East Asia in Motion: Literature, Cinema, Dance

We're holding a big symposium here at Yale next weekend featuring especially the independent filmmaker Kanai Katsu, who is coming to the USA for the first time, Here's the announcement:

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 sign-up for this event by February 23 via email to anne.letterman@yale.edu

SCHEDULE

Friday, February 27, 2009

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

7:00 PM  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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