'Intermediality as Method' -- Intercultrual Modernity and Jingju (Dr Ashley Thorpe) скачать в хорошем качестве

'Intermediality as Method' -- Intercultrual Modernity and Jingju (Dr Ashley Thorpe)

Third invited paper of Intermedia/Interarts Workshop 2: Exchanging Chinese Cultures, sponsored by the British Council under the aegis of the UK-China Humanities Alliance (UKCHA). ABSTRACT AND BIOGRAPHY ‘Intermediality as Method’: Intercultural Modernity and Jingju in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries Dr Ashley Thorpe This paper advocates ‘Intermedality as Method’ for several reasons. Firstly, discussions of intermediality in Asian performance are, at least in the discipline of English-language theatre studies, virtually non-existent. Secondly, ‘Intermedality as Method’ offers the opportunity to recognise intermediality as a network of relations, where the crossing of communicative strategies between media expresses strategic geopolitical alliances, shapes perceptions of imagined community both within a nation and beyond into its wider region, but also marks the effects of political control and the agitational potency of its itinerancy. ‘Intermedality as Method’ thus invites the consideration of intermediality as connected to trans- and interculturalism, but between locations in proximity rather than between ‘the East’ and ‘the West’. Accordingly, this paper will focus on the development of intermediality in Chinese Jingju (commonly translated as ‘Beijing Opera’) to challenge the dominant historical narrative that intermedial theatre practice is a predominantly Western phenomenon. It will argue that, as early as 1934, intermedial developments in Jingju, specifically through film, were conceived of as emerging from the theatricality of the form itself, implicitly challenging the primitivism accorded to Jingju by contemporaneous observers in the West (such as Eisenstein and Brecht). The adaptation of performances into film from 1949, as well as the inclusion of digital technology in twenty-first century projects, will demonstrate how ‘Intermediality as Method’ reveals the tensions between national and regional politics in this ‘traditional’ performance form from China. Ashley Thorpe is a Senior Lecturer in Theatre in the Department of Drama, Theatre & Dance. He has published a total of seven books, most recently the edited collection of essays Asian City Crossings: Pathways of Performance Through Hong Kong and Singapore (Routledge, 2021) with Rossella Ferrari. He wrote, produced, directed, and performed the English-language nō Emily (Tara Arts, 2019) about the suffragette Emily Wilding Davison, which has since been translated into Japanese and Chinese. He is currently working on an edited volume of English-language nō texts and critical essays, as well as his third monograph exploring the construction of China as a political entity in twentieth century British playwriting.