Just got back last night from the "East Asia in Motion:  Literature, Cinema, Dance" conference at Yale.  It was an exhilirating event, one of those conferences that keeps you moving from early morning until late at night, but leaves you feeling more energized than exhausted.  I did, however, pretty much collapse upon getting home....

   Friday night, the feature event was a screening of two experimental films by Kanai Katsu, "The Desert Archipelago" (Mujin retto, 1969) and "Good-Bye" (1971).  Kanai himself was in attendance, looking very dapper.  It was apparently the first time his work has been screened in North America.  "Good-Bye" was particularly fascinating in that much of it was shot on the fly in South Korea, always under the gaze of the military dictatorship. 

   There were two daytime panels of papers on Saturday.  Jonathan Hall (UC-Irvine) spoke about the films of Kanai and his contemporaries, comparing the different geographies they embedded formally in their films.  Yingjing Zhang (UC-San Diego) discussed the films of Jia Zhang-ke in terms of a new translocal, rather than transnational, practice.  Victor Fan (Yale) juxtaposed sports and martial arts films to explore questions of sovereignty and the mobilization of bodies into national projects.  Christine Marran (Minnesota) discussed the ecological, anti-humanist literature of Ishimure Michiko, while Christine Yano (Hawaii) explored appropriations of the Hello Kitty character by various persons and groups around the world.  My own paper traced through the problems of mimesis and coloniality in Japanese pop music from the 1930s through the early 1970s.

   Saturday night's session featured Shen Wei, founder and director of Shen Wei Dance Arts and the man who choreographed the modern dance piece featured at the start of the Beijing Olympics Opening Ceremony (the one where the dancers created an ink landscape painting with their feet).  We saw clips of a number of his works, including his radical reworking of "Rites of Spring," which seemed quite different in tone and intent from the Joffrey Ballet version I saw last week.

   The weekend also featured numerous other roundtable discussions.  I got to see lots of old friends while in New Haven, as well as meet some very interesting people who were new to me.  My thanks to the organizers, Aaron Gerow and Reginald Jackson!