Table Of ContentTRANSLOCAL
PERFORMANCE
IN ASIAN
THEATRE
AND FILM
Iris H. Tuan
Translocal Performance in Asian Theatre and Film
Iris H. Tuan
Translocal
Performance in Asian
Theatre and Film
Iris H. Tuan
National Chiao Tung University
Jhubei City, Hsinchu, Taiwan
ISBN 978-981-10-8608-3 ISBN 978-981-10-8609-0 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-8609-0
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This book is dedicated to my parents
Father Tuan Shi-Ge (1924–2004)
Mother Yang Shu-Yu (1938–2002)
A
cknowledgments
I feel grateful for many people’s help, support, and encouragement during
the difficulties and hardships in my life. This book is brand new, collecting
seven years of research after numerous revisions based on my accumulated
material from my summer of research in 2011 at Berkeley University, as
Visiting Scholar (chosen to be sent by Top University Strategic Alliance of
Taiwan) for one year in the Department of English at Harvard University
and Fairbank Center from 2012 to 2013, and what I have recently writ-
ten, as well as my teaching and academic services at National Chiao Tung
University from 2013 to 2018.
Almost all of the chapters in this book have been presented in their
preliminary draft states at international conferences, including American
Society for Theatre Research (ASTR), Association for Theatre in Higher
Education (ATHE), Association for Asian Performance (AAP), among
others, but until now have not been formally published. The expert and
valuable comments from professors and professionals have provided me
with very useful feedback, which has helped me to revise, polish, cut, and
embellish to create this book. Only a few of the book chapters have had
very small portions of the short performance reviews published in some
influential flagship international journals. I appreciate Asian Theatre
Journal (ATJ) Editor Kathy Foley’s excellent editing of my performance
reviews for My Daughter’s Wedding, CLT’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
and the Hakka musical Xiangsi Nostalgia, published in Asian Theatre
Journal (A & HCI). I have fair use to integrate my three short reviews into
my full-l ength chapters.
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
It is great that this manuscript can finally be published to share with
you, my dear readers, friends, and relatives my research expertise and
interesting knowledge from Western theory, Asian performance, and film.
I hope you enjoy the fruitful insights and wisdom in this book and that it
will inspire you in your life.
Special thanks go to Sara Crowley-Vigneau, Editor, Connie Li, Editorial
Assistant at Palgrave Macmillan, ArunPrakash Ramasamy and the
Production Team in Springer Nature. Thanks to my part-time assistant
Anna Chang, who helped with the page formatting from April to May
2017. Thanks also to Edison Lee, my part-time assistant, who helped me
to get the figure permission from those relevant directors and troupes
from December 2017 to January 2018.
Last but not least, the incessant unspoken support from my family and
beloved is highly appreciated. Without you, I cannot make it.
Translocal Performance in Asian Theatre and Film will be of interest to
students and scholars of theater and performance studies, film and media
studies, visual culture, cultural creative industry, Asian studies, cultural
studies, and musical theater.
c
ontents
1 Introduction 1
2 Methodologies: From Postcolonial Feminism
and Creolization Toward Translocal 11
Part I I ntercultural Theatre in Taiwan 19
3 Contemporary Legend Theatre’s A Midsummer Night’s
Dream: Tradition, Modernity, and Translocality 21
4 Yukio Ninagawa’s Hamlet in Taiwan: Intercultural
Representation 37
5 Theater Represents Literature: Love and Labor
in To Send Away Under Escort 51
Part II F rom Local to Global: Hakka, Dance, Chinese
Musical, and Film 61
6 Change of Hakka Opera: Ethnicity and Creation
in Hakka Musical and Hakka TV Drama 63
ix
x CONTENTS
7 Hakka Culture and Image in Film and Performance 97
8 Irresistible Seduction and Translocal Labor of Musical
Theater in Taiwan: From Translation to Multi-arts 105
9 Spectacle, Adaptation, and Sexuality in Chinese Musicals 125
10 The Abject, Murder, and Sex in The Great Buddha+ 139
11 Sex, Money, Calculation, and Manipulation in Politics
in The Bold, The Corrupt, and The Beautiful 151
12 Conclusion 161
Bibliography 165
Index 175
l f
ist of igures
Fig. 3.1 Cast and the team group photo. CLT’s A Midsummer Night’s
Dream (March 2016, National Theater in Taipei). (Courtesy of
CLT) 26
Fig. 3.2 Fairy King (played by Wu Hsing-Kuo in golden yellow
costume) and Fairy Queen (played by Wei Hai-Min in silver
white costume) have a quarrel over the ownership of the cute
boy in the forest scene. CLT’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream
(March 2016, National Theater in Taipei). (Courtesy of CLT) 31
Fig. 4.1 The the Mouse Trap scene is staged for the second time in this
play- within- the-play-within-the-play in Ninagawa’s Hamlet
(2015) in spectacular beautiful royal court costumes and
elegant movement in Japanese kabuki style. (Courtesy of
Takahiro Watanabe) 40
Fig. 4.2 Wearing a black long robe, Tatsuya Fujiwara’s interpretation
of Hamlet, with the hint of Oedipus Complex, is more violent
than Sir Laurence Olivier’s portrayal of a more classic and
melancholy Hamlet (1948 film). (Courtesy of Takahiro
Watanabe) 42
Fig. 5.1 Actor Tang Tsung-Sheng (playing the role of Pickpocket Ho)
performs the magic tricks of escaping from the handcuffs and
the rope on stage (left). The naïve Hwang (the role is played
by Huang Di-Yang) (right). (Courtesy of Greenray Theatre
Company) 53
Fig. 5.2 Actor Tang (playing the role of pickpocket Ho), kneeling down
to express his filial piety, finally meets his adopted grandmother
who is old, sick, and near dying. In the center right, Ray Fan
plays the role of the old Grandma. To the left, the good, naïve
xi
