Professor Lee will present her work at universities in Taiwan and Korea

Professor Esther Kim Lee has been invited to present her work at the National Taiwan University’s International Conference on Theatre, which will take place on November 8-9, 2014.

The theme of the National Taiwan University’s International Conference on Theatre is “Subjectivity, Textuality, and Theatrical Practice.” Professor Esther Kim Lee will be presenting a paper on the Chinese American playwright David Henry Hwang’s new play Kung Fu. See abstract below.

Professor Lee will also be giving lectures in Seoul, Korea at Hanyang University on November 12 and at the Korean National University of the Arts on November 14, 2014. 

Dr. Lee will be participating in a roundtable discussion this coming weekend in Philadelphia at the 4th National Asian American Theater Conference and Festival.

Dr. Lee's abstract:

The Theatricalized Body of Bruce Lee in David Henry Hwang’s Kung Fu

David Henry Hwang is the most recognized Asian American playwright and the winner of the Tony Award for Best Play for M. Butterfly in 1988. This talk examines his latest full-length play, Kung Fu, which is about the life and work of the martial arts icon Bruce Lee. The play opened in February 2014 at New York City’s Signature Theatre, which commissioned the play and devoted the 2013-14 season to Hwang’s oeuvre. Hwang intended to write Kung Fu as a musical but later decided against it. What has instead resulted is what can be called a “dancicle,”a style of theatre in which realistic scenes and highly choreographed dance/fighting sequences co-exist onstage. Throughout his writing career, Hwang has frequently used choreography in his plays, and Kung Fu represents an exploration of what he has described as a “Chinese American” style of theatre. This paper interrogates this style by focusing on how Hwang dramatizes the Asian American body in his plays. Hwang’s style echoes the style of traditional Chinese opera, which he frequently references in his plays, but at the same time, the style is unequivocally in the tradition of American theatre. By using theories of the body, movement, and choreography, I argue that the Asian American body Hwang creates for the stage is defined theatrically. The racialized Asian subjectivity onstage is not defined by its skin color or phenotypical traits. Rather, Hwang’s Asian American bodies are made real through theatricalized movements that require skill and labor. The paper interrogates how racial identities are theatrically embodied by Hwang’s characters and how he makes Bruce Lee quintessentially Asian American in Kung Fu.