Jing@Ju Karaoke: Interactive Queering of Bejing Opera
Projection & Digital Puppet Design.
Digital Dramaturgy Lab.

Festival of Original Theatre, University of Toronto. February 2015.
Structures of Digital Feeling Conference, University of Buffalo. March 2015.

A participatory performance-lecture featuring a Xbox-Kinect controlled “digital puppet”.

In our current context of transnational globalization, local multiculturalism, interactive digital culture and intersections between post-modern queer and multimedia performance practices/discourses this project is interested in exploring the rhizomatic, hybrid, multi-modal possibilities of putting ourselves and participants (regardless of self-identified gender) into the physical and digital shoes of the famous Hua Dan performer Mei Lanfang by using the dramaturgy and technique of Karaoke interactions.

Karaoke (Japanese kara 空 “empty” and ōkesutora オーケストラ “orchestra) was invented in the 1960s/70s in Japan – rooted in earlier live traditions – as “a form of interactive entertainment or video game in which amateur singers sing along with recorded music (a music video) using a microphone and public address system.” (Wikipedia) The inventor of the Karaoke machine, Japanese drummer Daisuke Inoue, received the tongue-in-cheek Nobel Peace prize for his invention, “thereby providing an entirely new way for people to learn to tolerate each other.”(ibid.)

What if we use current interactive technology Karaoke-style, like the Xbox kinect cameras, projection, interactive audio programming/projection and embodied praxis in order to learn – as the Jingju amateurs that we are – to put ourselves into the (problematic) shoes, i.e. lotus feet etc., of a Hua Dan performer modeled after movements and gestures performed by Mei Lanfang? In doing so, what can we learn about both gender constructions across cultures and digital technology in live performance as both, potentially oppressive or liberating?