ASIAN THEATRE JOURNAL最新文献

Abstract:

This article examines spiritual knowledge or ilmu that performers imparted or encouraged me to obtain while I conducted fieldwork on gamelan music and dance in the regency of Malang in the cultural region of east Java spanning 2005–2007 and subsequent visits. Thinking through ideological implications of pedagogy—that is, “[w]hat’s at stake politically in any given pedagogical model” (Wong 2001: 6), I focus on performers’ beliefs and discourses about ilmu as a form of pedagogy and system of knowledge. I extend Kathy Foley’s (1985) and Sarah Weiss’s (2003) discussions of an “empty vessel” approach to performance that is valued in different parts of Java to explore the preparation of a performer’s body to serve as a suitable container for ilmu. I contend that through their beliefs, practices, and verbal discourse about ilmu, musicians and dancers in Malang were maintaining and producing local systems of knowledge, transmission, and competence in a context of globalization, urbanization, and increasing expressions of Islamic orthodoxy and piety in Indonesia. Continuing such knowledge systems was part of performers’ ideological and cultural work to uphold local culture and identity as Javanese people, more broadly speaking, and as east Javanese in particular.

Abstract:

The Ati-Atihan is a Philippine festival held every January in Kalibo, Aklan province on Panay Island, in honor of the town’s patron saint, the Santo Niño (The Child Jesus) and, at the same time, a commemoration of the original settlers of the island, the dark-skinned Atis. The festival is believed to predate Hispanic colonialism. However, Spanish missionaries gradually added Christian meanings to it. The festival’s origin is also linked to the epic Maragtas, which tells the story of Ten Bornean Datus (chieftains) led by Datu Puti, who fled Borneo in the thirteenth century and landed on the island of Panay. The Borneans purchased the island from the Ati people. Feasting and festivities followed soon after the transaction, including a traditional Ati dance, which was mimicked by the Borneans as an act of appreciation. Today, the festival consists of religious processions and street dancing, showcasing groups and individuals wearing colorful and elaborate costumes and marching drummers. The street dancing, sadsad, is improvised where the foot is momentarily dragged along the ground in tune with the drummers’ beat. The essay interrogates the Ati-atihan Festival through its three components—a dance-drama called Maragtas it Panay (The Barter of Panay), the sadsad, and the cultural dance competition. I argued that religion (Catholicism), cultural history (the Maragtas), and the series of performances during the weeklong merry-making complicate the festival’s ontology. Entangling these aspects, the festival is explored as a celebration and, at the same time, a repulsion of the foreign (colonial disposition), which leads toward an understanding of the festival as a concatenation of entanglements: devotion and entertainment, utopia and nostalgia, and history and mythmaking. In the end, the Ati-atihan invokes a communal identity, which may be asserted as a recuperation of a pre-contact collective identity that embodies a proposition signifying how the body remembers what the archives failed to record.

Abstract:

This article aims to map out the features of political theatre in the contemporary post-colonial society of Pakistan, with a focus on the first two decades of the twenty-first century. Though there were some sporadic developments in the earlier period, a relatively organized political theatre movement, with its ideological underpinnings within the leftist project, started in the 1980s as a response to General Zal ul Haq’s dictatorship. However, it lost its resistive fervor and performative activism due to the neo-liberalization of theatre under NGO projects. The pioneering companies of this movement in Punjab, namely Ajoka (1983) and Punjab Lok Rahs (1986), started working on the development projects of national and international donors. Their politics of resistance against the local and international dictatorial and imperialist regimes transformed into the neoliberal politics of rights, justice and advocacy, dictated by the hegemonic agendas of Western corporations, imperialist governments and think tanks of the Global North (Abbas 2023:360). This phenomenon occurred with almost all theatre companies of the 1980s in Lahore. In this context, the question arises of whether political theatre is possible in contemporary Pakistan, and if so, in what form. This article explores this question by examining the case of Sangat Theatre in order to draw a picture of an alternative aesthetic reality for political theatre that exists outside the realm of NGO influence. At the same time, by focusing on certain decolonial approaches in theatre-making and performance, the article helps to decolonize theatre scholarship and offers an understanding of working-class theatre production in a postcolonial reality.

Abstract:

This article maps the ethos of the yajña ritual, sacrificial worship intended to enhance both the person and the community, in Girish Karnad’s The Fire and the Rain (2011). It explores the yajña ritual on both physical and mental levels through the mythological tales. Using the Yavakri story from the Mahabharata, the play portrays the physical yajña as a seven-year ritual, in which one prays to Lord Indra to grant rain to a dry land for ten years. Following the tale of Indra and Vritra, the yajña rite is also carried out in the mythological narration Garbha Nataka, which serves as a kind of mental yajña, giving people a place to reflect on their transgressions and attempt to make penance by sacrificing their interests in the service of the greater good. The crux of both myths is a yajña. The myths are incomplete without a yajña, and so is their professed path from the external yajña process to the internal yajña.

Abstract:

This essay links the contemporary dance theatre of the Newars of the Kathmandu Valley in Nepal to the medieval Malla theatre that was staged from the thirteenth to the eighteenth centuries by the same Newar ethnic group. A detailed study of both types of performance, ancient and present-day, shows that a remarkable persistence has been at work through the centuries, even after the abolition of the monarchy in 2008. This research particularly focuses on two prevalent past and present aspects of these performances: their religious and kingly dimensions. Examples drawn from ethnographic fieldwork in urban and rural environments are provided. By way of conclusion, the essay explores the social and political significance of these plays in present-day Nepal. Performing dance theatre today revives the Malla golden age and compensates in many ways for the downgraded status to which Newars have been relegated over the last two centuries in Nepal.

Reviewed by:

• The Challenge of World Theatre History by Steve Tillis
• Jessica Nakamura

The title of The Challenge of World Theatre History reflects Steve Tillis’s dual approach that grounds his book: the challenge of producing world theatre history and the challenge it offers to our established conventions and understandings. Throughout, Tillis engages with conceptual issues at the center of theatre historiography to argue the urgent need for global inclusivity, making it critical reading for theatre educators. While the implicit emphasis in Tillis’s book is on teaching theatre history, his development of methodologies to produce world theatre history in later chapters may well be applied to the creation of scholarly texts.

In its challenge, world theatre history is as much about what has existed as it is about developing new ways forward. The first half of the book is devoted to the former: Tillis’s introduction identifies the “Standard Western Approach,” what he describes as the prevalent approach to theatre history education, well ingrained in survey classes, textbooks, and anthologies. To explore why world theatre history has been slow to be implemented, Tillis’s second chapter identifies and “rebut[s]” arguments against world theatre history (p. 32). In his third chapter, Tillis identifies the “historiographical fallacies” of the Standard Western Approach (p. 61). In these two foundational chapters, Tillis undoes the thinking behind this existing approach to theatre history, pinpointing the false assumptions about space and time [End Page 218] that underlie its historiography. He uses scholars from the long-established school of world history to support his claims, while revealing that the nascent field of world theatre history is years behind historiographical work elsewhere.

In the second half of the book, Tillis outlines new methodologies to producing world theatre history, methodologies that emphasize comparison and multiplicity. In his fourth chapter, Tillis identifies the basic units in world theatre history writing, theatrical events, and theatrical forms that lend themselves to comparative work. If the Standard Western Approach is based on assumptions about space and time, Tillis’s final four chapters develop ways of thinking about space and time that are conducive to considering the world. Chapter five reevaluates geography to move beyond the nation-state model. The final three chapters examine conceptions of time, with Tillis first offering a long-durée approach to theatre history (chapter six), exploring how we think of continuities and change (chapter seven), and reexamining how