Abstract

Transnational Chinese Theatres: Intercultural Performance Networks in East Asia
What are the benefits of looking at performance cultures through the prism of the transnational? How can we reframe the theatres of the Chinese-speaking region through a trans-Asian lens? What can the “trans-” mean in the contemporary performances of the Sinophone? This talk explores the notion of transnational Chinese theatres as a practice and method of intercultural performance collaboration constituted by mobile networks of relations. Selected stage productions co-created by theatremakers from the Sinosphere – including China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore – and the wider East Asian region, such as Japan and South Korea, will be examined as performative inflections of notions of minor transnationalism, inter-Asian referencing, and (trans-)Asia as method, in order to probe the capacity of the transnational to redefine intercultural performance from the perspective of networks and in the context of trans-Asian collaboration. These connections foreground collaborative practice as a generative site of counter-memory and transgressive imagination. They reveal the potential of a networked approach to intercultural collaboration to mobilize multiple dimensions of the “trans-” in order to reconstitute trans-Asian performance cultures as platforms for transgressive reconfigurations of the nation, and to enable the collective memorialization of contested national histories through transnational comparison.

Bio note

Rossella Ferrari is Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Vienna, Austria, and she previously worked at SOAS University of London, UK. Her main expertise is in the performance cultures of the contemporary Sinosphere. Her research interests include experimental performance practices in the Sinophone region, transnational Chinese theatres, Asian performance networks, intercultural performance, avant-garde studies, memory studies, intermediality, and adaptation. She is the author of Pop Goes the Avant-Garde: Experimental Theatre in Contemporary China (2012), Transnational Chinese Theatres: Intercultural Performance Networks in East Asia (2020), and Asian City Crossings: Pathways of Performance through Hong Kong and Singapore (2021, co-edited with Ashley Thorpe). Her current project is on postsocialist performance in postmillennial China.