• From the Editor
• Siyuan Liu

This issue starts with Christina Sunardi’s “Speaking of the Spiritual: An Exploration of Knowledge and Pedagogy in Performing Arts in Malang, East Java,” which examines ilmu or spiritual knowledge Sunardi’s teachers imparted or encouraged her to obtain during her fieldwork on gamelan music and dance in east Java. Viewing their practice as pedagogy, Sunardi methodically documents the ways her teachers conceptually and physically transmitted or prepared her to receive ilmu, whether through ascetic practices and ceremonies or helping her to interpret dreams and encouraging her to ask spirits for permission or blessings. In addition to performance pedagogy, Sunardi also contends that the emphasis on ilmu as “part of performers’ cultural work to maintain local culture and ways of knowing, teaching, learning, and doing the arts despite the influences of Western and Middle Eastern cultures that have been aspects of globalization and urbanization.”

The other article on Southeast Asian performance, “Celebration and Remembrance in Kalibo’s Ati-atihan: Mythmaking, Devotion, and Cultural Memory” by S Anril Tiatco, studies the Philippine Ati-Atihan festival in Kalibo on Panay Island, which both honors the town’s patron saint, Santo Niño (The Child Jesus), and commemorates the original settlers of the island, the dark-skinned Atis. As such, the festival both predates the Spanish colonialism and is fused with Christian meaning. As a juror of its 2020 competition, Tiatco examines the festival’s three components, a dance drama reenacting the Borneans’s initial encounter with the Ati people and purchase of the island, an improvised street dance, and a cultural dance competition. He argues the festival is “a concatenation of entanglements: devotion and entertainment, utopia and nostalgia, and history and mythmaking.”

Moving on to South Asia, Gérard Toffin’s “The Past in the Present: The Religious and Royal Dimension of Newar Traditional Dance Theatre, Nepal” focuses on a geographic site rarely covered in Asian [End Page iii] Theatre Journal. A social anthropologist with decades of fieldwork in the Kathmandu Valley, Toffin makes a case for the strong relationship between contemporary dance theatre of the Newars of the Kathmandu Valley and theatre of the Malla dynasty between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries, largely thanks to the geographical seclusion of the valley and appreciation of the form by the region’s subsequent rulers. He focuses on two notable aspects of the performance, namely its religious and kingly dimensions. At the same time, he also notes that while these features are still strong even after the abolition of the monarchy in 2008, the event has shifted the patronage system from the royal court to the government and private sectors, resulting in more reliance on NGOs, UNESCO, and foreign embassies that may affect the future of “[t]his dance theatre [that] is too heavily shrouded in religious notions to be easily transmuted into a secular spectacle.”

Toffin’s work is followed by two other articles on South Asian theatre; the first is Qaisar Abbas’s “Decolonizing and Producing Working-class Theatre in Pakistan: The Poetics and Politics of Sangat Theatre’s Chog Kusumbhey Di (Picking Safflower).” Against the backdrop of rise (in the 1980s) and fall of political theatre in contemporary postcolonial Pakistan, Abbas focuses on the case of the all-voluntary Sangat Theatre as pioneering an alternative aesthetic reality in the new millennium. The essay zooms in on one of the theatre’s productions, Chog Kusumbhey Di (Picking Safflower), which is inspired by a seventeenth to eighteenth century classical Punjabi kafi poem, about the exploitation of seven female agricultural workers and their resistance efforts; it has been performed more than 200 times in non-theatrical venues. Based on extensive fieldwork, the article examines the politics of the play’s content and staging as “a journey from the tragedy of the laborer women to their jubilant dance of refusal,… [which] excites the audience to take action in the face of an unresolved issue reaching its climax.”

In the final article on South Asian theatre, “Ethos of Yajña Ritual: Mapping Girish Karnad’s The Fire and the Rain,” Sangita Patil provides a welcome study of another important work by the prominent Indian playwright Girish Karnad, known in the English...

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•  刘思源

本期以克里斯蒂娜·苏纳迪 (Christina Sunardi) 的“谈论精神：东爪哇玛琅表演艺术知识和教育学的探索”开始，该书探讨了苏纳迪的老师在加美兰音乐和舞蹈实地考察期间传授或鼓励她获得的ilmu或精神知识。在东爪哇。 Sunardi 将他们的实践视为教育学，系统地记录了她的老师从概念和身体上传播或准备她接受ilmu 的方式，无论是通过禁欲实践和仪式，还是帮助她解释梦想并鼓励她向灵魂寻求许可或祝福。除了表演教育学之外，苏纳尔迪还认为，尽管受到西方和中东文化的影响，但强调伊尔穆是“表演者文化工作的一部分，以维护当地文化以及认识、教学、学习和艺术的方式”。是全球化和城市化的各个方面。”

另一篇关于东南亚表演的文章，S Anril Tiatco 撰写的《卡利博阿蒂阿蒂汉节的庆祝与纪念：神话制作、奉献和文化记忆》研究了班乃岛卡利博的菲律宾阿蒂阿蒂汉节，该节日都是为了纪念该镇的赞助人圣人圣婴（圣婴耶稣），并纪念岛上最初的定居者，黑皮肤的阿蒂斯。因此，这个节日既早于西班牙殖民主义，又融合了基督教的意义。作为 2020 年比赛的评委，Tiatco 审查了该节日的三个组成部分：重演婆罗洲人与阿蒂人初次相遇并购买岛屿的舞剧、即兴街舞和文化舞蹈比赛。他认为这个节日是“一系列纠葛的结合：奉献与娱乐、乌托邦与怀旧、历史与神话。”

转向南亚，杰拉尔·托芬 (Gérard Toffin) 的《过去与现在：尼泊尔尼瓦尔传统舞蹈剧院的宗教与皇家维度》聚焦于亚洲[完页 iii]戏剧杂志中很少报道的地理位置。托芬是一位在加德满都谷地进行了数十年实地考察的社会人类学家，他论证了加德满都谷地尼瓦尔人的当代舞蹈剧场与十三至十八世纪马拉王朝戏剧之间的密切关系，这在很大程度上要归功于地理上的隔绝该地区后来的统治者对山谷的认识和形式的欣赏。他重点关注表演的两个值得注意的方面，即宗教和国王层面。同时，他还指出，尽管这些特征在2008年废除君主制后仍然很明显，但该活动已将赞助制度从皇室转移到政府和私营部门，导致对非政府组织的更多依赖，联合国教科文组织和外国大使馆可能会影响“他的舞蹈剧院的未来，该剧院过于笼罩在宗教观念之中，无法轻易转变为世俗奇观。”

托芬的作品之后还有另外两篇关于南亚戏剧的文章；第一个是凯萨尔·阿巴斯的《巴基斯坦的去殖民化和生产工人阶级剧院：桑加特剧院的乔格·库桑比·迪（采摘红花）的诗学和政治》。在当代后殖民巴基斯坦政治戏剧兴衰（20世纪80年代）和衰落的背景下，阿巴斯重点关注全志愿桑加特剧院的案例，作为新千年另类审美现实的先驱。这篇文章重点介绍了该剧院的一部作品《Chog Kusumbhey Di》 （采摘红花），该剧的灵感来自一首 17 至 18 世纪旁遮普卡菲经典诗，讲述了七名农业女工遭受的剥削及其反抗努力；它已在非剧院场所演出了200多次。基于广泛的实地调查，文章审视了该剧内容和舞台的政治性，将其视为“从女工的悲剧到她们欢欣鼓舞的拒绝之舞的旅程……[这]激发观众在面对悬而未决的问题时采取行动”。问题达到了高潮。”

在关于南亚戏剧的最后一篇文章“祭祀仪式的精神：映射吉里什·卡纳德的火与雨”中，桑吉塔·帕蒂尔对著名印度剧作家吉里什·卡纳德的另一部重要作品进行了受欢迎的研究，吉里什·卡纳德在英语中广为人知。