Illustration Credit: Dojoji engi emaki (Illustrated Legend of Dojoji)
This joint UCLA-UBC conference focuses on versions of and interconnections between two key East Asian tales about snake women: the Japanese Dōjōji 道成寺 and the Chinese Legend of the White Snake 白蛇傳. The four guest speakers each offer a thirty-minute work. Excerpts of performance videos of three versions of the Now play Dōjōji, the stop motion anime Dōjōji (1976), and one version of the Beijing Opera The Tale of the White Snake will be shown with English commentary and subtitles. In addition, there will be the world premiere of Snake Oil, a new virtual production by Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei, and two graduate students’ presentations.
The event is co-organized by Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei (University of California, Los Angeles), Sharalyn Orbaugh (University of British Columbia), and Siyuan Liu (University of British Columbia).
The presentations by Dr. Wilt L. Idema, Dr. Liang Luo, and Dr. Susan Blakeley Klein will be recorded and shared with registrants. Therefore, even if you cannot participate live, please register so that your email is on the mailing list. The rest of the conference proceedings cannot be recorded or shared in any way because of copyright restrictions.
Please email yueweiw@student.ubc.ca if you have any questions or require any accommodations.
Schedule
(in Pacific Time)
9:00-10:20 AM
“The White Snake and her Son: Female Lust, Filial Piety, and Romantic Love,” Dr. Wilt L. Idema (Harvard University)
The Legend of the White Snake has shown the same transformative power as the white snake itself. Growing from tales of man-eating snakes, it turned into a tale of the suppression of female sexuality. To be saved from imprisonment, the loving snake needed a grown-up son, who made his appearance in the eighteenth century, but once the legend turned into a tragedy of free love in the twentieth century, the son made a silent exit.
“The Inter-Asian Travels of the Global White Snake,” Dr. Liang Luo (University of Kentucky)
The Global White Snake examines the Chinese White Snake legends and their extensive, multidirectional travels within Asia and across the globe. Such travels across linguistic and cultural boundaries have generated distinctive traditions as the White Snake has been reinvented in the Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and English-speaking worlds, among others. This talk focuses on the multidirectional, inter-Asian voyages of the White Snake legends, with special attentions to the reinvention of the legends in Japanese and Korean films from the early 1950s to the late 1960s. These Japanese- and Korean-language films guide us to the excavation of Hong Kong as a Cold War cultural powerhouse, connecting mainland China with Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, exporting to Southeast Asia and internationally, and revamping the White Snake legends in vivid shapes and colors.
10:20-10:30 AM Coffee Break
10:30-11:20 AM
Selected Segments from the Beijing Opera Performance The Tale of the White Snake (白蛇傳) with English subtitles and commentaries.
11:20 AM-12:00 PM Lunch Break
12:00-12:30 PM
“Dōjōji: The Demonic Feminine as Serpent Through the Ages,” Dr. Susan Blakeley Klein (UC Irvine)
This talk will provide an overview of the Dōjōji legend, in which a woman turns into a fire-breathing serpent to chase after and kill a priest who has spurned her love. The story has its origins in didactic medieval setsuwa and emaki aimed at young priests, warning them of the dangers of too close association with women when on their sacred pilgrimages. The legend is then taken up in the Noh theater, where the story is transformed into a dramatic battle between the valiant forces of Buddhism and the wily, demonic feminine bent on revenge. The Edo period Kabuki play, Musume Dojoi, takes the story in rather different direction, using the Noh version as a framework upon which to hang a series of dances that focus on the stages of a woman’s love life, from innocent young girl experiencing the first pangs of love to the wretched bitterness of a discarded wife. If I have time, I’ll discuss Tsuruya Nanboku’s last Kabuki play, Kinnozai Sarushima Dairi, which returns to the Noh version in order to parody and subvert Kabuki plot tropes that undergird Tokugawa gender and samurai ideology.
12:30-1:30 PM
Selected Segments from three versions of the Noh play Dōjōji (道成寺) and the stop motion anime Dojōji Temple with English subtitles and commentaries.
1:30-2:20 PM
“The Bell and the Serpent: Early Modern Lives of Dōjōji,” Dr. Satoko Shimazaki (UCLA)
Various iterations of the Dōjōji narrative featuring a women’s transformation into a snake appear in forms and genres ranging from twelfth-century setsuwa collections to picture scrolls and the famous noh play Dōjōji. In the commercial theaters and the print market of early modern Japan, the Dōjōji story became increasingly fluid as it came to be embodied as an affective structure in the image of the bell and the serpent. While playwrights and writers continued to use the title Dōjoji, which remained tied to a specific temple and geographical location in Kii-province, early modern kabuki theater, in particular, dialed down the importance of this spatial connection, abstracting the story to fit the urban sites of stage performance. In this presentation, I will focus on the early modern recreation of Dōjōji through the dancing bodies of female-role actors in Kyōganoko musume Dōjōji and subsequent experiments that also loosened the strongly gendered connection between jealousy and serpentine transformation and the bodies of female characters.
2:20-2:30 PM Coffee Break
2:30-4:00 PM
The World Premiere of Snake Oil and conversation with Writer Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei and Director Penny Bergman
4:00-4:10 PM Coffee Break
4:10-5:10 PM
“Layered Temporalities: Reconsidering Railway Space-Time in Izumi Kyōka’s Kōya hijiri,” Victoria Davis (Ph.D. student at UCLA)
“Contesting Discourses of Qing in Qingshe (1993): From Imitation to Genuine Feelings,” Yuewei Wang (Ph.D. student at UBC)
Guest Speakers
Wilt L. Idema (Ph.D. Leiden, 1974) has taught at Leiden University (1970-1999) and at Harvard University (2000-2013). He has published extensively on traditional Chinese drama (often with Stephen H. West). In recent years most of his publications have concerned prosimetric narratives of late imperial China, for instance The White Snake and Her Son: A Translation of The Precious Scroll of Thunder Peak, with Related Texts (2009). He has also published on Chinese women’s literature.
Liang Luo is a professor of Chinese studies at the University of Kentucky in the United States and a distinguished visiting professor at Tianjin Normal University in China. She is the author of The Avant-Garde and the Popular in Modern China, published by the University of Michigan Press in 2014, and The Global White Snake, also from the University of Michigan Press in 2021. Professor Luo’s research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities at Stanford University, the National Research Foundation of Korea at Ewha Womans University, the International Center for the Studies of Chinese Civilization at Fudan University, and the Humanities Research Centre at Australia National University, among others. She is visiting the Leiden University Institute for Area Studies (LIAS) and working on a new book and documentary project, Profound Propaganda: The International Avant-Garde and Modern China.
Susan Blakeley Klein is Professor of Japanese Literature and Culture and Director of Religious Studies at University of California, Irvine. Her research interests include Japanese theater and dance; medieval commentaries; Japanese and Asian religions; New Historicism and Feminist Critical Theory. She has published on the Japanese postmodern dance form Butoh (Ankoku Butō: The Premodern and Postmodern Influences on the Dance of Utter Darkness), and on the development of secret medieval literary commentaries influenced by Shingon Buddhism (Allegories of Desire: The Esoteric Literary Commentaries of Medieval Japan). Her most recent book (Dancing the Dharma) is on religious and political allegory in Noh theater; her next project will be an introduction and full translation of Tsuruya Nanboku’s last Kabuki play, Kinnozai Sarushima Dairi, a parodic mash-up of the Dōjōji and Masakado legends.
Satoko Shimazaki is Associate Professor of Japanese Literature and Theater at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of Edo Kabuki in Transition: From the Worlds of the Samurai to the Vengeful Female Ghost (Columbia University Press, 2016), which was awarded the John Whitney Hall Book Prize and an honorable mention for the Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theater History. She has a joint appointment as Associate Professor at Waseda University in Tokyo.