Presented by Cheng-Chieh Yu, Yinghui Wu, and Cui Zhou

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The CCS Scholars Forum is a series that aims to bring together scholars on campus working on disparate aspects of Chinese studies in order to facilitate greater dialogue and collaboration. Each speaker will deliver a short and accessible presentation, introducing a current research project; followed by a general discussion. Each forum will pair scholars at different stages of their careers from different fields. These forums are envisioned as a means to strengthen ties within our Chinese Studies community at UCLA. Students and faculty with an interest in China are strongly encouraged to attend.

For this quarter, we will have Cheng-Chieh Yu, Professor of Choreography, Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, Yinghui Wu, Assistant Professor of late imperial Chinese literature and culture, Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, and Cui Zhou, Ph.D. student in the Department of Asian Languages share with us their current works.

The Good Person - Rethinking Bertolt Brecht’s The Good Women of Szechwan 
Negotiating Racialize Femininities and Violence

The video project is motivated by Bertolt Brecht’s The Good Woman of Szechwan. Instead of focusing on the plot and multiple characters of the original play, this video focuses on the dualities and conflicts within one person. The split-screen video plays on the theme of duality. How can two images collide and still reflect a single gesture? Objects, color, and material are utilized to confront gender, race, and identity. It is an imagistic portrait of a woman wrestling with the dilemmas of agency; a victim or a victimizer, an object or a subject position.
   
Yu’s choreographic research recognizes the exploitation trope of the female embodiment under threat as seeming intrinsic to Asian female visibility, agency, or lack thereof. Yu transcribes Brecht’s play The Good Woman of Szechwan motivated by her inhabiting through performance the perspective of Brecht’s female protagonist, Shen Te. In the dance-for-camera, Yu attempts to humanize Shen Te through somatic embodiment and de-textualize Brecht’s writing in parable objectification and moral framing.  

Cheng-Chieh Yu, Professor of Choreography, joined the UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance in 2001. She choreographs dance-theater and dance-for-camera projects that explore Asian and Asian-American profiles at intersections of social-political perspectives, gender ascription, and cultural hybridity. Yu’s work has been commissioned by institutions internationally, including the Chinese Information and Cultural Center（NYC）Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church（NYC）, the Beijing Modern Dance Company and Guangdong Modern Dance Company in China, Sun-Shier Dance Theater, the Creative Society, and the Taipei Dance Circle of Taiwan. Her choreography has been produced by numerous venues in NYC and Los Angeles as well as internationally in Germany, Israel, Malaysia, Cambodia, China, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Her dance film Martiality, Not Fighting is streamed at Link TV, PBS Southern California. This film has received the Dirorphte Jury Award in Amsterdam（2016）, The Best Short in Dance Camera West, Los Angeles（2015）, as well as the Best Performance Award from the InShadow International Festival of Video, Performance, and Technology in Portugal（2014）. In her research and teaching, Yu combines a rare synthesis of the primary kinesthetic languages of modernism and post-modernism in reformations that are informed by Chinese martial arts of TaijiDaoYin（太極導引）and BaGuaZhang（八卦掌）.

Reading Drama as qu Songs:
Literati Publisher-Connoisseurs of qu in the Late Ming 

In the late Ming, as drama occupied a central position in the life of the elite, various critics and connoisseurs emerged on the cultural scene to promote their expertise and judgment on the literary, musical, and theatrical qualities of drama. This presentation explores an understudied area of late Ming drama connoisseurship—the appreciation of drama as qu songs for singing—through a range of seventeenth-century treatises and anthologies that treat drama primarily as qu songs. The purpose is not to study music per se, but to demonstrate how the literati’s modes of self-expression and patterns of sociability were deeply embedded in and intertwined with their appreciation of qu singing. Firstly, I will argue that it is necessary to historicize drama criticism in the larger context of qu connoisseurship, which often discussed dramatic arias alongside nondramatic songs and prioritized singing. Secondly, I will chart the landscape of qu connoisseurship by identifying two major approaches as well as some underlying assumptions in the works of some prominent literati. Finally, I will examine Ling Mengchu’s role as a publisher-connoisseur of qu against his direct and indirect experience with qu singing in the pleasure quarters. I argue that, although the literati publisher-connoisseurs appeared to dominate the textual production of qu connoisseurship, a close examination of their publications reveal complex negotiations between literati taste and popular trends, and between the ideal and everyday practices of late Ming qu singing. 

Yinghui Wu is Assistant Professor of late imperial Chinese literature at UCLA.
Her work focuses on drama, book illustration and visual culture, and the interaction of text, sound, and visual media. In her current research, she is particularly interested in the relationships between print publishing, cross-media practices, and reading. Her book manuscript, tentatively titled Reading Drama in Seventeenth-Century China：Between Text, Image, and Sound, explores the rise of a multifaceted culture of reading drama in seventeenth-century China.

Mystery and Transparency：The Stethoscope and Illness Narratives in Socialist Minority Films

Depicting sick bodies is a type of tradition in Chinese culture. This talk will specifically focus on illness narratives in ethnic minority films during the socialist period. Examining the functions and metaphorical meanings of the stethoscope and related medical activities allows for exploring how Han filmmakers used illness as a setting to shape the images of minorities, construct the hierarchical power relationship, and position minorities in socialist modernity. The stethoscope makes the insides of minorities（patient）transparent to the Han（doctor）but deprives minorities of the right to master their own bodies. In this way, a hierarchical structure of power and knowledge forms：The Han becomes the insightful knower, while minorities are the known being investigated. In socialist minority films, this relationship occurs in a context where illness is always depicted as the legacy of past exploitations. The stereoscope, thus, besides estimating sickness, is endowed with another symbolic function：hearing the invisible, unspeakable bitterness and sufferings that minorities experience. This function transforms auscultation into a silent Speak Bitterness session. With the measure and regulation of modern medical instruments, ethnic bodies get the chance to be kept in the modern shape. But in the healing process, these bodies are merely passive objects that do nothing more than bear the modern works on their bodies. In the illness narratives of socialist minority films, ethnic bodies are, therefore, exhibits that amplify the magic charm of modernity, rather than modern subjects.

Cui Zhou is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at UCLA. She received her B.A. from Peking University in China and M.A. from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research interests include Chinese film history, Sinophone cinema, and the relationship between politics and cinema. She is currently working on her dissertation centering on ethnic minority films and relevant issues in China.

Sponsor（s）: Center for Chinese Studies