Registration and participation
Participation on spot
Venue: Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften, Am Wingertsberg 4, 61348 Bad Homburg
The number of participants is limited and only possible after prior registration: anmeldung@forschungskolleg-humanwissenschaften.de.

Participation via Zoom
For the Zoom registration link, please click here

About the lecture
This talk will introduce the concept of »xiqu 2.0« as a form of »expanded Chinese opera« (xiqu) and a contemporary articulation of Sinophone classicism. Xiqu 2.0 refers to performance experiments that rework the classical theatres of the Sinophone region through deconstructionist techniques and digital technologies. Xiqu 2.0 highlights strategies of versioning and serialization, media and textual interactivity, transnational networking, and participative contexts of production, reception, and circulation – including the circulation and sharing of cultural memory across the Sinosphere. The multiple dimensions of xiqu 2.0 are illustrated through the experimental xiqu practice of Hong Kong-based theatre and visual artist Danny Yung and his company, Zuni Icosahedron. Characteristic of Yung’s style of deconstructed classicism is his long-term work on the celebrated sixteenth-century Chinese drama, Peony Pavilion, in such productions as Sigmund Freud in Search of Chinese Matter and Mind (2002/2016) and The Interrupted Dream series. Launched in 2018 as a trans-Asian collaboration, The Interrupted Dream was redeveloped with a local Hong Kong cast and live-streamed in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic. In the aftermath of the 2019/20 Hong Kong protests, this new virtual manifestation, followed by an updated version in 2021, reconfigured the series as a channel of mediated remembrance across the digital Sinosphere and an incisive commentary on past and present revolutions, old and new »Chinese dreams«.

About the speaker
Rossella Ferrari is Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Vienna, Austria, and has previously taught at SOAS University of London, UK. Her research focuses on the contemporary performance cultures of the Chinese-speaking region, transnational and inter-Asian approaches to Sinophone cultural production, intercultural theatre, and theories and practices of the avant-garde. Her publications include Pop Goes the Avant-Garde: Experimental Theatre in Contemporary China (2012), Transnational Chinese Theatres: Intercultural Performance Networks in East Asia (2020), and Asian City Crossings: Pathways of Performance through Hong Kong and Singapore (2021, co-edited with Ashley Thorpe).

About the lecture series
In recent years, literary and cultural works that evoke the cultural memories of classical Chinese traditions are gaining popularity in the global Sinitic-languages space and cyberspace. From literary to visual culture, from pop music to fashion, from state policies to daily rituals, these classicist articulations present Chineseness as complicated, multifaceted, multilingual, and cross-cultural. They raise important questions on the relevance of Chinese traditions today to China, to global Chinese communities, and to a future of »world literature«—as Goethe envisioned it nearly two centuries ago. In this multiannual lecture series, prominent scholars, writers, and artists will present fascinating case studies from their research or draw upon their aesthetic practices to elaborate on their understanding on these important questions. Such investigations demonstrate the abundant aesthetic and intellectual resources that the vast repertoire of Chinese cultural memories may provide to engage in a dialogue on the present and future of a global culture.

Concept of the lecture series: Zhiyi Yang, Professor of Sinology, Goethe University Frankfurt am Main and Goethe Fellow at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften