This rich interdisciplinary monograph, written at the intersection of theatre studies and cultural geography, brings together discussions of transnationalism, identity and performance with a focus on Singaporean, Asian American, and British East Asian theatre. Based on a decade of research in the UK, US and Singapore, the book examines the transnational relations through which theatre emerges, ‘tracking’ both practitioners and creative process in their physical and imaginative border crossings to explore how meanings and identities are constructed, negotiated, and reconfigured across different spaces of production, performance and reception. Throughout the book Rogers traces these transnational geographies across different scales--from the micro-geographies of speech, plot and staging to the broader geographies of institutions, government policy, audience and professional networks--in a way that demonstrates the multiplicity and spatial complexity of transnationalism and the identities it produces.
In approaching identity as variable and contingent, the book goes beyond concepts of attachment to a ‘homeland’ or the ‘strategic’ employment of identity that often dominate discussions of transnational artistic production. It instead considers the multiple points of distance and proximity, association and disassociation, between which identities shift across distinct spatial and temporal moments. Here the fluidity and heterogeneity of transnational connection is placed not in counterpoint to the local, the national or the ethnic, but rather is understood as having a part in their continual emergence. This approach to transnationalism thus gives a nuanced account of the power and politics of cross-border artistic production—its frictions, inequalities and contradictions, as well as its hybridities, interconnections and flows.
The book falls into two parts. The first two chapters of Part I consider the transnational networks in which works and practitioners are entwined and how these are implicated in identity production. In focusing on networks of theatre-making between Singapore, the UK and the US, Chapter One aims to demonstrate how the relationships that underpin theatre performance and the identities it creates extend beyond the borders of national spaces and “minority” categorisations to encompass “diverse influences and trajectories” (page 27). Whilst outlining their fluidity and porosity, the chapter also emphasises the hierarchical, asymmetrical and tenuous nature of such networks and the inequalities they produce. Through attention to individual practitioner trajectories and the impulses and relationships that shape them, Rogers traces how changing dynamics of racialisation and identity articulation across space shape artistic opportunity and mobility in particular ways. Cross-border creative networks thus emerge as relations through which “national spaces and identities are simultaneously unravelled and reinforced” (page 43), offering “conflicting and contradictory possibilities” (page 44) for those within them.
Chapter Two develops this theme by exploring how these experiences of transnational connection and mobility translate into theatre practice. Rogers considers three plays informed by transnational encounter, bringing focus on the multiplicity of identity through an intersectional approach. She highlights the contradictory and contingent nature of identity performance, showing how “the transformation of one axis of identity may occur at the expense of another, so that marginalisation may be challenged and reinforced simultaneously” (page 45). The role of transnational relations in the production of theatrical works thus emerges as one in which the boundaries of identity are fluid and reworked at times, but “crystallise and harden” at others (page 47). The chapter, in this way, considers both the possibilities and limitations offered by transnationalism in the performance of intersectional identities and how power relations might be both reinforced and reworked in the process.
The following section of the book, “Transnationalism in Context”, seeks to counter common associations of transnationalism with migration and mobility to focus on the ways in which theatre’s production and performance might be embedded in transnational relations “in place”. Chapter Three, the first in this section, considers the dynamics of “glocalisation’” at the Singapore Arts Festival. The festival aspires to forge a strong national canon of theatre work whilst engaging with local audiences and building Singapore’s profile as a global city of culture. Rogers examines the re-articulation of the festival’s transnational geographies and the way in which “transnational forces can recognise and reinforce the nation-state, even as they traverse and unravel its boundaries” (page 74). The author outlines the entanglements that link body to city to global circuits of production in ways that present possibilities for both the reinforcement and reinvention of established discourse and power relations through cultural agendas.
Chapter Four continues to explore the tensions between the national and the transnational, but turns to their articulation through displacement in the diaspora. Focusing on Asian American diasporic and refugee theatre, the chapter considers the dynamics between multicultural and emerging transnational modes of belonging that involve the exploration and (re)negotiation of relationships to multiple national cultural spheres. Through an in-depth analysis of two US-based works, Rogers traces the tensions and contradictions as identities are constructed upon the “fluid ground between displacement and emplacement, between alienation and belonging” (page 98). Theatre here emerges at the intersection of culturally specific imagined homelands and the multicultural contexts of its production. It generates identities that are created and located through transnational connection and yet at the same time articulate desires for an “authentic homeland belonging” (page106). Easy conceptualisations of “diaspora” or “refugee” are thus problematized. The performance of essentialism and a sense of territorial rootedness, the chaper shows, can be as important as hybridity and cultural fluidity in contesting marginalisation in the diaspora.
Chapter Five takes this discussion of theatre in the diaspora to a focus on the production, performance and reception of works themselves. Through discussion of UK company Yellow Earth Theatre’s touring of two works by Asian American and Singaporean writers, Rogers attends to the intersections of transnationalism and multiculturalism in the construction of national (here British East Asian) forms of identity. The author traces the wide-ranging transnational relations that constitute such identities and shows how these are diverse and multiply located. Rogers considers their shifting articulation in performance between the reification and complication of essentialised difference, as works seek to navigate tensions between a “multicultural politics of visibility” and the exploration of a more complex ”diasporic sensibility” (page 123). Rogers shows how these concerns overlap and co-exist in the production of performance, creating a fluid and heterogeneous collective identity that generates particular kinds of cross-cultural dialogue and contributes to the reconfiguration of British multicultural imaginations.
The next section of the book explores the transnational interconnections between Singaporean, British East Asian and Asian American theatre, bringing particular attention to the lateral networks of its production. Its chapters consider relations conducted through institutions, festivals, and online spaces to trace the multiplicity and complexity of the transnational geographies through which theatre is constructed and debated. These are spaces of exchange and relation that, while enacted through cross-border flow and circulation, are also permeated by power dynamics that order, condition and disrupt these flows in particular ways. Chapter Six highlights cultural policy as one of these organising factors, illustrated through discussion of two agreements established between Scotland and Singapore in the 1990s and early 2000s. Focusing on the development of collaborative artistic relationships through the “institutional hubs” of the British Council and, more recently, the Edinburgh International Festival, Rogers shows how such initiatives, while seemingly orientated around the national, exceed such frames to engage with a broad range of cross-border flows and relations. The chapter thus demonstrates the transnational nature of national cultural policy-making and the multiple cultural and economic agendas enacted through these structures.
Following on from this, Chapter Seven illustrates how these institutionally-led geographies can also be challenged through transnational connection. Through focus on virtual spaces of protest and debate in the wake of a cross-racial casting controversy in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2012 production of The Orphan of Zhao, Rogers traces the role of transnational relations in the traversing and resurrecting of “geographical, racial and cultural borders” (page 175) as debates shifted between the blurring and marking of territorialised space. The chapter examines how transnational connection enabled cross-border alliance and support while also considering the disjunctures, absences, and limitations that constructed the protest's geographies in particular ways. Transnationalism thus emerges as a relational space that has the potential to both “dissolve and reassert borders of difference” (page 188) in the negotiation of theatre's production.
Chapter Eight shifts our attention to the importance of translocal circulation, and the networks that it creates and reconfigures, for theatre’s production. It focuses on the translocal mobility of the internationally successful play M.Butterfly by Asian-American writer David Henry Hwang, tracing its production, performance and reception across New York, Singapore and London and its emergence in dialogue with the particular geographies of each location. In showing the connections and influences created by the work’s border crossings, explored through the subsequent work of British Chinese theatre company Mu-Lan, Rogers illustrates that theatre both “operates through, and stimulates, circulation” (page 207); a circulation that is layered, often tenuous, and through which directors, actors, and theatrical works themselves make and remake the geographies of their location and the wider networks within which they operate.
In its detailed investigation of the productive relations between transnationalism and theatre performance, Performing Asian Transnationalisms does much to further geography’s growing engagement with the performing arts. Moving beyond an equation of performance solely with the concerns of non-representational theory, Rogers builds on a broader lineage of geographically oriented enquiry within performance and theatre studies (e.g. Chaudhuri, 1995; McKinnie, 2007b; Wiles, 2003). Her focus on the transnational complements past scholarship focused on the city (Harvie, 2009; McKinnie, 2007a), opening up a wider range of geographical approaches to theatrical performance. The book also contributes to other recent work in geography examining the politics of theatre’s production and reception across borders (e.g. Johnston and Pratt, 2014). Rogers’ text has wider value in this regard. Its varied chapters together offer a valuable schema for how to approach transnational cultural production from a geographical perspective, including attention to: sites of translocality; networks of institutional and more informal ‘lateral’ connection; multiple overlapping sites of cultural translation, dialogue and exchange; and the (im)mobilities of people, productions, and performances.
Rogers’ account of transnationalism thus brings focus not simply to human migration but to all manner of cultural flows and circulations as people, scripts, performances, opinions, and imaginations cross borders to produce theatre in particular ways. In this attention not only to the geographies that theatre might represent, reflect or challenge on stage, but also to those that constitute it through practice, the work also contributes in valuable ways to the emerging field of creative geographies (see Hawkins, 2014), bringing an understanding of how artistic makings and worlds are articulated through complex transnational relations. Throughout, discussion of the politics of these relations and its effects on theatre production helps us to unpack the power inequalities and hierarchies that shape transnational encounter, opportunity and possibility in theatre performance both ’in place’ and as it travels. Conceptually, the study thus moves beyond more common discussions of hybridity and fusion in practice to examine the complex and continual emergence of identities through multiple intersecting spaces of association and belonging. Substantively, it also brings much needed focus on creative worlds at least part-rooted/routed (whether through location or diasporic status) outside recognised ‘centres’ of arts production.
While the book works to demonstrate some of the ways theatre practice might organise and reconfigure wider transnational flows, I would perhaps have liked a deeper exploration of this, with a greater sense of the embodied aspects of practice. Rogers' intricate discussion of transnational relations and their operation in theatre production does, however, lay the ground for future studies that might look to further investigate these dialogues between the transnational and the minutiae of embodied performance practice (see Rogers, 2012). Roger’s deep involvement with these communities, their practice and their politics, is evident. It makes for a careful, detailed and rich work that brings together an impressive range of actors, places, and events. While this might in other hands have appeared disparate, Rogers, to my mind, succeeds in pulling these diverse instances together in a way that constitutes a nuanced engagement with the multiplicity, and heterogeneity, of transnational theatre production.
Overall, Performing Asian Transnationalisms holds important arguments for both geography and performance studies, and offers valuable ways for continuing to develop the productive conversations between them. The book will also be an important read for all those interested in further understanding the complex geographies of transnationality and their articulation and reconfiguration through creative practice. ReferencesChaudhuri U (1995) Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.Harvie J (2009) Theatre and the City. London: Palgrave Macmillan.Hawkins H (2014) For Creative Geographies: Geography, Visual Arts and the Making of Worlds. New York: Routledge.Johnston C and G Pratt (2014) “Taking Nanay to the Philippines: transnational circuits of affect”, in Theatres of Affect Ed. E Hurley. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press.Mckinnie M (2007a) City Stages: Theatre and Urban Space in a Global City. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.Mckinnie M (2007b) Space and the Geographies of Theatre. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press.Portes A (1995) "Economic sociology and the sociology of immigration: a conceptual overview.” In The Economic Sociology of Immigration Ed. A Portes. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.Rogers A (2012) “Emotional geographies of method acting in Asian American theater.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 102: 423-42.Wiles D (2003) A Short History of Western Performance Space. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
