Rossella Ferrari - Böcker

Asian City Crossings is the first volume to examine the relationship between the city and performance from an Asian perspective. This collection introduces "city as method" as a new conceptual framework for the investigation of practices of city-based performing arts collaboration and city-to-city performance networks across East- and Southeast Asia and beyond. The shared and yet divergent histories of the global cities of Hong Kong and Singapore as postcolonial, multiethnic, multicultural, and multilingual sites, are taken as points of departure to demonstrate how "city as method" facilitates a comparative analytical space that foregrounds in-betweenness and fluid positionalities. It situates inter-Asian relationality and inter-city referencing as centrally significant dynamics in the exploration of the material and ideological conditions of contemporary performance and performance exchange in Asia. This study captures creative dialogue that travels city-based pathways along the Hong Kong-Singapore route, as well as between Hong Kong and Singapore and other cities, through scholarly analyses and practitioner reflections drawn from the fields of theatre, performance, and music. This book combines essays by scholars of Asian studies, theatre studies, ethnomusicology, and human geography with reflective accounts by Hong Kong and Singapore-based performing arts practitioners to highlight the diversity, vibrancy, and complexity of creative projects that destabilise notions of identity, belonging, and nationhood through strategies of collaborative conviviality and transnational mobility across multi-sited networks of cities in Asia. In doing so, this volume fills a considerable gap in global scholarly discourse on performance and the city and on the production and circulation of the performing arts in Asia.

Asian City Crossings is the first volume to examine the relationship between the city and performance from an Asian perspective. This collection introduces "city as method" as a new conceptual framework for the investigation of practices of city-based performing arts collaboration and city-to-city performance networks across East- and Southeast Asia and beyond. The shared and yet divergent histories of the global cities of Hong Kong and Singapore as postcolonial, multiethnic, multicultural, and multilingual sites, are taken as points of departure to demonstrate how "city as method" facilitates a comparative analytical space that foregrounds in-betweenness and fluid positionalities. It situates inter-Asian relationality and inter-city referencing as centrally significant dynamics in the exploration of the material and ideological conditions of contemporary performance and performance exchange in Asia. This study captures creative dialogue that travels city-based pathways along the Hong Kong-Singapore route, as well as between Hong Kong and Singapore and other cities, through scholarly analyses and practitioner reflections drawn from the fields of theatre, performance, and music. This book combines essays by scholars of Asian studies, theatre studies, ethnomusicology, and human geography with reflective accounts by Hong Kong and Singapore-based performing arts practitioners to highlight the diversity, vibrancy, and complexity of creative projects that destabilise notions of identity, belonging, and nationhood through strategies of collaborative conviviality and transnational mobility across multi-sited networks of cities in Asia. In doing so, this volume fills a considerable gap in global scholarly discourse on performance and the city and on the production and circulation of the performing arts in Asia.

This Element examines performance in postmillennial China through the lens of postsocialism. The fragmented ontology of Chinese postsocialism captures the structural contradictions of a political system that supports a neoliberal economy while continuing to promote socialist values. This study explores how the ideological ambivalence and cultural paradoxes that characterise the postsocialist condition are embodied and represented in performance. Focusing on independent practitioners and postdramatic practices, it builds on theorisations of postsocialism as a state of temporal disjunction to propose a tripartite taxonomy structured around past, present, and future temporal regimes. The categories of postsocialist hauntologies, postsocialist realisms, and postsocialist futurities are introduced to investigate performance works that respectively revisit the socialist past, document present realities, and envision future imaginations. The intersection of competing temporalities and their performative manifestations reflects the disjunctive constitution of contemporary China, where past socialist legacies and futurological ambitions coexist within a fractured postsocialist present.

This Element examines performance in postmillennial China through the lens of postsocialism. The fragmented ontology of Chinese postsocialism captures the structural contradictions of a political system that supports a neoliberal economy while continuing to promote socialist values. This study explores how the ideological ambivalence and cultural paradoxes that characterise the postsocialist condition are embodied and represented in performance. Focusing on independent practitioners and postdramatic practices, it builds on theorisations of postsocialism as a state of temporal disjunction to propose a tripartite taxonomy structured around past, present, and future temporal regimes. The categories of postsocialist hauntologies, postsocialist realisms, and postsocialist futurities are introduced to investigate performance works that respectively revisit the socialist past, document present realities, and envision future imaginations. The intersection of competing temporalities and their performative manifestations reflects the disjunctive constitution of contemporary China, where past socialist legacies and futurological ambitions coexist within a fractured postsocialist present.

This is the first systematic study of networks of performance collaboration in the contemporary Chinese-speaking world and of their interactions with the artistic communities of the wider East Asian region.