October 12, 2021

‘Bringing Shakespeare in Asia to the World’ (NUS News, October 2021)

The Asian Shakespeare Intercultural Archive (A|S|I|A) is an online archive of Shakespeare performance materials from East and Southeast Asia, based in the NUS Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. The project, launched in 2008 and led by Associate Professor Yong Li Lan (NUS Department of English Language and Literature), has won three successive research grants from MOE.

The archive is a model of intercultural knowledge bringing together several areas: Theatre Studies, Comparative Asian Studies, Shakespeare Performance, and Translation and Digital Humanities. It contains over 60 Asian Shakespeare productions in 17 languages, including full length video recordings of performances, original scripts, programmes, and publicity materials donated by theatre companies. Over 60 scholars, translators, theatre practitioners, designers, and programmes from around the world, including undergraduates and graduate students from the NUS Department of English Language and Literature, are involved in the running of (A|S|I|A), whose target audiences includes scholars, practitioners, teachers, students, and general audiences.

All production scripts in (A|S|I|A) are translated into English, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, and the archive includes extensive data on the productions such as its creators, dates and venues, art/forms, languages and staging, receptions and reviews, and historical and cultural references. This is especially helpful since beyond being used for archival and research purposes, (A|S|I|A) also doubles up as a teaching resource. The archive is currently used in university courses in Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada.  (A|S|I|A) is the primary resource for teaching materials in A/P Yong’s “Shakespeare and Asian Performances” module.

A/P Yong, who is also co-chair of the 11^th World Shakespeare Congress (WSC), saw that (A|S|I|A) could be a great platform to enhance the WSC programme, which had moved online in July this year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Every year, the WSC features numerous theatrical performances, keynotes, roundtables, panels, and seminars.  Reducing this rich line up of events  to a series of typical Zoom session  would have made it lacklustre, so A/P Yong, along with Assistant Professor Alvin Lim (NUS Department of English Language and Literature) and Dr Eleine Ng (A|S|I|A), utilised (A|S|I|A)’s productions, networks, and copyright permissions to screen Asian Shakespeare performances as part of WSC’s first ever Digital Asian Shakespeare Festival.

Ten performances, most of which were drawn from (A|S|I|A), were screened during the festival. The organisers also brought in the directors of the screened performances to hold interactive watch parties, where a director would use various clips from their performance to talk about their process of adapting Shakespeare. The festival, which brought the special opportunity for attendees to understand how and why Asian practitioners bring Shakespeare onto their own stages, was a hit at the 2021 WSC.

According to A/P Yong, the pandemic saw the value and usage of (A|S|I|A) rise exponentially, along with the increase in need for digital archives. This is especially true considering how if physical performances had been staged in Singapore during WSC, there could not have been as many performances staged, nor would it have been possible to hold interactive sessions with the directors.

Read the article here.