Dramatic Transformations in the Foreign Language Classroom
Lisa Parkes
Harvard University
How can dramatic performance benefit the foreign-language learner? How can dramatic techniques help instructors choreograph a more dynamic classroom? And how can arts integration connect language acquisition to higher-level thinking? This presentation introduces strategies for transforming the literary text into a rich source of student creativity, and for reinvigorating the language classroom through drama-based pedagogy. Fundamental to this approach is the principle of imaginative and self-reflective engagement in the creative process itself: Through embodied performance, creative writing, and improvisational speaking, students not only engage more deeply and critically in the text, but also develop greater linguistic agency through intensive, creative language play. This focus on drama’s capacity to impart new manners of critical reflection responds to increasingly divided positions between utilitarian and contextualist views of language, offering a way to enrich our otherwise predominantly instrumentalist and functionalist language curricula.
——————————————————————————–
Teaching Mao through Music: Pedagogy and Practice in Today’s Liberal Arts Classroom
Lei Ouyang Bryant
Swarthmore College
Classrooms at most liberal arts colleges across the United States have changed in significant ways over the past 10-15 years. For many, we have an increasing number of students coming from East Asia to study on our campuses, and students in general are increasingly interested in studying East Asia. How then, does this impact the ways in which we teach about the performing arts of East Asia in our North American classrooms? In this presentation, I identify pedagogies in the undergraduate music classroom that may be applied across genres, topics, and disciplines. Utilizing the case study of my ethnomusicology course, “Music and Mao: Music & Politics in Communist China,” I consider how 1) assignments that explicitly connect course content and learning processes provide new levels of engagement with course concepts and 2) how a diverse and inclusive classroom of students can positively impact student learning and help foster an inclusive classroom and cross-racial learning.
———————————————————————————
Noh Studying in the Classroom: Using Theatre as a Means of Investigating History, Culture and Religion
Matthew R. Dubroff
Hampden-Sydney College
Japan’s noh theatre exists at a rich intersection of embodied history, religion, and culture. The study of this theatre form provides an excellent mode of analysis of major areas of Japanese studies in a liberal arts environment. Noh’s history, spans several centuries and is integrally related to major events of significance in Japan’s past. The plays of noh represent a wealth of literary responses to the dynamic relationship between the two main religions of Japan; Shintoism and Buddhism. Finally, the performance of and training for noh represent cultural practices that are significant aspects of Japanese behavior. As a focus of study within a theatrical context, noh provides wonderful insights into aspects of the world beyond traditional “Western Theatre”. For students of history, religion, or culture, noh is a unique and fascinating method of analysis. This presentation will explore the varying modes in which noh can be an exciting component of a liberal arts course of study. It engages students in fulfilling experiences and critical analysis through the prism of theatre.
———————————————————————————
Bringing the Backstage to the Classroom: Writing, Acting, and Researching Chinese Theatres in a Liberal Arts College
Man He
Williams College
Whether the perpetuated Oriental “other” or the colonial modernity product, Chinese theatres continue to intrigue our students, from the sensational presentation of gender performativity in male danroles to the astonishing choreographed (trans)national revolutionary theaters in the twentieth century. How do we transform students’ genuine curiosity with an “exotic” theatre art to critical reading and even potentially research capability? How to direct students’ interest in visual and sonic features of Chinese theatres to the backstage where the spectacle and acoustics are made? How do we explain the myth and mechanism by which Chinese theatre mediated the science, art, and act of “seeing” and “hearing” to overwhelm, formulate, and discipline the global audience? This paper answers these questions by analyzing two class activities that specifically address the theme of “play-making”, namely, the close-reading activity of Shadow Play(Dir. Hu Mei, 2002) and the cold-reading activity of Bus Stop(Gao Xingjian, 1990). This paper shares and discusses the process of teaching plan preparation, in-class discussions, students’ sample essays, and their evaluation/feedback for these activities.
——————————————————————————————-
From the Green Room to the Classroom: Staging a 13th-Century Drama in a 21st-Century Liberal Arts College
Jing Hu
“University of Pennsylvania
This presentation showcases the dual Chinese and English productions of The West Wing (西厢记), arguably the best drama China has ever produced, both of which were staged at Yale-NUS College in Singapore. The English production was performed by students from the Beginning Chinese class. Chinese opera is a form of musical theatre; its soul and charm lie in its lyrics and melody; students fell in love with it as they performed it. When they assumed the roles of the characters, they virtually lived Chinese culture. It motivated students to learn Chinese through dramatic work. For the Chinese production, most of the actors were students in advanced Chinese. The script used as much as possible of the original text. This enabled students to appreciate the beautiful poetry, vivid characterization, double entendre and subtext of the classical masterpiece.These semester-long theatrical projects helped boost enrolments in Chinese language and literature courses, and set off a China-craze on campus.
The presenter is a Chinese language instructor who organized these productions and adapted the Chinese script. She will discuss her experience adapting the original Yuan dynasty work for performance at a contemporary liberal arts college. She will also explain the techniques she used to produce Chinese texts that balance literary authenticity and contemporary intelligibility.
———————————————————————————-
Where’s My Ox? Learning the Japanese Tea Ceremony on the Journey Home
Janet Ikeda
Washington and Lee University
A collection of illustrations known as “The Ten Oxherding Pictures” is a well-known Zen teaching parable. Each illustration, with appended text and Chinese verses and later addition of Japanese verses, describes the various stages of Buddhist practice. The creation of the illustrations is attributed to a 12th-century Buddhist priest in China. We may ask why this visual depiction of an oxherding boy wandering in the mountains following the tracks of an unruly ox carries an unforgettable message for students in today’s classroom? Over the centuries, Buddhist priests, scholars and tea masters have interpreted the pictures. In my course on “chanoyu” or what is commonly referred to as the “Japanese tea ceremony,” students read a tea interpretation of these illustrations, which is found in Dennis Hirota’s “Wind in the Pines,” by the esteemed tea master Hamamoto Soshun.
The oxherding boy catches sight of the ox’s tracks, follows him through the mountains until he grabs hold of the animal with a tether. The ox resists being tamed at first until finally the tether grows slack, and he begins to obediently follow the boy’s lead. Eventually the tether is no longer needed and the boy hops on top of the ox and plays his flute as they stroll about the countryside. Only at the end does the viewer return to the marketplace. In many ways, this parable describes the educational journey of many an undergraduate student. The goal of a liberal arts education should be to encourage students to set out on this exploratory trek through mountainous terrain and, in the end, allow them to confront, lasso and wrangle with the larger picture of their life goals. I will use examples from teaching a lecture and practicum on the art of “chanoyu” to describe this journey.
———————————————————————————-
Case Analysis of a Chinese Drama Course
Bo Qian and Yuwei Jiang
Middlebury College
This course was a content-based course that provided guidance for students to learn Chinese drama through Chinese and improve their Chinese proficiency while learning drama. Through the process of designing and practicing the course, we followed the learning principle of “learning by doing”, encouraging students to discuss and analyze the scripts and guiding them to rehearse the short play. We also incorporated “Drama in Education” methods into the course to actively engage students’ experiences and emotions. These exercises and practices helped students gain a better understanding of Chinese drama and spoken Chinese.
We used a variety of interdisciplinary teaching methods to deepen students’ understanding of the three Chinese plays and guided students to perform a complete short theater piece in Chinese within the one-month course period. All students’ speaking skills had significant improvements, especially those who had just finished the prerequisite for taking the class. These students were able to express ideas and write literary commentaries in Chinese. Despite not living in a target language environment, even higher-level Chinese students were able to improve their ability to express abstract and complex ideas in Chinese through ample opportunities to lead discussions on the plays.
———————————————————————————–
Butoh and The Art of Being: A Creative Process Workshop
Craig Quintero
Grinnell College
In this one-hour workshop, I will introduce both the theory and praxis of butoh, providing a simple template for enabling students to kinesthetically engage with this form of contemporary Japanese dance. Since its development in Japan in the 1960s by Hijikata Tatsumi and Kazuo Ohno, butohhas emerged as a global dance movement, serving as a gateway into Japanese arts and culture and contemporary reflections on religion, sexuality, history, environment, and aesthetics. As a dance form, butoh emphasizes the uniqueness of each performer and challenges the strictly codified movements of Kabuki and Noh, enabling students without previous theatre or dance training to embody the tradition. No previous performance experience is required for this workshop.
———————————————————————————
Investigating Gender Relationship and Cross-Gender Performance: Teaching Chinese Yue Opera at a Women’s College
Ying Wang
Mount Holyoke College
This study intends to examine and explore the effective pedagogical strategies to teach a Chinese theater course, entitled Asian Studies 215: Androgyny and Gender Negotiation in Contemporary Chinese Women’s Theater.” Offered since 2012, this course focuses on Chinese Yue Opera, a predominantly all-female-cast performing art that acclaims to be the second most popular operatic theater after Beijing Opera.
Emerged in early twentieth century lower Yangtze Valley of China, Yue Opera has gone through a process that started withan all-male-cast at its inception, changed to and peaked with an all-female-cast in theRepublican era and early PRC period, forced to take gender-straight form during the Cultural Revolution, and revived back to an all-female-cast in the 1980s. The development of Yue Opera resonated with China’s socio-political changes of the May Fourth Movement (1919) and post-Cultural Revolution reform (1980s), and it is a successful story that theater art has interacted and benefited from women’s emancipation movement and that women have achieved more discursive power and the right to voice their needs and desires. Given its revival of cross-gender performing form, Yue Opera also offers a fertile ground to study gender identity, gender relationship, cross-dressing, and cross-gender performance in theater and in popular media.
In past years, this course mainly focused on the early part of Yue Opera’s historical development, its challenge of patriarchal ideology, the relationship between woman and man, and the art’s application of yin-yangaesthetic principles. Many different pedagogical approaches have been used in achieving these teaching goals, including blended learning, inviting embedded practitioners, video-conferencing with Yue Opera artists and fans, in addition to regular lecture and class discussion.
To further improve and broaden the perspective and content of this course, three aspects of related issues would be emphasized and strengthened this fall, which include more recent research studies and publications (such as new publications on queer theory and cross-dressing/cross-gender performance) in gender studies and women studies; a scrutiny of the revival of an all-female-cast after the Cultural Revolution; and theater’s role in negotiating gender identity and intervening social life. In terms of teaching methodology, in addition to providing students with a group of new reading materials to facilitate class lecture and discussion, two leading Yue Opera artists (Jun’an Wang, a young male lead, and Qi Tao, a young female lead) will be invited for a campus visit to host lecture, discussion, and demonstration for the class. If possible, collaboration with theater department and gender studies would be sought for the purpose of a broader and deeper discussion and exploration.
————————————————————————————
Toward a Reconstructive Approach to the Teaching of Asian Instrumental Chamber Ensembles in the Liberal Arts Context
Chuen-Fung Wong
Macalester College
This paper builds on the existing literature in the field of ethnomusicology that concerns world music performing ensembles at academic institutions. I also reflect on over a decade of my own experience directing traditional Asian ensembles at liberal arts institutions in both North America and Hong Kong. The case being examined here is small chamber instrumental ensembles of often no more than a dozen musicians performing repertoires and styles from a number of refined traditions in southeast China. Known somewhat indiscriminately as sizhu “silk-and-bamboo,” the genre and its aesthetic ideals of heterophony and collaborative ornamentation resonate broadly across comparable genres in other parts of Asia. Without losing sight of such important issues as representation, translation, and reflexivity, this paper seeks to understand world traditional music performance education at the liberal arts context as a uniquely transformative space for the cultivation of sounds, practices, contexts, and modes of creativity that lie outside the confines of modernist paradigms and reformist aesthetics (as in the case of modern professional Chinese concert traditions). A reconsideration of pedagogical strategies and performing practices as well as notions of competence and amateurism, I suggest, may offer interesting comparison with the broader liberal arts ideals.
———————————————————————————-
Performing Poetry and Painting: Teaching Chinese Literature and Culture in a Liberal Arts College
Sujane Wu
Smith College
This paper showcases a museum-based course, Chinese Poetry and the Other Arts, developed and taught in spring 2017 at Smith College. This course was supported by the Smith College Museum of Art’s Curriculum Integration Grant. Each student, during the process of learning and doing, cultivated their ability to critique and analyze works of art and visual objects from a museum exhibition, “Words and Images in Chinese Culture.” They analyzed and interpreted poems for the purpose of pairing with works of art, and presented their scholarship and recite the chosen poem to audiences at a campus-wide event, “Celebrating Collaborations: Students and Faculty Working Together.”
After the real-world presentation, students taking the course have also curated online exhibitions based on a theme. Expanding upon their course experiences, students put their new knowledge into practice and created a curatorial remix of “Words and Images in Chinese Culture.” They redesigned the exhibition by adding new works (paintings and poems), new interpretations, and multimedia (poetry recitations). The course culminated with the launch of the virtual exhibitions. These online exhibitions highlight an “aesthetic world” in which a poem or a painting alone could not accomplish. Intended for sharing with public audiences, this exhibition, as a way of performing, aims to contribute to scholarly discussion in the public sphere.
We hope this online exhibition provides a glimpse into the longstanding relationship between literary and visual expressions in Chinese tradition. We also hope through these student-curators’ lens, a multifaceted Chinese culture is manifested. Discovering the depth and inspiration that words and images have together to offer, we experience a holistic “aesthetic world” (jingjie境界). Words and images are two inextricably connected aspects of the arts in China. The two practices often complement and inspire each other: a painting is a silent poem, and a poem a painting in sound.
———————————————————————————–
Performing China: Educational Theatre for Chinese Learners
Hangping Xu
Middlebury College
This paper discusses the educational utilities of theatre in a liberal arts setting by proposing a four-week intensive course on modern Chinese spoken drama. The author argues for the central place of theatre in three aspects: 1) The dramatic medium of theatre provides a deeply emotional, socially collaborative, and highly creative platform where students practice their Chinese language; 2) Studying select classic Chinese dramas enables students to better understand Chinese history and culture; and 3) Theatre as a profoundly humanistic genre renders our cross-cultural educational experience more vivid, personalized and thus sympathetic. Taught in both Chinese and English during the Winter (J) term at Middlebury College, this course will have students not only carefully study the written scripts of classic modern Chinese dramas but also rehearse and eventually perform these dramatic pieces. Week 1 is theoretical and historical, that is, it focuses on the rise of modern spoken drama as a cultural and political project, posits a theoretical account of theatre as a dramatic medium, and discusses the differences between Western and Chinese theatrical traditions, between traditional and modern Chinese theatres. Week 2 and 3 are devoted to reading select modern Chinese dramas from the Republican, Socialist, and post-Mao periods. During week 4, students shall rehearse and perform. The final performance will be open to the public.
——————————————————————————-
Is There a Field Called Peking Opera Studies? How Do We Teach It?
Peng Xu
Swarthmore College
Despite its thriving in Chinese scholarship in recent decades, in English-speaking world Peking opera studies has never consolidated itself. Rather, this theatrical form is being studied as an object in various fields of scholarship such as social history, musicology, anthropology, visual and material culture, urban culture, film, media and sound studies, nationalism, colonialism and globalization. It then seems to be a unique, if not ideal, site to teach students how to approach an artistic form, with tremendous cultural and historical richness, from many different disciplinary perspectives. This course therefore helps students reach a broad understanding of Peking opera as a living tradition of theater; but beyond that, they will see how distinctly divergent approaches reshape the matrix of Peking opera studies. However, when Peking opera is placed into dense fields of social and cultural context, illuminating a historical phenomenon, the aesthetics and artistic expressions of the form tend to get lost. This essay discusses pros and cons of this course design, which was first implemented as an undergraduate student seminar at the University of Chicago and expanded and taught again at Swarthmore College.