History of Art Gallery, Goldwin Smith Hall
Reception to follow
Free and open to the public
YAN HAIPING
Professor, Theatre Arts, Comparative Literature, and East Asian Studies, Cornell University
Zijiang Chair Professor of Humanistic Studies, East China Normal University (ECNU), Shanghai
Director, Cornell-ECNU Center for Comparative Cultural Studies
MY DREAM: "NEW CHINA" IN PERFORMANCE
"Humans as a species reached the end of their development tens of thousands of years ago; but humanity as a species is just at its beginning." --- Walter Benjamin, 1930s
Abstract:
Through an analysis of My Dream, the signature piece of the Chinese Disabled People’s Performing Art Troupe, this essay explores potential implications of the unusual human energies engendered by this troupe through its simultaneous engagement with and contestation of the seemingly totalizing profit-centered logic of the marketplace and its cognitive regimes of value. Grounded in a transformative renewal of Chinese cultural-cum-historical images and facilitated by a creative utilization of the techniques of “mainstream” performance a la standardizing commercial marketability, My Dream stages an intervention into that globalizing “mainstream” which both exceeds its general parameters and draws attention to the specific material existence of the performers and their evocative significations. The “excess labor” required by these dancers, singers and musicians in order to re-define their “disabilities” on stage physically doubles and aesthetically tropes the excess labor with which they come to terms with the challenges of everyday life-practice in a material world deeply mediated by a cognitive mechanism of power relations that largely establishes itself through a foreclosure of variables that are irreducible to its operative codes of human normality, social worthiness, and the limits of intelligibility. My Dream therefore destabilizes the binary-leveraged distinction between ability and disability, the normal and abnormal, the valuable and valueless, the globally universal and the Chinese particular. In so doing, My Dream proposes a new model, in the figure of the excess laborer, for re-thinking what it actually means, could mean and ought to mean to be an active human being in a moment of world history otherwise marked as “post-human.” Thus, while My Dream stages what we might call a “Chinese image” as a locus of live energies both inherent to and exceeding such a moment of history, one that invites differential identifications as it moves across as well as mobilizes through differential socio-cultural sites around the world, we may also deploy such an image and its grounding notion of excess labor to rethink and indeed re-work, at the limits of the reproduction of the “mainstream” marketability and its lexicon, the relationship between the conditions of the historically (de)formed particularity and the dynamics of an embodied image of the universally human.
Yan Haiping, who holds her BA from Fudan University and advanced degrees from Cornell University in arts and literature, was awarded the First Prize for Excellence in Drama, 1980-81 by the All China Dramatists Association and the Ministry of Culture of the People’s Republic of China for her ten-act historical play Li Shimin, Prince of Qin. She was selected by CNN as “one of the six most influential Chinese cultural figures” in 1999 for her academic and creative works in both English and Chinese. Author of Chinese Women Writers and the Feminist Imagination, 1905-1948 (2006 and 2008) and Amidst Landscapes of Mobility: Tropes of Home in Urbanizing China (2011), Yan is Professor of Theatre Arts, Comparative Literature, and East Asian Studies at Cornell University; Zijiang Chair Professor of Humanistic Studies at East China Normal University (ECNU) in Shanghai; and was in 2009 the founding director of the Cornell-ECNU Center for Comparative Cultural Studies.
Co-sponsored by the East Asia Program, the Department of Asian Studies, and the Society for the Humanities
