Performing Archipelagos explores the historical connections and flows of performance-making and travel across Asian regions, seas, straits, and beyond. Spanning the 1840s to the 1970s, it seeks to identify established maritime and land routes and key geographical nodes that were part of performance networks that made touring, diasporic exchanges, and the migration of practitioners and troupes possible. It aims to de-emphasise the continent, sub-continent or mainland as the sole origin of performance practices and instead focus on the flows and circulation of people, practices, and intercultural performance-making over a longer time and transregionally. It recognises these flows as a collective heritage that is interactive and polycentric, rather than exclusive histories of nations and linear narratives of historical process. The concept of ‘archipelagos’ is incorporated as a metaphor to challenge dominant discourses of continentalism and nation-states. The goal is to decentre knowledge production and retell historical narratives of performance histories across a wider geography based on evolving social and ecological relations. 

Performing Archipelagos showcases theatrical networks and performance routes of the nineteenth century to the twentieth century across South, Southeast and East Asia. Through a performance database, it faciliates the study of the evolution and hybridisation of performance forms and practices as they travelled and passed through performance venues along trade routes. Till today, what we encounter as ‘traditional’ forms emerged out of a long process of cultural exchange, modernisation, and colonial trade and exploitation, experienced and spread in transnational (or rather trans-colonial) contexts. The project will seek to shed light on the following questions:

• Who and what constituted the performance networks?
• Who were the actors, agents, commissioners, and nodes responsible for forming and shaping transregional relationships, and who made the travelling of performance practices across geographical regions possible? What were some of these social relations within a troupe, a company or between individuals who facilitated these travels and theatre migration?
• What and where were the performance venues? What are their histories and what roles did they play in shaping reception and trends?
• Who were the audiences? How was news of the shows disseminated?
  How did early travels shape and inform performance and festival circuits found presently?
• How did trade routes, shipping lines, and technology (e.g. telegraph and steam) shape the networks that emerged and evolved over a long time?

Through digital narratives, the website seeks to examine these contexts and diversify the gaze (as opposed to a colonial gaze), re-narrating the histories of performance forms in contemporary and nuanced terms. Narratives will explore local subjectivities, where possible, in the form of travelogues, journals, photographic images, newspaper columns (or opinion pieces and theatre reviews), and written records. It will identify the ecosystems and networks of social relations that made these performance touring and commissioning possible. It also aims to provide a visual representation of performance travels–the routes that travelling troupes and performers took and the nodes that they arrived at to perform, reside or disembark. 

Aims

1. Theorise and document the circulation and travels of theatre, dance, and performance against the backdrop of colonial expansion, territorialisation, cultural diplomacy, trade, and technological development from 1835 to 1975. By situating Singapore as a significant node, the study will trace the networks that existed between urban centres, port cities, and the sea routes (namely, along the Malacca and Singapore Straits and diverging across Australia, Hong Kong and the Southern provinces of China, to name a few) that performance practices and performers travelled on as they embarked and disembarked, evolved, or took root across places in the region. The overall research objective is to narrate the micronarratives of cultural practitioners and connect them through storymaps and digital scholarship, ensuring that the histories of individual traditions are not told in isolation but visualised as a broad history of performance-making across regions. It is also important to avoid narrating this history from a specific vantage point but to consider other possible historical sources, routes, and narratives.
2. Digitally archive and curate these routes, nodes, theatre buildings, and historical figures who spread, developed or promoted the practices. The searchable database gathers a large set of performance data from disparate sources such as performance dates, names of performers and troupes, performance form or type of troupe, patrons and historical figures who supported these troupes, events and shows performed by the performer or troupe, and bibliographic sources (newspapers, travelogues, journals, etc.). Geospatial data will be presented through interactive maps that trace the routes of touring companies and troupes. These journeys will also be further developed and curated as digital exhibitions or ‘storymaps’ that narrate the travels and influence of a particular historical figure, performance venue, and/or troupe.
3. Propel extensive study of Asian performance in areas of interculturalism. The performance database will encourage future research on the cultural history of Asian performance, and provide a rich resource repository that can be used for comparative studies. Further research will illustrate the historical role of key nodes across Asia in gathering performers, communities, and audiences.
4. Conceive new pedagogical approaches in the teaching of cultural and performance history. The archive is an one-stop platform for students and teachers to search comprehensive historical data, curated narratives, and scholarship that explains the historical development of Asian performance forms. It will also provide tools for teachers to create lesson plans and for students to access the data and craft their historical narratives in the form of short essays and exhibitions.
5. Explore hybrid ways to create an experiential engagement with the digital scholarship. The overall project will design and plan for events to merge digital scholarship with experiential events, including public outreach programmes such as workshops and exhibitions. The project will also explore ways to present the performance database and research by designing interactive online tours or exhibitions. The next phase of the project is to experiment with ways to experience and interact with the data in immersive and interactive ways. The project will develop story-driven interfaces that present the data in engaging ways such as photo essays, story maps, layered maps with embedded digital assets, and video scrollytelling. These interactive interfaces will also be able to utilise data visualisation tools to present and visualise specific data and relationships such as social relations and support networks. In the future, the project will invite contributors to create their own narratives or scholarly essays that use story-driven layout templates to build their content with the ability to embed different digital objects like image galleries, data visualisations, and interactive maps.

Features

Searchable Database

Performing Archipelagos features a searchable database that presents contextual information of performances, persons, and venues, derived from archives and collections. The archives include existing digital and physical collections of old newspapers–advertisements, reviews, shipping news–, photographs, maps, programmes, academic articles and books–travelogues, journals, reports published by clans and associations. The set of data entries for each given data field serves as a starting point for exploring a particular performance context, relating this context to the wider historical and socio-cultural context across time and geography. In addition, the database is designed to be robust and encourages future research that will hopefully add to the stories of performance histories, thereby connecting communities and sharing comparative narratives that speak of the interregional networks. 

Through a filtering tool and key terms, users can choose and focus on specific time periods, performance genres, places, and networks.  

 For more information on the database structure, please see the webpage, ‘Model’.

Micronarratives and Storymaps

Performing Archipelagos curates a series of digital essays that narrate micronarratives of particular performance practices, persons, networks and histories. The platform provides storytelling tools to embed maps and multimedia content and to explore ways to interact with these narratives.