East Asia in Motion: Literature, Cinema, Dance, Yale February 27-March 1, 2009

[East Asian Studies]

East Asia in Motion: Literature, Cinema, Dance
A symposium sponsored by the Council on East Asian Studies, the  
Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, and the Whitney  
Humanities Center

Yale University
Whitney Humanities Center Auditorium, 53 Wall Street
February 27 to March 1, 2009

Featuring presentations by artists
Kanai Katsu and Shen Wei

This symposium seeks to extend the breadth of current scholarship on  
East Asia by focusing on literary, cinematic, and choreographic  
manifestations of movement. Oriented around the multivalent theme of  
“movement,” participants practicing a range of analytical and  
creative methodologies will collaboratively interrogate the limits  
of “East Asia” as presently configured while simultaneously  
exploring new avenues for engaged scholarly inquiry. By putting  
pressure on the multiple ways in which the cinematic, literary,  
choreographic, and political overlap and interpenetrate through the  
figure of movement, we hope to remain critically mindful of the  
extent to which any discursive motion, “East Asian” or otherwise,  
is always contoured and compelled by a range of ideological forces.  
Presentations will gesture beyond the staid borders of the  
“national” and outstrip the confines of singular academic  
disciplines. This will be done in the hope that the symposium’s  
theme of “movement” might provide a provisional pivot point in  
response to which participants can venture individual contributions  
to a dynamic, rigorous communal conversation about the ways in which  
East Asia moves and means in a planetary context.

The symposium will move beyond the borders of a normal academic  
conference by featuring the transnational work of two artists: the  
independent, avant-garde filmmaker Kanai Katsu, showing his work in  
North America for the first time; and the Chinese choreographer and  
dancer Shen Wei, who helped choreograph the Opening Ceremony of the  
Beijing Olympics. Papers for the two Saturday panels will be made  
available for participants beforehand so as to concentrate on  
discussion.


Registration required. Please register for this event by February 23  
via email to anne.letterman at yale.edu


Schedule

Friday, February 27, 2009

6:00 pm    Welcome Reception
                   Room 108, Whitney Humanities Center

  7:00pm    Independent Movement: The Cinema of Kanai Katsu
                  The Desert Archipelago (Mujin rett?, 1969), 35mm,  
55 min.
                   Good-Bye (1971), 16mm, 52 min.

Coming at the tail end of the 1960s New Wave, Kanai Katsu became a  
pioneer of truly independent filmmaking that traversed Japan and  
Korea to surrealistically engage with issues of politics and  
identity. The Desert Archipelago won the Grand Prix at the Nyon  
International Film Festival.

9:00 pm    Roundtable discussion on Kanai Katsu
                   Kanai Katsu – Japanese Filmmaker and Director
                    Markus Nornes – University of Michigan
                    Naoki Yamamoto – Ph.D student, Yale University
                    Seung-hoon Jeong – Ph.D student, Yale University
                    Aaron Gerow – Yale University

Saturday, February 28, 2009

  10:00 am   Panel One: Moving Images of Empire
                    Michael Bourdaughs – University of Chicago
                     Jonathan Hall – University of California, Irvine
                     Yingjing Zhang – University of California, San  
Diego

2:00 pm    Panel Two: Becoming Animal: Zones of Exchange and the  
Post-   Human Organism
                   Victor Fan – Ph.D student, Yale University
                    Christine Marran, University of Minnesota
                    Christine Yano, University of Hawaii

7:00 pm    Lecture-Demonstration by Shen Wei

Choreographer, director, dancer, painter and designer, Shen Wei is  
widely recognized for his defining vision of an intercultural,  
interdisciplinary, utterly original mode of movement-based  
performance. Mr. Shen will discuss his artistic vision, past and  
current projects, and the ways in which his work pushes the  
boundaries of what it means to "move" as a dancer in a transnational  
context.

8:30 pm    Roundtable discussion on Shen Wei
                   Shen Wei – founder and director of Shen Wei Dance  
Arts
                    Paize Keulemans – Yale University
                    Reggie Jackson – Yale University
                    Karen Shimakawa – New York University

Sunday, March 1, 2009

10:00 am    Concluding Roundtable:  Moving Forward: Further Questions  
and Trajectories
                    Shu-mei Shih – University of California, Los  
Angeles
                     Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto – New York University


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