Events

CALL FOR PAPERS DEADLINE: 15 JANUARY 2025

The workshop is jointly organized by the Department of English, Linguistics, and Theatre Studies and the Inter-Asia Engagements Cluster at the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore.

The workshop aims to explore the historical connections and flows of performance-making and travel across Asian regions, seas, straits, and beyond, focusing on developing research into cultural heritage and past intercultural engagements in this part of the world. It seeks to identify maritime and land routes and geographical nodes that were part of performance networks, touring, diasporic exchanges, and migration of practitioners and troupes from the nineteenth century to the twentieth century. It aims to de-emphasise the continent, sub-continent or mainland as the sole origin of performance practices and instead focus on the flow and circulation of people, practices, and intercultural performance-making over time and transregionally. It recognises these flows as a collective heritage that was interactive and polycentric, rather than exclusive to the histories of nations and linear narratives of historical processes. The concept of ‘archipelago’ (Rae 2019) is incorporated as a metaphor to challenge dominant discourses of continentalism and nation-states. The goal is to decentre knowledge production and retell historical narratives of performance histories across a wider geography based on evolving social and ecological relations.

Proposed papers can seek to uncover familial ties, apprentice-master relations, genealogies, social ties, and cultural exchanges that made possible hybridisation and cross-cultural innovations that came to define performance practices found in Southeast and East Asia and beyond. Divergent routes of performance networks may be addressed alongside imperial routes and Empire touring. Additionally, the workshop will intersect with the field of digital humanities, exploring how digital tools and approaches can contribute to the study of performance histories.

The workshop aims to propel the extensive study of the archipelagic flow and circulation of performance-making and travelling, building on prior research on interculturalism in Southeast and East Asian performance. It will also encourage scholars to engage with digital scholarship and combine historical and archival research with digital approaches to bring about interdisciplinary collaborations and exchanges.

Scholars working on regional case studies, performance databases, and theatre archives are encouraged to submit a proposal. The workshop also welcomes studies that combine digital methods such as network analysis, historical GIS, and visualisations with archival research and data collection across archives and digital collections. It also explores traditional methods and interfaces of storytelling and knowledge production in relation to performance-making and embodied practices. Methodological innovation is welcomed, and the conference themes and topics will encourage collaborative research projects and researchers who use digital approaches in their studies, including those exploring the possibilities of augmented and virtual reality technologies for rethinking performance. By combining approaches across disciplines, we hope to find new ways to tell and experience stories of our shared and unshared heritages, legacies, and genealogies of performance making in the region.

Topics may resemble (but are by no means limited to) the following examples:

1. Who were the actors, agents, commissioners, and nodes responsible for forming and shaping transregional relationships, and who made possible the travelling of performance practices across geographical regions? What were some of these social relations within a troupe, a company or between individuals who facilitated these travels and theatre migration?
2. What were the technologies that made these exchanges possible? And how did they contribute to creating and maintaining these performance networks? How can new digital technologies create platforms of exchange and dialogue based on alternative geographies and imaginaries of connection?
3. Where were the places of performances and what were their individual and collective histories? How were these places connected? How did each performance or production fit into the ecosystem of each ‘place’? And how were such sites part of a wider regional or transregional network of performance travels?
4. How did the travels in turn change the way the performers were received back home? Did performers adapt and respond to local tastes and expectations as they travelled from one place to another? What repertoire did performers acquire, invent, or carry forward from their travels? 
5.  Compared to travel routes shaped by the Empire, what other routes were travelled by the performers of diasporic communities? For instance, Cantonese opera troupes toured the Australian goldfields in Victoria during the Gold Rush from the 1850s to 1870s. What places were included in the itineraries of these troupes and what networks existed in the nineteenth century that made these transregional tours possible?

SUBMISSION OF PROPOSALS

Paper proposals should include a title, an abstract (200 words maximum), and a brief personal biography (about 150 words) for submission by 15 January 2025. Please also include a statement confirming that your proposed paper has not been published or committed elsewhere, and that you are willing to revise the version of your paper presented at the workshop for potential inclusion in an edited volume.

Proposals are to be submitted to valerie.yeo@nus.edu.sg using this template. Authors of selected proposals can expect to be notified by mid-February 2025. Workshop presenters will be required to submit short draft papers (3,000-5,000 words) by 10 June 2025. These papers will be circulated to fellow panelists and discussants in advance of the workshop and need not be fully polished.

This workshop will be held in person. The Asia Research Institute will provide overseas participants with full or partial airfare funding as well as three nights of accommodation in Singapore. Please indicate in the proposal form if you require funding support.

WORKSHOP CONVENORS

Dr Alvin Eng Hui LIM | Department of English, Linguistics and Theatre Studies, National University of Singapore
Dr Hedren Wai Yuan SUM | Department of English, Linguistics and Theatre Studies, National University of Singapore
Dr Kyueun KIM | Department of English, Linguistics and Theatre Studies, National University of Singapore
Prof Tim WINTER | Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore