“Thou art translated”: Remapping Hideki Noda and Satoshi Miyagi’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Post-March 11 Japan

As an example of this, I read A Midsummer Night’s Dream as adapted by Hideki Noda originally in 1992 and then directed by Miyagi Satoshi for the Shizuoka Performing Arts Centre in 2011. Drawing on my experience as the surtitle translator of Noda’s Japanese adaptation “back” into English, I discuss the linguistic and cultural metamorphosis of Noda’s reworking and the effects of its mediation in Miyagi’s rendition, and ask to what extent the production, adapted in post-March 2011 Japan, can be read as a “contact zone” for a translingual Japanese Shakespeare. In what way did Miyagi’s reading of the post-March 11 events inflect Noda’s adaption along socio-political lines? What is lost and gained in processes of adaptation in the wake of an environmental catastrophe

Through the Looking-Glass. The Wooster Group's "The Emperor Jones" (1993; 2006; 2009): Representation and Transgression

En 1993, la iconoclasta compañía estadounidense the wooster group, se propuso explorar las cuestiones sociales inherentes a la obra de o'neill y arrojar luz sobre sus mecanismos mediante el uso de diferentes estrategias metateatrales. Protagonizada por kaIn 1993, the iconoclastic American troupe, the wooster group, set out to explore the social issues inherent in o neill's work and to shed light on their mechanisms by employing varying metatheatrical strategies. Starring kate valk as a blackfaced brutus

Recent Ipswich CBD revitalisation - backdrop and reflections

In this paper we investigate the first stages of one of the largest regional regeneration projects in Australia. Although small by Asian standards, the Icon Project is an office and retail project, leased to the state government which is slated to catalyse revitalisation of Ipswich’s CBD. Ipswich Queensland is rapidly-growing city about 40 kilometres from Brisbane on the Bremer River. Once, due to its navigable access and surface coal, it was a candidate for Queensland’s state capital. But, as traditional industries folded in the 1970s, Ipswich declined economically and socially. The burning of Reids Department Store in 1985, the ill-considered Kern development, suburban retail leakage and a recession accelerated CBD decline. Recently, despite the GFC and floods, the rapid expansion of hydrocarbon prospecting in its western hinterland has lifted confidence in Ipswich’s future. Here, we sketch the backdrop to Ipswich’s growth and reflect on conflicts in planning between short-term economic goals and broader sustainable development

Saving the White Building: storytelling and the production of space

The White Building is an apartment complex in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. It was built in 1963 as a keystone of the Sihanouk governments' urban social housing scheme. After the fall of Khmer Rouge in 1979, the few surviving artists were called to live in The White Building due to its proximity to the National Theatre in order to re-build Khmer culture (the National Theatre has since been demolished). After decades of no maintenance and ongoing restructuring of the exterior, the White Building is in poor condition. However, behind the fading facade and dilapidated infrastructure there lives a complex community of over three thousand people including artists, musicians, community activists and everyday city dwellers. This paper explores the role of recent projects to document the everyday lives of the Building's inhabitants as both a means of resistance and to enable critical reflexivity among participants. Through the development of a number of initiatives across a variety of mediums and media platforms including the very successful Humans of Phnom Penh series, whitebuilding.org and the Sa Sa Art Projects artists' collective based in the building there is a desire to not only celebrate and document the living memory of this unique community, but to push back against government and property developers' interest in the site. By utilising a Lefebvrian analysis we argue, first, that the dominant discursive acts of the more powerful can be challenged through the expression of the 'lived' and the elevation of everyday life. And, second, we argue that the very perception of the space and the sense of place is (re)produced through these interactions across these new and diverse mediascapes

Persistent Place-Making in Prehistory: the Creation, Maintenance, and Transformation of an Epipalaeolithic Landscape

Most archaeological projects today integrate, at least to some degree, how past people engaged with their surroundings, including both how they strategized resource use, organized technological production, or scheduled movements within a physical environment, as well as how they constructed cosmologies around or created symbolic connections to places in the landscape. However, there are a multitude of ways in which archaeologists approach the creation, maintenance, and transformation of human-landscape interrelationships. This paper explores some of these approaches for reconstructing the Epipalaeolithic (ca. 23,000–11,500 years BP) landscape of Southwest Asia, using macro- and microscale geoarchaeological approaches to examine how everyday practices leave traces of human-landscape interactions in northern and eastern Jordan. The case studies presented here demonstrate that these Epipalaeolithic groups engaged in complex and far-reaching social landscapes. Examination of the Early and Middle Epipalaeolithic (EP) highlights that the notion of “Neolithization” is somewhat misleading as many of the features we use to define this transition were already well-established patterns of behavior by the Neolithic. Instead, these features and practices were enacted within a hunter-gatherer world and worldview

Transnational Spectrality: History, Trauma and Phantom Bodies in Postcolonial Asian Art and Literature

This dissertation proposes “transnational spectrality” as a socio-cultural phenomenon of a globalized world. Examining ghosts as metaphors of subaltern or counter-hegemonic transnational subjectivity, memory and history, this study focuses on transnationalism’s potential by exploring the intersection between terms, such as the subaltern, spectrality, transnational Asia, colonial/postcolonial histories, trauma and bodies. Particularly discussing postcolonial Asian literature and art works that dramatize traumatic historical events in Korea, India, and Sri Lanka, this project investigates how these cultural products construct a spectral vision of nations and the world through their metaphoric uses of wounded or phantom bodies. This dissertation begins with the examinations of Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman (1997) and the Korean-American female artists’ works—Yong Soon Min’s decolonization (1991) and Remembering Jungshindae (1992), Soo Jin Kim’s “Comfort Me” (1993) and Miran Kim’s Comfort Women (1995-8) that explore the history of comfort women—sexual slaves for Japanese imperial armies during World War II. By representing traumatized female bodies as emblems of the inherited trauma of the homeland, these diasporic producers provide an alternative paradigm for transnational history that challenges not only Japanese and American masculinist colonialism/neocolonialism, but also Korean patriarchy and nationalism. This project also examines how Salman Rushdie, whose novel Midnight’s Children (1981), and Indian-origin artists such as Sutapa Biswas, Yatin Patel, Surekha and Reena Saini present visions of “spectral India”—the nation as a liminal/hybrid space—through their manifestations of houses and bodies haunted by historical trauma. This project extends its investigation to Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost (2000) along with Sri Lankan local and global artists—Bandu Manamperi, Janani Cooray, Pradeep Chandrasiri, R. Veidehi and Kali Arulpragasam. These Sri Lanka cultural producers portray the spectralized victims of the Sri Lankan Civil War as metonyms of the national trauma, presenting the wounded or phantom body as a communicative space that links personal trauma to collective trauma on a local, national and global scale. Finally, Transnational Spectrality concludes that these postcolonial Asian practitioners emerge as transnational agents who can offer a fuller understanding of Asia to the transnational world by representing the fear, pain and suffering that Asian communities bear as the consequences of colonialism and its aftermath of violence

Summary of workshop large outdoor fires and the built environment

Large outdoorfires present a risk to the built environment. Wildfires that spread into communities, referred to as Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI)fires, havedestroyed communities throughout the world, and are an emerging problem infire safety science. Other examples are large urbanfires including those that haveoccurred after earthquakes. Research into large outdoorfires, and how to potentially mitigate the loss of structures in suchfires, lags other areas offire safety scienceresearch. At the same time, common characteristics betweenfire spread in WUIfires and urbanfires have not been fully exploited. In this paper, an overview of thelarge outdoorfire risk to the built environment from each region is presented. Critical research needs for this problem in the context offire safety scienceare provided.The present paper seeks to develop the foundation for an international research needs roadmap to reduce the risk of large outdoorfires to the built environment.Peer ReviewedPreprin