Feature Articles
Author: Alexander C. Y. Huang
Keywords: China, China and Inner Asia, Cultural Studies, India, Indonesia, Japan, Literature, Northeast Asia, Performing Arts, Russia, Singapore, South Asia, South Korea, Southeast Asia, Taiwan, United States, Vietnam
How to Cite: C. Y. Huang, A. (2012) “Asia, Shakespeare, and the World: Digital Resources for Teaching about Globalization”, Education About Asia. 17(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.65959/eaa.1085
Opening with the music of the horizontal Korean bamboo flute (taegŭm), Oh’s production evoked Korean myth, music, and the Confucian tradition. Throughout the storm scene, music that drew on Korean rural percussions provided the rhythmic foundation for the actions, and some characters, such as the spirits, took on animal roles, echoing the traditional mask dance drama. A work that has routinely been politicized by artists in nations that were formerly colonized, The Tempest was transformed by Oh into a play infused with a sense of lightness and Oh’s wit. Like Prospero, the Daoist magician King Zilzi rules the island and orchestrates the shipwreck out of revenge. But he brings the men to his island partly because it is high time his fifteen-year-old daughter “met somebody.” The Korean Miranda later reminds her suitor that the question about her purity is ridiculous; after all she has grown up on “a desert island.” The European premiere of Oh’s Tempest demonstrates that although works that criticize global inequalities receive more attention from Western critics, the genre of productions critical of resource inequities or the geopolitical status quo represent but one perspective. Oh’s version is not exactly a rollicking comedy but extrapolates something extraordinary from both the Elizabethan genre of romance and the Korean tradition of hybrid theatrical genres (such as ch’anggŭk and the masked dance drama kamyongŭk). Many people have seen Asian or Shakespearean performances. Some of these works have become canonical and well-rehearsed success stories of cross-cultural ventures, such as jingju (Beijing opera) actor Mei Lanfang’s tours to Moscow and the US and Japanese director Kurosawa Akira’s films, but few people are aware that there is a rich and complex history of Asian and Asian-themed performances of Shakespeare that complicates the notion of globalization as necessarily just “global Westernization.”3 An effective way to teach about globalization is to consider this history of cultural exchange. Examining Shakespeare’s place in Asian cultures and the impact of Asian theatrical traditions on Shakespearean performance can serve the double duty of addressing the marginalization of theater within Asian studies and the lack of understanding of Asian transformations of key Western texts. The two cases of Chicken Rice War and Oh’s Tempest in Edinburgh also demonstrate that the center of creativity in Shakespeare performance is shifting from the UK and the US to Asia, where directors such as Ninagawa yukio, Suzuki Tadashi, Ong Keng Sen, Wu Hsing-kuo, the late Kurosawa Akira, and many others experiment with combinations of traditional and contemporary theater, new strategies for work- ing across languages and genres, and new ways of reaching diverse audiences. Oh’s production received the 2011 Herald Angel Award in Edinburgh, and CheeK’s film received the 2001 Volkswagen Discovery Award at the Toronto International Film Festival and Special Jury Prize at the 2002 Miami Film Festival. Further, contemporary artists such as Oh and CheeK are more interested in carving a space of their own and establishing their artistic styles in the teeming global cultural marketplace than in speaking on behalf of their nations. All this is a result of a complex network of cultural exchange that makes the paradigm of West-to- East cultural flows or any “built-to-order” model meaningless. Shakespeare’s plays performed with Asian motifs (by either Asian or Western artists) form a body of work that defies existing conventions based on nation-state divisions of cultures. CheeK’s film is a sly commentary on the politics of manufactured multiculturalism and ethnic “harmony” in Singapore, even as it engages in a dialogue with Shakespeare’s global West. Oh is more interested in using Shakespeare to revive a sense of traditional Korea that is distant even to his hometown audience and to polish his signature style of bringing contemporary sensibilities to bear on traditional aesthetics. Ultimately, at stake is not how best to preserve Shakespeare’s text but reconnecting Oh’s Korean audience with the lost realm that is traditional Korea.4 These works provide rich material for the classroom. It has become irresponsible not to teach about globalization and localization through this body of work. We can no longer assume insularity of Asian cultures. They are thought-provoking, hold students’ interest, and offer a window into a history of cultural globalization that can otherwise be difficult to grasp. Globalization and digital culture are two of the catch phrases for our time, but they remain imprecise terms in the classroom and in popular dis- course about cultural difference and assimilation. Asian theater’s engagement with Shakespeare—a glob- ally circulating text and icon—provides a fertile ground for exploring the history of East-West cultural exchange on concrete terms. With new online video resources, instructors and students can compare and critique different performances and share their findings with each other. Unlike most playwrights in traditional Asia of comparable stature, Shakespeare’s global career began in his lifetime. Performances in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had a global flair. European visitors such as Thomas Platter left behind diary records of plays they saw at the Globe in Lon- don in 1599. Shortly after appearing on stage in London, Shakespeare’s plays traveled to Europe through polyglot performances mounted by touring English players, which helped to initiate translations of the plays into vernaculars, such as Dutch, German, and French, and to spread the plays to Russia and other parts of the world.5 Take Hamlet for example. The play was performed under varying conditions on board the Red Dragon, a vessel of the East India Company, near what is now Sierra Leone in 1607, on the island of Socotra in 1608, and possibly in a Dutch fortress in Jayakarta in colonial Indonesia in 1609.6 As the centuries wore on, Shakespeare was made to speak in a diverse range of tongues for and against the same political causes in Asia and beyond, such as Communism and imperialism. Both Asian-centric and Asian-inspired performances of Shakespeare have taken center stage as we enter the second decade of the twenty-first century. There are traditional productions such as Oh’s Tempest that use Shakespeare to rethink Korean history. There are also performances that are inspired by Asian elements such as Kenneth Branagh’s film As You Like It which deal with values that are believed to transcend cultures.Asian theater’s engagement with Shakespeare—a globally circulating text and icon—provides a fertile ground for exploring the history of East-West cultural exchange on concrete terms
With the rise of Asian economic power came bold reimaginations of both Shakespeare and Asian cultures. The past decades in particular saw diverse incarnations of Shakespearean comedies and tragedies onstage and on-screen. While well known, Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (Macbeth, 1957) and Ran (Lear, 1985) are far from the earliest or the only Asian Shakespeare films. Around the time of Asta Nielsen’s cross-dressed Hamlet (1921), gender-bender silent film adaptations of The Merchant of Venice and Two Gentlemen of Verona were made in Shanghai by Qiu yixiang and Bu Wancang. Shakespeare’s global career is far from a simple story of Western colonial expansion and Asian postcolonial reorientation. Japan was an Asian colonial power, and that history informs Otojiro Kawakami’s 1903 adaptation of Othello. Set in Taiwan, the play features indigenous Taiwanese dancing in praise of the Japanese colonizers. Singapore—an English-speaking Asian city-state—has emerged as a hybrid cultural location not only between British and Asian cultural legacies but also between traditional and modern values, as shown by Ong Keng Sen’s works that mix the performance techniques from traditional theaters of several East Asian countries. In the other direction, Singapore’s self-conscious insertion of its hybrid identity into the global marketplace provides a ready framework for parody in CheeK’s Chicken Rice War. Asian culture has, as I have argued elsewhere, also seeped into Western performances of Shakespeare.7 The global economy and Hollywood techniques have brought Asian elements and genres into the mainstream Western cultural register. Kenneth Branagh’s As You Like It (2006) is a film set in Meiji Japan with Shakespearean language. A self-professed “dream of Japan” articulated through the renowned director’s concept of “English men abroad,” this film opens with a kabuki performance disrupted by ninja assassins and closes with a lavish wedding ceremony with ornate kimonos. Michael Almereyda’s polished postmodern take on the “to be or not to be” speech in Hamlet (2000) is informed by Eastern spirituality and the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh’s teaching of “interbeing.” In theater, the British director Peter Brook rescued Titus Andronicus from oblivion—due in part to the foregoing tradition of heavy-handed and therefore ridiculous portrayal of horrors—by using abstract Asian-inspired stylization and minimalism in his 1955 production. Scarlet streamers flowed from Lavinia’s mouth and wrists to symbolize her rape and mutilation, for instance. Brook’s “Asian symbolism” made Titus into “a piece of visual virtuosity.”8 There are also Western productions that use multiple Asian languages. Tim Supple’s multilingual Midsummer Night’s Dream in 2007 was lauded by the Times as the most original take on the play since Brook’s 1970 version. The production used a Sri Lankan and Indian cast speaking Hindi, Bengali, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil, Sanskrit, and English. Supple recast the relationship between the play and “India” as a layered concept. These works are evidence of the power of performance in an age of globalization and offer both positive and negative lessons for us. In terms of translation, Shakespeare in Asia is not a linear process of transmission from Shakespearean texts to foreign-language performative texts. Many languages and performance traditions often filter the plays. Ideological requirements and marketing considerations further complicate the picture. Significantly, the dissemination of Shakespeare was “not coextensive with the advance of English” as a colonial or global language.9 Shakespeare’s original text was often relegated to the backstage. For exam- ple, East Asian cultures first encountered Shakespeare through local translations of Charles and Mary Lambs’ Victorian prose rewritings in The Tales from Shakespeare (1807).10 In 1957, one Chinese commentator remarked that “Shakespeare’s real home is in the Soviet Union.”11 Soviet theater practice and criticism were highly influential in China because of the then-intense cultural exchange between the two countries that made Soviet tastes into a significant filter through which Shakespeare was received in China. Even Shakespeare’s fortunes in colonial India do not follow a linear narrative. As University of Delhi English professor Poonam Trivedi points out,With the rise of Asian economic power came bold reimaginations of both Shakespeare and Asian cultures.
while the study of Shakespeare [in India] was an imperial imposition, the performance of Shakespeare was not, because he was regarded first and foremost as an entertainer and not a representation of English values.12It is also useful to bear in mind that Shakespeare in Asia is not always a rosy undertaking. Touring a Japanese production of Macbeth to London entails a higher level of cultural prestige for the Japanese company than translating Korean playwright Yi Kangbaek into English for the American publisher. Macbeth has been packaged as “universal” and is a widely read canon, but Yi’s plays are not. Wars, censor- ship, and political ideologies can suppress or encourage particular approaches to selected Shakespearean plays or genres. Global Shakespearean performances in our times often move across various media (such as incorporating cinematic elements into stage productions and vice versa) and reference other adaptations. CheeK’s Chicken Rice War develops both the melodramatic and tragic elements of Shakespeare’s play and brings them into stark relief against modern media history. Likewise, the strange echoes of lines from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Hamlet, and other plays in Oh’s production of The Tempest engage in the kind of polyglot conversation that makes reading across cultures so compelling today. From Fieldwork to Digital Collections For these reasons, I have spent the past decade building several fully open-access digital video archives for educational and outreach purposes with colleagues in the US and elsewhere. All of these web-based tools and projects are freely accessible and are built on a nonhierarchical structure that enables international collaboration. I started with the Stanford Shakespeare in Asia initiative (http://sia. stanford.edu/) with Patricia Parker and Haun Saussy’s support in 2004 and expanded it into Shakespeare Performance in Asia (SPIA; http://web.mit.edu/shakespeare/asia/) with Peter Donaldson at MIT (launched in 2009). We soon transformed SPIA into a more ambitious project that covers worldwide performances—Global Shakespeares (launched in 2010; suite of teaching tools launched in 2011). Based at MIT, http://globalshakespeares.org/ offers full videos of recorded performances and video highlights of select productions, many of which have English subtitles. At present, the archive covers Shakespeare in India, East Asia, Brazil, the Arab world, the US, and the UK. Given the interests of the readers of this journal, in what follows I focus on SPIA, the “Asian wing” of Global Shakespeares. The Team Behind Global Shakespeares: Project collaborators at the World Shakespeare Conference, Prague, July 18, 2011 (left to right): Peter Donaldson (editor-in-chief and co-founder), Margaret Litvin (regional editor, Arab World), Celia Ams (Brazil), Liana Leao (Brazil), Alexander Huang (co-founder and co-editor), Anna Camati (Brazil), Nick Clary (HamletWorks editor), Poonam Trivedi (India), Alfredo Modenessi (Mexico), Jesus Tronch-Perez (Spain), and Ryuta Minami (Japan). Source: Global Shakespeares.
