Introduction

Bollen, Jonathan

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-39411-0_1

Introduction

Jonathan Bollen⁵

Chapter
First Online: 07 May 2020

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Part of the book series: Transnational Theatre Histories ((TTH))

Abstract

In the 1950s and 1960s, artists flying between Hong Kong, Manila, Melbourne, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo, and Taipei performed their acts in nightclubs, television, and theatres. This chapter introduces the network of touring itineraries that formed the Asia Pacific region in international entertainment. It locates this formation within broader histories of regional mobility and cultural enterprise, and brings into focus the interplay of commercial touring, national distinction, and internationalism in the Cold War period. This chapter describes ‘walking the archive’ as a method of performance history linking archival evidence, data visualisation, and urban geography. It establishes the distinction between ‘content’ and ‘container’ in touring performance and defines key concepts for the book: variety as a genre, versatility as an artist’s range, and diversity as a cultural value.

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Notes

1.
In this book, I present artists with Chinese, Japanese, and Korean names in the order of family name followed by given names, and I retain the alphabetic transcription most frequently encountered in archival sources. Authors with Chinese, Japanese, and Korean names who publish scholarship in English, however, are presented in the order of given names followed by family name, if that is the order on their publications.
2.
Christopher Balme, ‘The Bandmann Circuit: Theatrical Networks in the First Age of Globalization’, Theatre Research International 40.1 (2015), 19–36.
3.
meLê yamomo, Theatre and Music in Manila and the Asia Pacific, 1869–1946: Sounding Modernities (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).
4.
David C.S. Sissons, ‘Japanese Acrobatic Troupes Touring Australasia 1867–1900’, Australasian Drama Studies 35 (1999), 73–107; Rosemary Farrell, ‘Sweat from the Bones: Politics, Chinese Acrobatics and Australia’, PhD thesis (La Trobe University, 2007); Gillian Arrighi, ‘Circus and Sumo: Tradition, Innovation and Opportunism at the Australian Circus’, Theatre Research International 37.3 (2012), 265–82; ‘Touring’, in Companion to Theatre in Australia, ed. Philip Parsons (Sydney: Currency Press, 1995), 609–13.
5.
Papers of Coral Tottie Gunning, 1932–1989, MN 2093, Battye Library, State Library of Western Australia.
6.
John Gunn, Challenging Horizons: Qantas 1939–1954 (St Lucia: The University of Queensland Press, 1987) and High Corridors: Qantas 1954–1970 (St Lucia: The University of Queensland Press, 1988).
7.
Advertisements for Qantas, Sydney Morning Herald, 1 September 1953, 4; South China Morning Post, 17 August 1956, 11; 7 October 1957, 11; 6 July 1959, 8.
8.
See Leigh Edmonds, ‘How Australians Were Made Airminded’, Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media and Culture 7.1 (1993), 183–206.
9.
‘Japan in Autumn’, Sydney Morning Herald, 30 August 1961, 14.
10.
Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizens: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 55–56.
11.
The ‘Asia Pacific’ region is historically distinct from an earlier ‘Australasian’ region which Veronica Kelly describes in ‘Australasia: Mapping a Theatrical “Region” in Peace and War’, Journal of Global Theatre Histories 1.1 (2016), 62–77; see also Rob Wilson and Arif Dirlik, Asia/Pacific as Space of Cultural Production (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995); Catherine Driscoll and Meaghan Morris, ‘Introduction: Gender, Modernity and Media in the Asia-Pacific’, Cultural Studies 27.2 (2013), 165–85.
12.
Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Catherine Vance Yeh, Shanghai Love: Courtesans, Intellectuals, and Entertainment Culture, 1850–1910 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006); Wen-Hsin Yeh, Shanghai Splendour: Economics Sentiment and the Making of Modern China, 1845–1949 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Meng Yue, Shanghai and the Edges of Empire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).
13.
See research by Yung Sai-shing, Chua Ai Lin, and Lily Kong in The Business of Culture: Cultural Entrepreneurs in China and Southeast Asia, 1900–65, ed. Christopher Rea and Nicolai Volland (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2015), and China Forever: The Shaw Brothers and Diasporic Cinema, ed. Poshek Fu (Urbana; Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008).
14.
Chan Kwok-bun and Yung Sai-shing, ‘Chinese Entertainment, Ethnicity, and Pleasure’, Visual Anthropology 18 (2005), 103–42, at 113–14.
15.
Miriam Silverberg, Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); see also Yamanashi Makiko, A History of the Takarazuka Revue Since 1914: Modernity, Girls’ Culture, Japan Pop (Leiden: Brill, 2012).
16.
Lee, Shanghai Modern, 324–41; Wong Kee Chee 2001, The Age of Shanghainese Pop, 1930–1970 (Hong Kong: Joint Publishing, 2001).
17.
Filomeno V. Aguilar Jr, Migration Revolution: Philippine Nationhood & Class Relations in a Globalized Age (Singapore; Kyoto: NUS Press and Kyoto University Press, 2014).
18.
yamomo, Theatre and Music, 199.
19.
yamomo, Theatre and Music, 201.
20.
Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 16.
21.
Yoshimi Shunya, ‘“America” as Desire and Violence: Americanization in Postwar Japan and Asia During the Cold War’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 4.3 (2003), 433–50; Shin Hyunjoon and Ho Tung-hung, ‘Translation of “America” During the Early Cold War Period: A Comparative Study on the History of Popular Music in South Korea and Taiwan’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 10.1 (2009), 83–102; Chi-Kwan Mark, ‘Hong Kong as an International Tourism Space: The Politics of American Tourism in the 1960s’, in Hong Kong in the Cold War, ed. Priscilla Roberts and John M. Carroll (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2016), 160–82.
22.
Shannon Steen, Racial Geometries of the Black Atlantic, Asian Pacific and American Theatres (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 7.
23.
Tony Day and Maya H.T. Liem (eds), Cultures at War: The Cold War and Cultural Expression in Southeast Asia (Ithaca, NY: Southeast Asia Program Publications, Cornell University, 2010); Christopher Balme and Berenika Szymanski-Düll (eds), Theatre, Globalization and the Cold War (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
24.
Chua Beng Huat, ‘Conceptualizing an East Asian Popular Culture’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 5.2 (2004), 200–21.
25.
Koichi Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 39–50.
26.
Akira Iriye, Cultural Internationalism and World Order (Baltimore; London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 181.
27.
Iriye, Cultural Internationalism, 9.
28.
With the introduction of the term ‘transnational’, the meaning of ‘international’ in Iriye’s broad sense has since been unnecessarily ‘confined to the nation-state or to nationally institutionalized organisations’ (Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization, 16).
29.
Jane R. Goodall, Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin: Out of the Natural Order (London; New York: Routledge, 2002), 115. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED: Oxford University Press, 2019) dates the usage of ‘variety’ designating theatrical entertainments from 1868.
30.
OED.
31.
Erika Fischer-Lichte, ‘Interweaving Cultures in Performance: Different States of Being In-Between’, New Theatre Quarterly 25.4 (2009), 391–401, at 393.
32.
Erika Fischer-Lichte, ‘Introduction: Interweaving Performance Cultures—Rethinking “Intercultural Theatre”: Toward an Experience and Theory of Performance Beyond Postcolonialism’, in Politics of Interweaving Performance Cultures: Beyond Postcolonialism, ed. Erika Fischer-Lichte, Torsten Jost, and Saskya Iris Jain (New York: Routledge, 2014), 39–40, at 50.
33.
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948, https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/; International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, 1966, https://www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/pages/cescr.aspx, accessed 2 June 2019.
34.
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, ‘Objects of Ethnography’, in Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, ed. Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine (Washington; London: Smithsonian Institution, 1991), 386–443, at 422.
35.
David Rees, The Age of Containment: The Cold War, 1945–1965 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1967); John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy During the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
36.
Régis Debray, Transmitting Culture, trans. Eric Rauth (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 60.
37.
Debray, Transmitting Culture, 57–59; original emphasis.
38.
Benjamin Lee and Edward LiPuma, ‘Cultures of Circulation: The Imaginations of Modernity’, Public Culture 14.1 (2002), 191–213; John Urry, Mobilities (London: Sage, 2007); Peter Adey, Mobility (London; New York: Routledge, 2010).
39.
Paul Rae and Martin Welton, ‘Traveling Performance’, Performance Research 12.2 (2007), 1–4.
40.
Christopher Balme, Pacific Performances: Theatricality and Cross-Cultural Encounter in the South Seas (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Veronica Kelly, The Empire Actors: Stars of Australasian Costume Drama, 1890s–1920s (Sydney: Currency House, 2011); Margaret Werry, The Tourist State: Performing Leisure, Liberalism and Race in New Zealand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011); Marlis Schweitzer, Transatlantic Broadway: The Infrastructural Politics of Global Performance (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
41.
Fiona Wilkie, Performance, Transport and Mobility: Making Passage (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
42.
Pheng Cheah, What Is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 30, 42.
43.
Jonathan Bollen, ‘Data Models for Theatre Research: People, Places, and Performance’, Theatre Journal 68.4 (2016), 615–32, at 630.
44.
Sir Anril P. Tiatco, Buhol Buhol/Entanglement: Contemporary Theatre in Metropolitan Manila (Peter Lang, 2017), 37.
45.
Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).
46.
This is a version of the ‘distant reading’ advanced by Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History (London; New York: Verso, 2005); see Julie Holledge, Jonathan Bollen, Frode Helland, and Joanne Tompkins, A Global Doll’s House: Ibsen and Distant Visions (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) for an application in theatre history.
47.
Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge, 1993).
48.
Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).
49.
yamomo, Theatre and Music, 4.
50.
Engseng Ho, ‘Inter-Asian Concepts for Mobile Societies’, The Journal of Asian Studies 76.4 (2017), 908.
51.
Ho, ‘Inter-Asian Concepts’, 909.
52.
Ho, ‘Inter-Asian Concepts’, 908, 922–23.
53.
Chen Kuan-Hsing, Asia as Method: Towards Deimperialization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 255.
54.
Chen, Asia as Method, 223–27, 254.
55.
Ien Ang and Jon Stratton, ‘Asianing Australia: Notes Toward a Critical Transnationalism in Cultural Studies’, Cultural Studies 10.1 (1996), 16–36, at 34.
56.
David Goldsworthy (ed.), Facing North: A Century of Australian Engagement with Asia, Volume 1, 1901 to the 1970s (Carlton South: Melbourne University Press, 2001).
57.
David Walker, Anxious Nation: Australia and the Rise of Asia, 1850–1939 (St Lucia: The University of Queensland Press, 1999).
58.
See, for a sample, David Walker and Agnieszka Sobocinska (eds), Australia’s Asia: From Yellow Peril to Asian Century (Crawley: UWA Publishing, 2012).
59.
Katharine Brisbane (ed.), Entertaining Australia: An Illustrated History (Sydney: Currency Press, 1991); Richard Waterhouse, From Minstrel Show to Vaudeville: The Australian Popular Stage, 1788–1914 (Kensington, NSW: The University of New South Wales Press, 1990); Frank Van Straten, Tivoli (South Melbourne: Lothian, 2003).
60.
See Angela Woollacott, Race and the Modern Exotic: Three ‘Australian’ Women on Global Display (Clayton, VIC: Monash University Publishing, 2011); Shirley Jennifer Lim, ‘Glamorising Racial Modernity’, in Australia’s Asia: From Yellow Peril to Asian Century, ed. David Walker and Agnieszka Sobocinska (Crawley: UWA Publishing, 2012), 145–69; Amit Sarwal and David Walker, ‘Staging a Cultural Collaboration: Louise Lightfoot and Ananda Shivaram’s First Indian Dance Tour of Australia, 1947–1949’, Dance Chronicle 38.3 (2015), 305–35; David Chapman, ‘Suburban Samurai and Neighbourhood Ninja: Shintaro and Postwar Australia’, Japanese Studies 35.3 (2015), 355–71.
61.
Helen Gilbert and Jacqueline Lo, Performance and Cosmopolitics: Cross-Cultural Transactions in Australasia (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 83.
62.
Denise Varney, Peter Eckersall, Chris Hudson, and Barbara Hatley, Theatre and Performance in the Asia-Pacific (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Jacqueline Lo, Dean Chan, and Tseen Khoo (eds), ‘Asian Australia and Asian America: Making Transnational Connections’, special issue of Amerasia Journal 36.2 (2010); Rachel Fensham and Odette Kelada, ‘Situating the Body: Choreographies of Transmigration’, Journal of Intercultural Studies 33.4 (2012), 395–410.

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Bollen, J. (2020). Introduction. In: Touring Variety in the Asia Pacific Region, 1946–1975. Transnational Theatre Histories. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39411-0_1

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39411-0_1
Published: 07 May 2020
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-39410-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-39411-0
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