Theatre Studies

This article traces the relationship of the contemporary critics to the International Theatre Exhibition in Amsterdam, 1922. The origins (that lay with a playwright and critic!) and organisational set up of the exhibition are described. The role of Wijdeveld as key figure is emphasized and his ideas on the renewal of theatre are identified as the leading thought behind the exhibition and the events surrounding it. The exhibition then can be seen as a theoretical lecture proclaiming a visionary ideal of a new theatre that is mainly defined in opposition to the realistic and naturalistic tendencies of the nineteenth century bourgeois tradition. As such it provided a platform where professionals could meet and discuss this illusive theatre of the future. Next the reception of the exhibition and the role of its critics are assessed.  It emerges that on the whole the press is following the lead of the organisers – reporting rather than criticizing and often quoting more or less verbatim from lectures and writings by the organisers and contributors. It is surmised that this is largely due to the fact that the critics belonged to the same cultural elitist group of artists and organisers that were responsible for the exhibition: together they created the self fulfilling image of an avant-garde reaching out for a new theatre.

The growing importance of steam over sail navigation and the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 cut the travel time between Southeast Asia and Western Europe to one month. Within this period, hundreds of ships arrived and left the Singapore, Manila, Haiphong, and Batavia within a single month, dramatically increasing the volume of trade. These developments heightened the pace of trade and exchange of the performing arts and cultural materials. The steam ships that carried European pianos and musical instruments, as well as music scores from Europe, also brought opera, operetta, zarzuela, and theatre companies and musical performers to the region. Boarding the same steamships were ideas and ideologies that brought about the rise of nationalism in the colonies, fostered through inter-cultural exchange and early instances of cultural global economies.

The rise of Southeast Asia (SEA) as a region is inextricably linked to the birth of the Cold War.  Nowhere else was the Cold War felt the “hottest” as in the region.  After the decolonization, SEA nation-states forming new national identities each found allegiances with the two Cold War powers:  On one hand, nationalist-communist parties fuelled by rejectionist fervor against previous European colonial powers were supported by the ‘progressive’ Soviet philosophy and politics; on the other hand, pro- democratic capitalist states had their national economic and social development engineered by the CIA and implemented under the guise of American philanthropy.

This paper looks at how theatre performed the Cold War, and how the Cold War stage-managed the flow of cultural diplomatic exchanges in Southeast Asia.  Particular focus will be on the Philippines between the 1950s-1980s. The Philippines all the way until the fall of the Marcos government in 1986, was a jumping board for American political, military and cultural presence and propaganda. During the Cold War, Marcos’ long reign also allowed him to juxtapose this US interest with that of Soviet Russia; thus both brought to Manila cultural groups, made pivotal with the Cultural Centre of the Philippines built by Imelda Romualdez Marcos in 1969. Concurrently, agit-prop theatre groups inspired by Communism in mainland China filled the streets of Manila with Maoist ideology.

"The core of the Memory Booth installation revolves around an archive of video registrations of traditional dance forms. The installation has an interactive input interface, the Booth, and an output exhibition in another, public, space. When a user enters the Memory booth, he/she is welcomed by a screen that invites him/her to imitate a series of movements. Each time a countdown commences and the user will have to perform the movement. At the end of the game the user is asked to perform the whole series of movements in one dance and this series is recorded by a camera. This last performance is not an imitation from an on-screen video, but from (embodied) memory. Each new dance is consequently saved in the computer database. All series are projected on the walls of a separate publicly accessible space in tandem with the original archival videos, forming a constantly expanding exhibition.

The Memory Booth draws elements from three memory stimulating devices: the photo booth,the game ‘memory’ and Giulio Camillo’s ‘theatre of memory’. The aim of the project is to explore how technology and performance can interact in the process of remembering, specifically how performance functions as mnemonic device aided by technology. The installation serves as a venue and happening that allows both the creators and the users to explore the workings of personal embodied memory in relation to database storage and the performing of an archive, vis-à-vis the body as database.

The Memory Booth was launched at the Monash Academy of Performing Arts 2011 Season,  Curatorial Talk by artistic director meLê yamomo and curator, Lonneke van Heugten during the ADSA Conference 2011."

In the second half of the 19th and in the beginning of the 20th century, the Asia Pacific region was inevitably entangled with early modern globalisation. In this article the author examines the spread of town bands and popular music in this period, and the ways in which both the bands and their music were intertwined with the modernist aspirations of the urban capitals, from Manila and into the Asia Pacific region. The role of the Manila musicians as crucial cultural mediators in this sonic modernisation project is closely examined. Looking into biographies, historical newspapers, and surviving archival documents, the author surveys some general patterns and specific narratives in the various replications of modernities, through the movement of sounds and ideas instigated by the migrant Manila musicians. In particular, the case of the Sta. Cecilia Band in Singapore between 1892 and 1910 is analysed.

The advancement of the new transportation and communications technologies in the nineteenth century changed the landscape of the trade between Asia and Europe. Steam transportation, the telegraph, and the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 heightened the pace of material trade and labour migrations (including cultural workers), along with commercial transactions of cultural goods and performance cultures. These steamships that carried the raw products from East to theWest also carried musical instruments, musical scores, and opera and theatre companies from Europe to Asia. This article surveys primary archival sources and recent literature on the itinerant European opera companies that arrived in Southeast Asia in the nineteenth century and analyses the economic and sociological aspects of this phenomenon. This article also examines the local responses to the travelling theatre troupes which took residencies in the different Southeast Asian cities.
Keywords

The absence of international copyright protection during the era of its initial publication propelled the presence of Uncle Tom's Cabin in cities across the world. Meanwhile, within a decade of initial publication, the global spread of print and entertainment-related capitalism enabled its adaptations to ap pear in different cultural expressions and popular media idioms. This es say investigates how Uncle Tom's Cabin "medialized" the racial knowledge formation of the imperial administrations in colonial Southeast Asia, espe cially in the ways that contemporaneous media showcased how colonizers imagined and employed the hierarchical racial categories within imperial territories. These are observed in news reports, announcements, opinion pieces, and entertainment articles in newspapers from the British Straits Settlements, Manila, and the Dutch Indies. In Southeast Asia, the colonial powers' imperial administrations employed Uncle Tom's Cabin to propa gate discreet racial discourses as well as to criticize neighboring colonies' racial policies and practices of indentured labor. However, at the turn of the twentieth century, these colonial understandings of race began to clash with local "medializations" that gave room for indigenous race understand ings and strategies that emanated from anti-colonial nationalism. By the late nineteenth century, the newspaper was an important trans national medium through which information and ideas were circulated across nations, empires, and cultures. News reports from distant cities and continents were translated and reprinted in local newspapers. Communities around the globe imagined a transnational/transimperial world as they read

This chapter explores methodologies of ‘hearing history’ and the theoretical enquiries of acoustic epistemology, putting into question how modernity was heard in Manila and Asia Pacific. The chapter presents theoretical frameworks and methodologies to analyse sonic understandings of modernity in Manila and the Asia Pacific region. The overlapping issues of cultural sociology and economics in how modernity brought about (1) aesthetic autonomization, and (2) cultural commodification in the act of listening is presented here. By drawing from and synaesthetically comparing contemporary visual and performance theories with sound studies, this chapter proposes the conceptual framework Anthropology of Sound.

In the second half of the 19th and in the beginning of the 20th century, the Asia Pacific region was inevitably entangled with early modern globalisation. In this article the author examines the spread of town bands and popular music in this period, and the ways in which both the bands and their music were intertwined with the modernist aspirations of the urban capitals, from Manila and into the Asia Pacific region. The role of the Manila musicians as crucial cultural mediators in this sonic modernisation project is closely examined. Looking into biographies, historical newspapers, and surviving archival documents, the author surveys some general patterns and specific narratives in the various replications of modernities, through the movement of sounds and ideas instigated by the migrant Manila musicians. In particular, the case of the Sta. Cecilia Band in Singapore between 1892 and 1910 is analysed. meLe yamomo is an Assistant Professor of Theatre Studies at the University of Amste...

The advancement of the new transportation and communications technologies in the nineteenth century changed the landscape of the trade between Asia and Europe. Steam transportation, the telegraph, and the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 heightened the pace of material trade and labour migrations (including cultural workers), along with commercial transactions of cultural goods and performance cultures. These steamships that carried the raw products from East to the West also carried musical instruments, musical scores, and opera and theatre companies from Europe to Asia. This article surveys primary archival sources and recent literature on the itinerant European opera companies that arrived in Southeast Asia in the nineteenth century and analyses the economic and sociological aspects of this phenomenon. This article also examines the local responses to the travelling theatre troupes which took residencies in the different Southeast Asian cities.

The influence of extension of the aromatic core of phthalocyanines derivatives on the properties of the functionalized single walled carbon nanotubes (CNT) is studied. For this purpose the comparative study of the structural features and sensing properties of the CNT functionalized with zinc 2,9,16,23-tetra-tert-butylphthalocyanine (ZnPc) and zinc 2,11,20,29-tetra-tert-butyl-2,3-naphthalocyanine complex (ZnNc) is carried out. The adsorption of ZnPc and ZnNc molecules onto the CNT surface has been confirmed by Raman spectroscopy, SEM, and thermogravimetric analysis. It was determined that the number of ZnNc molecules anchored on the CNT walls is more than the number of ZnPc molecules. The more preferable π-π interaction of ZnNc molecules with CNT appears to be due to the bigger number of π-electrons forming naphthalocyanine aromatic system. Thin films of pristine CNT, CNT/ZnPc and CNT/ZnNc hybrids were prepared by drop casting onto interdigitated electrodes and applied as active layers to detect ammonia vapour (10-50 ppm) by measuring electrical resistance changes. It has been shown that sensor response of the CNT/ ZnNc hybrid toward ammonia vapours is lager than that of CNT/ZnPc hybrid.

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