Author Description

This book is an analysis of the theatrical imaginative as it manifests in theatre and performance in Australia, Indonesia, Japan and Singapore. The sites encompass marked differences in language, performance, history and politics, and variations in the solidity and volatility of their imagined worlds. Recognizing these differences, the book explores contrasts in each nation as it identifies with the region and the cultural interconnections that support a regional identity. While the four nations demonstrate degrees of ambivalence and connection to the Asia-Pacific as a region, the project argues that relations to modernity and globalization are less nation-specific. The project articulates a regional configuration of modernity which is multiple, contradictory but nonetheless regional. Each nation has in common the imperative to reconcile with and adapt to European modernity in a way that renders global modernity multiple rather than singular.