Date：1:00 — 2:40 pm on Wednesday, 7th January 2015

Venue：Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia 1st meeting room (3rd floor)

Speaker：徐芃(Xu Peng), Assistant Professor, Modern Languages and Cultures, Virginia Military Institute / Visiting Fellow, IASA

Title：Garden Onstage: Gendered Spaces in Late-Ming Gardens and Their Representations in Chuanqi Drama

Chairperson：Yasushi OKI (Professor, IASA)

Language：Chinese（interpretation:japanese）

Abstract：
As a literary distinction of late-Ming chuanqi drama, garden scenes abound. In the late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth centuries, they were typically performed in private theaters set in private gardens. Thus the garden is at once the location of the theatrical event and the setting of the drama per se. This special garden, which is at once literary and historical, onstage and offstage, is ontologically different from other garden types examined in the earlier studies of many disciplines—landscape studies, urban planning, cultural studies, architecture, literature, and theater history—which have treated gardens as geographical locales, economic enterprises, or aesthetic objects and experiences. Drawing on recent scholarship of performance studies, this study rereads some garden scenes against the backdrop of garden history and considers how gender-related spatial arrangements affected both the literary design and theatrical performance of chuanqi drama.