Abstract
This chapter explores intercultural Asian Shakespeare productions by island-based theatre companies, individuals, and cultures in Southeast and East Asia, tracing both their performance travels and how this work is archived. These interactions make visible established networks where practitioners, producers, and audiences gather in international festivals to produce intercultural adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays. The chapter will argue that recent intercultural productions reiterate established colonial routes of exchange, but that new possibilities may be emerging from the multiplication of pathways for performance to travel through digital means. Digital archives such as Asian Shakespeare Intercultural Archive (A|S|I|A), Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Global Shakespeares, and the Shakespeare Lives programme in Asia reflect an increasingly entangled cultural environment that mobilises Shakespeare and local performance forms to travel (both physically and digitally) through geographical circuits. On the one hand, the directions (and creative choices) that these productions take echo the old colonial imperatives and responses that go back to the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, when Western troupes, particularly the George Crichton Miln Company, travelled to Southeast and East Asia. On the other hand, new nodes of exchange facilitated through digital technology better reflect specific cultural engagements and entanglements rooted in shifting geopolitics and hegemonies.
This chapter is dedicated to Professor Kobayashi Kaori, a mentor and a dear friend
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
A “router” can also refer to a cutter used to make a pattern, cut a groove, or hollow out wood; it can also mean to force (someone) from a place.
- 2.
Full list of Shakespeare Lives events previously accessed at https://www.britishcouncil.cn/en/shakespearelives/events/list but is no longer available.
- 3.
This list is quoted from Kobayashi’s (2016) important account of the itineraries of Shakespeare productions performed by travelling companies from the West that travelled to Asia in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century.
- 4.
Quote was taken from a digital copy of a 1904 [1932] brochure published in Chicago by Hollister Brothers Engravers & Printers. Miln was to later give lectures organised by Central Lyceum Bureau and Redpath Lyceum Bureau for their 1905/1906 season. See http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/cdm/ref/collection/tc/id/18793, accessed March 26, 2018.
- 5.
See also Kobayashi 2014 for a detailed account of travelling companies (including Miln and Wilkie) to Japan, who later went on to influence Tsubouchi Shoyo’s own production of Hamlet in 1911.
- 6.
These plays were most likely written as part of a “Catholic Theatre Movement” in New York during the 1910s. See The Sacred Heart Review, Volume 55, Number 18, 15 April 1916. Available at http://newspapers.bc.edu/cgi-bin/bostonsh?a=d&d=BOSTONSH19160415-01.2.21, accessed 26 July 2017.
- 7.
In 1866, A Dutch merchant and seafarer Captain M.J.B. Noordhoek Hegt first built a public hall in Yokohama, which was later expanded and named Gaiety Theatre. See Kobayashi 2000, as she traces the naming of Gaiety and its connections to English theatres in the United Kingdom and similarly named theatres around the empire.
- 8.
More recently, Ninagawa’s production of Richard II arrived at the 2016 edition of the biennial Craiova International Shakespeare Festival. Maria Shevtsova (2016) reports that its founder, curator, and permanent organiser Emil Boroghina’s “dream for more than a decade was to bring a Ninagawa production to Craiova, and here it was, finally” (278). The unfortunate passing of Ninagawa on 12 May 2016 subsequently prompted Shevtsova to pen a tribute to Ninagawa.
- 9.
See Press Release, “‘Shakespeare Lives’ Metro Pulls into Shanghai” on the British Council China website available at https://www.britishcouncil.cn/en/about/press/Shakespeare-on-the-Metro, accessed on 23 June 2017.
- 10.
The video player and a description of the production of Shakespeare’s Globe’s Midsummer Night’s Dream was previously hosted on http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p047lmwj but is no longer available.
Works Cited
Bay-Cheng, Sarah. 2012. Theater Is Media: Some Principles for a Digital Historiography of Performance. Theater 42 (2): 27–41. https://doi.org/10.1215/01610775-1507775.
Becker, Tobias. 2014. Entertaining the Empire: Theatrical Touring Companies and Amateur Dramatics in Colonial India. The Historical Journal 57 (3): 699–725. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X13000538.
Bharucha, Rustom. 1993. Theatre and the World: Performance and the Politics of Culture. Abingdon/New York: Routledge.
Bird, Tom. 2013. The Globe to Globe Festival: An Introduction. In Shakespeare Beyond English: A Global Experiment, ed. S. Bennett and C. Carson, 13–18. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139629119.003.
Brokering, Jon M. 2007. Ninagawa Yukio’s Intercultural “Hamlet”: Parsing Japanese Iconography. Asian Theatre Journal 24 (2): 370–396.
Cabranes-Grant, Leo. 2011. From Scenarios to Networks: Performing the Intercultural in Colonial Mexico. Theatre Journal 63: 499–520.
Carlson, Marvin. 2001. The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Chaudhuri, Una. 1991. The Future of the Hyphen: Interculturalism, Textuality, and the Difference Within. In Interculturalism and Performance: Writings from PAJ, ed. Bonnie Marranca and Gautam Dasgupta, 192–207. New York: PAJ Publications.
Christian, John Leroy. 2001. Commerce, Industry and Labor. In South East Asia, Colonial History: High Imperialism (1890s–1930s), ed. Paul H. Kratoska, 162–177. London/New York: Routledge.
Clifford, James. 1997. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Connerton, Paul. 1989. How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Farfan, Penny, and Ric Knowles. 2011. Editorial Comment: Special Issue on Rethinking Intercultural Performance. Theatre Journal 63 (4): i–iii. https://doi.org/10.1353/tj.2011.0108.
Featherstone, Mike. 2000. Archiving Cultures. British Journal of Sociology 51 (1): 161–184.
Huang, A.C.Y. 2011. Asian Shakespeare 2.0. Asian Theatre Journal 28 (1): 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1353/atj.2011.0002.
Ick, Judy Celine. 2017. The Augmentation of the Indies: An Archipelagic Approach to Asian and Global Shakespeare. In Shakespeare’s Asian Journeys: Critical Encounters, Cultural Geographies, and the Politics of Travel, ed. Bi-qi Beatrice Lei, Judy Celine Ick, and Poonam Trivedi, 19–36. Abingdon: Routledge.
Im, Yeeyon. 2004. The Pitfalls of Intercultural Discourse: The Case of Yukio Ninagawa. Shakespeare Bulletin 22 (4): 7–30.
Kawachi, Yoshiko. 2017. Shakespeare’s Long Journey to Japan: His Contribution to Her Modernization and Cultural Exchange. In Shakespeare’s Asian Journeys: Critical Encounters, Cultural Geographies, and the Politics of Travel, ed. Bi-qi Beatrice Lei, Judy Celine Ick, and Poonam Trivedi, 37–54. Abingdon: Routledge.
Kennedy, Dennis. 1993. “Afterword: Shakespearean Orientalism,” in Foreign Shakespeare: Contemporary Performance. In Foreign Shakespeare: Contemporary Performance, ed. Dennis Kennedy, 290–303. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
———. 2001. Looking at Shakespeare: A Visual History of Twentieth-Century Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kobayashi, Kaori. 2000. Touring in Asia: The Miln Company’s Shakespearean Productions in Japan. In Shakespeare and his Contemporaries in Performance, ed. Edward J. Esche, 53–72. Aldershot: Ashgate.
———. 2013. Between the East and the West: Tsubouchi Shoyo’s Production of Hamlet in 1911. In Renaissance Shakespeare: Shakespeare Renaissances: Proceedings of the Ninth World Shakespeare Congress, ed. Martin Procházka, Andreas Höfele, Hanna Scolnicov, and Michael Dobson, 220–228. Newark: University of Delaware Press.
———. 2016. ‘The Actors Are Come Hither’: Shakespeare Productions by Travelling Companies in Asia. New Theatre Quarterly 32 (1): 49–60. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266464X15000858. Accessed 23 June 2017.
Lei, Daphne P. 2011. Interruption, Intervention, Interculturalism: Robert Wilson’s HIT Productions in Taiwan. Theatre Journal 63: 571–586.
Lei, Bi-qi Beatrice. 2017. Shakespeare’s Asian Journeys: An Introduction. In Shakespeare’s Asian Journeys: Critical Encounters, Cultural Geographies, and the Politics of Travel, ed. Bi-qi Beatrice Lei, Judy Celine Ick, and Poonam Trivedi, 1–15. Abingdon: Routledge.
Miln, Louise Jordan. 1894. When We Were Strolling Players in the East. London: Osgood, McIlvaine and Co.
Min, Tian. 2008. The Poetics of Difference and Displacement: Twentieth-Century Chinese-Western Intercultural Theatre. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.
Norzizi Zulkifli (dir.). 2018. Mak Yong Titis Sakti, Programme, 27 January–4 February 2018. The Actors Studio, The Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Centre.
Pratt, Mary Louise. 1991. Arts of the Contact Zone. Profession: 33–40. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25595469
Roach, Joseph. 1996. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York: Columbia University Press.
router, n.6. OED Online. June 2017. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/272580?rskey=xDDado&result=6&isAdvanced=false. Accessed 01 July 2017.
Shakespeare’s Globe archive to be digitized. SAGE Publishing. 4 August 2016. https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/press/shakespeare%E2%80%99s-globe-archive-to-be-digitized. Accessed 1 Nov 2017.
Shevtsova, Maria. 2016. The Craiova Shakespeare Festival 2016 and a Valediction for Yukio Ninagawa. New Theatre Quarterly 32 (3): 276–282. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266464X16000257.
Simmel, Georg. 1997. Simmel on Culture. Ed. D. Frisby and M. Featherstone. London: Sage.
Suematsu, Michiko. 2010. Import/Export: Japanizing Shakespeare. In Shakespeare in Asia: Contemporary Performance, ed. Dennis Kennedy and Yong Li Lan, 155–169. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tsubouchi, Shoyo. 1927. Naichi de Hajimete Mita Gaikoku-haiyu no Shakespeare-geki no Insho [The Impression of Foreign Actors: Shakespearean Productions I Saw for the First Time in Japan]. In Shoyo Senshu XII, Trans. Kaori Kobayashi, 375–377. Tokyo: Shunyodo.
Varney, Denise, Peter Eckersall, Chris Hudson, and Barbara Hatley. 2013. Theatre and Performance in the Asia-Pacific: Regional Modernities in the Global Era. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Yong, Li Lan. 2010. Shakespeare Here and Elsewhere: Ong Keng Sen’s Intercultural Shakespeare. In Shakespeare in Asia: Contemporary Performance, ed. Dennis Kennedy and Yong Li Lan, 188–216. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Yong, Li Lan, Ha Young Hwang, Alvin Eng Hui Lim, Ken Takiguchi, Chee Keng Lee, Michiko Suematsu, Kaori Kobayashi, and Hyon-u Lee. 2014. Asian Shakespeare Intercultural Archive (A|S|I|A). 3rd ed. Singapore: National University of Singapore. In English, Chinese, Japanese and Korean. www.a-s-i-a-web.org
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Lim, A.E.H. (2019). Routes and Routers of Interculturalism: Islands, Theatres and Shakespeares. In: McIvor, C., King, J. (eds) Interculturalism and Performance Now. Contemporary Performance InterActions. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02704-9_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02704-9_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-02703-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-02704-9
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)