 Hello and welcome to the Sewers podcast. Each episode we'll be discussing the latest in economics, politics and culture. I'm Isabel Edwards and today I'm talking to Dr. Osella Ferrari about Asia as method in theatre. So thanks for coming to speak to me today. And this discussion sort of stems from the paper you wrote about the TOKI experimental project. So I was wondering if maybe we could start by explaining a bit more about what that project was about. Yeah sure. So the project started in 2010 with the Shanghai Expo when the Japan Pavilion Commission a production. Basically the pavilion the theme of the Expo in general was sustainability, environmental sustainability and better life, better city, better life and the sorts of themes. Therefore the one of the main themes of the pavilion was the TOKI which is the Japanese crested ibis bud and in Japanese it's called TOKI, in Chinese it's called Tukuan and the scientific name is Nippon and Nippon which is where they suggest its significance for Japan in terms of it's a national identity symbol. I think it was named as a national treasure in the 1950s and it's also connected very much to diplomacy so it has some sort of significance not only in terms of identity but also in terms of reconciliation efforts between China and Japan. Why? Because at some point the TOKI was believed to be extinct until they found some specimens in China and in 1999 China donated the first couple to Japan which was seen as a gesture of friendship and diplomacy so much so the political science in the US I think Mary McCarthy has written an article called Ibis Diplomacy basically comparing this exchange of bird gifts to you know panda diplomacy or ping-pong diplomacy and other diplomatic projects. So basically the TOKI the first pair was in 1999 another one I think in 97 and two also and last year as well a couple of others and there's a sanctuary in Japan on an island called Sado where they now the first they were bred in captivity and I think now they were released to the wild but just to underscore the significance in 2007 I think at the height of disputes between China and Japan about a number of issues China had promised another pair and then they withdrew the gift. Right okay yeah so it just sounds low what is it about this bird but it's actually quite interesting so anyway so the theme of the of the pavilion was the TOKI so there were a lot of videos about it the personnel of the of the pavilion were dressed there wearing head gear that was reflecting on the colors of the bird and so on and so forth so a Japanese director Satomakoto who is he's I think in his 70s now he's one of the pioneers of avant-garde theater underground in Japan in the 70s now he directs a theater in Tokyo so he was commissioned a production and I think in his theater now they do quite a lot of children's theater so the idea was that this performance would be for a general audience and would be like the final performance the final thing that they would see after concluding the visit to the pavilion and so children were also on these audiences and and Sato asked to collaborate so to do a collaborative production with Danny Yong who is another pioneer of Asian theater from Hong Kong and that is quite unusual if you think about it because normally you think of the expo as a showcase of national culture so I don't I think it was the only case of collaboration and also another unusual potentially a controversial thing was that after Danny Yong came on board they invited a performance from Lending to participate in a project performance from Lending, a performance of this type of traditional indigenous theater called Kunju-kun opera which is the most ancient form of Chinese theater which is still practiced today and and that is unusual I said because normally if you think about again national cultures Beijing opera would come you know as the first choice but I didn't and also potentially controversial because Lending is the site of a massacre that occurred in 1937 over six weeks and it's still the memory and the legacy of this massacre is still contentious and it keeps affecting sign of Japanese relations to this day and not only the Kunju actors were involved but also children from Lending so after the the expo they continued this partnership and this collaboration focused on the development of traditional Asian forms which have been listed as intangible cultural heritage of humanity by UNESCO and then eventually in 2012 this started the festival in Lending which I've written about so it's quite overtly political what's happening I think we'll come back to talk about that but just before that I wondered what it actually looks like when you've got so many different styles of theater that are all interacting at once so we've got these very ancient forms and then something more modern in there how I don't know if you if you went to see it or if you've seen it but how what is it like when they're all interacting together well the interaction is based on a format which again Daniel's company called Zuni from Hong Kong they have pioneered in the 90s and it's one table and two chairs so one table and two chairs is the standard standard stage setting of most forms of indigenous Chinese theater so Beijing Opera Contue and so on and so forth so basically in 1997 Yong and his company they started a collaboration project which initially involved sign-of-one practitioners from Taiwan China Hong Kong so again political to reflect on the idea of one country to system because 1997 was the year when Hong Kong was returned to China so one table and two chairs one country to system right so so from then this one table and two chairs became a broader signifier of relationship so it has been used for many projects by Zuni involving practitioners of many different types of theater for many different parts of the world and so basically the traditional arts or indigenous I prefer the term of Asia so mostly no theater from Japan could you from China and also they were practitioners from Indonesia India Thailand participating in the festival Nanjing they were I don't know exactly how they were matched but basically you often had you have usually had two performers because the format is one table two chairs two performers 20 minutes right yeah that's interesting because it is prescriptive in a way but at the same time it leaves you a lot of freedom so it's been it's been very interesting to watch how people interacted with the format and what kind of meanings they invested this format with depending on where they came from culturally politically also you know gender relationships class relationship age relationship you can do a lot like they do in fact in the traditional theater you know in Beijing opera could you for example one table and two chairs can signify a tribunal can signify the court of the emperor or you can signify I think if when they step on it it can mean you know height or position of height anyway so so basically it's not the interaction is unstructured it's it's quite structured and that allows the comparison you know and also another principle I think is this idea of deconstructing the traditional forms through modern methods of directing and also by letting traditional and modern performers interact with each other and what kind of statement do you think it's making about sort of political situation in Asia is it almost is it reflective of improving relations or do you think it's almost saying this is what we should be moving towards is this greater collaboration well I think there's an artistic aspect to it which is related to this fact that consul no and some of those other arts what are considered now intangible cultural heritage so this is felt by the practitioners as both you know source of pride and also I think a source of funding in terms of in terms of could you definitely China has given it much more prominence in terms of cultural diplomacy of 2001 anyway so it's a form of pride the source of pride on the one hand but also a source of responsibility and anxiety because of the you know you are living national treasure how they call them in Japan so as a living national treasure what do you do are you do you belong to the museum or are you responsible for continuing the form in a way that can engage new performers no practitioners new audiences so it's quite tricky and that's why also the idea of the calling the festival toki not only because of this sign of Japanese of its important in sign of Japanese diplomatic relations but also because the talking bird is is caged right right so in a way as a traditional performer you belong to this cage way puts you there as a treasure but then what do you do from there you know you'll be constricted so the idea of this project artistically I think is to try and find a way of developing this forms well at the same time respecting them although there's been discussions you know some critics say that this this toky experiment was kind of violating tradition yeah we're making it more you know and and and politically of course I think it's an example of how you can produce you know a micro political acts of reconciliation through the arts you know and also that an idea you know as I said you know arts theater dance are often used for cultural diplomacy but by governments by this case you know the political and governmental intervention is minimal if not zero so so in my achieve something more genuine on a human level and this is a sort of annual is it continuing now it's an annual project or has it from 2012 to 16 it's been done every year and I was there in 2015 I think yes then I think I'm not sure I think because the Japan side of the funding probably was you know has a limited duration then it changed and soon he started something called creative playground whereby young practitioners were taken to Nanjing on a study tour and also other practitioners of both more than contemporary and traditional arts went to Hong Kong to train the practitioners I don't think the Japanese presence was so good because they are but then it's interestingly one of the participants from Singapore a young younger that young director he participated in 19 and then he took the format of Singapore right okay so it's spreading further away and there's this sort of distinctly Asian you know it's from it's built on that cultural heritage and I think the way we've described it almost described sort of seems that before that there was a different way of looking at theatre in Asia and always more of a Western centric approach from where we'd be looking so do you think that this has kind of changed the the dynamics of theatre between Asia and the West or do you think it's always had its own thing but it's the way that we're looking at it has maybe evolved well I don't know I don't know how much of an impact this particular project has had on the on the practice in general although you know one of the reasons why I wanted to write about it is it was to try and show that there are different ways of of practicing let's say tradition and also perhaps different methods by which you can approach the study of not only Asian theaters but also in the cultural theater or comparative drama or theater so the idea and that's behind you know this is why I applied this theory of Asia as method which is obviously not my theory but it's it started in the 1960 Japanese scholar and sinologist actually Takya Jiyoshimi gave a speech called Asia as method in which he proposed basically to try and look at Japan's modernization trajectory comparatively within Asia so he also mentioned China India so very a very pioneering approach for that time when Japan was mostly looking westward you know to America rather than Asia and and then more recently this Taiwanese scholar Chen Kuanxing wrote a book I think in 2000 was probably he wrote a series of articles in Chinese and then he published a book with Duke I think I can't remember the date anyway it's called Asia's method towards the imperialization and and and this book inspired me to try and think of how the theory which he does not apply to the arts specifically in his book how could that work perhaps to look at the arts and particularly the theater because I often find when I when I read you know theory of intercultural theater was for example if you look at comparative literature world literature the benchmark you know it's always a Euro American Caucasian Anglophone whereas everything else Asia Africa tends to be marginalized or or tokenized so so in this case the idea is to shift the focus of the inquiry towards Asia which doesn't mean to you know to move from one got some sort of hegemonic perspective to another hegemonic perspective but just to try and bring attention to practices that my or areas that might have been overlooked and yes so kind of dissentering the discourse basically and do you think there's a link to be made there between what's happening there and then what's happening more broadly and so as with the decolonizing the curriculum discussion that's been going on so for example you know making reading lists much less you're American and British writer-centric and making those much more open well there are definitely echoes although my research not only the article you've read but I've written a book which I finished recently on this subject so there are echoes between the two although they are not directly related on the colonizing source and research but definitely the echoes and it's important you know both for research and teaching you know to include and to produce some sort of cultural shift where you include more and more non-west in the curriculum including you know teaching students to look at things from the perspective of the regions that we study and in the language I would like to say of the regions that would study because I think you know knowing the language of the region that you are looking at is quite important to you know to if you want to understand anything about that region the cultural language are quite some sort of the starting point so I also think the decolonization in fact if you work at the intersection at the crossroads between a region and a discipline is again almost natural it's your starting point because for example when you go to conferences it's interesting particularly if you're working theater I find because when we go to various studies conferences the theater there's very few of us there but then when you go to theater studies conferences or performance studies conferences the Asian stuff again the Asian content tends to be a bit sideline so it's difficult to strike the balance and that's what I think is important to do and do you think that the theater still has that prominent role for questioning things that are happening or making those sort of reflections of society so I guess now I don't know how many young people are going to the theater and I don't know if they are maybe it's like musicals and things and I'm not sure if it's is it becoming a little bit obsolete in terms of a reference point but the theater you know has also evolved you know we're so engaged with popular culture social media now you have online theater online theater festivals a theater even including traditional theaters of Asia you know like last year there was a program here in London about now and neuroscience they've involved robotics AVR VR in I met and also it was interesting when I was in engine the toky festival to look at how audiences engaged with traditional forms you know you had less of the funds you know the traditional funds normally some kind of middle-aged mostly women I think who attended the performances but then you also had quite young people and it's interesting because they were constantly filming or taking photographs of the performances and immediately Instagramming them we chatting them you know we charges the Chinese most popular social media in China so I think you know that there are still audiences that engage or the engagement both on the side of the practitioners and the reception side has also you know shifted so yeah so I don't think we can talk about obsolescence yeah and if anything it's nice to think about that becoming a more diverse audience and making it more accessible if it is online to probably more people than would have gone yeah physically yeah yeah absolutely I will thank you so much for talking to me today about your your research and what you've been up to it's been really interesting to hear and thanks for joining us for the size podcast if you would like to hear more you can head over to the sales blog or visit our website