The Departments of East Asian Languages and Cultures, East Asian Studies, and the Confucius Institute at UC Davis invite you to the upcoming event:
Intercultural Theatre / Performance in Contemporary China
A lecture to be given by Chengzhou He, Dean of College of Arts, Nanjing University
Thursday, May 9, 2019
12:00 PM
912 Sproul Hall
This lecture examines intercultural theatre in China during the last few decades in its social and cultural context as seen in the adaptation of foreign plays by Shakespeare, Ibsen, and O'Neill into modern spoken drama, traditional Chinese opera, and other kinds of performing arts. A recent example is the Italian opera Turandot, which was not just performed in China, but also in East Asia and Europe. This interweaving cultural performance can also be found in the Chinese and Japanese collaboration in the kunqu opera The Peony Pavillion, in which the Japanese Kabuki actor Tamasabu Bando impersonates the female protagonist. Exploring these recent productions, this lecture discusses the localization of foreign plays, diverse audience receptions, the roles of market and globalization, and the challenges and issues of the existing paradigms of intercultural theatre studies.
Professor Chengzhou he is a Distinguished Professor of the "Cheung Kung Scholars Program" and a foreign member of the Academia Europaea. He won the Ibsen Prize in 2002 and is now Dean of the College of Arts at Nanjing University and Chairman of the Jiangsu Comparative Literature Association. He has published two monographs and over ten edited books in English and Chinese, including Henrik Ibsen and Modern Chinese Drama (Oslo, 2004), Representation of the Other (Goettingen UP, 2009), Performativity in Literature (Stockholm, 2016), and numerous articles in leading academic journals in China, the U.S., and Europe.
