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The week-long Moriones Festival on the island of Marinduque, south of Manila, weaves together a complex mix of events including street theatre, processions, religious ceremonies, and a three-night sinakulo that dramatizes the history of salvation with a focus on the Christ story. Present throughout the week's events are the morions, caped and elaborately costumed local men enacting a vow or panata, whose identities are disguised by large headpieces and full-face carved masks meant to resemble Roman centurions. The leading morion is the Roman centurion Longinus, who according to apocryphal sources, was the lance-wielding soldier present at the crucifixion and whose sight was miraculously restored by Christ's blood. The ubiquitous morions and the transformation and martyrdom of Longinus provide an active, experiential route into the story of Christ's sacrifice for many Catholics in Marinduque during Holy Week.
Traditional norms and values stood in the way of radical experimentation with the form of wayang until Indonesia's postcolonial era. The same impediments did not exist for colonial European artists. Edward Gordon Craig formulated his theories of the ūber-marionette with reference to wayang, while Richard Teschner adapted wayang puppets for his unique Viennese puppet theatre. This initial encounter of Europe with wayang articulated a pattern of colonial exploitation: Asian products were alienated from their producers and transported to Europe stripped of direct connections to the people and conditions from which they arose.
The 1960s ushered in a new era of intercultural communication. A major influx of Indonesian puppetry came to the United States when a generation of budding American puppet artists received direct tuition from Indonesian puppet masters at California summer schools in the early 1970s. Many subsequently went to Java and Bali themselves for lengthy periods of wayang study and apprenticeship. Some of these artists crossed traditional Indonesian puppets forms with other modes of practice to create complex hybrids. Much of the most interesting contemporary wayang work today is taking place along transnational axes. Wayang has been embraced by international artists and companies in order to tell idiosyncratic myths and celebrate the sacred and the ethereal.
The efforts of Ninagawa Yukio to draw upon traditional Japanese theatrical techniques in the staging of Western classics arose from his desire to break from the mimetic, Western style of staging plays and to revitalize aspects of classical Japanese theater that had fallen out of use in modern "new theater" (shingeki) drama. Moreover, he wished to divest Shakespeare of the highbrow status it held in Japan and popularize Shakespeare by incorporating familiar imagery from indigenous culture. Owing to their highly visual approach, Ninagawa's productions have also enjoyed surprising success in the West, where his interpretations provide striking new perspectives on Shakespeare and other classics. Ninagawa has gained worldwide recognition and in Great Britain his work is often hailed as profoundly illuminating. This paper investigates Ninagawa's production of Hamlet (1998), which ran for eight performances at the Barbican Centre, London, as part of the Barbican International Theatre Event series. In this revival, the author served as backstage interpreter between the Japanese and the British stage crews.
The paper examines four major aspects of Ninagawa's approach. First, it focuses on his transposition of the play in time and space: as a framing device Ninagawa sets the play in the dressing rooms of a theater, underscoring the themes of pretense and dissembling. Second, the paper examines Ninagawa's symbolic use of curtains and stairways. Third, it discusses the allegorical use of the Japanese doll tier (hinadan) as a central motif to highlight the hierarchy of the Danish court and the precariousness of power. Finally, it discusses the stage techniques which Ninagawa borrows from kabuki and nō to enhance the production's theatricality. The warm reception this Hamlet enjoyed in both Britain and Japan demonstrates how Ninagawa Yukio's stage iconography transcends cultural, linguistic, and political borders.
In contemporary Singapore a transformation is taking place in the performance of Chinese opera (xiqu) as amateur performers with state support take over roles and repertoire formerly associated with professional companies. The rise of amateur groups can be seen as an outcome of the city-state's cultural policy and the emphasis on amateur rather than professional presentations is also linked to a long Confucian heritage that emphasizes the scholar-amateur and deemphasizes professionals in artistic performance.
The Sanskrit theatre tradition of India has often been regarded as avoiding, even prohibiting, depiction of death on the stage. This article argues that death was both threatened and enacted on the stage, and has always been integral to the Sanskrit theatre tradition, as seen to the present day in Kerala's kūṭiyāṭṭam tradition. The apparent conflict between "rules" from the Nāṭyaśāstra, the normative text for theatre, and actual dramas is examined, and the surprisingly large number of references in the Nāṭyaśāstra to dramatic uses of death are discussed. For the audience member, seeing depictions of or threats of deaths on the stage can be a significant component of the Indic theatrical experience.
This paper looks at how Hong Kong theatre is expressing the city's relationship to globalization and its own position within a changing international framework. The performances feature the city responding to challenges of globalization and nationalism by resorting to various means of global connectivity. The impact of globalization on presenting the ultralocal, the national, and the global on stage will be examined. These are responses to internal factors such as Hong Kong theatre history and conventions, as well as reactions to external factors such as the resumption of sovereignty over Hong Kong by the People's Republic of China in 1997. Hong Kong theatre dexterously negotiates the conflicting claims of localism, nationalism, and globalism to create a unique Hong Kong identity as a capitalistic Special Administrative Region within the communist People's Republic of China. Vignettes of the Chinese diaspora can also be found, with people converging in and diverging from Hong Kong, trying to respond to calls for modernity and globalism without loosing Chinese identity.
One-tenth of the plays in the current nō repertoire retell stories of Chinese origin or feature a Chinese character, raising the role of China in nō theatre. Through a close reading of the two plays, Sanshō (The Three Laughers) and Hakurakuten (Bai Letian), this paper proposes that one major reason for the staging of China is to voice sociopolitical comments. Although both plays feature well-known Chinese literati, they demonstrate contrasting treatment of the foreigners. Such polarity in the portrayals of the Chinese reveals the different presentation of China in response to the changing sociopolitical climates in medieval Japan.
This paper considers a 2004 performance of Nō Project II ‘Can't' is ‘Night,' a collaboration of Japanese American dancer June Watanabe, Japanese nō master and Intangible Cultural Treasure of Japan Uchida Anshin, composer Pauline Oliveros, and poet Leslie Scalapino. The project, spearheaded by Watanabe, translated nō for a contemporary San Francisco audience, imbuing it with social and political meaning for California viewers. Watanabe translated nō's internal concentration into a collaborative process she calls "being in the moment." The performance became a way for collaborators and audience to examine values in art making and sociopolitical practice.
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