ACTive Encounter 2024
ACT Shanghai Contemporary Theatre Festival (ACT Shanghai) is an annual festival for performing arts, held in Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre and other partner venues since 2005. In almost two decades, ACT has cultivated a young, curious audience unique to Shanghai and become an important connecting platform for local and international artists with the Chinese audience.
ACTive Encounter consists of four talks and panels about different aspects of dramaturgy. It is presented by ACT Shanghai in collaboration with Asian Dramaturgs’ Network and Centre 42, with support from the National Arts Council Singapore.
Date
Event
22 Sep 2024,
2PM - 4PM
ACT x ADN Session 1: Doing Dramaturgy in China and an Introduction to the Asian Dramaturgs' Network
This panel seeks to survey the practice of dramaturgy both within the context of China and in relation to the immediate history of the Asian Dramaturgs’ Network (est. 2016). The invited practitioners and respondents from China, Hong Kong and Singapore will offer summaries and reflections of the contemporary past and present of dramaturgical doing in the region, and identify both resonances and divergences in theory and practice.
MODERATOR: KOK HENG LEUN
SPEAKERS: LIM HOW NGEAN, JANICE POON, ZHAO ZHIYONG
RESPONDENTS: DR. SHI KE, GUO CHENZI
22 Sep 2024,
4.30PM - 6.30PM
ACT x ADN Session 2: Dramaturgical Memory(ies): Case Studies from Southeast Asia
What - and how - do dramaturgs remember? This dialogue on the dramaturg-as-archive will explore the embodied histories, cultural memory, and thick relationships that emerge from long-term dramaturg-artist collaborations across Southeast Asia, and how these relationalities are shaped over time by the artist’s evolving body of work, as well as their personal histories and positionalities.
SPEAKERS: KOK HENG LEUN, NIA AGUSTINA, LIM HOW NGEAN
MODERATOR: CORRIE TAN
23 Sep 2024, 10AM - 12.30PM
ACT x ADN Session 3: Am I A Dramaturg? - Embodied Experiences and Practices
This dialogue and sharing session invites emerging artists and practitioners with an interest in dramaturgy to discuss their collaborative practices and relationships, and how they might begin to cultivate their own dramaturgical thinking and toolkits based on their specific contexts. Following an introduction to the work of the Asian Dramaturgs’ Network, we will think together and exchange knowledge about how dramaturgy might be practised in different ways, and with different methodologies and vocabularies.
CO-FACILITATORS: CORRIE TAN, NIA AGUSTINA
23 Sep 2024, 2PM - 4PM
ACT x ADN Session 4: Roundtable: Dramaturgies of Expanded Festival-Making
What have we come to expect of festivals, and what elements of festival-building do we take for granted? Beyond the conventional boundaries of the festival as a live performance event, how does the curation of community-building and place-making enter these conversations? This panel explores the often invisible dramaturgy of festival-making and communal creative gatherings, and how approaches to artistic directorship of these platforms, whether national or niche, large or small, shape the festival’s final form and role.
OPENING SPEAKER: CHIAKI SOMA
MODERATORS: OPHELIA HUANG, CORRIE TAN