Iris H. Tuan and Ivy I-Chu Chang's edited collection adds to a growing corpus of scholarship that scrutinizes Asian performance through a transnational lens. The volume's primary merit lies in its effort to rethink the contemporary performance cultures of Asia and the Asian diaspora beyond national boundaries, and to present these as partaking in processes of identity construction which traverse and connect a plurality of cultural interests and social realities across shifting geopolitical borders. Covering a range of texts and styles, its nine chapters provide a comprehensive picture of the breadth of experimentation that characterizes current practice across the region, while also advancing some debates on familiar approaches to production, training and theorization. An example of the latter is Tsu-Chung Su's reassessment of the role of the Indian ritual tradition in Richard Schechner's performance theory.

Tuan's and Chang's chapters examine the current ‘glocalization’ of indigenous performance genres in Taiwan by looking, respectively, at hip hop jingju (Beijing opera) and Hakka opera from the perspective of cultural hybridity and intertextual adaptation. In raising the question of how to appeal to young audiences, Chang's analysis resonates with William Sun's reflections on the Shanghai Theatre Academy's intercultural drama pedagogy for pre-college education. Furthermore, Chang's observations on the sonic dimension of interculturalism and on processes of (self-)othering of Asian cultural traditions echo John Weinstein's reflections on the strategic deployment of ‘oriental’ aural, visual and choreographic elements in the transnational performance of Asian and Asian-American women's figure skating. Esther Kim Lee similarly investigates the diasporic dimension of Asian performance with an appraisal of the first presentation of a Korean-American play in South Korea, Sung Rno's Yi Sang Counts to Ten (1998), directed by Lee Breuer in Seoul in the year 2000. Lee makes a compelling argument for the need to recognize not only the gains but also the lost opportunities that transnational production might entail. Equally meaningful with regard to mobile Asian identities are Yoshiko Fukushima's and Yasushi Nagata's contributions: Fukushima investigates Hideki Noda's concurrently ‘transnational and intranational approach’ (p. 107) in British (2006) and Japanese (2010) versions of The Bee. Nagata considers the nexus of theatre and geography in Ishinha Theatre Company's 2010 staging of When a Taiwanese Grey Cow Stretched by Yukichi Matsumoto at a multi-sited festival held across several islands in Japan. Finally, Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren evaluates the gendered dimension of transnational performance in her perceptive examination of South Asian theatre's ‘translocal intimacies of disability’ (p. 124), arguing for the significance of gender and disability as catalysts of processes of identification across borders.

A common thread that runs through the chapters is the nexus of interculturalism and transnationalism. Individual contributors address these notions to varied extents, but more rigorous theorization of these and other key terms (such as identity and mobility) would have enriched the analysis and strengthened the volume's editorial vision. Additionally, the collection would have benefited from a cohesive definition of ‘performance’ and – indeed – a more extensive reflection on the physical geographies and conceptual latitudes of ‘Asia’ and ‘Asian performance’, since it covers not only theatre but also sport and ritual, and looks at the performativity of East and South Asian as well as Asian-American identities, both locally and transnationally. While the collection succeeds in exploring these themes empirically – thanks to a rich selection of case studies – it misses an opportunity to do so on a more conceptual level. A longer and theoretically more substantial introduction to the volume might have achieved this goal. However, the section designated as the introduction (which, unusually, does not appear in the table of contents) only presents brief chapter abstracts without elucidating their unifying rationale or articulating the volume's critical foundations and overarching themes. Nonetheless, the analytical insights these chapters offer will undoubtedly benefit future scholarship, as the variety of trends they scrutinize helps us think through some key manifestations of Asian transnational performance and their connections to performance geographies, intercultural adaptation, sport as performance, diaspora, gender and disability studies – among other areas of research.