Doug Eacho
@dougeacho
asst prof of theatre and performance studies at the national university of singapore. 🇺🇸/🇨🇦. writing a book about automating theatre (surrealism, cybernetics, backstage tech, ai) in which i discover to much astonishment that it was capital all along.
i finished this book. fascinating on ming/qing chinese development. i think a little sanguine about the PRC (2007, a different time.) but its deep discusson about the usa's transformation into an indebted racketeer post-hegemony is, twenty years on, chilling.
current draft of readings for the "Drama in the 20th Century" undergraduate course I'll teach this winter. my attempt at narrating a global (with many caviats) canon. some essays and interviews will be added. i am also not 100% committed to which brecht to teach.
checked out the letterboxd of my favorite film today (Hou's THREE TIMES, 2004) and the most liked review quotes Barthes and Badiou and ends with "love is a dialectics" i guess all the romantic theoryheads are suckers for this one together
then there is the newly abridged Norton, which goes Athens to today in one volume. Ed. Gainor, Garner, and Puchner Let's say you just assign it and start at Ibsen. OK, here's your list.
showing my receipts -- there is one "Modern and Contemporary Drama" anthology in print, from Routledge (2016), ed. Maggie Gale and John Deeney. It's provocative in some ways I sympathize with, but it is 95% European without being labelled as such. (and the USA choices are, um, eccentric.)
captivating, fetishistic, clever. again and again surprising but at end the oldest and most familiar story there could be. postmodernism isn't dead yet. "Oh dear oh dear oh dear!"
finally writing up my take on Appia's 1913 Orfeo (pictured: the Act II underworld, perhaps the single most influential work of set design ever produced?). if anyone wants to share references to critical interpretations of the orpheus myth - right now i'm working w/ Blanchot's - please do share
And some thoughtful, comical video documents of 90s-00s performance art, a form that remains very difficult to produce within the country.
And then we arrive at SG's properly revolutionary and nationalist moment. The star here is Khoo Sui Hoe's "Children of the Sun." I exclaimed "what the fuck!!" as soon as we saw this and earned a glare from the guards.
Four more from the 1950s, including a cubist/expressionist depiction of the labour protests that rocked Singapore in the decade and brought the PAP to power. Meanwhile Liu Kang's loves for Bali and Matisse are rather on the nose, but, I sympathize...
Three 1930s paintings by Tchang Ju Chi, and photos of his anti-Japanese political activites.
Very taken by this. Chua Mia Tee, "National Language Class," 1959. The chalkboard reads "What is your name?" in Malay.
at the national gallery of singapore today, and as usual in this country, having my mind blown. astonishing heights of postcolonial modernism. posting for now, will add alt text captions later.
teaching a class on popular performance at NUS means students sharing shit with me past what my weak millennial american mind can comprehend. behold Wang Sulong's "ROMANCE CITY" concert at Bird's Nest (capacity 100K), complete with floats, mascots, transparent LED displays, ceiling projection... 😶
the nyt refusing to call the One Piece flag a One Piece flag seems symptomatic of a whole set of crises: of journalistic style, of generational divisions, and especially of an american liberal order that cannot speak (let alone understand) what the world has become
A few turns of events differently and a KMT China could have joined the Axis. Taylor stresses how seriously Stalin took this possibility, and how commited he was to keeping Chaing in place to prevent it.
The US thought a Japanese China sounded good for business as late as 36.
Madame Chiang (Soong Meiling) was an incredible character and still may have been the least interesting of her siblings. I really have to see the Soong Sisters movie