From the Editor

Abstract

From the Editor Siyuan Liu This issue starts with two long-planned articles in ATJ’s “founders of the field” series that started with two clusters of articles in 2011 (28.2) and 2013 (30.2), followed by a number of “founding mothers” articles between 2014 and 2017 (31.1, 32.2, 33.2, 34.1), continuing in this issue with Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei’s profile of Betty Bernhard and Julie Iezzi’s article on Jonah Salz. Sorgenfrei focuses on Bernard’s extraordinary capacity in discovering and promoting aspects of Indian performance to the world through fundraising and sponsoring international engagements by India artists, students training and productions of India plays with Indian artists at Pomona College, as well as several research-based films and videos, all of which made Bernard, as Sorgenfrei puts it, “an important influencer well before that concept became a social media meme.” The second “founder” article, written by Julie Iezzi, focuses on Jonah Salz, who stands out, in comparison to other founders profiled in this series, as a Western theatre director, producer, teacher, scholar, and translator primarily based in an Asian country, in his case Kyoto, Japan. Among Salz’s wide-ranging accomplishments, Iezzi focuses on his co-founded Noho Theatre Group that has produced hundreds of shows and toured internationally over forty years; his co-established Traditional Theatre Training (TTT) program that since 1984 has trained hundreds of artists in noh, kyōgen, and nihon buyō; and his research and publications, most notably as editor-in-chief of A History of Japanese Theatre, a monumental achievement via international collaboration. These two pieces are followed by six articles covering both traditional and modern theatrical forms in East, South, and Southeast Asia, starting with two articles on modern Chinese spoken drama huaju. In “History as Farce and the Intellectual as Comedian: Li Jing’s Metahistorical Drama Comedies from the State of Qin,” Andreea Chirita analyzes contemporary Chinese playwright Li Jing’s 2017 [End Page iii] metahistorical play Qinguo xiju (Comedies from the State of Qin). After a survey of historical plays that turned into metafiction in the post-Mao era, Chirita focuses on “the dramatic techniques used by Li Jing to articulate the role of the intellectuals as comedians and spiritual healers in contemporary China and their power to debunk and rethink history from a perspective that challenges the country’s political status quo.” The second article on huaju offers new evidence on China’s National Theatre Movement of the mid 1920s that has prompted several recent publications, including one in ATJ (33.1). In her “A Missing Piece of the Collage: The Stage Practice in the National Theatre Movement,” Barbara Jiawei Li discusses three productions of the movement, starting with one in New York’s International House that is generally believed to be the impetus for the movement’s transition back to China. Li’s discussion is made possible by a newly discovered contemporaneous report. She also draws our attention to the close relationship between the National Theatre Movement’s performance focus and the American New Stagecraft Movement. The next two articles also focus on East Asia, starting with Tove Solander’s “Mortal Bromance: Homoeroticism on the Takarazuka Stage,” which also offers a new take on a familiar topic. Through close reading of original productions, Solander challenges current framing of the revue’s main appeal as female homosociality, arguing instead for the productions’ specific invocation of male homoerotic themes. In the next article, titled “Yakiniku Dragon as Prophecy and Reflection,” Seungmoo Paik analyzes the success of a 2008 joint Korea-Japan production in both countries, about the sufferings of a Zainichi (Koreans in Japan) family as part of the forced migration during Japanese occupation (see the play’s translation in ATJ 31.1). Refuting Korean reviews’ excessive admiration of the production as expression of guilt by the Korean people, Paik’s analysis focuses on the son’s suicide as emblematic of national yearning for a real father figure and the dispersion of the three daughters to South Korea, North Korea, and Japan as offering a solution to end the bondage of the war in East Asia. Moving on to India, Prateek’s “Towards a Definition...