Theatre and Performance in the Asia-Pacific Regional Modernities in the Global Era

Theatre and Performance in the Asia-Pacific is an analysis of the theatrical imaginative as it manifests in theatre and performance in Australia, Indonesia, Japan and Singapore. The sites encompass marked differences in language, performance, history and politics, and variations in the solidity and volatility of their imagined worlds. Recognizing these differences, the book explores contrasts in each nation as it identifies with the region and the cultural interconnections that support a regional identity. While the four nations demonstrate degrees of ambivalence and connection to the Asia-Pacific as a region, the project argues that relations to modernity and globalization are less nation-specific. The project articulates a regional configuration of modernity which is multiple, contradictory but nonetheless regional. Each nation has in common the imperative to reconcile with and adapt to European modernity in a way that renders global modernity multiple rather than singular.

Denise Varney is Associate Professor in Theatre Studies at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Publications include The Dolls' Revolution: Australian Theatre and Cultural Imagination (co-author Rachel Fensham), Theatre in the Berlin Republic (ed.) and Radical Visions: The Impact of the Sixties on Australia Drama.

Peter Eckersall is Associate Professor of Theatre Studies in the School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne, Australia. Publications include Theorising the Angura Space: avant-garde performance and politics in Japan 1960-2000 (2006) and Kawamura Takeshi's Nippon Wars and Other Plays (ed. 2011).

Chris Hudson is Research Leader in the Globalization and Culture Program of the Global Cities Research Institute, and Associate Professor of Asian Cultural Studies in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. Chris has published widely in Asian Cultural Studies.

Barbara Hatley is Emeritus Professor of Indonesian in the School of Asian Languages and Studies at the University of Tasmania, Australia, and Adjunct Professor of the School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University, Australia. Publications include Javanese Performances on an Indonesian Stage: Contesting Culture, Embracing Change (2008) and Ketoprak Theatre and the Wayang Tradition (1979).

Introduction: Regional Modernities in the Global Era
PART I: CHANGING FORMS OF THEATRE AND DRAMA
1. Modern Australian Drama: Haunted by the Past
2. Modernity and the Self in Singapore: Emily of Emerald Hill
3. Modern Drama and Postcolonial Modernity in Indonesia
4. Hirata Oriza's Tokyo Notes and the New Modern
PART II: MOBILE PERFORMANCE AND FLUID IDENTITIES
5. Solid and Liquid Modernities in Regional Australia
6. Staging Indonesian Modernity After Suharto
7. 'Youth is not the Only Thing That Passes at Sonic Speed': Speed and Private Lives in Okada Toshiki's The Sonic Life of a Giant Tortoise
8. Dramaturgy of the Liquid: Cargo Kuala Lumpur-Singapore
PART III: BEYOND REGIONALITY: THE ASIA-PACIFIC'S GLOBAL REACH
9. Australian Adaptations: The European Turn
10. Performing Liquid Modernity: Chay Yew's Visible Cities in Singapore
11. Performing 'Authentic Indonesia' Transculturally
12. Kawamura Takeshi's Theatre and the Spectacle of Adaptation
PART IV: REGIONAL FLOWS
13. Cultural Exchange, Arts Festivals and Markers of Modernity
Conclusion