scholarly journals On Teaching Kim’s Convenience: Asian American Studies, Asian Canadian Studies, and the Politics of Race in Asian Canadian Theatre and Performance Studies

2019 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Colleen Kim Daniher
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Learning Experience ◽  
Institutional Setting ◽  
American Theatre ◽  
Canadian Theatre ◽  
Canadian Studies ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Politics Of Race

This article offers a critical overview and rationale for why and to what ends Daniher put a comparative Asian North American method into practice in her classroom on Asian American Theatre and Performance Studies at Brown University in Spring 2016. In particular, Daniher focuses on pairing Ins Choi’s play-text Kim’s Convenience (2011) alongside a viewing of the made-for-PBS broadcast of Anna Deavere Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (2001) in order to broach the topic of anti-Black racism in both Canada and the US in the Black Lives Matter moment . Although Daniher describes here a course and learning experience from within a US-American institutional setting, she directs the following emergent queries to the field of Canadian Theatre and Performance Studies in light of its recent inauguration of the new “sub-field” of Asian Canadian Theatre and Performance Studies: How should we frame Asian Canadian theatre and performance in the classroom? For what purpose and under what curricular conditions do we teach racialized “minority” repertoires of theatre and performance in Canada? Drawing on overlapping genealogies of Asian American and Asian Canadian Studies, Daniher contends that a more rigorous engagement with existing theories, methods, and critical analyses of racial power is urgently needed if Asian Canadian Theatre Studies hopes to coincide with the larger political-ethical stakes of “Asian Canadian studies projects” writ-large.

scholarly journals Hanging Out with Cyclists

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 84-88
Author(s):  
Noam Shoked
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Art History ◽  
Architectural History ◽  
Associate Professor ◽  
Field Trips ◽  
University Of California ◽  
Art Practice ◽  
Art Students ◽  
And Performance

In 2014, architecture Professor Margaret Crawford and Associate Professor of Art Practice Anne Walsh taught the first University of California, Berkeley, Global Urban Humanities Initiative research studio course, called “No Cruising: Mobility and Identity in Los Angeles.” What occurred during the course had both varied and unexpected interpretations as ten students majoring in art practice, art history, architecture, and performance studies each selected a dimension of mobility they wished to identify on field trips to LA. One goal of these field trips, or research studios, was to get students out of their comfort zones to explore new approaches and methods. We encouraged students to draw on each others’ disciplines, so art students undertook archival research while architectural history students, like Noam Shoked, used interviews and photography to investigate contemporary conditions. The stories here are from Shoked as he comes to interpret and interact with the cyclist of LA.

East West Players and Asian American Theatre: A Retrospective

2016 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 238-241
Author(s):  
Josephine Lee
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Annual Conference ◽  
Asian American Studies ◽  
American Theatre ◽  
Multiple Dimensions ◽  
Theatre Company ◽  
Artistic Director ◽  
East West

The following essays were inspired by talks delivered at the 2015 Association for Asian American Studies annual conference, where we commemorated the fifty years since the 1965 founding of East West Players (EWP) in Los Angeles. Currently led by artistic director Tim Dang, EWP is known as the first and longest-running Asian American theatre company. It has played a crucial part in the training of Asian American actors and the formation of other Asian American theatres across the nation and in the development of new plays and productions that articulate and challenge how “Asian America” is understood and represented. Through reflecting upon the past, present, and future of EWP, our essays contemplate the most significant questions about Asian American theatre practice: how theatre engages the multiple and even contradictory aspects of what is “Asian American,” the panethnic racial category that is consistently challenged by the diverse cultural practices, communities, and identities it purports to describe. EWP's history illustrates the multiple dimensions of how Asian American theatre can challenge the limited prescriptions, labels, and packaging so often used in talking about race both inside and outside the theatre.

‘The Most Traditional and the Most Pioneering’: New Concept Kun Opera

2020 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 223-236
Author(s):  
Chengzhou He
Keyword(s):  
Performance Studies ◽  
First Century ◽  
Modern Life ◽  
Chinese Opera ◽  
American Theatre ◽  
The Awakening ◽  
Alternative Future ◽  
New Form ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Chinese And English

Featuring hybridity, transgression, and improvisation, New Concept Kun Opera refers to experimental performances by Ke Jun and other Kun Opera performers since the beginning of the twenty-first century. From telling the ancient stories to expressing the modern self, this new form marks the awakening of the performer’s subjectivity and develops a contemporary outlook by rebuilding close connections between Kun Opera and modern life. A synthetic use of intermedial resources contributes to its appeal to today’s audiences. Its experimentation succeeds in maintaining the most traditional while exploring the most pioneering, thus providing Kun Opera with the potential for renewal, as well as an alternative future for Chinese opera in general. Chengzhou He is a Yangtze River Distinguished Professor of English and Drama at the School of Foreign Studies and the School of Arts at Nanjing University. He has published widely on Western drama, intercultural theatre, and critical theory in both Chinese and English. Currently, he is the principal investigator for a national key-research project, ‘Theories in European and American Theatre and Performance Studies’.

Theatre and Performance at a Time of Shifting Disciplines

2001 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-144 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marvin Carlson
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Academic Discipline ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Academic Culture ◽  
American Universities ◽  
American Theatre ◽  
Disciplinary Boundaries ◽  
Traditional Organization ◽  
And Performance

The boundaries of theatre as an academic discipline have never been particularly clear, and its relationship to other disciplines has been the focus of constant struggle and negotiation. This essay traces that negotiation, focusing upon its process in American universities. Competing with literature departments for the study of dramatic texts, American theatre departments drew their own new disciplinary model, based primarily on German Theaterwissenschaft, with emphasis upon the staging history and historical context of dramatic texts. More recently such emerging fields as performance studies and cultural studies have sought to transcend such traditional disciplinary boundaries. Despite some resistance from existing academic and publishing structures, the trend towards the breaking down of these traditional boundaries seems clear. Our academic culture seems headed towards a considerably more fluid organization of its materials of study than the traditional organization into fairly discrete disciplines could offer.

Hemispheric America in Deep Time

2010 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 111-125 ◽  
Author(s):  
JILL LANE
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Uniform Space ◽  
Deep Time ◽  
Performance Artists ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Contemporary Artists

This article introduces hemispheric performance studies to suggest that performance in the Americas – and the very idea of the ‘hemispheric’ – may be usefully engaged as a set of connected practices in deep time rather than as a continental mass in uniform space. The argument is illustrated in relation to three contemporary artists: the Los Angeles-based photographer and multimedia artist Bruce Yonemoto, and the visual and performance artists Susana Torres from Lima, Peru, and Liliana Angulo from Bogotá, Colombia.

Karen Tei Yamashita

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Asian American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
The Past ◽  
Asian American History ◽  
Karen Tei Yamashita ◽  
American Heritage ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Relationship Of

Karen Tei Yamashita’s novels, essays, and performance scripts have garnered considerable praise from scholars and reviewers, and are taught not only in the United States but in at least half a dozen countries in Asia, South America, Europe. Her work has been written about in numerous disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Karen Tei Yamashita: Fictions of Magic and Memory is the first anthology given over to Yamashita’s writing. It contains newly commissioned essays by established, international scholars; a recent interview with the author; a semiautobiographical keynote address delivered at an international conference that ruminates on her Japanese American heritage; and a full bibliography. The essays offer fresh and in-depth readings of the magic realist canvas of Through the Arc of the Rain Forest (1990); the Japanese emigrant portraiture of Brazil-Maru (1992); Los Angeles as rambunctious geopolitical and transnational fulcrum of the Americas in Tropic of Orange (1997); the fraught relationship of Japanese and Brazilian heritage and labor in Circle K Cycles (2001); Asian American history and politics of the1960s in I Hotel (2010); and Anime Wong (2014), a gallery of performativity illustrating the contested and inextricable nature of East and West. This essay-collection explores Yamashita’s use of the fantastical, the play of emerging transnational ethnicity, and the narrative tactics of reflexivity and bricolage in storytelling located on a continuum of the unique and the communal, of the past and the present, and that are mapped in various spatial and virtual realities.

Performed Otherwise: The Political and Social Possibilities of Asian/American Performance

2013 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-139
Author(s):  
Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson ◽  
Elizabeth W. Son
Keyword(s):  
Performance Studies ◽  
Asian American ◽  
The Political ◽  
Special Edition ◽  
And Performance

For this special edition of “Critical Stages,” Chambers-Letson and Son meditate on the following questions: What are the exigencies that animate your entry into the field of theatre and performance studies? How does a shared project in Asian American performance offer a range of possibilities for thinking through pressing political questions and crises that seem otherwise insurmountable?

Staging the Dance of Coalition with Versa-Style and CONTRA-TIEMPO

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cindy García
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
African Diaspora ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Dance Music ◽  
Dance Theater ◽  
Racialized Violence ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Dance Companies ◽  
Choreographic Analysis

This chapter puts race in a transnational context in the Americas, expanding their framework to the context of dance, music, and performance. It addresses the ways that two Latina-originated dance companies in Los Angeles stage coalition from the placeless realm of the undercommons. Ana Maria Alvarez's CONTRA-TIEMPO Urban Latin Dance Theater and Miss Funk Jackie Lopez's hip-hop and house-based Versa-Style theorize the complex dance and musical migrations that underscore their experiences and visions of latinidad in coalition. Both companies have a foundational connection to dances of the African diaspora. Using choreographic analysis of dance and performance studies as well as interviews with the choreographers, the chapter examines the coalitional dimensions of their works. At the heart of this work is the question “In this contemporary moment of Black Lives Matter, how do these Los Angeles-based companies cultivate alternatives to racialized violence”?

scholarly journals SOUTH ASIAN AMERICAN THEATRE: (UN/RE-)PAINTING THE TOWN BROWN

2008 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-117 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sudipto Chatterjee
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Los Angeles Times ◽  
South Asian American ◽  
American Theatre ◽  
Language And Literature ◽  
The University ◽  
Indian Students ◽  
Overland Monthly

In his second year at the University of California, Berkeley, Arthur William Ryder (1877–1938), the Ohio-born Harvard scholar of Sanskrit language and literature, collaborated with the campus English Club and Garnet Holme, an English actor, to stage Ryder's translation of the Sanskrit classic Mrichchhakatikam, by Shudraka, as The Little Clay Cart. The 1907 production was described as “presented in true Hindu style. Under the direction of Garnet Holme, who … studied with Swamis of San Francisco … [and] the assistance of many Indian students of the university.” However, in the twenty-five-plus cast, there was not a single Indian actor with a speaking part. The intended objective was grandeur, and the production achieved that with elaborate sets and costumes, two live zebras, and elephants. Seven years later, the Ryder–Holme team returned with Ryder's translation of Kalidasa's Shakuntala, “bear cubs, a fawn, peacocks, and an onstage lotus pool with two real waterfalls.” While the archival materials do not indicate the involvement of any Indian actors (barring one Gobind B. Lal, who enacted the Prologue), its importance is evinced by the coverage it received in the Oakland Tribune, the Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine, and the Los Angeles Times.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document