Schedule

Friday, April 12th 

Harvard-Yenching Common Room (2 Divinity Ave)

Introductory Remarks 9:30–9:45

Panel 1 (10:00–12:00) Thinking through Performance


Chair: David Wang (Harvard)

  • Thomas Kelly (Harvard), “Writing Evanescence: Pan Zhiheng’s Essays on Acting”
  • Ling Hon Lam (UC Berkeley), “In Search of Bad Singing: A Disarticulation of the Automaton, or a Mathematical Critique of ‘Self-So’ Cosmology”

Break (12:00–1:00)

Panel 2 (1:00–3:00) Performance as Method in Song and Oral Storytelling


Chair: Si Nae Park (Harvard) 

  • Patricia Sieber (OSU), “Surprise as Method: Performance Aesthetics in Yuan Sanqu Songs”
  • Canaan Morse (BU), “The Image of the Book and the Performance of Reading in The Drunken Man’s Talk and the Early Huaben

Panel 3 (3:30–5:30) Performing Spectatorship


Chair: Wai-yee Li (Harvard) 

  • Yinghui Wu (UCLA), “Pan Zhiheng’s Connoisseurial Experience and the Aesthetics of Contingency”
  • Ming Tak Ted Hui (Oxford), “Vocal Imaginaries: Connoisseurship of the Operatic Voice in the 16th Century”

Saturday, April 13th 

Harvard-Yenching Common Room (2 Divinity Ave)

Panel 4 (9:30–12:30) Translation Workshop


Judith Zeitlin (UChicago), Yiren Zheng (Dartmouth), and Tom Kelly will lead a group discussion of essays by Pan Zhiheng 潘之恆 (1556–1622) on acting, singing, and theater.

Break 12:30–2:00

Panel 5 (2:00–4:00) Theater and Theatricality   


Chair: Catherine Yeh (Boston University)

  • Guojun Wang (McGill), “Bibliography as Critique: Cataloging and Categorizing Drama in Premodern China”
  • Kangni Huang (Harvard), “Rethinking Meta-Theater: From Wu Bing to Jiang Shiquan”

Roundtable (4:30–5:30) New Directions