Performance in East Asia often made creative use of places such as gardens, rivers, or even the abstract space of legal discourse. Challenging familiar understandings of the “place” as a mere location, setting, or venue in which a performance event occurs, participants in this symposium will examine the dynamic ways in which a wide variety of performance acts, and their technological mediation in both material and virtual forms, engage in acts of place-making. This symposium brings together scholars of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean theater, art, cultural history, and performance studies whose work connects in various ways with performance, media, and space, all broadly conceived, in an effort to launch a new transcultural and interdisciplinary conversation. The term “media,” here, is invoked in an expansive sense that extends beyond the worlds of print, film, television, and so on, to include the environment itself, material artifacts, and embodied experiences. We hope that adopting this perspective will prompt meaningful dialogue between premodern and modern scholarship on theater and performance in the East Asian cultural fields. What new, transhistorical conversations might become possible if we adopt a perspective that sees the environment as a medium? How have bodies been mediated in space and time in East Asian contexts? How do media relocate or displace bodies? What types of spaces do acts of performance produce?

The first day will feature three touchstone talks; the second will include four thematic panels; and finally, the last day will be devoted to pedagogical questions relating to new techniques for integrating performance and media into teaching and research.

Visit Symposium Website for more information. Conference registration is currently full. Please RSVP to join waitlist.

Day 1  Thursday, April 24       

3:00-5:30 pm                  Illumination Room

3:00-3:30 pm

Coffee and Introduction  

Opening Remarks by Hyun Suk Park and Yinghui Wu                   

3:30-5:30 pm

Touchstone Talks   

Moderator: Satoko Shimazaki

Vyjayanthi Ratnam Selinger (Bowdoin College), “Towards the Sensori-Legal in Medieval Japanese Drama”

Weihong Bao (UC Berkeley), “Set, Design, and Environment”

Suk-Young Kim (UCLA), “Nomadic Asia: Korean Language Theater in Kazakhstan and the Ecolinguistic Networks Beyond Nation-States”

6:00 pm  Reception by invitation only

Day 2   Friday, April 25

8:30 am – 5:10 pm            Panels      Illumination Room

8:30-10:10 am  

Panel 1: Gardens and Mountains: Intermediality and Ecological Spaces of Performance

Moderator: Huijun Mai

Peng Xu (ShanghaiTech University), “The Courtesan Performing in a Garden: Intermediality and Images of Brothel Performances in Late Ming China”

Ivanna Sang Een Yi (Cornell University), “Voices Inscribed by Land: P’ansori Mountain Study and the More-than-Human World”

Timon Screech (The International Research Center for Japanese Studies, Kyoto), “Performing Gardens in the Edo Period: The Case of Three Daimyo Gardens”

10:10-10:30 am             Coffee Break         

10:30 am-12:10 pm  

Panel 2:  Emplacement/Displacement: Sensory Place-Making and Spectral Performativity

Moderator: Sixiang Wang

Guojun Wang (McGill University), “Sensory Spaces: The Courtroom and the Forensic Site in Premodern Chinese Drama”

Ling Hon Lam (UC Berkeley), “Alibi from Environment: Amnemotechnics and the (Dis)placing of Performance, circa 1800”

Hayana Kim (Ohio State University), “Futures of Activism in South Korea: Hologram Protest and Spectral Performativity of Public Assembly”

12:10-1:20 pm                   Lunch                     

1:30-3:10 pm  

Panel 3: Inscribing Bodies: Material Artifacts and Technologies of Mediation

Moderator: Torquil Duthie

Ariel Stilerman (Stanford University), “A Poetic Contest of Working People: How Imagining Commoners’ Lives Shaped Aristocratic Experiments in Medieval Poetry”

Ksenia Chizhova (Princeton University), “Kinship, Erudition, and Skill: Women’s Learning in a Vernacular Korean Miscellany”

Melissa Van Wyk (University of Chicago), “Sensational Fictions: Performance, News Media, and Disability in Meiji Japan”

3:10-3:30 pm               Coffee Break         

3:30-5:10 pm

Panel 4: Geopolitical Performances: Playscript, Kinetoscope, and Gramophone

Moderator: Michael Emmerich

Ariel Fox (University of Chicago), “Barbarian Geographies: The Appearance of the Star of Literature and the Early Modern World”

Mariko Okada (J.F. Oberlin University, Tokyo), “When Images Dance: Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope Imperial Japanese Dance Travels to Japan”

Yu Shi (UCLA), “Journey to the Northeast: Producing a Recording Project of Chinese Storytelling Performances in Japanese-occupied Chōsen, 1941”

6:30 pm         Dinner

Day 3  Saturday, April 26 

9:00-11:30 am                                 

Pedagogy Roundtable                                Artistry Room

9:00-10:15 am Pedagogical Innovation I: Incorporating Performance in the Classroom

Moderators: Hyun Suk Park and Yinghui Wu

Ivanna Sang Een Yi (Cornell University), “Teaching p’ansori“

Peng Xu (ShanghaiTech University), “Staging English Kunqu plays”

Kirk Kanesaka (California State University San Bernardino), “Teaching Kabuki”

10:15-10:30 am                                   Coffee Break

10:30-11:30 am Pedagogical Innovation II: Teaching with Media

Moderators: Satoko Shimazaki and Andrea Goldman

Ariel Stilerman (Stanford University), “Making, Material Heuristics, and the New Humanities Classroom”

Paula Curtis (UCLA), “Digital Humanities for Researching and Teaching East Asia”

11:30 am-12:00 pm     

Closing Remarks and Open Discussion

Closing Remarks by Satoko Shimazaki

Sponsor(s): Center for Chinese Studies, Center for Korean Studies, Yanai Initiative for Globalizing Japanese Humanities, Asian Languages & Cultures, Luskin Endowment for Thought Leadership, Early Modern Asian Studies Funds (UCLA Department of Asian Languages and Cultures)