As Jessica Nakamura and Katherine Saltzman-Li note in their essay collection Realisms in East Asian Performance, the conflation of reality with realism is very much a product of the realist movement in the West and its concomitant popularity. The ‘real’ onstage has been less of a concern for traditional East Asian performing arts, many which consider what they present onstage to be realism. The traditional view of realism in Asia still connects it with Western imperialistic overtones originating in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth. In this Eurocentric view, older Asian performing arts were labelled ‘classical’ and celebrated not for their authenticity but instead for their ‘theatricality’. Confronted with this paradigm, a work such as Realisms in East Asian Performance is very welcome. Through a broad selection of essays, covering material from pansori and jingju to the contemporary theatre, Nakamura and Saltzman-Li explore the multiple ways in which the theatrical ‘real’ is understood throughout Japan, China and Korea. Despite a few minor concerns about terminology and organization, Realisms in East Asian Performance presents the reader with a slew of interesting, and intellectually compelling, essays that add to the ongoing discussion of what constitutes the ‘real’ onstage. The editors are to be commended for selecting and developing essays that feel absolutely in conversation with each other.
The book is divided by theme into four sections: ‘Revealing Realisms’, ‘Real Life Onstage’, ‘Technologies’ and ‘Evolving Realisms’. The first section contains essays on Kabuki, jingju and the Korean realist theatre form sasiljuuigeuk. Katherine Saltzman-Li reclaims the term ‘realism’ by looking at how Kabuki actors trained, studied and were evaluated upon their ability to play material realistically. Xing Fan's examination of the performance text of Picking Up a Jade Bracelet argues that the body of the performer creates a realistic performance ‘text’. The final essay, Soo Ryon Yoon and Ji Hyon (Kayla) Yuh's ‘Racing the Real: Korean Realism Theater and Racial Representation in Cha Bumseok's Yeoldaeeo’, looks at the mid-twentieth-century play Yeoldaeeo (Tropical Fish) and at how this work explores the complexities of race and realism in South Korea. This essay, while well written and interesting, seems somewhat out of place with the other two in this section; a better fit would have been Min-Hyung Yoo's essay on pansori (which is in Section 2 of the text).
The second section looks at how ‘realistic expression can reflect the world back to us and what strategies are used to do so’ (p. 9). In the essays on the plays of Park Kunhyung by Kee-Yoon Nahm and post-socialist realism in China by Rossella Ferrari, readers familiar with the theories of de Certeau and Lefebvre will find fascinating Asian examples of the interactions between the everyday and the performative.
The book's third section contains some of the work's most compelling scholarship. Aragorn Quinn's essay on Yagi Ryūichirō's kinodrama The Laughing Letter (1937) is incredibly well researched, shedding light on this fascinating film/theatre hybrid. Quinn's essay is especially valuable as it highlights the supposed greater ‘realism’ inherent in film and demonstrates how this was not the case in this situation. Cody Poulton's essay on Japanese playwright Hirata Oriza, covering his work on colloquial and android theatre, connects the material in this chapter with Jyana Browne's essay on puppet theatre and Guojun Wang's look at clothing in traditional Chinese theatre. The field of material and object performance is emerging in the West and these essays add greatly to this scholarly field, reminding readers of the long traditions of material/object performance in Asia.
The final section of the book looks at the interactions between realistic performance and sociopolitical changes. With essays by Siyuan Liu (on huaju), Jessica Nakamura (on colloquial theatre in Japan) and Miseong Woo (on Korean realist drama of the 1920s), this section deals most closely with the historical understandings of realism.
There is one quibble I have with the text in its use of terminology. Realism is a recognized historical movement; the choice of the editors and authors to overwhelmingly use the term ‘realism’ as opposed to ‘real’, ‘reality’ or ‘truthful’ kept pulling that movement into the conversation. While this is certainly germane for some essays (such as Siyuan Liu's), for others the use of this term was distracting.
This is a minor issue, however. Realisms in East Asian Performance is an excellent text, highly readable, and full of intriguing ideas and information about a wide variety of theatre forms. It is an excellent read for anyone interested in representations of reality on stage; it is especially valuable for scholars of East Asian theatre.
