The history of modern Chinese theatre begins with a journey. In 1906, a group of art students who had relocated from China to Japan to study oil painting initiated the Spring Willow Society (Chunliu she) in Tokyo with the ambition of producing new dramas in Chinese. One of the founders, Li Shutong, was an associate of Tsubouchi ShĆyĆâs Literary Society, known for its seminal role in the formation of modern Japanese theatre. Another Spring Willow member, Lu Jingruo, trained with shingeki (new drama) pioneer Osanai Kaoru and with shinpa (new school drama) star Fujisawa AsajirĆ before travelling back to China to become a theatre personality in Shanghai. Fujisawa also instructed the cast of Spring Willowâs inaugural production of a one-act version of La Dame aux CamĂ©lias in February 1907. In June 1907, the group premiered Black Slaveâs Cry to Heaven (Heinu yutian lu), a five-act dramatization of Harriet Beecher Stoweâs Uncle Tomâs Cabin (1852) which is commonly held as the foundational text of modern Chinese drama. Black Slave was adapted from an American novel, staged in a well-known shinpa theatre in Tokyo, and performed by a troupe of Chinese, Japanese, and Indian students. Its sets were of Chinese design and Japanese construction, and its style was a hybrid of Chinese, Japanese, and European aesthetics.1
The purpose of restating the sanctioned genealogy of spoken drama (huaju) in China is not to fix a point of origin, but rather to trace a dynamic confluence of transnational imaginations and mobile connections that have shaped the configuration of Sinophone performance cultures since the so-called modern period as âinherently and perpetually interculturalâ.2 While actively seeking for national forms, the forerunners of modern huaju were arguably engaging in an embryonic manifestation of the contemporary phenomenon that this study defines as transnational Chinese theatres. The first Chinese modern play was, effectively, an intercultural collaboration resulting from the convergence of multiple itineraries of inter-Asian movement across multiple locations into a focal time-spaceâor chronotopeâof production and circulation. It was born as a transnational phenomenon, through travel.
Theatre constituted a productive site of early twentieth-century inter-Asian exchange. The experiences of transregional mobility of Asian students and intellectuals in Japan were vital to the establishment of modern East Asiaâs âartistic contact nebulaeâ and to the emergence of new theatrical forms not only in China but also in Taiwan and Korea.3 Furthermore, as early twentieth-century Japanese models and Chinese huaju developments affected developments in other areas of Sinophone cultural production and stimulated the unfolding of theatrical relations across the Sinosphere in later decades, one may imagine âTokyo, 1907â as the irradiating point of a composite assemblage of performance culturesââa network of transversals, of crisscrossing diagonal pathsâ.4
While the temporal framework of this study sits firmly in the contemporary period, as it surveys intercultural performance networks that have surfaced across East Asiaâs Chinese-speaking communities since the 1980s, the received narrative of those seminal inter-Asian journeys teases out some of its key conceptual and thematic nodesâall of which inhabit the foundational chronotope, âTokyo, 1907â. This early spatiotemporal juncture forestalls a vision of East Asian theatrical cultures since the twentieth century as networked formations forged by the transfer of ideas and bodies across the borders of the regionâs (post-)colonial nation-states. It forms a landscape of conceptual archipelagos, rather than islands, hence this volumeâs insistence on the pluralâtheatresâto accentuate a state of interconnected multiplicity.
The late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century connections that will unfold in the ensuing chapters are, therefore, better seen in the light of prolonged historical interactions rather than as a new contemporary phenomenon. In other words, the notion of transnational Chinese theatres that this study introduces for the purpose of conceptualizing the dynamics of intercultural performance networks in the East Asian Sinosphere should be situated within an integrative system of continuities that extend beyond the chronotopic latitudes of this specific analysis. It is one of this studyâs objectives that the method it proposes may help chart rhizomatic relations taking place further afield in timeâsuch as those unfolding in the early decades of the twentieth centuryâand space, for instance, within the equally fertile sites of Sinophone cultural production of Southeast Asia.
Transnational Chinese Theatres: Definitions
The intensification of inter-Asian contactsâincluding those among Asiaâs Sinophone communitiesâhas caused a surge in transborder collaboration since the late twentieth century as a result of the partial dissolution of political barriers and strengthening of economic relations between Asian nation-states in the post-Cold War order. The contemporary proliferation of transnational networks has enabled theatremakers of diverse nationalities and creative backgrounds to come together to scrutinize shared identities, intersecting histories, and potentially intertwined futures, while also exposing the wounds of the territorial and affective fractures that have unsettled the regionâs geopolitics for decades.
The transnational turn has reconfigured the ways in which performance is conceived, created, and circulated within the contemporary Sinosphere. On the one hand, it has revealed the limits of nation-bounded approaches and âmethodological nationalismâ5; on the other hand, it has stressed the demand for alternate paradigms that are more suited to capture the relational quality of performative connections across borders.6 The individual work of some of the contributors to these transnational collaborations has been studied, and cases of triangular (liangâan sandi) or quadrilateral (liangâan sidi) interactions in Chinese-language (huawen or huayu) and Sinophone (huayu yuxi) theatres have been surveyed. However, a systematic model to rationalize the networks per se has yet to be formulated.7 Hence, this project introduces transnational Chinese theatres as a praxis, theory, and method defined by transborder collaboration, which seeks to enhance the mobility, plurality, and interconnectedness of contemporary performance cultures across the Asian Sinosphere.
What are, then, transnational Chinese theatres? This phrase defines, first, a specific mode of theatremaking. It designates types of collaborative performance that radiate from networks of Sinophone cultural production, namely, work that partakes in dynamics of mobility and interculturality and that is jointly conceived and circulatedâwithin Asia and globallyâby practitioners from different Chinese-speaking localities in mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, and Sinitic-language communities worldwide. Additionally, transnational Chinese theatres denote a critical matrix, or method, to conceptualize this kind of praxis. As such, the concept elucidates a rhizomatic model of intercultural theatreâand theoryâpredicated upon interactional contexts of transb...