Artists began flying across Asia and the Pacific in the 1950s, as commercial aviation extended the horizon of international touring. Nightclubs in Hong Kong, Manila, Melbourne, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo, and Taipei presented an international retinue of acts from across the region and beyond. Entire theatrical revues with companies of sixty artists or more toured the region by air, while smaller troupes presented their acts at newly built nightclubs and international hotels. At the same time, singers, dancers, and variety acts of all kinds extended their regional reach with appearances on recently introduced television shows. Behind the scenes, entrepreneurial promoters conspired with booking agents and venue managers to form a regional circuit for touring variety in international entertainment. Nightclubs from Australia supplied artists for the Shaw Brothers in Singapore to tour on South-East Asian circuits, while the Toho Company of Japan, a producer of large-scale theatrical revue, embarked on tours to Australia and New Zealand.
There were many intersecting itineraries among the artists touring the region. Many nightclub singers in Hong Kong—Chang Loo, Rebecca Pan, and Grace Chang, among others—were emigrants from Shanghai, while the bands providing music were led by musicians from Manila. Singers Pilita Corrales and Pete Cruzado from Manila toured to Australia, as did Mona Fong and Frances Yip from Hong Kong, Rose Chan and Teresa Leung Ping from Singapore, and Koshiji Fubuki and the Kawashima Dancers from Japan. Artists from Australia found work in nightclubs across the region, among them Toni Lamond and Judd Lane in Manila, Shirley Abicair and the Flying Michelles in Singapore, Beryl Meekin and Peter Allen in Hong Kong, and the Dalrays and the Rudas Dancers in Tokyo. By the early 1970s, nightclubs in Sydney were promoting artists from the region, including the Maori Hi-Fives from Aotearoa/New Zealand, the Sitompul Sisters from Indonesia, and the Tamil-Malay singer Kamahl from Kuala Lumpur, while the Indigenous Australian singer Wilma Reading from Cairns had reached London via Singapore, Hong Kong, and Tokyo.1
These touring artists were among the first to fly between engagements across Asia and the Pacific. Between nightclubs, television, and touring productions, their itineraries provide evidence of an extensive circuit that realised opportunities for artists to reach audiences across the region. This book sets out to investigate how this happened. Over three decades, from 1946 to 1975, it explores the post-war formation of the Asia Pacific region through international touring and the transformation of entertainment during the ‘jet-age’ of commercial aviation. It finds that the commercial circuits touring international entertainment forged new relations between artists, audiences, and nations across the region. These relations intensified in the post-war period as governments led capital investments in regional infrastructure for international tourism, cultural enterprise, and nation-building. In particular, touring variety diversified the repertoire in circulation, as versatile artists translated repertoire into national distinction and commercial networks led to regional developments in entrepreneurial diplomacy .
Here from There: International Aviation and Regional Touring
How did artists in the 1950s and 1960s tour between nightclubs across Asia and the Pacific? What motivations set so many artists in circulation? And what desires drew audiences to enjoy touring artists from elsewhere? In touring the region, each artist left a trail of fragments—notices of their appearance at a nightclub on a date—but the artefacts are dispersed, often incomplete, and each seems insignificant in itself. It is only by accumulating artefacts, piecing together fragments, and tracing their connections that a broader pattern begins to emerge. Formed from the fragments that touring artists left behind, the subject of this book is a network of intersecting itineraries: the Asia Pacific circuit as a region of international entertainment—its contours traced by the itineraries of touring artists, its contents accumulated as the repertoire they relayed in performance.
Long-distance travel had always been factored into the business of touring artists across the region. In the nineteenth century, theatre companies toured productions between port cities across Asia.2 Musicians from the Philippines travelled widely, sailing from Manila by ship to engagements in Singapore, Hanoi, Hong Kong, Honolulu, and San Francisco.3 Performers from China and Japan found audiences in Australia, as did troupes from Britain, Europe, and the United States.4 Artists from Australia made their way to London along the shipping routes of the British Empire: Coral Gunning, for instance, left Melbourne after 1937 and toured widely, performing in Singapore, India, Egypt, Hong Kong, Burma, and Britain, before returning to Australia in the 1950s.5
Yet the expansion of international aviation enabled new patterns of touring. Commercial aviation increased the mobility of artists around the region, with new routes linking cities across Asia and the Pacific. Qantas introduced long-range aircraft on the ‘Kangaroo Route’ to London via Singapore and Calcutta in 1947 and weekly services via Darwin and Manila to Tokyo and Hong Kong in 1949.6 In the 1950s, Qantas was advertising Hong Kong, Manila, and Japan to tourists from Australia as ‘exciting new holiday places’ and encouraging tourists from Hong Kong to fly to America and Europe via Australia and the South Pacific.7 Other international airlines flying to Sydney through the region were the British Overseas Airways Corporation flying from London via Singapore from 1948, Air India flying from Bombay via Singapore from 1956, and Cathay Pacific flying from Hong Kong via Manila and Darwin in 1959.8
Aviation set a new paradigm for international entertainment in an affinity with nightclubs, introducing a streamlined aesthetic, a space-shrinking temporality, and a network topology of hubs and spokes. In contrast with the gracious inertia of massive ships at sea, planes were lighter, faster, much smaller, and more intimate. Whereas ocean-going liners had approximated the architectural splendour of nineteenth-century theatres, the attentive intimacy of travelling by plane was more akin in its modernity to nightclub entertainments and television production. In particular, the speed with which artists and their audiences now travelled here from there approached the soon-to-be-realised simultaneity of ‘live’ television via satellite transmission.
For artists, agents, and promoters, aviation enhanced the speed, frequency, and reach with which they found audiences for their acts. By reducing international travel times from weeks-at-sea to hours-by-air, aviation enabled artists to move more flexibly between cities and international tourists to pass more frequently through venues. From Tokyo to Singapore, Sydney to Hong Kong, and Manila to Melbourne, theatrical revues and nightclub floorshows embraced the travelogue form. They presented touring artists from the region and regional variety in repertoire, whisking audiences on ‘whirlwind’ tours of regional settings, and becoming, in turn, tourist attractions that attracted travellers to holiday destinations.9
For audiences, aviation afforded the prospects of international tourism. Travel agencies promoted international holidays as a kaleidoscope of encounters and sights, endowing the experience of tourism with the scene-changing qualities of a travelogue revue. Tourist audiences encountered touring artists across the region. Both were implicated in the development of tourism, as commercial agents and enablers of economic integration. Across the region, tourism to an ‘international’ standard became a pre-requisite for welcoming visitors of all kinds—travelling artists, tourists on holiday, traders on business, and delegates to conventions. Alongside efficient airports, swift transportation, and comfortable hotels, international tourists sought appetising meals at well-appointed restaurants, easy-to-reach opportunities for sightseeing and shopping, and evening entertainments that mixed local flavours with cosmopolitan sophistication.
Touring artists relayed repertoire in international circulation. Crossing borders between nation-states and cities, they also reconfigured relations between venue types, performance genres, and technologies of transmission. Versatility was an asset in seeking opportunities to perform. Variety acts from theatre circuits adapted their performance while on tour for presentation at nightclubs and broadcast o...