Studies in International Performance Published in association with the International Federation of Theatre Research General Editors: Janelle Reinelt and Brian Singleton Culture and performance cross borders constantly, and not just the borders that define nations. In this new series, scholars of performance produce interactions between and among nations and cultures as well as genres, identities and imaginations. International in the largest sense, the books collected in the Studies in International Performance series display a range of historical, theoretical and critical approaches to the panoply of performances that make up the global surround. The series embraces culture which is institutional as well as improvised, underground or alternate, and treats performance as either intercultural or transnational as well as intracultural within nations. Titles include: Khalid Amine and Marvin Carlson THE THEATRES OF MOROCCO, ALGERIA AND TUNISIA Performance Traditions of the Maghreb Patrick Anderson and Jisha Menon (editors) VIOLENCE PERFORMED Local Roots and Global Routes of Conflict Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case STAGING INTERNATIONAL FEMINISMS Christopher B. Balme PACIFIC PERFORMANCES Theatricality and Cross-Cultural Encounter in the South Seas Matthew Isaac Cohen PERFORMING OTHERNESS Java and Bali on International Stages, 1905 1952 Susan Leigh Foster (editor) WORLDING DANCE Helen Gilbert and Jacqueline Lo PERFORMANCE AND COSMOPOLITICS Cross-Cultural Transactions in Australasia Helena Grehan PERFORMANCE, ETHICS AND SPECTATORSHIP IN A GLOBAL AGE Judith Hamera DANCING COMMUNITIES Performance, Difference and Connection in the Global City James Harding and Cindy Rosenthal (editors) THE RISE OF PERFORMANCE STUDIES Rethinking Richard Schechner s Broad Spectrum Silvija Jestrovic and Yana Meerzon (editors) PERFORMANCE, EXILE AND AMERICA Ola Johansson COMMUNITY THEATRE AND AIDS Ketu Katrak CONTEMPORARY INDIAN DANCE New Creative Choreography in India and the Diaspora
Sonja Arsham Kuftinec THEATRE, FACILITATION AND NATION FORMATION IN THE BALKANS AND MIDDLE EAST Daphne P. Lei ALTERNATIVE CHINESE OPERA IN THE AGE OF GLOBALIZATION Performing Zero Carol Martin (editor) DRAMATURGY OF THE REAL ON THE WORLD STAGE Yana Meerzon PERFORMING EXILE, PERFORMING SELF Drama, Theatre, Film Lara D. Nielson and Patricia Ybarra (editors) NEOLIBERALISM AND GLOBAL THEATRES Performance Permutations Alan Read THEATRE, INTIMACY & ENGAGEMENT The Last Human Venue Shannon Steen RACIAL GEOMETRIES OF THE BLACK ATLANTIC, ASIAN PACIFIC AND AMERICAN THEATRE Marcus Cheng Chye Tan ACOUSTIC INTERCULTURALISM Listening to Performance Maurya Wickstrom PERFORMANCE IN THE BLOCKADES OF NEOLIBERALISM Thinking the Political Anew S. E. Wilmer (editor) NATIONAL THEATRES IN A CHANGING EUROPE Evan Darwin Winet INDONESIAN POSTCOLONIAL THEATRE Spectral Genealogies and Absent Faces Forthcoming titles: Adrian Kear THEATRE AND EVENT Studies in International Performance Series Standing Order ISBN 978 1 4039 4456 6 (hardback) 978 1 4039 4457 3 (paperback) (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and one or both of the ISBNs quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England
Neoliberalism and Global Theatres Performance Permutations Edited by Lara D. Nielsen Assistant Professor, Macalester College, Saint Paul, MN, USA and Patricia Ybarra Associate Professor, Brown University, Providence, RI, USA Palgrave macmillan
Selection and editorial matter Lara D. Nielsen and Patricia Ybarra 2012 Individual chapters contributors 2012 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2012 978-0-230-27831-8 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6 10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2012 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave and Macmillan are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-32613-6 ISBN 978-1-137-03560-8 ( ebook) DOI 10.1057/9781137035608 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12
Contents List of Illustrations Series Preface Acknowledgments Notes on Contributors vii viii ix x Introduction: Heterotopic Transformations, The (Il)Liberal Neoliberal 1 Lara D. Nielsen Part I Institutional Strategies 1 Nintendo Museum: Intercultural Pedagogy, Neoliberal Citizenship, and a Theatre without Actors 25 Margaret Werry 2 Archeologies of Empire: Colonial Hollywood and the Neoliberal Academy 42 Sebastián Calderón Bentin 3 Neoliberalism, the Arts, and the Global University 53 Eng-Beng Lim 4 Branding the Revolution: Hair Redux 65 David Savran Part II Modes of Transmission 5 I Feel for You 81 Patrick Anderson 6 Staging a Moving Map in Byron Au Yong s and Aaron Jafferis s Stuck Elevator 97 Karen Shimakawa 7 Fighting for a Future in a Free Trade World 113 Patricia Ybarra 8 Unchecked Popularity: Neoliberal Circulations of Black Social Dance 128 Thomas F. DeFrantz v
vi Contents Part III Formal Economies 9 Model Dissent: Lưu Quang Vũ and the Melodramatic Performance of Renovation in Post-War Vietnam 143 Khai Thu Nguyen 10 Representational Practices and Real Abstractions in Early Eighteenth-Century London 161 Michal Kobialka 11 The Gift of the New Orleans Second Line 176 Margaret M. Olsen 12 Wole Soyinka s The Beatification of Area Boy as Neoliberal Kaleidoscope 189 Catherine M. Cole Part IV Sites of Articulation 13 Teatro Visión and the Limits of Chicano Politics in Neoliberal Space 209 Jon D. Rossini 14 Repairing Teatro Oficina Perdiz 221 Nitza Tenenblat 15 Palimpsestic City: Nostalgia in Neoliberal Bangalore 237 Jisha Menon 16 Desiring the Stage: The Interplay of Mobility and Resistance 253 Rachmi Diyah Larasati Aquatopia: Harmattan Theater, Neoliberal Provisionality, and the Future of Water 266 May Joseph Bibliography 277 Index 307
Illustrations Cover: Photo of signs in Mexico City, The Zócalo, July 2011, by Lara Nielsen. Permission granted by the photographer. Photo of Teatro Perdiz, May 2010, by Dennis Cajaty Barbosa Braga. Permission granted by the photographer 223 1 Map of Dutch East India Company Combined Colonial Occupation. Courtesy Daniel Hetteix 268 2 Map of Noten Eylant. Chart of the Entrance of Hudson s River, from Sandy Hook to New York. The Lionel Pinkus and Princess Firyal Map Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations 271 vii
Series Preface The Studies in International Performance series was initiated in 2004 on behalf of the International Federation for Theatre Research, by Janelle Reinelt and Brian Singleton, successive Presidents of the Federation. Their aim was, and still is, to call on performance scholars to expand their disciplinary horizons to include the comparative study of performances across national, cultural, social, and political borders. This is necessary not only in order to avoid the homogenizing tendency of national paradigms in performance scholarship, but also in order to engage in creating new performance scholarship that takes account of and embraces the complexities of transnational cultural production, the new media, and the economic and social consequences of increasingly international forms of artistic expression. Comparative studies (especially when conceived across more than two terms) can value both the specifically local and the broadly conceived global forms of performance practices, histories, and social formations. Comparative aesthetics can challenge the limitations of national orthodoxies of art criticism and current artistic knowledges. In formalizing the work of the Federation s members through rigorous and innovative scholarship, this series aims to make a significant contribution to the ever-changing project of knowledge creation. Janelle Reinelt and Brian Singleton International Federation for Theatre Research/ Fédération Internationale pour la Recherche Théâtrale FIRT IFTR viii
Acknowledgments This anthology would not have been possible without the support of the Brown Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies, or without the support of the Theatre and Dance Department, and a Wallace Research Grant, at Macalester College. Permission has been granted by Duke University Press to reprint the text of Eng-Beng Lim s Neoliberalism, The Arts, and The Global University, which was published under the title Performing the Neoliberal University in a different form in Social Text (2009), 27.4: 25 44. Permission to reprint maps of New York has been granted by the New York Public Library. Permission to print a photo of Teatro Oficina Perdiz in Brasília has been granted by Dennis Cajaty Barbosa Braga. We developed many of the ideas and research in this anthology through sessions titled Neoliberalism and Performance in the Global Market at the American Society for Theatre Research in 2007 and 2008, and some participants in those sessions are included in this volume. We would like to thank the participants in the first group: Joanne Zerdy, John Carwath, Eng-Beng Lim, Elisa Legon, Jon Rossini, Charlotte McIvor, Milija Gluhovic, Maurya Wickstrom, Khai Thu Nguyen, Evan Winet, Rob Shimko, Sebastián Calderón. Audiences at these seminars have offered key questions and dialogue which this volume intends to sustain. Intellectual support and inspiration have come from Catherine Cole, David Savran, Nicholas Ridout, May Joseph, Anita Cherian, and Michal Kobialka. One of the great pleasures of this volume has been working with scholars who are mentors and mentees. We are proud that this is an international and multigenerational project. We would like to thank the editors of the series, Janelle Reinelt and Brian Singleton, for their suggestions and support throughout the book development process, as well as Paula Kennedy and Ben Doyle at Palgrave, for their keen guidance and kind responses to last minute questions. We are grateful for the tireless work of our proofreaders Andrew Starner and Anna Fisher. We also wish to thank Linda Magoni, who worked with many publishers to help obtain rights to material. Gentle thanks, finally, to the patient Milind Shah and the impatient Naveen, who arrived early; and to friends and family who walked both of us back into life after extraordinary happenings. ix
Notes on Contributors Patrick Anderson is an associate professor in the departments of Communication and Ethnic Studies and Director of Critical Gender Studies at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of So Much Wasted: Hunger, Performance, and the Morbidity of Resistance (2010), and the co-editor (with Jisha Menon) of Violence Performed: Local Roots and Global Routs of Conflict ( 2009). He is currently completing two new books: Autobiography of a Disease and Empathy s Others. Sebastián Calderón Bentin is a PhD student in the Department of Drama at Stanford University. Catherine M. Cole is Professor of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Performing South Africa s Truth Commission: Stages of Transition (2010) and Ghana s Concert Party Theatre (2001). She is the co-editor of the book Africa After Gender? (2007) as well as of a special issue of Theatre Survey on African and Afro-Caribbean performance, and she recently served as editor for Theatre Survey. Her dance theatre piece Five Foot Feat, created in collaboration with Christopher Pilafian, toured North America in 2002 2005. Cole has published articles in Africa, Critical Inquiry, Disability Studies Quarterly, Research in African Literatures, Theatre, Theatre Journal, and TDR, as well as numerous chapters in edited volumes. Thomas F. DeFrantz is Professor of Dance and African American Studies at Duke University. His books include the edited volume Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance (2002; Errol Hill Award) and Dancing Revelations: Alvin Ailey s Embodiment of African American Culture (2004; de la Torre Bueno Prize). May Joseph is the founder of Harmattan Theater and Professor of Social Science and Cultural Studies at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY. She has written widely on performance, visual culture, and urbanism. Michal Kobialka is Professor of Theatre in the Department of Theatre Arts and Dance at the University of Minnesota. He has published over 75 articles on medieval, eighteenth-century, and contemporary European theatre, as x
Notes on Contributors xi well as theatre historiography. His most recent book is Further on, Nothing: Tadeusz Kantor s Theatre (2009). Rachmi Diyah Larasati is an assistant professor in theatre arts and dance and an affiliate graduate faculty in feminist studies at the University of Minnesota. In 2011 she was guest faculty in critical global humanities at Brown University s Research Institute. Inquiries into postcolonialism, globalization, and womens citizenship strongly mark her scholarship. Her forthcoming book Dancing on the Mass Graves centers on nationalizing the traditional dance form in relation to the politics of amnesia, genocide, and the Cold War. Eng-Beng Lim is an assistant professor of theatre arts and performance studies at Brown University and an affiliate faculty in the Gender and Sexuality Program, the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, and the Department of American Studies. His essays and writing have appeared in Theatre Journal, Asian Theatre Journal, Modern Drama, Theatre Survey, Social Text, and various anthologies. Jisha Menon is an assistant professor of drama at Stanford University. She has previously taught in the Department of English at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. Lara D. Nielsen is an assistant professor in theatre and dance at Macalester College, where she teaches theatre and performance studies. Her next two books focus on performance, rights, and work. She has published articles and reviews in Performance Research, Women & Performance, Contemporary Theatre Review, Theatre Journal, Journal of Dramatic Theory & Criticism, TDR, Law, Culture, and the Humanities, and e-misférica. Khai Thu Nguyen is James Gray Lecturer in Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley. Her book project focuses on political operations of melodrama in colonial and post/socialist Vietnam. Her work has been published in Portrayals of Americans on the World Stage (ed. Kevin Wetmore, 2009) and is forthcoming in Asian Theatre Journal and Amerasia. Margaret M. Olsen is an associate professor and Chair of Hispanic and Latin American Studies at Macalester College. She specializes in transatlantic literatures of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as well as Afro-Caribbean texts of the colonial and contemporary periods. She has published a book, Slavery and Salvation in Colonial Cartagena de Indias (2004), and several articles on Africans and their descendants in the Hispanic world in Bulletin of the Comediantes, Hispanic Review, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, and Revista Iberoamericana.
xii Notes on Contributors Jon D. Rossini is an associate professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of Contemporary Latina/o Theater: Wrighting Ethnicity (2008) and has published essays in journals such as American Drama and Latin American Theatre Review, and chapters in collections such as Mapping Landscapes for Performance as Research (2009) and Death in American Texts and Performances (2010). David Savran is a specialist in twentieth- and twenty-first-century US theatre, popular culture, music theatre, and social theory. He is the author of eight books, most recently Highbrow/Lowdown: Theater, Jazz, and the Making of the New Middle Class (2009; Joe A. Callaway Prize). He has served as a judge for the Obie Awards and the Lucille Lortel Awards, and he was a juror for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in Drama. He is Distinguished Professor of Theatre and holds the Vera Mowry Roberts Chair in American Theatre at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Karen Shimakawa is an associate professor of performance studies in the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. Her research focuses on critical race theory, intercultural performance, and Asian American cultural production. Nitza Tenenblat is a theatre director and researches theatre directing methodologies and collective theatre praxis. She teaches directing and acting at the University of Brasília, Brazil. Margaret Werry is an associate professor in the Department of Theatre Arts and Dance at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of The Tourist State: Performing Leisure, Liberalism, and the Racial Imagination (2011) and of numerous articles on topics as diverse as critical pedagogy, historiography, spatial theory, photographic criticism, multimedia performance, indigenous politics, and liberal statehood, film, and cultural policy. She is also an actor, dramaturg, and performance artist. Patricia Ybarra is an associate professor of theatre arts and performance studies at Brown University. She is the author of Performing Conquest (2009). She has published articles and reviews in Theatre Journal, Radical History Review, Aztlán, Latin American Theatre Review, and the Journal of Dramatic Theory & Criticism.