Amanda Rogers

Geographies of performing scripted language

It is the first read through of Solve for X. [...] Kelvin [an actor] comes up to me and starts talking about the script, telling me that Judy is an amazing writer and even though things get changed he thinks it’s not often needed. He is really enthusiastic about this play, he says he loves this part because he doesn’t have to be a ‘bad guy’, he gets to play love and sex, and he loves Judy’s writing because it’s like poetry. Jeff [the director] approaches us and asks me to put the scripts together with paper fasteners as I sit chatting. I make up a large box of scripts ready for each of us to have our own copy, even though everyone has already read it for auditions. [...] When everyone has organised themselves around the table Jeff gives us all a script. There is an air of anticipation and excitement as we are now starting a journey of exploration. Immediately everyone flicks through the script, and I notice that people start de and re-assembling it in folders, writing their names on it, some actors have highlighter pens at the ready. After a few minutes of fuss, Jeff calls us to attention and goes through the evening’s agenda.

Emotional Geographies of Method Acting in Asian American Theater

Method acting, in both theory and practice, is a technique that actively creates emotionally embodied performances. Yet the theory of method acting views emotions as experiences generated by an individual, independent of his or her social or geographical context. This article offers a spatialized rereading of method acting, highlighting the relational spatialities involved in the bodily performance of emotion, thereby developing literatures in theater on space, emotion, and meaning. A focus on Asian American theater enables an examination of the racial politics of this acting technique and its emotional performances. By drawing on four months of ethnographic research working as an assistant stage manager on an Asian American theater production, my analysis demonstrates how relational spaces of emotion enabled fluid performances of racial identity. The performance of emotion was marked by an ambivalent tension between seeing emotional experience as universal and also being marked by racial difference. Examining the theatrical practice of method acting therefore opens up geographical discussions surrounding race and emotion beyond a critique of universality or a focus on difference by attempting to reconcile these contradictory perspectives of emotions in performance. Dramatic forms of theater can be considered sites through which to demonstrate the complexity of creating, experiencing, expressing, and reading emotional bodies.

Butterfly takes flight: the translocal circulation of creative practice

This article analyses the relationship between artistic practice and mobility through a focus on the translocal circulation of theatre. It works against the assumption that art and its creative practices are tied to particular contexts. Instead I suggest that examining translocal connection provides a framework through which to consider how practices of art-making are emplaced and differentiated, whilst also encompassing physical and imaginative movement. I demonstrate this argument by examining the writing, casting, and staging of the play M. Butterfly in New York City, London and Singapore. I analyse how these creative practices were related to translocal travel, but also demonstrate that such activities spilled beyond the performance to reorganise socio-cultural relations. As a result, my analysis views creativity as an interrelated set of artistic and social processes. This article thus extends contemporary geographical work on art and performance in two ways: first, by considering how artistic practices draw upon, and are influenced by, spatially extensive flows of people, finance and ideas; and second, by considering the creative effects of artworks as they circulate through different contexts.

A Controversial Company: Debating the Casting of the RSC’s The Orphan of Zhao

This introduction investigates the issues raised by asserting cultural ownership over specific traditions of performance. In particular, it highlights how casting – one of the least analysed areas of theatre practice – might both empower and complicate debates around who should participate in performance. How might authentic casting – of casting actors who ‘look like’ they are from the same geographical region as the performance text or tradition – and colour-blind casting practices come into conflict? The casting controversy surrounding the Royal Shakespeare Company’s (RSC’s) 2012-13 production of The Orphan of Zhao provides an opportunity to tackle these questions.

Advancing the geographies of the performing arts

Performance has become an analytical lens for examining a range of geographical phenomena. However, research specifically on the geographies of the performing arts has not kept pace with this broader field. Here, I argue for a deeper engagement with the theories and practices of the performing arts, particularly as research on creativity and the geohumanities gathers momentum. The article focuses on three areas where literatures from theatre and performance studies can expand our understanding of what ‘the geographies of the performing arts’ might be: intercultural aesthetics, migrant mobilities, and geopolitics. It examines how these come together in contemporary Cambodian dance.

Thinking through Intercultural Spatialities onImelda: A New Musical

This article examines the performance of culture on a Filipino American musical called Imelda: A New Musical by the Asian American theatre companies East West Players and Pan Asian Repertory Theatre. In so doing, it critically discusses how this musical moved towards a more open conception of spatiality. By analysing the context of production, processes of rehearsal, the performances dance and costumes, and the musicals reception, this article demonstrates the dialogic and multiple production of cultural space on Imelda. This article also reveals the resulting complexities inherent in trying to affiliate performances to located cultural identities. The implications of these more fluid, shifting geographies for intercultural theatre and the production of identity are then detailed.

Interview with Daniel York, Actor, Writer, and Director and Anna Chen, Writer, Performer, and Broadcaster

In the second of the two commissioned interviews for this Special Issue, we discuss the experience and politics of casting from the perspective of ethnic minority actors. Although there were a number of individuals and organisations who could have been approached, here we talk to Daniel York, who initially drove the debates after he was auditioned for, but not cast in, The Orphan of Zhao, and to Anna Chen, who spearheaded the media campaign against the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC). Both are also founding members of British East Asian Artists, a lobbying and production group that was formed during the RSC controversy to promote East Asian representation on stage and screen.

Bookish cultural geographies

In this short editorial, we outline some of the reasons why we think books and book reviews remain important for the field of cultural geography.

British Chinese Performance in Minor Transnational Perspective

This chapter uses the concept of minor transnationalism to examine how British Chinese performance can harness the critical potential of physical and imaginative encounters across borders. The analysis focuses on two productions: Anna Chen’s (2009) solo show, Anna May Wong Must Die!, and David Yip and Kevin Wong’s (2010) multimedia performance, Gold Mountain. In investigating the “minor-to-minor” networks embodied in these works, the chapter argues that thinking transnationally does not automatically position British Chinese artists as “foreigners” who do not belong to the national sphere. Instead, focusing on minor transnationalism opens up the analysis of cross-border connections beyond race and ethnicity and positions British Chinese performers as active protagonists who reshape national imaginaries vis-a-vis contemporary globalization.

Asian Mutations: Yellowface from More Light to the Royal Shakespeare Company’s The Orphan of Zhao

In this article I examine the contention that the Royal Shakespeare Company’s (RSC’s) The Orphan of Zhao used yellowface. By comparing The Orphan of Zhao to a recent production of Bryony Lavery’s (1997) play, More Light, I argue that yellowface is a highly mutable practice. In particular, I suggest that in the period between these two productions, contemporary British understandings of yellowface shifted from ideas around racial impersonation using prosthetics and make-up to the casting of white actors in Asian roles in general. This latter conceptualisation of yellowface draws attention to the inequalities, exclusions, but also the possibilities of casting in The Orphan of Zhao. The article offers a nuanced account of yellowface in the RSC production by attending to how racial-ethnic minorities are represented in theatre.