Performing Shanghai and Beyond: An Introduction

As a Shanghai native, I didn’t know until I had lived in the United States for years and was in my 30s that the English name of my hometown was also used as a pejorative verb. Shanghai got its “bad name” in the mid-19th century when American thugs “shanghaied” unwilling men, grabbing them off the streets to labor on ships heading to places like Shanghai, a metropolis thriving after the Opium War (1840) while China was ironically in decline and chaos. Today, after decades of stagnation, Shanghai is thriving again, this time along with the rising Chinese nation.

In January 2012, Shanghai was the site of a TDR Consortium event, the Winter Institute, at the Shanghai Theatre Academy (STA). Professors and students from Brown, New York University, Yale, and Princeton joined their STA hosts for two weeks of teaching and learning around the general theme of “Performing Shanghai.”

Shanghai was not only the site of performances and performance studies research, but also the subject of both—Shanghai’s performance on the world stage, from its intercultural past to the 2010 six-month-long World Expo exhibiting 190 countries. “Performing Shanghai,” the theme collectively chosen by the five universities’ professors, was meant to go beyond Shanghai, to consider the many peoples and cultures that comprise and inspire Shanghai. Shanghai was a “salad bar” of cultures, just like New York, long before the simile for multiculturalism was commonly used. Growing numbers of immigrants came to the city to live in largely separate neighborhoods, including concessions ruled by different governments. The city began as a small world unto itself in the heyday of colonialism when Western powers pushed their way in despite local resistance, until 1949. In our postcolonial era, Shanghai is once again becoming a small world as China actively invites international investors, advisors, and collaborators with local business partners to participate in the development of the nation, mostly in economic areas. As a cosmopolitan center for arts as well as commerce, Shanghai was the birthplace of Chinese film, modern drama, modern dance, and modern music, all imported from Europe and America, some via Japan. These new genres and styles fused with Chinese traditions to make up China’s “New Culture” about a hundred years ago.

The first Winter Institute was followed by the second in January 2013, themed “Shanghai Encounters.” These gatherings are the source of many of the essays in this issue. Mary Schmidt Campbell puts theatre in the context of community building and university curriculum design. Her point, as I see it, is that aesthetic performance and its study can help various social performance institutions in an instrumental way. Shen Liang’s article on community-based theatre projects in Shanghai further elaborates on the question of how performance skills practiced in artistic institutions can be applied to social performances that impact and improve people’s daily lives. Shen’s article is a case study in the new area of “social performance studies” that Faye C. Fei and I discussed in an earlier TDR issue (57:3). The writings of Claire Conceison, Emily E. Wilcox, Michael Leibenluft and Maja-Stina Johansson Wang, Tarryn Li-Min Chun, and Ivy I-chu Chang cover a wide range of aesthetic performances in the Chinese world, from traditional opera to avantgarde theatre, from the mainstream to the periphery, from conventional theatre spaces to art spaces existing under the radar, from straight to queer, from Shanghai to Beijing to Taipei. Jiayun Zhuang’s paper needs a special mention because her subject, an enacted oral history “memory project,” is at the same time social and aesthetic performance.Shalom Shanghai, a play with music that has a mixed cast of Chinese and American actors, directed by Lee Breuer and produced by STA’s Lou Wei, Han Sheng and Guo Yu for the 2014 China Shanghai International Arts Festival, is in a sense also a “memory project” because it is about Jewish refugees who escaped to Shanghai during World War II. With fictional characters against a projected backdrop of historical photographs and videos gathered from Jewish museums in Shanghai and New York, Shalom...