Performance in East Asia often made creative use of places such as gardens, rivers, or even the abstract space of legal discourse. Challenging familiar understandings of the “place” as a mere location, setting, or venue in which a performance event occurs, participants in this symposium will examine the dynamic ways in which a wide variety of performance acts, and their technological mediation in both material and virtual forms, engage in acts of place-making. This symposium brings together scholars of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean theater, art, cultural history, and performance studies whose work connects in various ways with performance, media, and space, all broadly conceived, in an effort to launch a new transcultural and interdisciplinary conversation. The term “media,” here, is invoked in an expansive sense that extends beyond the worlds of print, film, television, and so on, to include the environment itself, material artifacts, and embodied experiences. We hope that adopting this perspective will prompt meaningful dialogue between premodern and modern scholarship on theater and performance in the East Asian cultural fields. What new, transhistorical conversations might become possible if we adopt a perspective that sees the environment as a medium? How have bodies been mediated in space and time in East Asian contexts? How do media relocate or displace bodies? What types of spaces do acts of performance produce?
The first day will feature three touchstone talks; the second will include four thematic panels; and finally, the last day will be devoted to pedagogical questions relating to new techniques for integrating performance and media into teaching and research.
