Chinese Themes at the International Federation for Theatre Research Conference in Osaka in August 2011

CHINOPERL Papers No. 30 (2011)©2011 by the Conference on Chinese Oral and Performing Literature CHINESE THEMES AT THE INTERNATIONAL FEDERATION FOR THEATRE RESEARCH CONFERENCE IN OSAKA IN AUGUST 2011 JANNE RISUM University of Aarhaus, Denmark The International Federation for Theatre Research (FIRT/IFTR) was founded in 1955 by delegates from twenty-one countries, including Japan (as the only Asian country). Its 51st Annual Conference in 2008 was the first to take place in an Asian country and was hosted by the theatre and media studies section at Chung-Ang University in Seoul in South Korea. 7KH DSSRVLWH WKHPH RI WKH 6HRXO FRQIHUHQFH ³5H-constructing AsianQHVV HV LQD*OREDO$JH´DWWUDFWHGPDQ\WKHDWUHVFKRODUVIURPDOORYHU the world, including a pleasant number of theatre scholars from various Asian countries, includinJ RQH IURP WKH 3HRSOH¶V 5HSXEOLF RI &KLQD However, at the IFTR conferences the Chinese theatre has always been a recurrent subject. The second Annual Conference of the IFTR to take place in an Asian country was hosted this summer by the Theatre Studies Section at Osaka 8QLYHUVLW\LQ-DSDQIURPWR$XJXVW,WKDGWKHWKHPH³7UDGLWLRQ ,QQRYDWLRQ&RPPXQLW\´DQGDWWUDFWHGDQLQWHUQDWLRQDO FURZGRIDURXQG 350 participants²among them were, of course, many Japanese theatre scholars. Irrespective of their cultures of origin, many participants seized the opportunity to focus their papers on aspects of old and new Japanese theatre. As for Chinese theatre, this year there was a handful of scholars addressing that subject, and it was particularly gratifying to hear as many as four young Chinese scholars presenting their ongoing research. Below, I will try to briefly show the variety of the papers that dealt with Chinese theatre by introducing them according to the historical period they covered. Joscha Shin-Jyh Chung 䦮⅓❦ of Taipei National University of the Arts shared with us some of his discoveries from his research project on CHINOPERL Papers No. 30 266 the first pioneers of huaju 䂡ࢷ (spoken drama),QKLVSDSHU³1HZ6WDJHV Before the New Stage: The Origins of the First Modern Chinese Theatre´ he persuasively showed that huaju has a longer stage history than is often thought. Lia Wen-Ching Liang ằ᮷㧱 of National Tsinghua University in Taiwan presented her research project on the extremely popular modern melodramatic chinoiseries on the London stages in the 1910s in a paper HQWLWOHG ³5HYLVLWLQJ /LPHKRXVH &KLQDWRZQ RQ /RQGRQ¶V 6WDJH Reinvestigating the Past via Limehouse Nights  ´,QKLVSUHVHQWDWLRQ³*HQGHULQJ )HPDOHV RQ WKH $VLDQ 6WDJH 0HL /DQIDQJ DQG %DQGǀ Tamasaburǀ,´ 0LQJ