“Performing Dragons” Conference
This conference presents ongoing research findings of an international group of scholars studying the topic of dragons in performance.
In the past, the cartographic legend “hic sunt dracones” (like “hic sunt leones”) indicated the extent of known territories (land and seas) and the boundaries of safety, yet what laid beyond pervaded the consciousness of many artists, travelers and scholars. Dragons, which have occupied the human imagination since antiquity, gained particular importance after 1400 CE, and appear in many guises— St. George plays, Karagöz, Chinese shadow puppets, etc.—and so mark the outlines of a Denkraum (or “thinking space”) between cosmology, zoology, superstition, and spectacle, with many offspring up to the present day. While theatre history is also a theatre of migration, circulation, miscegenation, globalism, and affect, performance often indexes all these experiences within “marvels” such as dragons and mystics.
We began “sharing dragons” in 2022 and have met in Chicago, Cologne, Beijing, Shanghai, and now, in Southern California. In our ongoing discussions over the course of the Southern California conference, our current questions encompass the following:
- Where and how do dragons emerge, enchant, and connect? What and how do they signify? How are they entangled within their own contexts, and how do they provoke and inspire further entanglements with other bodies, texts, beings?
- How do dragons arise in a media ecology across times, places, and diverse cultures? How do they destabilize or consolidate through/as performance?
- What do performing dragons ask of historiography? How does centering dragons in research sustain counter-histories? How does it reveal grounded performance theory?
- What are “dragons” in any given culture? How are their performances evidence of syncretism, either from human migration and trade or technological exchange? What do such insights suggest for further research?
Investigating performing dragons allows for an in-depth reading of how form and content are inseparable, providing a critical object with which to reflect on representations, implied modes of perception, and the historical (dis)continuities that make the dragon appear. In staging dragons, certain conventions are always involved, but a more inclusive investigation addressing multiple centuries and cultural vectors enables a better grasping of their complex histories. The dragon is very specific, and at the same time exemplary for culturally bound cyphers that can manifest in many forms and shapes. We look forward to exploring these topics with our UCLA participants and audiences.
Speakers:
Erith Jaffe-Berg, University of California Riverside
Leo Cabranes-Grant, University of California Santa Barbara
Tracy C. Davis, Northwestern University
Peter W. Marx, University of Cologne, Germany
