see the socio-historical
events in reality through the fictional world (Ō tori 2001, p. 195). The
Bee’s non-stop violence was relayed in a fairy tale style to Ogoro’s son:
Once upon a time there was a man

Who, for all the world, appeared to be good.
He worked hard, cared for his family,
And lived life as it is commonly felt that one should.
But then a bad man came into the good man’s life,
And took as hostages the good man’s son and wife,
And for all that the good man was good,
He could not get himself to behave
As it is commonly felt that one should.
So he made the decision to become perfectly bad
To out-bad the baddie in the bad tricks that he had (Noda and Teevan,
2006, p. 62).
Hunter had coined Noda’s style as Hidekian, playing off the English
expressions Beckettian and Brechtian. She defined Hidekian as “the artist
who is free from established rules and conventions” (Hunter 2012, p. 29).
Noda’s absurdity partially came from Beckettian absurdism in Tsutsui’s
original. According to Hunter, Noda’s directing technique was an operatic
approach to orchestrating his theater, sensing the tone, rhythm, pitch, and
pace of the actors’ voices—similar to Beckett (p. 29). Also, like Brecht,
Noda had thought of how to establish interaction with his audience and
chosen the humble approach of paying attention to “the reaction of his mass
audience” (Ō tori and Noda 2001, p. 115). Noda’s intranational technique
to depict the Japanese abnormal families was united with Brecht’s estrange-
ment effect. The transnational and transgender English version of The Bee
could alienate the audience and guide them to be critical observers of the
horrific events on the stage. Hunter concluded, however, that “Because of
the cultural difference, it is very difficult to tell if Noda’s Hidekian is unique
to himself or comes from his Japaneseness … a mixture of practice, efforts,
playful mind” (Hunter, 2012, p. 32). Hunter’s dilemma had perhaps come
from Noda’s dualism deploying both the Japanese trait, ganbaru (being
tenacious and hardworking) and the counter concept, asobi (being playful)
in his theater making (see Allison 2009, pp. 119–20).
Conclusion
Noda’s transnational and intranational approach is different from the
“translational” approach by the shingeki practitioners in the early twentieth
century. I call the shingeki approach translational because the shingeki prac-
titioners “translated” and imported techniques from Western theater when
modernizing Japanese theater. The translational research method is to
attend rehearsals and productions in the theater “laboratory” overseas, to
research foreign materials in the laboratory in Japan, and to stage a mim-
icry of the Other. In contrast, Noda’s twenty-first-century approach is
transnational and intranational. His goal is neither to Westernize Japanese
theater nor to import the London style workshops. Experiences in London
has changed (or perhaps returned) Noda’s theater from production cen-
tered to directors/actors centered. It has made his directing style more
communicative with his actors (Senda 2012a, p. 6). Collaborative creation
120 Y. FUKUSHIMA
through the workshops has provided Noda with an open space where he
can draw inspiration from actors enjoying performing with him (see Hasebe
2005, pp. 71–85).
Noda Hideki is not Peter Brook. In London, he is Japanese and a
minority of British society. When Noda directs, he must discuss with
“argumentative British actors” and logically explain his directing to them
(Senda 2012a, p. 9). If his explanation is not persuasive enough, they
become frustrated with his nonnative English. At the same time, the actors
are respectfully “waiting for his final decisions as director” (Noda 2006,
p. 63). Unlike Brook, who directed Mahabarata from ancient India, Noda
directs Japanese tales. Noda is neither mimicking Japanese culture nor
showing the stereotyped image of Japan that the Other wants to see (Noda
2006, p. 66).
When Noda acts with British actors on the same stage, equality is born.
The English version of The Bee created the Tsutsui-Noda world in collabo-
ration. We see a neutral Japan, accompanied by the Other’s perspective.
Noda’s femininity and Hunter’s masculinity are properly alienated from
the normative. For Noda, performing outside Japan is a “stimulus” and
the feeling of “being ‘alien substance (ibutsu)’” (Senda 2012a, pp. 11–12;
Noda 2012, pp. 30–31). Working with foreign actors, experiencing cul-
tural differences, and delivering his political voice against war and violence
encompass the “very Japanese” Hidekian style of theater.
Notes
1. “Transnational/Intranational” was the theme that Ō tori had used in the
Laokoon Festival (Kampnagel, Hamburg) when serving as artistic director
between 2002 and 2004 (Ō tori 2004, pp. 9–12; 2006, p. 220).
2. Noda studied the Lecoq’s “physical” theatre with the Seinenza’s theatre
director Shinozaki Mitsumasa at his troupe Yūminsha (Ō tori and Noda
2001, pp. 108–109; Fukushima 2003 [2005], p. 3; Senda 2012a, p. 8).
3. For the detail of The Red Demon, see Noda, H. and Ō tori, H. (2006).
4. David Lan at Young Vic Theatre introduced Teevan to Noda. For the detail,
see Uchida ed., 2009, pp. 9–51.
5. According to Noda, gender was switched because British actors did not like
performing the rape victim in the workshop in London (Tsutsui and Noda
2007).
6. See http://news.mynavijp/news/2013/07/12/236/ [Accessed on 1 May
2017].
Work Cited
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CHAPTER 8
Disequilibrium: Disability, Gender,

and Belonging in Mahesh Dattani’s Tara
and Manjula Padmanabhan’s Harvest
Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren
Abstract The chapter gestures toward addressing how the theories and
practices of folding disability perspectives in, with, and alongside other
categories of difference can provoke a generative politics of intimacy
and related states of belonging. This consideration will include the
development of a brief (and still provisional) genealogy of such translo-
cal intimacies in a transnational Indian context. In order to do so, I will
include: (1) a sketch of a philosophy of translocal intimacies through
art (primarily but not only performance); (2) an explication of how
prior scholarly work on South Asian disability and gender studies points
to the need for a revalorization of the body, culture, public space, and
disability rights; and (3) a consideration of India-specific performance
examples—Mahesh Dattani’s Tara (1990) and Manjula Padmanabhan’s
Harvest (1997)—plays that address social issues revolving, in part,
around pressing questions about disability and gender identities in an
Indian context.
K. Kochhar-Lindgren (*)
Folded Paper Dance and Theatre Limited, Hong Kong, China

124 K. KOCHHAR-LINDGREN
We urgently need new critical and performance methods that can

chart an emerging politics of intimacy along, with, and through the dra-
matization of “disequilibriums”: new approaches that, for this project,
articulate how South Asian disability theaters can provide new under-
standings of, and engagement with, the translocal. These considerations
have implications for emerging work in the performing arts, the inter-
linking of cultural and disability and deaf rights, diverse approaches to
the interweaving of performance cultures, and the broader terrain of
socio-cultural transformation. Translocal intimacies of disability and deaf
theaters can help delineate ways of reworking the politics of intimacy and
belonging.
Keywords Translocal • Disability • Gender • Indian-English theater •

Disequilibriums • Tara • Harvest
Introduction
As the boundaries between, and within, nation-states shift, we must recon-
figure the local and the national across the performativity of the “trans,” a
shifter that indicates a temporal state of moving toward a future that has
not yet happened as well as a spatial movement across disciplines, l anguages,
and localities. The pervasiveness of digital technologies, climate change,
economic recession(s), the growing shift in economic power from Europe
and the US toward India and China, and a range of post-9/11 issues have
led to increasingly fluid and disorienting experiences of geopolitical time
and space, and the global circulation of people through both voluntary and
forced migration. The cultures, materials, and practices that cross every day
as well as aesthetic borders unsettle and even transform our contemporary
socio-cultural terrain.
These conditions necessitate a reengagement with the possible uses of
theatricality. We urgently need new performances and critical methods
that chart these emerging mobile geographies as forms of disequilibrium.
A close look at how the transection of disability and gender has been lever-
aged as a cluster of motifs in Indian-English theaters can provide one such
dynamic point of entry for building an extended understanding about the
ways in which they may trigger translocal intimacies—or new states of
DISEQUILIBRIUM: DISABILITY, GENDER, AND BELONGING IN MAHESH… 125
belonging—in a global context. Disability is a primary disequilibrium,

and, as Margrit Shildrick notes, “[D]isability just is one of those intersec-
tional modalities that cannot be separated out for discrete study as though
its implications were fully contained within the material condition of those
with anomalous embodiment. These are not just contact zones, but bor-
der crossings where bodies of knowledge inflect and disturb one another
in what we can understand as highly productive ways” (2017, p. 137).
This investigation, in turn, has implications for (incipient) transnational
disability feminist performance studies.1
Mahesh Dattani’s Tara (1990) and Manjula Padmanabhan’s Harvest
(1997)2 are plays that address social issues revolving, in part, around press-
ing questions about how disability and gender identities link with one
another in an Indian context. Tara is the story of conjoined twins, Chandan
(male) and Tara (female), who were surgically separated when they were
infants in a way that has weakened Tara’s constitution—consequently, she
later dies as a young adult. Harvest is the tale of Om, who lives with his
mother Indumathi, his wife Jaya, and Jeethu, his brother. Finding himself
jobless, Om signs a contract for money and other goods with InterPlanta,
a multinational firm in Mumbai, in exchange for some of his organs and
body parts. This sci-fi drama, which occurs in the not too distant future,
charts the disastrous impact of the then legal practice of harvesting organs
from impoverished but healthy Third World individuals and selling them to
ailing North American clients.3
Both plays hinge on the idea of doubling. Tara doubles through the
conjoined, and then separated, twins, and the resultant medicalized inter-
ventions with prosthetic legs. Harvest doubles through the suturing of the
virtual and physical bodies between North America and Mumbai. The
doubling precipitates forms of travel across multiple geographical, politi-
cal, technical, and gender borders. To provide the social conditions for
such traveling, disability—physical and otherwise—must be prostheti-
cized, shaped within a logic of multiplication and subtraction, and made
portable.4 Portability, the (de)construction of bodies that can move as
either a whole or as an assemblage of parts, is made actual in the name of
the “able bodied,” even while disability and gender/sexual identities
remain artificially sutured, one to the other. Sharon Snyder and David
Mitchell articulate that “the fundamental premise of disability studies: the
able body emerges as a narrow measure for the creation of discriminatory,
human-made environments that elide the existence of biological and cogni-

tive variations” (2001, p. 369). Within this context, the “natural/artificial”
tends to remain in place as a fundamental binary that structures the underly-
ing tensions about disability and gender in these plays.
Anita Ghai—whose work often develops links between feminist and
disability theory and politics in India—notes that:
Western disability studies often fail to comprehend the reality of disability in

India, which is marked by a complex amalgam of class, gender, and caste
issues. Feminism with its emphasis on multiple oppressions is the key to
guiding disability studies and research toward an understanding of the plu-
ralities that characterize the experience of disability in India (2002,
pp. 51–2).
The conditions for disabled women in India form one important index of
the complexities of disequilibrium (in relation to disability) across geo-
graphical borders and situated lives.5 Furthermore, the research and
related discourse about the lived experience of disabled women in India is
still vastly underdeveloped.
In the extrapolation of the available statistics, they have indicated that dis-
abled women are marginalized much more than the disabled men. Disability
legislation also adopts a gendered approach, with the result that out of
twenty-eight chapters outlining various issues, not a single one addresses the
problems of disabled women. This approach reflects the general attitude
toward disabled women in India in general. In Hindi the phrase, “Women
with disabilities” (Ek to ladki oopar se aapahij) means, “one a girl, and that
too disabled.” This intermingling of disablement and gender marks the real-
ity of a woman with disability in India (Ghai 2002, p. 53).
A transnational disability feminist performance study, which works at the

intersection of these four critical discourses, requires a methodological
and experiential shift from “business as usual” in ways that account for
how people’s lives are impacted across both the local and the global. How
might we fold thinking of this work into doing this work performatively?
How might thinking and doing, which always belong in the most intimate
manner possible to one another, take on a transformative charge through
a range of textual and performance practices, across the broad contempo-
rary socio-cultural terrain, within the disabled communities as well as out-
side and across a network of diverse communities?
Tara and Harvest activate new cultural spaces on several fronts: (1) as
frameworks that challenge the moral and medical model of disability; (2)
as performative devices for shifting mainstream cultural and experiential
frames of reference; (3) as formats for generating new cultural stories that
problematize the trans-sections of disability and gender; and (4) as coin-
habited public spaces that actively gesture toward diverse sensorial/corpo-
real frames, or what I term as disequilibrium. Tara and Harvest, as well as
other related plays, have the potential to generate translocal intimacies
that can facilitate new engagement in a politics of belonging across the
global terrain.
Translocal Intimacies
Translocal intimacies imagines the possibility of building new forms of
connection—or proximities of relations—across communities, regions,
and/or national boundaries, possibly intervening in dominant ideologies.
Through theater, these interventions can offer countervailing practices
and narratives, or ways of rewiring our communities, that can initiate (and
is, at times, already initiating) new socio-cultural linkages. In Intimacies of
Four Continents, Lisa Lowe articulates the need for a new “calculus” of
intimacy, “[O]ne that may unsettle the ‘dominant’ notion of intimacy as
the possession of the individual, if we consider both the ‘residual’ and
‘emergent’ forms of intimacies on which that dominance depends. This
involves considering scenes of close connection in relation to a global
geography that one more often conceives of in terms of vast spatial dis-
tances” (2015, p. 18).
Although Lowe’s work focuses on settler and colonial histories and
related epistemologies of liberal subjectivity, I borrow from her so that we
can begin a process of unpacking how disability—as its own discursive
category wrapped up in significant local and transnational socio-cultural
histories—is also an essential register for charting processes of an ongoing
dynamic of the residual and the emergent across transnational sites in rela-
tion not only to disability but also gender. This work requires a discursive
maneuver away from identity politics and toward a politics of performativ-
ity, helping to create new senses of belonging—near and far—that can
recalibrate disequilibrium across multiple communities, cultures, and
states of being.
The term “translocal” conveys the sense of simultaneously leaving one
place and arriving at another, as well as the sense of connecting places with
one another. Making theater can provide a shared space for the generation
of knowledge, exploring identities—both individual and collective—and
investigating how disability operates across spatial registers and manifests
through culture(s) in motion. As the works cross the inflection of disabil-
ity and gender, they accomplish very pragmatic cultural work as the local
and the global, the at-home and the nomadic, are both borne along unex-
pected pathways by the action of translocal performativity. This is what
creates new configurations of identity in the most concrete forms
imaginable.
Tara
In Dattani’s Tara, conjoined twins Chandhan and Tara are surgically sepa-
rated when they are three months old, leaving each child with one natural
and one prosthetic leg. The medical conditions, ostensibly, supersede all
other determinants. We learn how Chandhan’s survival, nevertheless, is
prioritized at great cost to Tara. These decisions regarding the wellbeing
of an Indian girl (as a form of delayed female infanticide) enact the socio-
cultural biases against people (particularly women) with disabilities, who
are considered deficient and even cursed. Chandhan, who has become a
London-based writer, retells the story years later through a series of
flashbacks.
Initially, when we meet Chandhan, who lives in a bedsit “in a seedy
suburb of London thousands of miles from home” (Dattani 2000, p. 323),
we watch him limp to the cabinet to pour a drink. We learn that he has, up
until this moment, been trying to put as much distance as possible between
himself and his past.
Chandhan: But that’s all done with. Tonight, I drop everything I’ve d
esperately
wanted to be in my years in England. (Mimes removing a mask and throwing it
away.) The handicapped intellectual’s mask. (Mimes removing another mask.)
The desperate immigrant. (Mimes removing yet another.) The mysterious
brown with the phony accent. The last being the hardest to drop having spent
whole years in acquiring it. And what remains is what I intend to make capital
of. My freakishness.
…
Allow the memories to flood in. (Winds another sheet on the typewriter
and then stops.) To tell you the truth I had even forgotten I had a twin sister
(Dattani 2000, p. 324).
Here, Chandhan invokes a litany of terms regarding his self-perception

and identity markers: the “handicapped intellectual,” who has more to
offer as a writer than as an embodied human being; the “desperate immi-
grant,” who seeks ways of fitting in and leaving his past behind; the “mys-
terious brown with the phony accent,” who renders exotic his identity,
while at the same time attempting to modulate his voice so that he can fit
in. The removal, so to speak, of these markers, depicted as “masks,” serves
as an initial attempt to peel away the neocolonial mimicry in which he has
participated.
Chandhan asserts, then, that he is a “freak,” that his “freakishness” is
what he can make the most of. In this case, capital—as a form of wealth—
resonates across several registers: (1) as playwright, Chandhan needs to
write about a topic that will sell; and (2) as writer, at the same that he
invokes his own life situatedness as he terms himself a “freak,” he also
invokes his previously “hidden” (or not claimed) genealogy of being a
person with a disability. The freak shows, circa the mid-sixteenth century
(London) to the 1940s, along with other earlier forms of the transnational
circulation of people with disabilities, were sites where individuals with
biological rarities, including conjoined twins, were displayed. These shows
also acted as early forms of disability theater, where the individual who
revealed their disability in a publicly-sanctioned venue could capitalize on
it (Garland Thomson 2017 (1997); Adams 2001; van Dijck 2002).6
Chandhan’s revelation cuts two ways; he names himself (and his sister),
and he puts himself inside a genealogy linked to specific socio-cultural
histories of the normal/abnormal.
Chandhan is situated in the interstices of existence, between many
locales as a doubled man who is attempting to un-double, to become one.
He struggles to speak for himself and for his sister, who is both radically
similar and radically different from himself in a tangled imbrication of
identities. As Chandhan tells the story about his and his sister’s history
in a series of flashbacks—and the “flashback” is very close to a kind of
Benjaminian image of history itself—we discover his profound grief and
ambivalence about his own condition and his relationship to his sister, as
the fantasy of becoming “simply” an object for scientific research comes to
the surface. The most encompassing of transcendental signifieds—Nature,
God, and Destiny—become entangled in a fantasy of mutual death, surely
a means to attempt to hold off both the trauma of his grief and his guilt as
the only surviving voice of the twosome, that is then “overcome” in the
image of the remains of a doubled-self stored in formaldehyde.
Chandhan: This isn’t fair to Tara. She deserves something better. She never
got a fair deal. Not from nature. Neither of us did. Maybe God never wanted
us to be separated. Destiny desires strange things. We were meant to die and
our mortal remains preserved in formaldehyde for future generations to
study (Dattani 2000, p. 330).
Chandhan invokes his “freakish” genealogy, already deemed by Dr. Thakkar

as extremely rare, and one Chandhan compares with the historical practice
of “cabinets of curiosity,” the mechanisms of display for an early type of
what becomes more formal anthropological and scientific study.
The cabinets of curiosity are collections of oddities and miracles that
would require a different social and scientific organization to become
“knowledge” in its modern connotations. While Chandhan considers his
history as a biological aberration, we see how tightly the medical and
social domains are locked together. As a result, Chandhan’s process of
remembering raises a series of questions about who is speaking and who
speaks for whom. The dead sister has, in a strange twist, become the
sound-box for Chandhan. Tara is the theatrical framing of the device of
the play, itself another cabinet of curiosities. Step right up and open the
doors to the freakshow! This is theater. It is a displaced voice—she is, after
all, “dead”—but the dead talk and the play is an uncanny space in which
Chandhan’s narrative continues to speak both for itself and for the twin-
ning of a subjectivity that will never be able to free itself of its doublings.
It may wish to become an object preserved in a chemical that serves as an
archive, but that cannot happen as long as the voice of his desire, however
traumatized and guilty, continues.
As the play progresses, we encounter the precariousness of Tara’s
situation, fueled by the medical and social mores prioritizing boys over
girls. At first, it appears that the surgical separation—despite Thakkar’s
praise for medical science—is straightforward.
Dr. Thakkar: Complications were expected. Our team of doctors were aware
of that. The pelvic region, as I had mentioned before, was a problem. There
was only one bladder and it belonged to the boy. So did the rectum. We
would have to have an artificial one made for the girl. Later on, when she
grows up, we can fashion one from her intestinal tissues. And the boy’s
lungs aren’t fully developed.
…
The prognosis, on the whole, was favourable for both. Nature had done
a near complete job. Medical science could finish it for her. Theoretically,
the separation was possible (Dattani 2000, p. 356).
Through this description of the intertwined bodies that share body parts,
the articulation of two human beings is no simple matter, and that nor-
mality—in terms of the erasure of unnecessary biological variegation—
must be achieved. Biology, here, seems to trump other aspects of the
decision-making process.
Patel: Your grandfather and your mother had a private meeting with Dr.
Thakkar. I wasn’t asked to come. That same evening your mother told me
of her decision. Everything will be done as planned. Except—I couldn’t
believe what she told me—that they would risk giving both legs to the boy.
…
Patel: The chances were better that the leg would survive on the girl …
As planned by them, Chandan had two legs for two days. It didn’t take them
very long to realize what a grave mistake they had made. The leg was
amputated. A piece of dead flesh which could have—might have—been Tara
(Dattani 2000, p. 377).
Medical intervention is, indeed, no simple matter, and certainly not strictly
scientific. Given the valorization of Chandhan’s social status and value over
Tara’s, it comes as no surprise that the opportunity to become “normalized”
is handed to Chandhan at Tara’s expense. Eventually, we learn that this medi-
cal decision weakened Tara’s capacity for survival, and that she needed several
subsequent operations, including a kidney transplant. In the end, none of
these interventions are successful, and Tara dies as a young adult.
Because it is considered less desirable to have a daughter than a son in
India, the lived reality is far more severe for Tara. Female infanticide is
common in India.7 Roopa, a friend of Tara’s, shares a tale about the
Gujarati practice of female infanticide:
Roopa: … The Patels in the old days were unhappy with getting baby girls—
you know dowry and things like that—so they used to drown them in milk.
Pause.
Tara: In milk?
Roopa: So when people asked how the baby died, they could say that she
choked while drinking her milk (Dattani 2000, p. 349).
From Tara’s birth onward, her survival exacts uncertainty. Bharati, the
twins’ mother, informs Chandhan:
Bharati: It’s all right while she is young … But let her grow up. Yes,
Chandhan. The world will tolerate you. The world will accept you—but not
her! Oh, the pain she is going to feel when she sees herself at eighteen or
twenty. Thirty is unthinkable (Dattani 2000, p. 348).
Once Tara comes of age, and must become a fully participating member
of society, acceptance will not be possible.
Tara is intelligent and spirited. Though she is often viewed as “mon-
strous” by other girls, she rebels by using the same tools that identify her
as such as a way of defying the social order. For example, when she first
meets Roopa and Prema, she knows that they want to see her artificial leg.
Tara: Then I showed it to them. The duckling couldn’t believe her eyes. She
stared at my leg. She felt it and knocked on it. Silly as well as ugly, I thought.
“The very best from Jaipur,” I said. “We get them in pairs. My twin brother
wears the other one” (Dattani 2000, p. 335).
Revealing her artificial limb to the girls ruptures the social fabric of the
status quo. Instead of hiding or covering over her disability identity, Tara
flaunts it. There is a considerable force in the image of Tara and her pros-
thetic leg, and Tara’s act instantiates a new rule of the body over and
against the effort of the girls to break her body down into its parts.
At the end of the play, we discover that Chandhan struggles with com-
pleting his narrative, and that, in fact, he has only been able to record the
story, not write it down. He laments that all that will remain is the sound
of his voice.
Chandhan: Only a voice—that once belonged to an object. An object like

other objects in a cosmos, whose orbits are determined by those around.
Moving in a forced harmony (Dattani 2000, p. 379).
Chandhan no longer desires freedom; he wants to be “forgiven,” but for

what? For surviving? For being the male? We can only partially surmise.
Chandhan: But somewhere, sometime, I look up at a shooting star … and

wish. I wish that a long-forgotten person would forgive me. Wherever she is.
Tara walks into the spot without limping. Dan also appears without the limp.
And will hug me. Once again.
They kneel, face to face.
Forgive me, Tara. Forgive me for making it my tragedy.
Tara embraces Dan as the music starts. The explosive opening of Brahms’
First Concerto. They hug each other tightly (Dattani 2000, p. 379).
Several writers have claimed that Tara is about Chandhan’s efforts to

come to terms with his feminine self. At some level this is an understand-
able claim, seemingly reinforced by the ending where the two appear to
each other without their limps. Nevertheless, this summation does not
take an investigation of the underlying tension between the natural/artifi-
cial and its relationship to disability far enough. Tara, for our purposes, is
the tale of the performance of doubling―the remembered-material dis-
abled bodies of Tara and Chandhan—haunted by their own others, at first
about the tragedy of Tara, and then becoming the tragedy of Chandhan:
the disequilibrium of the duo, who conjoined at birth were separated, and
therefore already always “moving in a forced harmony” with the possibili-
ties of a freedom just out of reach.
Harvest
In Padmanabhan’s Harvest, the twining of disability and sexuality first
emerges when we find that Om, in exchange for money and material
goods, will be giving his organ(s) to Ginni, his virtual North American
female counterpart. Although we only see Ginni’s face and hear her voice,
she is described as “The blonde and white-skinned epitome of an American-
style youth goddess. Her voice is sweet and sexy” (Padmanabhan 2001,
p. 217). The operative images are of Om, a man from a Third World
country, willing to give up his body parts for money and goods, and the
completion of a virtual partnership with Ginni, replete with sexual iden-
tity. Om’s body parts are a promise for the acquisition of a prosthetically-
normalized body for Ginni; Ginni serves as a “prosthetic” projection for
Om’s dream of escaping his poverty through a kind hypersexualized vir-
tual reality.
While these prosthetic exchanges are most certainly not equivalent,
they highlight how poverty predicates Om’s choices. Unable to work, his
body parts become the substitute for proving his value. Michael Davidson
notes that, “[D]isability studies has monitored such remappings as they
impact social attitudes about nontraditional bodies, but it has not paid
adequate attention to the political economy of the global body. As a result,
disability studies risks remaining a vestige of an earlier identity politics
rather than a critical intervention into social justice at large” (2006,
p. 118). Consequently, the vastly uneven terrain between these First and
Third World exchanges requires us, as Davidson suggests, to begin “seeing
disability spatially” (2006, p. 119).
Toward the end of the play, we learn that Ginni is, in fact, Virgil, who
has been simply waiting to take up Om’s body. Virgil is never seen. “He
has an American cigarette-commercial accent—rich, smoky, attractive, and
rugged” (Padmanabhan 2001, p. 217). We find out that Virgil takes up
Jeethu’s body—because it is good enough—so that Virgil can impregnate
Jaya, virtually. Davidson indicates that “[T]ransplantation narratives rein-
force the links between the space of the body and the global space of capital,
between a body regarded as a totality of parts and a communicational and
media space in which those parts are sold, packaged in ice chests, and
shipped around the world. And organ trafficking is a discursive matter”
(2006, p. 123). In these performances of doubling, the virtual-real bodies
in Harvest necessarily recalibrate the social and global equations regarding
the interrelationships of the able-bodied to the disabled through an eerie
logic of multiplication and subtraction.
Jaya: Everyone knows already! D’you think you’re the only one with this
job? D’you think everyone doesn’t know what it means … when the guards
come from the agency? All that remains to be known is what part of you’s
been given away!
…
Om: You think I did it lightly. But at the expense of calling you my sister
… we’ll be rich?… Think it’s a fine thing—living day in, day out, like mon-
keys in a hot-case.
…
Jaya: I’ll tell you! He’s sold his rights to his organs! His skin. His eyes.
His arse. Sold them! Oh God, oh God! What’s the meaning of this night-
mare! (To OM) How can I hold your hand, touch your face, knowing that
at any moment it might be snatched away from me and flung across the
globe! If you were dead I could shave my head and break my bangles—but
this? To be a widow by slow degrees? To mourn you piece by piece? Should
I shave half my head? Break my bangles one at a time? (Padmanabhan 2001,
pp. 222–3).
Om has capitulated to the differential exchanges dictated and controlled

by InterPlanta, the multinational corporation that operates according to a
global economy in favor of the wealthy North Americans. Jaya contests
this decision, offering a counterargument about the value of body parts as
constitutive of the whole person.
Davidson notes that “[T]ransplantation narratives reinforce the links
between the space of the body and the global space of capital, between a
body regarded as a totality of parts and a communicational and media space

in which those parts are sold, packaged in ice chests, and shipped around
the world. And organ trafficking is a discursive matter” (2006, p. 123). To
make the exchange viable, InterPlanta turns Om’s apartment into a decon-
tamination zone that is to remain clean and controlled at all costs. The
guards and agents arrive to set up the Contact Module, where “[A]ll imple-
ments of personal fuel preparation will be supplied exclusively by InterPlanta
Services” (Padmanabhan 2001, p. 221). As time passes, the apartment is
eventually turned into “a sleek residence … with TV set, computer termi-
nal, mini-gym, an air-conditioner, the works” (Padmanabhan 2001, p. 227)
and, later, the Video Couch.
This reclaiming of the family space on behalf of Ginni’s welfare instanti-
ates two key facets that help make the transplantation possible. First, as the
outcome of the Contact Module and the Video Couch is to digitize the liv-
ing space; render Om, Jaya, and Ma as virtual equals; and facilitate vacating
the physical markers for the virtual identities. Second, in this science-fiction
drama, the trafficking of body organs is legal, and these circumstances invoke
a type of what Priscilla Wald calls “bioslavery” (2005, p. 207) explaining that
it “registers the power of one group to define the relationship of another
group to the legal conventions of property and personhood to control their
bodies and define them as a group in which that control is embedded.” The
relegation of the family to the liminal zone of the Contact Module cuts them
off from their local surroundings, further rendering them subservient to the
situation.
We meet Jeethu, Om’s brother, early in the play, when Jaya (who has
also been having an affair with Jeethu) goes to tell him what is going on
in the apartment, and that the InterPlanta agents are asking for him to
come and register. Jeethu, who is a prostitute, indicates that he is happy
where he is and will not show up for InterPlanta. His argument, in part, is
that as a prostitute he can decide who he works for and when.
However free Jeethu might perceive himself to be, he also falls prey to
the InterPlanta seduction when he arrives unexpectedly at the apartment
because he has become sick. Despite the family’s fear about being found
out by InterPlanta for breaking the rules (by not being properly registered
and following the regime set for them), Jaya takes Jeethu in and starts to
nurse him back to health. When InterPlanta comes for Om the first time,
Om panics and hides, and Jeethu is taken in his stead. When Jeethu
returns, we see that his eyes are bandaged, and we assume that his corneas
have been extracted for transplantation.
The InterPlanta guards come back one more time and take Jeethu.
Here, we find ourselves at the apotheosis of the play. Davidson writes that:
[I]n Raymond Williams’s terms, globalization could be seen as a “structure

of feeling” that cannot be contained in a single image or narrative. We could
imagine this structure of feeling around globalization as a kind of phantom
limb phenomenon that registers a phantasmatic “whole body” that can no
longer be constituted by an appeal to national origins or cultural integrity
(2006, p. 122).
This ghostly logic is portrayed in an extreme form toward the end of

Harvest, when we learn that Ginni, who is really Virgil, has taken up
Jeethu’s body, and he wants to virtually impregnate Jaya from where he is
in North America. In this mediatized medical spectacle (van Dijck 2002),
reminiscent of the freak shows and cabinets of curiosity, we see how much
Virgil’s demand for this sexual intertwining of virtual and real bodies has
relied, in odd and violent ways, on the enactment of an extreme form of
neocolonial voyeurism and dominance through the virtual—one that has
simultaneously kept him both distant and very close to Jaya.
Virgil: This is me, Zhaya— don’t you recognize me? I’m your Jittoo now—
Jaya: Oh! (doubles over, sinks to the ground, sobbing heartily) What
have you done, what have you done?
Virgil: (the figure walks over to where Jaya kneels, kneels down himself)
I thought you’d be happy to see me!
Jaya: (refuses to look at him) How can I be happy with a ghost!
Virgil: I’m not a ghost—
Jaya: You can’t be who you look like!
Virgil: But I am—in one sense.
Jaya: (she looks up) You can’t be. It’s all just another madness—
Virgil: Why, Zhaya? Trust your eyes—(Padmanabhan 2001, p. 245)
…Jaya: Look: I’m not stupid, you know? I know you’re stronger than
me, you’re richer than me. You’ll get me in the end – I know you will. But
I want you to risk your skin for me (Padmanabhan 2001, p. 248).
Jaya demands that the virtual Virgil-Jeethu comes to her, and she attempts
to reorganize the terms of their relationship.
Jaya: And in the meantime, I want you to practice saying my name correctly:
It’s Jaya―‘j’ as in ‘justice,’ ‘j’ as in jam—
Virgil: Zhaya―
Jaya: I won’t talk to you unless you say it right!

Virgil: (pause) Zh … Jaya. Jaya. Jaya―listen to me―
Jaya: No. You listen to me! … I suggest you take some rest. You have a
long journey ahead of you and it’s sure to be a hard one (Padmanabhan
2001, p. 249).
Toward the end of the play, Jaya waits with a piece of broken glass at her
throat, and she tells Virgil, “[I]f I lose my life, I win this game … but I’ll
die knowing that you, who live only to win, will have lost to a poor, weak
and helpless woman” (Padmanabhan 2001, p. 248). Jaya refuses to engage
in this final InterPlanta act that would, for all intents and purposes, seal the
deal that Om originally made with InterPlanta (even if he was not aware
of the implications). She also refuses to capitulate to the “phantasmatic
whole body” that attempts to supersede “national origins or cultural
integrity.” Jaya, always the resistant one in the play, is on her own now as
she reinstates her power as an embodied female at the brink of possible
death, and as she strives to turn the virtual back on itself.
Limping Ahead
In both Tara and Harvest, we can see how theaters of disequilibrium cut
across national, socio-cultural, and artistic boundaries in ways that gener-
ate a politics of practiced intimacy and invite new states of belonging
within and across differences. Tara, as the dead sister, sounds out to us,
even if only partially, through Chandhan’s retelling of their story; Jaya, as
the disenfranchised wife/sister, speaks to us—in the end almost at the
point of death—across the virtual space in a resistant counter ploy to
Virgil’s demands. Because the plays themselves pivot on the format of
doubling, that doubling also implicates us as readers and audience mem-
bers; as artists, scholars, and activists. Through these theatrical projects,
we can encounter how “we are all irreducibly situated in an ever-shifting
network of corporeal relationships” (Shildrick and Price, Fall 2005/Spring
2006). Therefore, we too become a part of the fabric of translocal intima-
cies, one which draws on and further excavates, what Lowe has termed,
the “residual” and the “emergent” (2015, p. 18).
Such forms of disequilibrium involve what Jacques Rancière calls “the
distribution of the sensible [that] reveals who can have a share in what is
common to the community on what they do and on the time and space in
which the activity is performed” (2004, p. 8). The sensible, in this context,
refers to all facets of the sensorium—a complex organization of what is

available to the senses (that can be seen, heard, or touched) based on the
historical construction of what Rancière has termed the “aesthetic regime”
(2004, p. 16). The arts, as the primary approach for thinking through the
senses, are the most viable way for creating and considering alternative
formulations of the sensible.
Theater as a literal and symbolic reconfiguration of the sensible focuses
on what Rancière terms the “potentiality inherent in the innovative sen-
sible modes of experience that anticipate a community to come” (2004,
p. 25). Theater can activate Rancière’s “aesthetic regime” (2004, p. 16) or
forms of making and doing imbued not with a hierarchy of established
values but, instead, with a “heterogeneous power” (2004, p. 16).
Arts making exists by crafting the difference that is always within itself;
it unsettles and transforms the sensible, thereby opening up the possible.
Rancière leverages the word “foreign” (2004, p. 18) as the name for this
difference. The foreign, typically seen as that which is “of or related to
another country” or “strange and unfamiliar,” can, by virtue of its power,
challenge location, relationship, and ideation. It sets in motion processes
of disequilibrium that are often very difficult to navigate, but which none-
theless give us space in which to move, even if that movement is sideways
or forward.
Performance, through the dramatization of creative disequilibrium,
provides an essential platform for an articulation of a new politics of inti-
macy, of a new way of belonging together in difference. Indian theater
that reframes disability at the interstices of gender offers new understanding
about, and engagement with, the translocal and transversal politics of inti-
macy in which we come to belong differently.
Notes
1. This chapter is part of a series of larger projects that aim to develop transna-
tional Asian performance studies examining disability theater in the context
of a range of issues, including gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and new forms of
cultural livelihood. A preliminary version of this chapter was presented at
“Intimacy and Belonging in Contemporary India,” in 2016 at the Indian
Institute of Advanced Study in Shimla, India. For more on earlier publications
on this work, please see Kochhar-Lindgren (2014, 2013a, b, 2009, 2006).
2. Helen Gilbert writes: “After winning the prestigious competition in 1997,
Harvest had its professional premiere in Greek at Karoulous Koun Theatre
in Athens directed by Mimis Kouyiouintzis (1999), with subsequent
readings and/or performances (mostly amateur) in India, the UK, Australia,

Canada, and the USA. It has also been broadcast as a radio play on the BBC,
translated into German and anthologised in two major collections of ‘world
drama’ … In 2001, Harvest was adapted for film (with dialogue in English
and Hindi) by Mumbai director Govind Nihalani and released under the
title, Deham, meaning ‘body’.” (2006, pp. 123–4).
3. There is a global need for body parts that exceeds the supply. Illegal organ
trade occurs when body parts are taken for commercial gain. For more, see
Goodwin, Michele (2006) Black Markets: The Supply and Demand of Body
Parts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; and Budiani-Saberi, D. A.
and F. L. Delmonico (2008) “Organ Trafficking and Transplant Tourism: A
Commentary on the Global Realities.” American Journal of Transplantation.
Volume 8, Issue 5. May 2008, pp. 925–9.
4. While it is beyond the scope of this chapter to unpack the prostheticizing of
disability in relation to David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder’s ground-
breaking work on disability as a narrative prosthesis, for our initial purposes,
our use of the term has to do with the ways in which the disabled body can
act as metaphorical, corporeal, and material assemblages of hybridity. For
more on Mitchell and Snyder’s work, see: Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and
the Dependencies of Discourse. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000.
5. For more on disability in India, see Ghai’s Rethinking Disability in India.
New Delhi: Routledge, 2015.
6. “Medical documentary: conjoined twins as a mediated spectacle” is an
important source for understanding the freak show as a transnational phe-
nomenon and its continuity from live performances into film. Particularly
pertinent to our study here is José van Dijck’s recounting of Indian conjoined
twins and “the separation of the conjoined twins Doodica and Radica Neik
of which only a short fragment of the original eight minutes shot in 1902
has survived.” (van Dijck 2002, p. 544).
7. According to Dean Nelson, “India is the most dangerous place in the world
to be born a girl, with females almost twice as likely to die before reaching
the age of five, according to new UN figures.” (India “most dangerous place
in world to be born a girl.” The Telegraph. Feb 1, 2012. Online.)
For more on female Infanticide in India, see Bhatnagar, Rashmi Dube,
Renu Dube, and Reena Dube (2012) Female Infanticide in India: A
Feminist Cultural History. Albany: SUNY Press.
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Transplant Tourism: A Commentary on the Global Realities. American Journal
of Transplantation 8 (5): 925–929.
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———. 2015. Rethinking Disability in India. New Delhi: Routledge.
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CHAPTER 9
The Orient on Ice: Transnational Cultural

Portrayals by Asian and Asian American
Figure Skaters
John B. Weinstein
Abstract In the 1990s, Chinese and Chinese-American competitors in

ladies’ figure skating used Oriental cultural elements in their winning
World Championship programs. The cultures reflected were drawn from
multiple regions within those considered the “Orient,” both Near Eastern,
in the European conception, and Far Eastern, in the American concep-
tion. Although always a transnational performance form, figure skating
has, from the 1980s onward, expanded from Euro American cultural
dominance into greater prevalence among Asian countries and Asian
American skaters within the US. This did not initially lead to greater pres-
ence of non-Western cultures in figure skating performances, until 1995
World Champion Chen Lu of China and 1996 World Champion Michelle
Kwan of the US engaged in cultural portrayals beyond pure Euro American
movement and visuality. Their choreography, however, drew much from
Oriental performance already mediated by Western dance forms, and their
performances were only “in character” within limits, in performances still
dominated by technical elements.
J. B. Weinstein (*)
Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, USA

144 J. B. WEINSTEIN
Keywords China • Figure skating • Performance • Orientalism
When Chinese ladies’ figure skating champion Chen Lu took the ice for
her free program at the World Figure Skating Championships in
Birmingham, England, in March of 1995, NBC commentator Sandra
Bezic stated that, “With this program, she [Chen] says she wants to com-
bine her Asian heritage with a sport that has been originated in the West.”1
Chen, “dubbed the rising star of the ’92 [Olympic] Games” by Skating
magazine (1992, p. 37), had won China’s first World Championship
medals—a pair of bronzes in 1992 and 1993—and China’s first Olympic
medal in figure skating—also a bronze, in 1994. Now, Chen stood poised
to reach the top step of the podium. Wearing auspicious Chinese red,
Chen launched into her program set to selections from the score of
Bernardo Bertolucci’s film The Last Emperor. When her program con-
cluded, and her scores were revealed, Chen had become China’s first
world champion in figure skating. She had done so by invoking and por-
traying elements from her native culture, drawing upon her heritage to
raise her levels of artistry, and bringing figure skating into a new transcul-
tural era embracing cultural aesthetics from Asia.
Or had she? To an extent, definitely. Analyzing her performance reveals
that Chen did make innovations in portraying elements drawn from non-
Western cultures, and her victory was part of a clear rise in Asian promi-
nence in figure skating from the 1990s onward. In that decade, Chinese
and Chinese-American competitors in ladies’ figure skating used Oriental
cultural elements in their winning World Championship programs. The
cultures reflected were drawn from multiple regions within those consid-
ered the “Orient,” both Middle Eastern, in the European conception, and
East Asian, in the North American conception. Chen in 1995, followed by
American Michelle Kwan in her own World Championship performance in
1996, engaged in cultural portrayals beyond pure Western movement and
visuality. After low artistic marks in 1995, Kwan returned in 1996 with a
new look, dressed as the temptress Salomé. While her seven triple jumps
occupied much of her four minutes, she also wove in movements evoking
the Oriental theme of her program. Both Chen’s and Kwan’s choreography,
however, drew much from Oriental styles already mediated by Western
dance forms, and their performances were only “in character” within lim-
its, balancing their newly raised artistry with the technical elements and
other conventions of the sport of figure skating, a sport still “originated in
the West.”
THE ORIENT ON ICE: TRANSNATIONAL CULTURAL PORTRAYALS BY ASIAN… 145
Whose Orient?
“Oriental” has been applied to multiple regions, cumulatively covering a
span of the world from the Levant to Japan. In Western scholarship, across
multiple disciplines, the word has become inextricable from the concept of
Orientalism, explicated by Edward W. Said in his 1978 book Orientalism.
In their 2016 edited volume Orientalism, Eroticism and Modern Visuality
in Global Cultures, art historians Joan DelPlato and Julie F. Codell write,
“It is impossible to address the topic of the Orient and the oriental with-
out acknowledging the impact of Edward Said’s Orientalism, now nearly
forty years old, on the dynamics of contact between the Middle East and
Europe” (p. 6). Said chose to limit the geographic scope of his study, fol-
lowing the rationale that “one could discuss Europe’s experience of the
Near Orient, or of Islam, apart from its experience of the Far Orient”
(Said 1979, p. 17). Consequently, Said’s book Orientalism applies most
directly to Europe and the Middle East, though the concept itself can
apply well to America and East Asia. Said himself acknowledges from the
outset that the term “Orient” has a different meaning for Americans:
“Americans will not feel quite the same about the Orient, which for them
is much more likely to be associated very differently with the Far East
(China and Japan, mainly)” (p. 1).
Indeed, in American skating journalism, Oriental refers, as Said would
expect, to the cultures of the “Far East.” In Skating magazine, the official
publication of US Figure Skating, the term appears at least twice, both
times referring to dresses of skaters of East Asian descent. In coverage of
the 1983 US Figure Skating Championships, the Skating staff writes of
Tiffany Chin, the first Asian American figure skater to make the World
Team and, later, win the national title and medal at the World Championships,
“Tiffany Chin wore an exquisitely beaded black dress, reminiscent of an
oriental flower garden” (p. 37). The same word is used five years later to
describe the skating dress and music of the next Asian American national
champion, Kristi Yamaguchi, who also won World and Olympic gold med-
als. In her report on the Central Pacific Sectional Championships, Dorothy
Bowers writes, “Dressed in an oriental style, red wrap-front dress and skat-
ing to a selection of oriental flavor music, Kristi took the ice with assurance
and refused to let up” (1988, p. 63). Though “Oriental” in this case is
referencing American perceptions of East Asia, and not Said’s European
perceptions of the Middle East, the Skating reporters’ usage contributes to
the discourse on Orientalism, as these viewers of figure skating cast their
146 J. B. WEINSTEIN
gaze differently on the Asian American skaters. Tiffany Chin was known for
exquisitely beaded costuming, but she was neither the first nor last skater
to ever have flower motifs on her dress.
Historian John MacKenzie, in his 1995 book Orientalism: History,
Theory and the Arts, applies Orientalism to visual arts, architecture, design,
music, theater, and dance—the latter most relevant to this study. In
MacKenzie’s view, the Orient became a source of new inspiration for
dancers, which leads MacKenzie to see Oriental influence in a more posi-
tive, apolitical light than Said: “Through fabric, colour, design and move-
ment the artists were expressing excitement and admiration, never racial
difference and disdain. With the Ballet Russes the Orientalist thesis of
Edward Said seems at one level superficially confirmed and at another
irretrievably disrupted” (Mackenzie 1995, p. 199). MacKenzie examines
Sergei Diaghalev’s Ballet Russes as a key example of Orientalism’s role in
saving ballet from what MacKenzie calls a “moribund state” in the early
twentieth century (p. 197). Skaters have embraced the same musical selec-
tions as Diaghalev. MacKenzie references, among others, Rimsky-
Korsakov’s “Scheherezade” and Borodin’s “Polovtsian Dances”; Michelle
Kwan skated to “Scheherezade” in her second Olympics in 2002; and
Nathan Chen, who became the first Asian American US men’s champion
in 2017, won that title skating to “Polovtsian Dances.”
Sheng-mei Ma takes a darker, more political stance in his 2000 volume
The Deathly Embrace: Orientalism and Asian American Identity, calling
Orientalism “the discursive tradition in the West dealing with the subject
and the subjugation of the East” (p. xi). Interdisciplinary scholar Ma ana-
lyzes films, novels, comic strips, and other genres portraying subjects mostly
of Chinese and Japanese origin. Ma examines the evocation of stereotypes
as a means of eradicating them, but he also sees that process as laden with
pitfalls. In his introduction, he writes, “But in order to retire racist stereo-
types, one is obliged to first evoke them; in order to construct ethnicity,
one must first destruct what is falsely reported as one’s ethnic identity. Both
result in an unwitting reiteration of Orientalist images” (2000, p. xi).
DelPlato and Codell more recently address the object of the gaze
speaking back and demonstrating agency, and with somewhat more opti-
mism than Ma. They write, “Said’s stance has been unfairly caricatured to
imply an unbridgeable divide between East and West and an inevitable
passivity of the ‘oriental,’ in service to the politically powerful Westerner
who produces culture” (2016, p. 6). DelPlato and Codell increase the
agency of that oriental, noting, “Just as the female object of the male gaze
in fact has the power to be desired and is not simply reified and powerless,
so the object of the oriental gaze has some negotiable agency over orien-
talism” (2016, p. 18). For the purposes of this study on figure skaters
portraying the Orient, DelPlato and Codell’s viewpoints open up the pos-
sibility that skaters, when creating their performances in a viewed and
judged sport, retain a degree of agency over what is viewed. DelPlato and
Codell are less concerned than Ma that these objects, when speaking back,
are already coopted by the audiences—in the case of figure skating, many
different audiences—that gaze upon them.
Figure Skating as Transnational Performance

Before figure skating can be deemed transnational performance, it must
first be categorized as performance. Richard Schechner, originator of the
field of Performance Studies, notes that “Performances occur in eight
sometimes separate, sometimes overlapping situations,” and then goes on
to list the eight, which include “in sports and other popular entertain-
ments” among them (Schechner 2002, p. 25). Within the broader cate-
gory of sports, figure skating is identified as being more on the side of arts
than other, more quantitative sports: “some sports are close to fine arts.
Gymnastics, figure skating, and high diving are recognized by the Olympics
… these ‘aesthetic athletes’ are judged qualitatively on the basis of ‘form’
and ‘difficulty.’ Their performances are more like dancing than competi-
tions of speed or strength” (Schechner 2002, p. 26) The centrality of fig-
ure skating as an example of performance is highlighted by Schechner’s
inclusion of a time-lapse photograph of 1980 World Champion Denise
Biellmann of Switzerland doing a triple toe loop (p. 26).
Figure skating in its present form is transnational, for no single nation
lays claim to the sport. Consider, for instance, the names of the key figure
skating jumps named after individual skaters who pioneered them: the
Salchow, named for Swedish skater Ulrich Salchow, the Lutz, named for
Austrian Alois Lutz, and the Axel, after Norwegian Axel Paulsen. There
were, earlier on, national styles; the histories of these styles are presented
in historian James R. Hines’ Figure Skating: A History and sociologist
Mary Louise Adams’ Artistic Impressions: Figure Skating, Masculinity, and
the Limits of Sport. Hines delineates three major styles during the nine-
teenth century, with the English focused on team-based designs on the
ice, North Americans focused on individual, unique ones, and European
continental skaters having “interest in movement across the ice” (2006,
p. 86). The Europeans’ style was known first as the Viennese and later the
international style, but its most famous creator was an American, ballet
148 J. B. WEINSTEIN
dancer Jackson Haines, who found more favor in Europe than at home. In
his first public performance in Vienna, a city at the time “in the midst of
waltz fever,” Haines, making “what was surely a calculated move … took
to the ice to the strains of a waltz” (Adams 2011, p. 98). The international
style would come to eclipse the others. “When the International Skating
Union (ISU) held a Congress to adopt rules for international figure skat-
ing competitions, while the Congress has been presented as compromise
and consensus,” Hines notes, “in reality they represent a triumph of the
international style” (Hines 2006, p. 86).
For most of the twentieth century, skaters of European descent domi-
nated figure skating, but the rise of skaters of Asian descent is figure skat-
ing’s most significant development in the early twenty-first century.
Although Asian and Asian American skaters won a handful of world med-
als in the 1970s and 1980s, success remained slow until 1989, when
Japan’s Midori Ito became the first Asian skater to win the World
Championship; she earned a silver medal the following year. In 1991,
Kristi Yamaguchi was the first Asian American to win the World
Championship, and in 1992, two out of three podium slots at both the
Olympics and the World Championships went to skaters of Asian descent:
at the Olympics, Yamaguchi (gold) and Ito (silver); at Worlds, Yamaguchi
(gold) and newcomer Chen from China (bronze). From that point
onward, skaters of Asian descent became regular medalists in the ladies’
events: Chen in 1993, and Chen (Olympic bronze) and Japan’s Yuka Sato
(Worlds gold) in 1994, leading up to the World Championships by Chen
in 1995 and Kwan in 1996. From 1989 to 2017, there have been only
three years in which no ladies’ medalist was either Asian or Asian American,
remarkable given that in all the years prior to 1989, only three such medals
had been won.2
A figure skating performance has multiple simultaneous audiences, and
those audiences further increase the sport’s transnationality. In today’s
multi-media world, when a figure skater performs in World-level competi-
tion, audiences include: the judges, the skater’s coaches, other competi-
tors and their coaches, the live audience within the arena, and audiences of
an ever-expanding range of live and recorded options: network television,
cable channels, online platforms like www.icenetwork.com, live score
results available online from the International Skating Union (ISU), and
recorded performances on YouTube and other video platforms. Recorded
performances are now readily available soon after many events occur via
the ISU’s YouTube channel, as well as various private postings. The online
presence in particular enables fans to follow skaters from any nation they
wish. The figure skating fan base is transnational, with Japan as the current
epicenter of figure skating fandom.
The judging panel is, by longstanding regulation, transnational. In the
1920s, the ISU established a rule limiting a country to only one judge per
panel (Hines 2006, p. 114). Furthering transnationality are the contribu-
tions of coaches and choreographers, with national variation in skater,
coach, and training location long a part of figure skating. British 1980
Olympic gold medalist Robin Cousins, who was trained at the Broadmoor
World Arena in Colorado by Italian Carlo Fassi, is one of many examples.
Though Chen Lu had Chinese coaches throughout her career, her 1995
artistic leap came by adding Canadian Toller Cranston as choreographer
to her coaching team led by Li Mingzhu. American Michelle Kwan’s cho-
reographic transformation was likewise catalyzed by a Canadian choreog-
rapher, Lori Nichol.
Transnational Showdown: Ito vs Yamaguchi

The increased presence of skaters of Asian descent at the World
Championship level did not initially bring Asian cultural portrayals to the
international ice rink. A case in point is the first rivalry between an Asian
and an Asian American skater at the World and Olympic level: the 1992
Olympic battle between Midori Ito and Kristi Yamaguchi. Although skat-
ers nearly always downplay rivalries, the Ito–Yamaguchi pairing has defi-
nitely been presented as such in the media at the time and in subsequent
scholarship. There was much to make this rivalry appealing. Their cultural
background had overlap, with the Japanese Ito pitted against the Japanese-
American Yamaguchi. They truly were the top two skaters in the world at
the time, with Ito, the first woman to land a triple Axel jump in competi-
tion, in the role of the “athlete” and Yamaguchi, who had developed an
elegant style, as the “artist.”
This rivalry has made the leap from media coverage into academic
scholarship. The contradictions, and the sexism, inherent in the athlete/
artist dichotomy are core components of theater scholar Abigail M. Feder’s
1994 article in The Drama Review, entitled “‘A Radiant Smile from the
Lovely Lady’: Overdetermined Femininity in Ladies’ Figure Skating.”
Through analysis of media accounts of the Ito/Yamaguchi rivalry, Feder
concludes: “What is always close to the surface, but rarely acknowledged,
in the narrative of the artistry vs. athleticism debate is that for women,
150 J. B. WEINSTEIN
artistry is indistinguishable from physical beauty” (1994, p. 69). Feder

quotes Ito on why the skater relied on athleticism over artistry: “All I can
really do is jump. Figure skating is a matter of beauty, and Westerners are
so stylish, so slender. I wish I could be beautiful like them” (Ito, in Feder
1994, p. 69). Notable in this comment is that Ito’s greatest rival among
“Westerners” in the moment was the Japanese-American Yamaguchi, who
did have a more slender build than the more compact Ito. Nevertheless,
Ito’s valorization of the Western physique is, in this case, the opposite of
an Orientalist gaze, for the more exotic Ito is not portrayed as an object of
physical desire.
Orientalism does rear its head in a different sense, though, through a
fetishized Japanese sense of honor and duty that pervaded the presentation
of Ito’s Olympic experience. When Ito suffered a shocking fall in the short
program, which instantly removed any reasonable chances of a gold medal,
much was made in the Western media of her public apology to the Japanese
people. In a year end retrospective in Sports Illustrated, E. M. Swift (1992)
wrote, “Ito, her face blank to hide her embarrassment and her eyes red
with tears, felt obliged to apologize to the people of Japan … ‘I was never
disappointed for myself, only that I had let down the people of Japan,’ she
says” (p. 73). With Yamaguchi solidly in first place after the short program,
Americans could feel superior in two ways; their skater was on the path to
gold, and her soon-to-be-realized American Olympic dream contrasted
with a Japanese culture seemingly oppressive to its own people.
However, Yamaguchi was not immune to Oriental stereotype. Upon
her return from Albertville, Swift reports that an overtly racist discourse
emerged when “certain members of the business media predicted that
because of her Japanese-American heritage she would never get the
endorsement opportunities of previous U.S. figure skating gold medal-
ists” (1992, p. 74). With Japan squeezing the US economy, the theory
was that American companies would not want to associate with a visibly
Japanese spokesperson. Swift remarks that “This was pure speculation, but
it took on a life of its own. Yamaguchi, who had never felt the sting of
discrimination, was suddenly being cited as a victim by prominent mem-
bers of the Japanese-American community” (pp. 74–5).
While Japanese ethnicity may have played a role post-Olympics, non-
Western cultures played no notable role on the ice in either Ito’s or
Yamaguchi’s programs. Both skaters chose completely Western music, and
thoroughly frequent options at that. Ito chose Spanish music for her short
program; for her free skate, she skated to music by Rachmaninoff.
Yamaguchi chose the Western classic “The Blue Danube” for her short,
and then also went in the Spanish direction for her free skate, skating to
one of figure skating’s great musical warhorses, “Malaguena.” Ito’s and
Yamaguchi’s safe, familiar Western musical selections were likely wise
choices at the time.3 In the chapter titled “Another Lesson in ‘How to Tell
Your Friends Apart from the Japs’: The 1992 Winter Olympics Showdown
between Kristi Yamaguchi of the United States and Midori Ito of Japan,”
in her Imagining Japanese America: The Visual Construction of Citizenship,
Nation, and the Body, women’s and gender studies scholar Ellen Tajima
Creef identifies the media’s “overt participation in this careful overrepre-
sentation of Yamaguchi as a ‘normal All-American girl” (2004, p. 158). If
“All-American girls” skate to “Malaguena,” then Yamaguchi had best stick
with the program. Meanwhile, Ito had best not overemphasize her
Japaneseness, beset as she was with what the Japanese called “daikon
aishi,” or “radish legs” (Creef 2004, p. 163). Ito and Yamaguchi broke
racial barriers with their achievements, but to do so they stayed stylistically
well within figure skating’s European culture of origin.
Choreographing the Orient: Chen vs Kwan

Chinese skater Chen Lu and Chinese-American skater Michelle Kwan
took a different cultural approach for their championship programs in the
next great Asian/Asian American battle for gold. Chen and Kwan have
not been historically viewed as rivals. Hines, in his section on Kwan, does
present her career as a sequence of two rivalries, but with American Tara
Lipinski as the first and Russian Irina Slutskaya as the second. Chen is
notably absent from that discourse, though Hines does call 1996 “One of
the most exciting finishes in World Championship history.” He writes,
“Michelle Kwan of the United States skated immediately after Lu Chen
had presented an artistically superb free skate and wrested away the World
title with the impromptu inclusion of an extra triple jump at the end of an
equally superb free skate” (Hines 2006, p. 254). The relative absence in
published scholarship of the Chen/Kwan battle, as compared with Ito/
Yamaguchi, could be because Chen and Kwan were more champions in
sequence than rivals per se; Chen’s competitive career was winding down
as Kwan’s was ramping up. Timing is also a factor. Their 1996 battle
occurred midway between Olympic years. Figure skating receives much
less media focus in non-Olympic years, and often scholarship on figure
skating, such as Feder’s and Creef’s, draws heavily on media coverage as
source material.
152 J. B. WEINSTEIN
Both Chen and Kwan, not atypically, literally jumped to prominence

through technical achievements, but then needed artistic growth to reach
the top of the podium. This had happened with Yamaguchi as well. Feder
notes that, “Yamaguchi … grew into her artistry and, according to many,
out of her athleticism” (1994, p. 70). Chen’s breakout performance in the
1992 Olympic free program included six triple jumps, actually more than
gold medalist Yamaguchi completed that night. To become the complete
package, Chen needed to grow artistically, and she did in subsequent
years; all that remained was the signature program that moved her from
medalist to champion. For Kwan, the transformation from athlete to
artist-athlete happened within one season. Hines references Kwan’s sev-
enth triple as being key to her victory over Chen’s six triples in 1996, but
Kwan had landed seven triples to Chen’s five in 1995, yet finished only
third in the free program and fourth overall that year. Until she addressed
her issues of artistry, maturity, and overall “look,” Kwan was not going to
unseat Chen.
Both skaters looked to the Orient, albeit to different Orients, for the
solution to their artistic challenges. Chen’s Orient was what Said consid-
ered the North American one: the “Far Orient,” specifically Chen’s native
China. Her free skate program fusing her Chinese heritage with a sport of
Western origin was, in numerous ways, presenting an East being mediated
by the West. The music came from the film The Last Emperor, which medi-
ates the story of Emperor Puyi for Western audiences; the score itself
brings together music by Japanese, Chinese, and American composers
(Sakamoto et al. 1987). Chen’s red skating dress evoked Chinese tradi-
tions, within the Western-originated skating dress. Most importantly, her
movement—the only one of these components that is actually judged—
incorporated Chinese cultural elements. One minute and forty seconds
into the program, Chen paused from technical elements for approximately
twenty seconds of dance movements, including steps on her toes followed
by angular arm movements, while drums and Chinese-sounding wind
instruments played. Though the movements were intended to—and for
many audiences, likely did—evoke Chineseness, they were also likely more
Western-influenced that authentically Chinese. Dance scholar Emily
Wilcox (2017) has commented that Chen’s steps remind her of those
incorporated into Russian ballet, when that dance form sought to portray
folk dances from various cultures. This has a long tradition in ballet;
consider, for example, the Chinese and Arab dances from Tchaikovsky’s
Nutcracker, both of them examples of Orientalism in John MacKenzie’s
sense of the word. Chen’s “Chinese” dancing, in a program choreo-
graphed by Canadian Toller Cranston, was mediated by Western dance
traditions before even reaching the ice.
The reverse mediation also occurred, however, as Cranston’s choreog-
raphy—whether inspired by Chinese folk dance, Russian ballet, or even his
own imagination—was also mediated by Chen’s own body, as a Chinese
skater performing those movements as her interpretation of cultural
fusion. Chen’s statement to the media, conveyed by Bezic, attests to the
deep personal meaning this program had for Chen. As the world watched,
Chen used figure skating choreography to reconcile her Chinese identity
with a sport that had never crowned anyone of her ethnicity as World
Champion. Chen grasped the agency that DelPlato and Codell would
posit she can possess. Yes, the “powerful Westerner,” using DelPlato and
Codell’s term, plays a role, whether in the guise of choreographer
Cranston, the predominantly Western judges, or figure skating itself as a
natively Western activity. Chen’s own viewpoint, however, expressed ver-
bally through her words to the press and visually through her physical
performance on the ice, is what made her free skate inspired by the
Orient—specifically the “Far Orient,” as Said would say—of historical and
transnational significance.
Michelle Kwan, meanwhile, was trying to jump start artistic maturity,
and she found her new look in the other part of the Orient, the Middle
East of Said’s Orientalism. As Jere Longman of the New York Times
(1996) reported following Kwan’s success as world champion, “The
[winning] marks represented a calculated decision that her coach, Frank
Carroll, made last year after Kwan finished fourth at the worlds. He
thought she looked too much like a girl, when she needed to look like a
young woman to win a world title.” Skating magazine writer Jay Miller
cites Kwan’s perspective on the new approach: “At Worlds in 1995, I
skated very well … the best I could at that point … I knew when I saw
technical marks around 5.8 dropping to 5.5 in the second (presentation)
mark there was something wrong with what we were doing. When I fin-
ished fourth, I said, ‘What can I do to move three places higher?’” (Kwan,
quoted in Miller 1996, p. 23). The decision was a new, more mature
program theme: Salomé. As Longman (1996) reports of Kwan’s new
look, “Her hair is now worn in a bun instead of a ponytail. She wears
154 J. B. WEINSTEIN
makeup and more sophisticated costumes … she has become Salome, the

biblical temptress.”
Similar to Chen Lu’s ballet-mediated Chinese folk dancing, Kwan’s
Salomé program connected to a tradition of Western-mediated Oriental
dance. The Western dancer most associated with this tradition is Ruth St.
Denis, who created and performed numerous dances on Oriental themes.4
Suzanne Shelton (1981), one of St. Denis’ biographers, writes: “The pro-
totype of these exotic dances was Salomé. Richard Strauss’ operatic version
at the Metropolitan Opera in 1907 spawned dozens of dancing Salomés in
vaudeville and the legitimate theatre” (p. 90). Regarding St. Denis’ par-
ticular approach to the role, another biographer, Walter Terry (1969),
writes: “[St. Denis] did not simply strip off seven veils as the scenario sug-
gested. She did not strip at all, but she did have seven veils, each totally
different from the other and each representing a different mood or quality
of action in the enchantress” (p. 118). Kwan’s program, with seven triple
jumps in lieu of seven veils, was still dominated by technical elements.
Nevertheless, choreographer Lori Nichol helped make Kwan’s arm
movements—sometimes sharply angular, sometimes boldly extended—far
more impactful. Kwan’s costuming also went more toward the theatrical
than the norm for competitive figure skating at the time, though the
seemingly bare midriff of Kwan’s Salomé dress was covered with
rhinestone-embellished nude-colored fabric.
Increased theatricality actually helped Kwan and her parents, respec-
tively, execute and accept her new look. Actual “Salomé” movement in the
program came largely from the arms, with no section similar to Chen’s
twenty seconds of Chinese, or Chinese-esque, dance. Kwan imbued her
arms, and her full body, with greater passion and conviction, and thinking
internally of playing a role helped her external execution. Jay Miller writes:
Michelle’s makeover, however, was not merely external. For the first time,
Kwan was asked to play a role in Salome. “(Salome) was really different for
me because you really need to perform it and play the role that the music was
given by and it was fun. It was very unusual for me,” she said. “I wouldn’t
do that in ’94 or ’95, it was just a program. This year, one arm movement
meant something – it wasn’t just an arm movement.” (1996, p. 24)
New York Times reporter Longman (1996) references the key role of char-
acter portrayal in dissipating the Kwan family’s reluctance about the choice
of Salomé: “Finally, Kwan’s parents consented, accepting that Michelle

was essentially an actress playing a role, a greasepaint seductress who left
the role of Salome behind when she left the ice.”
This discourse surrounding Kwan’s transformation raises the bigger
question of whether, and to what extent, figure skaters actually portray a
character on the ice. Musical interpretation has long been key for artistic
success in figure skating, but shifting from musical interpretation to char-
acter portrayal is another matter, particularly when technical elements
occupy so much program time. One arguable example of character por-
trayal is East German Katarina Witt’s 1988 Olympic free program, in
which she sought to literally portray the role of Carmen from Bizet’s
eponymous opera. As Skating magazine (1988) recounts, “Her interpre-
tation followed the story of the opera, of the tragic, seductive heroine,
who dies at the hands of her lover” (p. 36); Witt ended laying down on
the ice. Her portrayal, which only earned gold medalist Witt second place
in the free skate, was controversial, particularly “A questionable middle
section with over thirty seconds of posing and no skating” (p. 36). Chen’s
dance section, so central to her Chinese cultural portrayal was, at twenty
seconds, not radically different in length from Witt’s Carmen posing,
which did actually involve some skating. These examples suggest that, in
competitive programs full of jumps and spins, skaters can only portray
characters choreographically for twenty to thirty seconds at most.
A final question is the agency of Chen and Kwan, two trailblazing
women of East Asian heritage in the sport of ladies’ figure skating, as the
event is officially called. Were Chen and Kwan, as Sheng-mei Ma would
say, “unwitting” in their “reiteration of Orientalist images” (p. xi)? Or
were they, as DelPlato and Codell offer, female objects speaking out? The
latter better befits both skaters. Chen’s conscious choice to use her culture
as a path to victory challenged a skating establishment whose previous
champions of Asian descent had not overtly manifested their heritage on
ice. Kwan showed agency repeatedly vis-à-vis longtime coach Frank
Carroll, well known for expecting skaters to do as he wishes and for dis-
missing more than one Olympian from his services. Kwan, in contrast,
moved up to the senior level in 1992 against Carroll’s wishes—she took
the senior test while Carroll was away—and then parted ways with him in
2002, in the largely unheard of move of competing without a coach for
the Olympic year. Kwan’s many fans will always speculate whether going it
alone cost Kwan Olympic gold, but there is no doubt that Kwan demon-
strated her agency in her own skating.
156 J. B. WEINSTEIN
Kwan’s 1996 gold was her first of nine World Championship medals. In
some programs she used themes of the Orient. Her Taj Mahal free pro-
gram of 1997, with a sari-inspired skating dress, is one standout example;
her Scheherezade of 2002, which earned Kwan her second Olympic medal,
is another. In many other programs, she did not use Oriental themes.
Chen had a similar musical range. She used Rachmaninoff in 1996, and
the Chinese-themed Butterly Lovers in 1998. Both Chen and Kwan, in the
end, needed the Orient as a catalyst, not a crutch. The Orient had pro-
vided a fresh, winning look for them, just as it had, as John MacKenzie
notes, given ballet new life in the time of Diaghilev. Chen’s image evoked
her own culture, the Orient of the Far East. Kwan’s Salomé evoked Orients
of both Middle and Far East, with its combination of program theme
derived from the former, and her own ethnicity from the latter. If, as
Edward Said hypothesized nearly forty years ago, one Orient appeals to
Europeans and the other to North Americans, Kwan’s performance of two
Orients was a truly golden strategy for the transnationally judged sport of
figure skating.
Notes
1. Bezic’s comment can be heard in multiple YouTube and Youku postings of
the broadcast. See, for example, https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=ARd8UsQj_Ag.
2. Hines’ Figure Skating: A History includes complete listings of World
Championship (pp. 313–21) and Olympic (pp. 336–8) medalists. This same
information is available from many other sources.
3. Ito frequently used music by Japanese composers, albeit in Western musical
styles, in her early years of competition, including her 1989 World
Championship programs. Because this information appears in her Wikipedia
entry but has not been substantiated by another source, it is included here
only as a note.
4. Thank you to Emily Wilcox for recommending St. Denis’ work as a line of
inquiry.
Works Cited
Adams, M. L. (2011) Artistic Impressions: Figure Skating, Masculinity, and the
Limits of Sport. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Bowers, D. 1988. Central Pacifics. Skating, January, 61–63.
Creef, E.T. 2004. Imagining Japansese America: The Visual Construction of
Citizenship, Nation, and the Body. New York: New York University Press.
DelPlato, J., and J.F. Codell, eds. 2016. Orientalism, Eroticism and Modern
Visuality in Global Cultures. New York: Routledge.
Feder, A.M. 1994. ‘A Radiant Smile from the Lovely Lady’: Overdetermined
Feminity in ‘Ladies’ Figure Skating. TDR 38 (1): 62–78.
Hines, J.R. 2006. Figure Skating: A History. Urbana: University of Illinois Press &
Colorado Springs, World Figure Skating Museum and Hall of Fame.
Longman, J. 1996. Grace and Improvisation: Kwan Wins World Title. New York
Times, March 23. http://www.nytimes.com/1996/03/24/sports/figure-
skating-grace-and-improvisation-kwan-wins-world-title.html. Accessed 26
September 2017.
Ma, S. 2000. The Deathly Embrace: Orientalism and Asian American Identity.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
MacKenzie, J.M. 1995. Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts. Manchester:
Manchester University Press.
Miller, J. 1996. The Maturation of Michelle. Skating, June, 22–25.
Said, E.W. 1979. Orientalism. New York: Vintage.
Sakamoto, R. et al. 1987. The Last Emperor. Audio CD. EMI Europe Generic.
Schechner, R. 2002. Performance Studies: An Introduction. New York: Routledge.
Shelton, S. 1981. Divine Dancer: A Biography of Ruth St. Denis. New York:
Doubleday & Company.
Staff Report. 1983. The Great Skate: Pittsburgh ’83 Nationals, Civic Arena
February 1–6. Skating, April, 31–45, 54, 65.
———. 1988. XV Winter Olympic Games: Showdown in Calgary. Skating, April,
22–39
———. 1992. XVI Olympic Winter Games: Albertville, France. Skating, April,
30–49.
Swift, E.M. 1992. All That Glitters. Sports Illustrated, December 14, 70–76, 78,
80.
Terry, W. 1969. Miss Ruth: The “More Living Life” of Ruth St. Denis. New York:
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Wilcox, E. 2017. Personal Conversation with Author, August 3.
Index1
NUMBERS AND SYMBOLS Artaud, 2, 16n1

108 Heroes: Tales From “The Water Asano, Kazuyuki, 114–116, 118
Margin” (Part I), xviii, 4, 5 Asia, xvii, 12, 23, 54, 55, 57–66, 94,
108 Heroes: Tales From “The Water 144, 145
Margin” (Part II), xviii, 4, 5, 12 Asian-American, xviii, 54, 55, 145,
1992 Olympic Games, 144 146, 148, 149, 151
1995 World Figure Skating Audience, xviii, xx, 3–5, 10, 11, 14,
Championships, 144 15, 30, 35, 41, 43, 45, 51,
1996 World Figure Skating 71–73, 78, 79, 95, 96, 98, 99,
Championships, 144 101, 106–109, 117–119, 137,
147, 148, 152
Authenticity, 15, 25, 36, 87, 152
A Avant-garde, xix, 2, 46, 63, 92–100, 102
Abbas, Ackbar, 2 Ayodhya, 72
Absurdism, 119
Adaptation, xviii, 3–5, 11, 20–23, 31,
35, 36, 36n2, 41, 42, 92, 95, 96 B
Aesthetic regime, 138 Balinese ritual, 2
Akaoni (The Red Demon, 1996), Barba, Eugenio, 45, 54, 84, 88n1
108, 120n3 Barnett, Angus, 108
Androgynous body, 12–14 Baudrillard, Jean, 2
Aristotle’s Poetics, 31, 48 Beckett, Samuel, 119
Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

and Mobility in Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7107-2
160 INDEX
Bee, The (2006), xvii, xix, 105–120 Conjoined twins, 125, 128,
Bell, Tony, 109 129, 139n6
Betrayal, xviii, 20–36, 36n3 Consumerism, 11
Bhakti, 84 Contemporary Legend Theater
Bhardwaj, Surinder Mohan, 89n5 (CLT), 3–5, 7, 12, 14
Bharucha, Rustom, 83, 84, 86–88 Cultural mobility, xx, 20, 21, 24, 25,
Bioslavery, 135 31, 32, 35, 36, 36n2
Blue and White Porcelain, 6, 7 Cultural other, 4, 15
Body, 10, 13, 63, 72, 96, 108, 115, Cultural Revolution, 14, 48
125, 131–136, 139n3, 153, 154 Cymbal percussion, 10
Brecht, Bertolt, 2, 16n1, 119
Brechtian narrator, 11
Breuer, Lee, xix, 92, 97–99, 102 D
Broad spectrum approach, 81, 83 Dattani, Mahesh, 125–133, 135–138
Brook, Peter, 54, 88n1, 106, 120 Davidson, Michael, 133, 134, 136
Bush, George W., 109 De/colonization, 4, 14, 55, 92, 93
Butler, Judith, 33, 54, 115 Déjà disparu, xv, 2, 5, 14
Diaspora, 92–100, 102
Disability, xx, 92, 125–133, 135–138
C Disequilibrium, 125–133, 135–138
Cardenio, xviii, 20–36 Don Quixode, xviii, 24, 32
Carroll, Frank, 153, 155 Double Falsehood, 20, 21, 23–25, 31
Cervantes, Miguel de, xiv, xvii, 20–22,
24, 31, 32, 36n1
Chang Ta-ch’uen, 5, 7 E
Chao Gai, 7, 13 Edinburgh Festival, 107
Chau Wa-kin, 5, 7 Educational theatre, 41
Chen Lu, xx, 144, 149, 151, 154 Efficacy, 80, 82, 84, 88
Child, 5, 41, 42, 48, 49, 92, Electronic music, 7, 12
109, 111, 128 Emperor Showa, 107
Chinese folk arts, 11 Environmental theatre, 73, 81,
Chinese nationalism, 3, 15 82, 89n8
Chineseness, 6, 16, 152 Epic narrating, 11, 81
Chinese Wind, xviii, 2–15 Estrangement effect, 119
Choreography, xx, 70, 144, 149, Ethnicity, 15, 107, 110, 138n1, 146,
151–156 150, 153
Chou, Jay, 6 Etude, xix, 40–43, 45–49, 51
“Chrysanthemum Reunion”, 13 Exoticism, 25, 55
Class, 33, 41, 42, 48, 49, 51, 52, 56, Experimental theater, 21
93, 94, 110 Extra-dailyness, 45
INDEX
161
F Harvest, 125–133, 135–138

Family, 7, 92, 93, 98, 111, 118, Harvey, David, 2
135, 154 “Hashiru Toriteki” (The Sumo
Fang, Vincent, 6 Wrestler Trainee), 108
Fantasy, 6 Heroism, 5
Faye Fei, 16n1 “Hijacking the Convoy of Birthday
Feingold, Michael, 107 Gift”, 7
Female infanticide, 128, 131 Hip-hop, xviii, 2–15, 50
Femininity, 13, 110, 115, 120, 149 Hip-Hop Opera: A Play of Brother
Feudalism, 27, 28 and Sister, 5
Field, Norma, 107 Hispanidad, 25
Homoerotic, xviii, 31
Horse step, 12
G Hunter, Kathryn, 109, 110, 112, 113,
Gandō gaeshi, 114 116, 119, 120
Gaulier, Phillipe, 107 Hybrid, xx, 4, 6, 11, 12, 14, 16,
Gekiga, 114 16n1, 36, 139n4
Gender, 34, 110, 115, 116, 124–128,
138, 138n1, 151
Gender perfomativity, 34, 115 I
Geography, xix, 23, 54, 124–127, 145 Imitation, xix, 26, 48–52
Geopathology, 20 Individualization, 40, 41
Ghai, Anita, 126 Intercultural, xviii–xx, 24, 25, 31, 54,
Globalization, xviii, 15, 66, 86, 55, 70, 71, 82–84, 86, 88, 97,
106, 136 102, 106
Glocalization, xviii, 11, 20, 21, 24, 25, Interculturality, 54, 82
31, 35, 36, 37n5 Interculturalization, xx, 106
“Going into the Underworld”, 7 Intercultural theater, 54, 70, 83, 88
Great China, 6, 14 International Skating Union (ISU), 148
Groenewegen, Jeroen, 4, 6 Intertextuality, 20, 22–23, 32, 35
Grotowski, Jerzy, 2, 16n1, 84, 88n1 Intracultural, 56
Inujima, xix, 56, 58, 60, 62–64
Ishinha, xix, 54–66
H Ito, Midori, 148–151, 156n3
Haines, Jackson, 148
Hakka, xviii, 20–36
Hakka Eight Sounds, 30 J
Hakka Flat Monotonous Music, 30 Japanese colonization, 4, 55, 92, 93
Hakka Tea-Picking Tune, 30 Japan foundation, 56
Hall, Stuart, 15 Japan-US Security Treaty, 117
Hanshin (Half Gods), 107, 108 Jiangshi, 7, 11
162 INDEX
Jingju, xviii, 2–15, 25 M

Jingju innovation, 3, 4, 14 Macbeth, 3
Jingyun dagu, 11 Madame Butterfly, 112
Juban kuaishu, 11 The Mahabarata, 106, 120
Ju Yon Kim, 100, 101 Male gaze, 115, 146
Manga, 10–11, 114
Marsh, Liangshan, 7, 11
K Martin, Carole, 118
Kabuki, 110, 114 Marxist, 107
Kara, Juro, 56, 64–66 Masculinity, 13, 115, 120
Kathakali, 2, 71, 72, 79 Matsumoto, Yukichi, xix, 56, 63–65
King Lear, 4, 33–35 Mazu, 4
King, Martin Luther Jr., 117 McBurney, Simon, 107
The Kingdom of Desire, 3, 4, 16n2 Metamorufosesu Guntō , 109
Korea, xix, 16n2, 56, 61, 66, Michael Jackson, 10
92–95, 97–102 Mimicry, 119, 129
Korean American, xix, 92, 94, 98–102 Mitate, 110–112
Koxinga, 4 Mitchell, David, 125, 139n4
Kunqu, 30 Mnouchkine, Ariane, 4, 88n1
Kuomingtang (KMT), 3 Mobility, xvii, 20–36
Kwan, Michelle, xx, 144, 146, 148, Modern dance, 99
149, 151–156 Modernization, 55, 62, 65
Kwon, Hyi-ro, 117 Modern theater, xii, 31, 50, 65, 92
Monty Python, 109
Mushiriai (Plucking at Each Other), 106
L “My Way”, 111
Lai, Sara, 10
Lear Is Here, 4
Lecoq method, 107, 120n2 N
The Legend of Widow’s Village, 6 National Theater, 3, 24, 26–29
Les Miserables, xiv, xvii, 40–43, 45–49, 51 New York International Festival of
Liao, Tianding, 4 Arts, 107
Lin Hsiu-wei, 4 Noda, Hideki, xvii, xix, 106–112,
Lin Wen-Pin, 11 114–116, 118–120
Localization, 25, 40 Noda, Manabu, xx, 106, 120
London, xx, 36n1, 107–109, 112, NODA MAP, 108, 112, 113,
119, 120, 120n5, 128, 129 116, 117
Lowe, Lisa, 127, 137 Nokemono kitarite (Decent of the
Luotian Sacrificial Ceremony, 13 Brutes), 107
Lu, Zhishen, 10 Nostalgia, 15, 57, 64
INDEX
163
O S
Occidentalism, 65 Said, Edward, 54, 110, 145, 146, 152,
The Old Man and the Sea, 51 153, 156
Olympic Games, 144 Salomé, 144, 153–155
Onnagata, 110 Schechner, Richard, xix, 70–88,
On the Run, 7 88n1, 147
Opera, xi, xviii, 3, 5, 6, 16n1, 20–36, Scheherezade, 146, 156
43–46, 48–51, 56, 154, 155 Senda, Akihiko, 108, 115, 119,
Opus 12, 7 120, 120n2
Orient, 54, 110, 144–156 September 11 attacks, 108, 109, 118
Orientalism, 145–147, 150, 153 Setagaya Public Theatre, 106
Orientalist, 110, 112, 146, 150, 155 Shakespeare, xvii, xviii, 2–4, 20–36
Ō tori, Hidenaga, 106, 107, 118, 119, Shi (Death, 1995), 108
120n1, 120n2, 120n3 Shildrick, Margrit, 125, 137
Outlaws of Water Margin, 4 Shi Nai’An, 5, 11
Shingeki, 119
Shizi Hillside, 10
P Shō gekijō (Japanese Little Theatre),
Padmanabhan, Manjula, 125–133, 110, 114
135–138 Simulacra, 2, 4
Pan, Jinlian, 9 Simulation, 2, 4
Pantomime, 10–11 Snyder, Sharon, 125, 139n4
Pastiche, 11 Soho Theatre, xx, 108
Pavis, Patrice, 70 Song, Jiang, 7, 12
People’s Republic of China (PRC), Suisei no shisha Jı̄kufurı̄to (Comet
3, 4, 6 Messenger Siegfried), 107
Performance studies, 73, 81, 82, Suitengu Pit, 106
84, 86, 87, 88n1, 125, 126, Sun Erniang, 10, 14
138n1, 147 Sun, William, xvii, 16n1
Pop music, xviii, 4, 5, 12 Sung Hee Choi, 98
Post-modern collage, 11 Sung Rno, xix, 92–100, 102
Pritchard, Glyn, 109, 111 Surrealism, 94, 102
Suzhou pingtan, 11
Suzuki, Tadashi, 64, 66
R Swan Lake, 111
Race, 107, 110
Rancière, Jacques, 137, 138
The Red Demon, 108 T
Republic of China (R.O.C), v, 42 Taiwan, 3, 4, 6, 14, 16n1, 21, 23–25,
Rock and roll, 4, 7, 11, 12 30, 31, 36, 37n7, 55, 56, 66
The Romance of the Three Taiwanese consciousness, 3, 15
Kingdoms, 5 Taiwanese hand puppet theater, 11
164 INDEX
Taiwanese nationalism, 3, 15 V
Tango, 10 The Village Voice, 107
Tara, 125–133, 135–138, 151 Violence, 96, 111, 112,
Tatlow, Antony, 2 116–118, 120
Teevan, Colin, xix, 106, 108, 111, Voice, 110, 119, 120, 129,
114, 118, 119, 120n4 130, 132, 133
The Tempest, 33, 34
Théâtre de Complicite, 107
Theatre De Soleil, 4 W
Theatre Tram, xx, 106, 108, 112, 113, Wald, Priscilla, 135
116, 117 Western canons, 2, 3, 14
The Timely Rain, 7 Western Impressionist
Time–space compression, 2, 11, 15 painting, 11
Toho, 115 Western literary canon, 40
Tokyo, xx, 67n2, 94, 106–109 Western total theater, 7
Traditional Asian theater, 2, 15, 48 World Figure Skating
Trans, 124, 127 Championships, 144
Transcultural, 94, 144 Wu Dalang, 9, 10
Transgender, 34, 106, 109, 114, 119 Wu Hsing-kuo, 3–5, 10–14
Translation, xix, 7, 31, 94, 98, 108 Wu Song Slaughters Tiger, 9
Translocal, xiv, xx, 20–36, 124,
127–128, 137, 138
Translocal intimacies, xx, 124, X
127–128, 137 Xipi and erhuang, 30
Translocality, 25, 31, 35, 36 Xiqu, 31, 46
Transnational, xvii, 14, 15, 92–100, Xunyang Tower, 12, 13
102, 106–112, 114–116, 118–120,
125–127, 129, 139n6, 144–156
Transnational avant-garde theatre, xix, Y
92–100, 102 Yamaguchi, Kristi, 145,
Transnational disability feminist 148–152
performance studies, 125, 126 Yang Zhi, 7
Transplantation narratives, 134 Yan Xijiao, 8
Transsexual, 115 Yi Sang, xix, 92–100, 102
Tsutsui, Yasutaka, xix, 106, 108, 109, Yume no Yūminsha, 107
117–119, 120n5
Z
U Zhang Wenyuan, 8
Ukiyo-I, xv, 5 Zheng Chenggong, 4
Universality, 40–43, 45–49, 51 Zhongguo feng, xviii, 4, 13
U.S. Figure Skating (USFS), xii, Zom-Hsing Hakka Opera
145, 150 Troupe, xviii, 24, 26–29

Transnational Performance, Identity and Mobility in Asia: Iris H. Tuan and Ivy I-Chu Chang

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TRANSNATIONAL

ISBN 978-981-10-7106-5 ISBN 978-981-10-7107-2 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018937668

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

Cover pattern © Melisa Hasan

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by the registered company Springer

This book is the outcome of the nine contributors’ academic research

1 Encountering the Alienated Self: Hip-Hop Jingju

2 Translocal Mobility: Hakka Opera Betrayal Inspired by

3 Is Universality Possible in Content and Pedagogy?

4 Crossing the Sea: The Ishinha Theater Company’s

5 Lila or Mela? Richard Schechner’s “Play”

6 Korean Diaspora and the Moebius Strip: Sung Rno’s

7 Noda Hideki’s The Bee and Being Transnational/

8 Disequilibrium: Disability, Gender, and Belonging

9 The Orient on Ice: Transnational Cultural

Ivy I-Chu Chang in Performance Studies at New York University with

Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren Director of Folded Paper Dance and Theatre,

Scholar at Aberystwyth University in 2012–13. His areas of interest

her Ph.D. in Theater in 2005 from UCLA. She writes prolifically on issues

Fig. 1.1 In Contemporary Legend Theatre’s 108 Heroes (2007)

Fig. 5.8 The use of performance-enhancing effigies. (Photo by Tsu-

Abstract This book investigates the representative international perfor-

Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren argues that arts making amplifies factors of

Keywords Transnationalism • Performance • Identity • Mobility

This book investigates the representative international performances in

In Chap. 3, William Huizhu Sun exemplifies his methodology and

premiered at Soho Theatre, London, in 2006 by Noda with British actors,

National Chiao Tung University Iris H. Tuan

Encountering the Alienated Self: Hip-Hop

Abstract Wu Hsing-kuo and Contemporary Legend Theatre’s 108 Heroes

I. I.-C. Chang (*)

© The Author(s) 2018 1

Keywords Jingju • Hip-hop • Chinese Wind • Contemporary Legend

Encountering the Alienated Self

Since the mid-twentieth century, the innovation of traditional Asian the-

Wu Hsing-kuo (吳興國) and the Contemporary Legend Theatre’s

and the stories of Mazu (媽祖 Taiwanese goddess), Zheng Chenggong

Making Hip-Hop jingju a Fashion: Wu Hsing-Kuo’s

Chasing the Rising Trend of Chinese Wind

There is unbounded joy when the wind is cool.

Staging Hip-Hop Jingju with Unprecedented Erotic

Intriguingly, playwright Chang Ta-ch’uen reinforces the characters’ psy-

nicknamed “timely rain,” a chivalrous hero in need, always places brother-

Fig. 1.1 In Contemporary Legend Theatre’s 108 Heroes (2007) premiered at

Another noteworthy alteration is playwright Chang’s innovation of the

Pantomime, Manga Characters, Versatile Narrator,

In addition to jingju, hip-hop, pantomime, and tango are incorporated

Our ideas of costume design come from Japanese wooden painting

Wu’s comment exemplifies the traveling of culture through time and

Toying with Chinese Symbols and Wu Hsing-kuo’s

Fig. 1.4 In the scene “Xunyang Tower,” Wu Hsing-kuo performs a ribbon

Chinese Symbols and Chinese Wind: Theatrical

clichés and a cluster of memories of the once seemingly familiar Chinese

cultural form for us to imagine the Chinese global landscape. Insofar as

McClintock, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat, 173–187. Minneapolis: University

Translocal Mobility: Hakka Opera Betrayal

© The Author(s) 2018 19

friendship echoing Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixode, while the Hakka

Keywords Cardenio • Betrayal • Shakespeare • Glocalization

The motivation for writing on Shakespeare’s Cardenio in this work was

Multiple Adaptations of Cardenio

1 Encountering the Alienated Self: Hip-Hop Jingju

2 Translocal Mobility: Hakka Opera Betrayal Inspired by

3 Is Universality Possible in Content and Pedagogy?

4 Crossing the Sea: The Ishinha Theater Company’s

5 Lila or Mela? Richard Schechner’s “Play”

6 Korean Diaspora and the Moebius Strip: Sung Rno’s

7 Noda Hideki’s The Bee and Being Transnational/

8 Disequilibrium: Disability, Gender, and Belonging

9 The Orient on Ice: Transnational Cultural

National Chiao Tung University Iris H. Tuan

erformativity, “gender is the repetition of stylized acts”, can explain the

Fig. 5.3 Sadhus—devout participants at the Ramnagar Ramlila. (Photo by Tsu-