This first-ever biography exploring the life of Ping Chong (1946), successful avant-garde artist and Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient, focuses on his valuable contributions to modern theatre. Drawing on primary sources and her own attendance of Chong's productions, the author takes a broad and informative approach to his work as a performer, playwright and director over 48 years.
"The cumulative power of these shared stories is nothing short of astonishing. Ping Chong creates a tremendous tapestry of lives."—Twin Cities Reader This three-piece volume of Undesirable Elements, the community-specific theater works series, examines the lives of those born into one culture but living in another. Each production grows out of an extended residency, during which Ping Chong and his collaborators conduct interviews of community members and then create a script that explores both historical and personal narratives. Ping Chong is a theater director, playwright, choreographer, and video and installation artist. The recipient of two OBIE awards, two Bessie awards, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, he has created more than fifty works for the stage, including twenty-five in his Undesirable Elements series.
This engrossing studyinvestigates the connections between hearing and deafness in experimental, Deaf, and multicultural theater. Author Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren focuses on how to articulate a Deaf aesthetic and how to grasp the meaning of moments of "deafness" in theater works that do not simply reinscribe a hearing bias back into one's analysis. She employs a model using a device for cross-sensory listening across domains of sound, silence, and the moving body in performance that she calls the "third ear." Kochhar-Lindgren then charts a genealogy of the theater of the third ear from the mid-1800s to the 1960s in examples ranging from Denis Diderot, the Symbolists, the Dadaists, Antonin Artaud, and others. She also analyzes the work of playwright Robert Wilson, the National Theatre of the Deaf, and Asian American director Ping Chong. She shows how the model of the third ear can address not only deaf performance but also multicultural performance, by analyzing the Seattle dance troupe Ragamala's 2001 production of Transposed Heads, which melded classical South Indian use of mudras, or hand gestures, and ASL signing. The shift in attention limned in Hearing Difference leads to a different understanding of the body, intersubjectivity, communication, and cross-cultural relations, confirming it as a critically important contribution to contemporary Deaf studies.
The rise of performance art as chronicled by renowned critic Sally Banes. Her approach to the complex matrix of art, community, and culture draws on histories and theories of painting, photography, dance, theater, and folklore. Her vivid descriptions and provocative interpretations fill a gap in the history of contemporary performance--where the avant-garde met the mainstream.
In recent years adaptation studies has established itself as a discipline in its own right, separate from translation studies. The bulk of its activity to date has been restricted to literature and film departments, focussing on questions of textual transfer and adaptation of text to film. It is however, much more interdisciplinary, and is not simply a case of transferring content from one medium to another. This collection furthers the research into exactly what the act of adaptation involves and whether it differs from other acts of textual rewriting. In addition, the 'cultural turn' in translation studies has prompted many scholars to consider adaptation as a form of inter-semiotic translation. But what does this mean, and how can we best theorize it? What are the semiotic systems that underlie translation and adaptation? Containing theoretical chapters and personal accounts of actual adaptions and translations, this is an original contribution to translation and adaptation studies which will appeal to researchers and graduate students.
In his debut picture book, Motum brings the story of NASA's beloved Mars rover Curiosity to life in vivid color. Full of eye-catching retro illustrations, this book is sure to fascinate budding space explorers and set inquisitive minds soaring. Full color.
'Living as Form' grew out of a major exhibition at Creative Time in New York City. Like the exhibition, the book is a landmark survey of more than 100 projects selected by a 30-person curatorial advisory team; each project is documented by a selection of colour images.
With humor and grace, the memoir of a first-generation Chinese American in New York City Our Laundry, Our Town is a memoir that decodes and processes the fractured urban oracle bones of Alvin Eng's upbringing in Flushing, Queens in the 1970s. Back then, his family was one of the few immigrant Chinese families in a far-flung neighborhood in New York City. His parents had an arranged marriage and ran a Chinese Hand Laundry. From behind the counter of his parent’s laundry and within the confines of a household that was rooted in a different century and culture, he sought to reconcile this insular home life with the turbulent yet inspiring street life that was all around them––from the faux martial arts of tv’s Kung Fu to the burgeoning underworld of the punk rock scene. In the 1970s, NYC, like most of the world, was in the throes of regenerating itself in the wake of major social and cultural changes resulting from the Counterculture and Civil Rights movements. And by the 1980s, Flushing had become NYC’s second Chinatown. But Eng remained one of the neighborhood’s few Chinese citizens who could not speak fluent Chinese. Finding his way in the downtown theater and performance world of Manhattan, he discovered the under-chronicled Chinese influence on Thornton Wilder’s foundational Americana drama, Our Town. This discovery became the unlikely catalyst for a psyche-healing pilgrimage to Hong Kong and Guangzhou, China—his ancestral home in southern China—that led to writing and performing his successful autobiographical monologue, The Last Emperor of Flushing. Learning to tell his own story on stages around the world was what proudly made him whole. As cities, classrooms, cultures, and communities the world over continue to re-examine the parameters of diversity, equity, and inclusion, Our Laundry, Our Town will reverberate with a broad readership.
