Theatre of Asian Diasporas as Methodology: Performing, Choreographing, Collaborating, and Documenting Asian Diaspora Experiences

• In Event: Asian Diaspora Inquiries: Decolonizing and Deimperializing Theoretical and Methodological Traditions

Abstract

The presentation is derived from an Asian diaspora scholar/artist’s experience in performing, choreographing, and collaborating on various plays and other documentary theatrical events in the US. Specifically, the Asian diaspora scholar/artist’s experiences in this presentation are from documentary theater performances on the lost history of a treaty that changed the world, The Treaty of Breda, from the perspectives of the people that history has ignored, the people of the spice islands (Jenkins, 2017). These documentary theaters were created, choreographed, and performed at the university theaters, public theaters, Asian diaspora events, art museums, and university classrooms, as well as broadcasted by both national and international media outlets inside and outside the US. The scholar/artist also collaborated with students in producing documentary theater as part of the class curriculum in which the students co-wrote scripts.

The Treaty of Breda is an agreement between the Dutch and the English to trade Run Island, Maluku, Indonesia for Manhattan, New York. The Treaty attempts to establish peace by formally erasing the memory of war. The forgotten Run Island is the producer of nutmeg, the most coveted luxury in seventeenth-century Europe (Milton, 1999). The presentation will articulate the reflections inspired from the artistic practice, oral history, and archival texts used in the play scripts, and participation in performing, choreographing, and collaborating in the project as a way to advance theater of Asian diasporas as methodology: (1) to speak and learn about Asian diasporas; (2) to create spaces of critical exchange of histories, narratives, cultures, translations, struggles, (un)knowingness, knowledge, and knowledge production, and intercultural creativity that engage with Asian diaspora audiences in transnational contexts; (3) to connect the nodes on Asian diasporas; and (4) to connect with Asian diasporas to think and understand logics of coloniality and decoloniality, and the construct of colonial body then and now in curriculum, schooling, and education. In addition, the presentation will discuss the impact of the “missed” or “forgotten” histories on the lives of schooled children.

Presentation engages with works from Um (2005) on diaspora and interculturalism, Chen (2010) on Asia as method, Indonesian immigrants in the US writers on Indonesian diaspora literature (Adji, Mulyani, & Rosiandani, 2018; Mignolo, 2007) on decoloniality, and Smith (1999) on decolonizing methodology.

Author

• Dinny Risri Aletheiani, Yale University