Asian theatre

The continent of Asia, where 60% of the world’s population lives, is heir to a staggering variety of
theatrical performance traditions and has been the generator and recipient of much theatrical
innovation over the last centuries. The categories ‘Asian theatre’ or ‘Oriental drama,’ as these have
been defined in ‘the West’ and received and re-interpreted in Asia, are taken to refer to plays and
productions composed in the countries of East Asia, South Asia and Southeast Asia, or created by
people of Asian descent. Drama from other parts of the Asian continent (including the Middle and
Near East and Central and West Asia) will be consequently dealt with elsewhere in this database.

Much Asian theatre has a ritual character and the distinction between religious and artistic practice
is more fluid than sometimes asserted. Hindu and Buddhist ideas and practices have historically
been closely intertwined with Asian theatre, even after the rise of Islam in the region starting in the
12th century and Christianity in the 16th century. The oldest surviving Asian theatre texts, a corpus of
two dozen or so plays and a number of fragments written in a hybrid of Sanskrit and Prakrit,
dramatize mythological episodes. The Natyashastra (Treatise on Drama), an ancient compilation of
Sanskrit texts on theatre, indicates these plays were dedicated to Hindu deities and performed at
ritual occasions to expert spectators. The director in this theatre is the sutradhar, literally the
puppeteer or ‘string holder,’ an early realization of an enduring figuration of human actors as
puppets to be pulled by invisible threads of authority. It is difficult to precisely date the beginnings of
the Sanskrit theatre, but surviving plays appear to have been written in northern India between the
1st and 7th centuries CE. The Jataka tales and the epics of the Mahabharata and Ramayana these
plays dramatized remain common stock for theatrical traditions around the region.

Dynastic history is also a familiar dramatic subject in Asia, and theatre has long been a privileged
medium for disseminating courtly ideals. The Chinese historian Sima Qian (145-86 BCE) describes a
theatrical spectacle titled Dawu (Great Warrior Dance) purportedly witnessed by Confucius (551-479
BCE). This courtly pageant in six movements or acts re-enacted the establishment of the Zhou
dynasty in the 11th century BCE through symbolic gestures, music, and props such as weapons and
shields, aiming to demonstrate ‘order and good government’ and inculcate awe of military might.
While hereditary monarchs have largely been superseded by the nation-state in modern Asia,
chronicle plays are still enacted on the stages of the nation, stately pavilions of surviving kingdoms,
and humble village halls.

Many of today’s major theatre traditions crystallized in 14 th to 18th century CE Asia, a period of rapid
social and political change. Chinese opera came to maturity during the Yuan dynasty (1280-1368);
Japan’s courtly nō theatre took form in the late fourteenth century, while its lively popular drama
kabuki came of age around 1700; wayang kulit (shadow puppet theatre) developed under the
patronage of sixteenth-century Javanese royal courts; kathakali emerged in Kerala around 1600;
Thailand’s khon masked dance-drama flowered in the Ayutthaya period (1350-1767). These
sophisticated and highly codified arts benefited from royal patronage, as was the case for much
theatre in Europe at the time, and they remain iconic forms, appreciated by foreign visitors and
locals alike. Other pre-modern theatrical practices have left fewer traces. Around Asia there were
numerous traditions combining shamanic ritual and trance with drama for the purpose of healing or
prognostication, for example. Also ubiquitous were sometimes-raucous folk dramas performed by
itinerant drama troupes using masks, puppets, magic, and acrobatics. Some ritual and folk forms
survive today through state patronage, tourism and heritage industries, or persistent beliefs in their
efficacious qualities.

The introduction of European-style education and the printing press wrought significant changes in
nineteenth-century Asia. European scholars collected manuscripts of plays and transcribed plays
that had previously existed only as oral compositions. Scripts that had been formerly the exclusive
preserve of court libraries or transmitted within professional theatre clans were published and made
available for critique and re-use. European theatrical forms, such as spoken drama, were studied at
schools and imitated in practice. Playwrights such as Burma’s U Ponnya (1807-1866) and U Kyin U
(1810 - ?) wrote secular dramas for the literary market. The Parsi theatre, an indigenization of light
opera, began in 1850s Bombay, and quickly was turned into a commercial enterprise, with Parsi and
other entrepreneurs fielding Hindustani-language musical troupes that travelled as far east as
Indonesia. The Parsi theatrical model was in turn widely imitated around South and Southeast Asia.
Modern courses, schools, and institutes including Baroda’s Royal Academy of Music (founded 1886),
the Tokyo Music School (founded 1887), Beijing’s Fuliancheng School (founded 1904), Ecole des Arts
Cambodgiens in Phnom Penh (founded 1917), and Yogyakarta’s Kridha Beksa Wirama (founded
1918) opened esoteric artistic practices to outsiders, formulated new aesthetic principles, and
reconceived training in terms of grades and levels. In the early twentieth century, theatrical
naturalism and realism attracted many adherents, particularly among European-oriented educated
elites. Equally significant, however, was the hybrid poetic drama developed by Bengali poet and
public intellectual Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), Asia’s first Nobel Prize winner in literature.
Tagore travelled widely in Asia and developed a pan-Asian aesthetic and ideology in his plays and
dance dramas. His work was hugely influential for several generations. Anti-colonial theatremakers
under Tagore’s spell such as the Indonesian playwright and politician Roestam Effendi (1903-1979)
laced their densely symbolic plays with indigenous symbols in a conscious effort to construct
national cultures.

The colonization and occupation of much of Asia by Japan before and during World War Two
challenged European cultural dominance, and ultimately furthered the development of national and
pan-Asian theatre. During the decades of the cold war, theatre workers were courted by proponents
of Soviet realism and American avant-gardism. Some, such as Japan’s absurdist playwright Betsuyaku
Minoru (1937-), plowed the furrows of the latest international theatre trends. While tradition
provided only a loose inspiration for some theatre, such as in the ‘modern nō’ plays of Yukio
Mishima (1925-1970) written in the 1950s, other practitioners, including the Indian playwright-
director Habib Tanvir (1923-2009) and Indonesian playwright-director W.S. Rendra (1935-2009),
made a close study of traditional forms and fashioned what has been described variously as ‘theatre
of roots’ or ‘new tradition’ by re-interpreting folk forms for cosmopolitan audiences. During the
Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), China pursued an aggressive policy of modernization. Eight ‘model
operas’ (yangbanxi) combining features of traditional Chinese opera and European ballet were
created by creative teams supervised by the wife of Chairman Mao Zedong and were the only form
of theatrical expression sanctioned by the state. Postmodern varieties of dance theatre emerged in
the 1960s and 1970s, including butō in Japan, the environmental dance-theatre of Indonesian
choreographer Sardono W. Kusumo (1945- ), Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan (founded 1973),
and India’s Chandralekha (1928-2006), which departed in sometimes startling ways from traditional
forms and ideas. Many companies were oriented towards international festivals and markets rather
than domestic consumption.
It was also in the 1960s and 1970s when Asian theatre began to exert significant influence on non-
Asian practice. Previous generations of European artists had looked upon Asian theatre from afar as
an exotic resource. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) wrote the prologue to Faust (1806-29)
in response to scholarly editions of Sanskrit drama; William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) wrote his Four
Plays for Dancers (1921) based partially on nō manuscripts edited for publication by his secretary,
the American poet Ezra Pound (1885-1972); Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) and Bertolt Brecht (1898-
1966) wrote enthusiastically about Balinese, Cambodian, and Chinese performance with limited
exposure or cultural knowledge, mainly to endorse their own pre-conceived theatrical notions.
Genuine cultural exchange only became possible with the age of cheap jet travel. Performing artists
from Asia were invited to attend conferences, pursue degrees in higher education, and teach
summer schools. European, American and Australian artists undertook practical studies with Asian
masters, supported by grants and favourable exchange rates, over months if not years. Some Euro-
American practitioners formed theatre companies with Asian collaborators, such as Julie Taymor’s
Teater Loh (1975-1980). The ‘poor theatre’ model of Polish director Jerzy Grotowski (1933-1999),
which drew on Asian philosophical ideas and movement systems, was enthusiastically taken up
around Asia, and provided an important point of reference for psychophysical training, research in
the theatre, structuring of theatrical collectives and engagement with environments. Intercultural
hybrids, most famously Peter Brook’s The Mahabharata (1985-1989) and a series of Asian-
influenced works by Ariane Mnouchkine’s Théâtre du Soleil, were also products of this moment of
exchange. The work of Brook in particular was contested as neo-imperial and exotifying by Asian
cultural activists.

Multicultural policies and awakened public interest in all things Asian in the 1970s and 80s helped
bring recognition to theatremakers of Asian descent such as Chinese-American playwright David
Henry Hwang (1957- ), British-Asian director Jatinder Verma (1954- ), and Chinese-American
director-choreographer Ping Chong (1946- ), and prompted them to mine ethnic heritage for
theatrical materials. Coalitions among ethnic minority practitioners were endorsed and theorized by
academia, the media, sponsors and funding bodies, yielding such categories as ‘Asian-American
theatre’ (in the United States), ‘Black and Asian theatre’ (in Britain) and ‘Australasian theatre’ (in
Australia).

Asian theatre since the 1990s has been increasingly focused on exchange within the region. Japan’s
economic boom subsidized Cry of Asia! (1989-1997), a theatre of liberation project bringing together
representatives of 15 Asian-Pacific countries; an inter-Asian Lear (1997) directed by Singaporean Ong
Keng Sen (1963- ); and the Asian Contemporary Theatre Collaboration (2003-2005). A pan-Southeast
Asian Ramayana titled Realizing Rama (1998) was an exercise in ASEAN cultural integration.
Singapore’s endeavour to position itself as a cultural capital has underwritten artistic exchange
programmes such as The Flying Circus Project (1996-2010), artistic residencies and commissions at
the Esplenade – Theatres on the Bay arts centre (opened 2002) and the Intercultural Theatre
Institute for performance training. Outside institutions have taken active interest in regional
exchanges and collaborations among emerging and established artists. The Asia Pacific Performing
Arts Exchange (1996-2010) was funded by the United States State Department, the Mekong Art and
Culture Project (2006-2008) was supported by the Rockefeller Foundation and Arts Network Asia
(1999-present) is underwritten by the Ford Foundation. Diasporic Asian artists now look increasingly
to collaborate with Asian institutions and practitioners, tapping into transnational capital and
relocating themselves temporarily or permanently to Asia, in preference to building institutions and
alliances in Europe, Australia or the Americas.

The upshot of this heavy cultural traffic is that Asian practitioners are viewing their traditions with
new eyes. They are able to draw strategically on their training and ethnic and national identities in
collaborative transnational productions that tour globally and confidently rework and play with
performance inheritances in post-traditional theatrical productions. Producers of commercial
theatre have also awoken to the possibility of creating work for the regional market since the
lucrative 2002 Asian tour of the Singaporean musical Chang & Eng (1997). As is the case in most of
the world, Asian theatre is predominately created by local artists for local audiences, and is informed
by local sensibilities and values. However, what it means to be ‘local’ is changing rapidly due to
increased mobility, expanding networks of communication and enlarged cultural horizons.

Matthew Isaac Cohen

Royal Holloway, University of London