On (not) being useful: the art of drifting in Asian contemporary theatre

ABSTRACT In 2014, I founded Scene/Asia, a platform of critique and dialogue for Asian contemporary performances. The main objective of the project was to extract performance tropes and concepts cultivated on the Asian soil; we tried to build a pool of knowledge that uses ‘Asian theatre [and not Western theatre] as method’, to cite Rossella Ferrari, who, in turn, borrowed from Kuan Hsing-Chen. Taking this three-year project as an empirical basis, this paper argues, in a hybrid language consisting of fieldwork reports, discussion outcomes, curatorial procedures and scholarly analysis, that the three pillars of Western canonisation in theatre – institutionalisation, historicisation and the ensuing commodification – may be ‘useful’ to the West, but a priori contradict the raison d’être of traditional Asian performances. The paper demonstrates this by referring to traditional Asian pop-up theatres and a text by Japanese ethnologist Orikuchi Shinobu, who argues that Japanese entertainers were originally ukare-bito (drifting people). Finally, this paper demonstrates an analysis of Malaysian theatre director Mark Teh’s Version 2020: The Complete Future of Malaysia (2017) as a contemporary Asian theatre piece that brings into relief ‘Asian theatre as method’ by adopting what Teh calls the ‘dispersive dramaturgy’.