LUCY M. BURNS

This article is a keynote address by Karen Yamashita, to the 25th annual conference for the German Society for Contemporary Theatre and Drama in Eng- lish at Eichstätt University. The keynote essay is followed by an interview by Lucy M Burns.

In an essay about Eartha Kitt’s rendition of a famous Filipino folk song Waray Waray, I work to open up the predictable ways that such a performance has been analyzed within the politics of solidarity and shared histories among minoritized subjects of U.S. Empire, specifically black-Filipino relations. As I analyze Kitt’s border crossing performance, I seek to broaden existing critical interpretations of meaning-making in cross-racial and international performances. This essay is included in the collection (NYU Press 2015), Filipino Studies: Palimpsests of Nation and Diaspora, edited by Martin Manalansan III and Augusto Espiritu.

http://www.writinginstructor.org/burns-2015-03
This essay is a meditation on (new) technologies of communication, social media, and its interaction with "older" media, specifically live theater and dance. I meditate on these relations and interactions through my work as a dramaturg in Stardust, a multi-media dance theater piece by award winning American choreographer David Rousséve.

Rousseve describes this project as a coming of age story for the Twitter generation. Projecting now in the form of text messages in vernacular language identified as black or urban/youth English. An iPhone appears on stage, on to which Junior’s Grandfather’s Skypes come in. Grandpa at first is unfamiliar with “skyte,” but he speaks through it, sending encouragement to Junior. It is not until later in the piece that we find out that Grandpa is in fact “skyting” from the afterlife. The piece thus expresses the long time link made between (new) technology, spirituality, other life forms communicating through mechanical invention.

As the piece dares to explore social media in the form of Twitter, texting, and Skype—new-ish forms of human communication and social connectivity—theater itself becomes a focus for me. What is the function or role of theater as technology in this Twitter/Instagram/YouTube generation?

This essay focuses on the critical role artists and the arts in imagining new life worlds toward social change. Specifically, I focus on the musical group A Grain of Sand (also known as Yellow Pearl) and theater performances of Sining Bayan during the Asian American movement. These movement or protest art are but two examples of the vibrant political creations envisioned and performed by Asian Americans.

This is the introduction to my first book Puro Arte: On the Filipino Performing Body (NYU Press 2012), winner of the Cultural Studies Book Award, Asian American Studies Association, (2012).

Puro Arte tracks the emergence of Filipino American theater and performance as it conjoins colonial histories of the Philippines with U.S. race relations and discourses of globalization. In Filipino, puro arte performs a more ironic function, gesturing rather to the labor of over-acting, histrionics, playfulness, and purely over-the-top dramatics. In each chapter, I trace a range of corporeal icons in various performance spaces, which include early plays about the U.S.-Philippine War and Filipinos “displayed” in the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, the Filipino patron in the U.S. taxi dance halls, theatrical performances about martial law, and the Filipino performers in the musical global phenomenon Miss Saigon. It is through these multiple and differentiated spaces of performance that I theorize the Filipino performing body as an “archival embodiment” of U.S.-Philippine imperial relations. While I engage with the racialization of Filipinos in the U.S. through the history of imperial relations between the U.S. and the Philippines, I equally emphasize Filipino racial formation in the U.S. as already formed in relation to the racialization of African Americans, other Asians, Native Americans, Latinos, and other subjects of the U.S. empire. I stage a conversation between colonial constructions of/and contemporary performance practices by Filipinos to argue for a consideration of performance not simply as site of uncritical visibility, resistance, or agency, but as a relationship constituted within colonial and neocolonial histories.

This essay explores the politics of the performance of the "terno," the Philippine national dress. I explore the semiotics of the terno, the Philippine national
dress, creatively interpreted by diasporic artists as a dense metaphor for the proper and improper Filipina. These artistic deployments of the terno lay bare unquestioned notions of Filipina femininity and nationalism to be
fabrications of colonialism, militarization and globalization.

This essay discusses the emergence and signification of the unique archival collection, the Uno Collection of Plays by Asian American Women, housed at the W.E.B. DuBois Library at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. This archive was envisioned and established by Roberta Uno, the founder of New WORLD Theater, a theater for, by, and about people of color.

Working with the phrase "management of race," I consider how a project like New WORLD Theater is situated within and without reparative racial policies and practices in American theater in the last three decades of the twentieth century. I articulate the task of dealing with the “problems” posed by the topic of race and the presence of racialized bodies in the institution of theater here as “managing race” to point to the limits of policies and initiatives that sought to reconcile the ever-shifting grounds of race in the US, treating race as problem that can indeed be reconciled.

I argue that New WORLD Theater's approach to race in American theater challenges "the management of race" practiced broadly in American Theater. The creative experiment of New WORLD Theater had a more critical approach, one that confronts the fundamental and profound erasure of racialized peoples in American theater. At the same time, it also acknowledged the impossibility of a complete confrontation and salvation.

This essay considers the politics of immigration and social space through the experiences of Filipino patrons in taxi dancehalls of the 1920s. It foregrounds the power relations enveloping night life, immigration, and white racial panic around "the Filipino problem."

The issue of the Asian American Literary Review, an interdisciplinary humanities journal, includes a section celebrating the 20th anniversary of R. Zamora Linmark's Rolling the Rs.

"Philomena, Kuya Bongbong of Magsaysay Street." This flash fiction tells the story of three siblings and their close encounters on the iconic main road running through Olongapo city in the Philippines. It also the street which led to the U.S. Naval base in which the city was the host.