Asian City Crossings

Asian City Crossings is the first volume to examine the relationship between the city and performance from an Asian perspective. This collection introduces "city as method" as a new conceptual framework for the investigation of practices of city-based performing arts collaboration and city-to-city performance networks across East- and Southeast Asia and beyond. The shared and yet divergent histories of the global cities of Hong Kong and Singapore as postcolonial, multiethnic, multicultural, and multilingual sites, are taken as points of departure to demonstrate how "city as method" facilitates a comparative analytical space that foregrounds in-betweenness and fluid positionalities. It situates inter-Asian relationality and inter-city referencing as centrally significant dynamics in the exploration of the material and ideological conditions of contemporary performance and performance exchange in Asia. This study captures creative dialogue that travels city-based pathways along the Hong Kong-Singapore route, as well as between Hong Kong and Singapore and other cities, through scholarly analyses and practitioner reflections drawn from the fields of theatre, performance, and music. This book combines essays by scholars of Asian studies, theatre studies, ethnomusicology, and human geography with reflective accounts by Hong Kong and Singapore-based performing arts practitioners to highlight the diversity, vibrancy, and complexity of creative projects that destabilise notions of identity, belonging, and nationhood through strategies of collaborative conviviality and transnational mobility across multi-sited networks of cities in Asia. In doing so, this volume fills a considerable gap in global scholarly discourse on performance and the city and on the production and circulation of the performing arts in Asia.

Rossella Ferrari is Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Vienna, Austria. Ashley Thorpe is Senior Lecturer in Theatre and Director of the Centre for Asian Theatre & Dance at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK.

1. Introduction: Mapping the Terrain: Hong Kong, Singapore, and the City as Method 2. Culture of Exchange and Cultural Exchange 3. From 1989 to 1997 and Beyond: Zuni Icosahedron's Transnational Explorations 4. Dialectics as Creative Process and Decentring China: Zuni Icosahedron and Drama Box's One Hundred Years of Solitude 10.0: Cultural Revolution 5. Thoughts on Cross-Cultural Collaboration by Mok Chiu-yu, a Hong Konger: What We Did and Why There Was Little Interaction with Singapore 6. Augustine Mok Chiu-yu's Intercultural Asian People's Theatre: Imagining 'The Third Way' for Hong Kong 7. Solitude to Solidarity: Imagined Transnational Alliance of Humanity against Bestial Hegemony 8. Crossing-Over as Strategy 9. The City and the Artist: Alice Theatre Laboratory's Seven Boxes Possessed of Kafka in Shanghai 10. Unequal Cosmopolitanisms: Staging Singaporean Nanyin in and beyond Asia 11. Minor Translocalism: Messy and Marginal Networks in and beyond Singapore. An Interview with Tan Suet Lee 12. Facilitating Exchange 13. Postscript: Asian City Crossings as a Strategy for Freedom?