Miss Saigon Research Articles

A Lotus or a Dragon? - The orientalization and fetishization of Asian women's bodies.

This article stems from interviews conducted with Chinese women residing in Lisbon, aged 18-34, during the initial phase of fieldwork (2021/2022). As an outcome of my Anthropology Ph.D. project, the focus here is on comprehending the perception of Asian women within the realm of everyday life as fetishized entities and how they persist in (re)shaping their identities. By primarily examining visual "yellow fever" depictions (in Hollywood cinema through films like "The World of Suzie Wong", "Madame Butterfly", "Miss Saigon", and the "Year of the Dragon", along with interracial Pornography), I endeavor to delve into the impact of "race", "sexual fetishization", and the ubiquitous propagation of stereotypical imagery on the lives of the individuals I engage with.

Um Lótus ou um Dragão? - a orientalização e fetichização dos corpos das mulheres Asiáticas

Abstract This article stems from interviews conducted with Chinese women residing in Lisbon, aged 18-34, during the initial phase of fieldwork (2021/2022). As an outcome of my Anthropology Ph.D. project, the focus here is on comprehending the perception of Asian women within the realm of everyday life as fetishized entities and how they persist in (re)shaping their identities. By primarily examining visual “yellow fever” depictions (in Hollywood cinema through films like “The World of Suzie Wong”, “Madame Butterfly”, “Miss Saigon”, and the “Year of the Dragon”, along with interracial Pornography), I endeavor to delve into the impact of “race”, “sexual fetishization”, and the ubiquitous propagation of stereotypical imagery on the lives of the individuals I engage with.

The Butterfly Effect: Creating and Recreating the Story of Madame Butterfly, on Paper and on Stage

The consequences of the partially coerced opening of Japan to the Western world in the second half of the 19th century went far beyond economic and political goals and considerations. The previously secluded land almost instantly became a source of artistic inspiration and endless fascination. Japonisme, the term by which the latest craze become known in France, was no passing fad. For many decades, Western artists, most of whom had never set foot in Japan, derived profound inspiration from all facets of the mysterious culture which unfolded in the period. Thus, with scant information and a lack of accurate records being available, common gossip and unfounded rumor filled in the blanks of official reports and naval tales, connecting the dots between the real and the imagined. In this paper, I succinctly examine the story of Madame Butterfly, cutting across time, genre and borders in the works of John Luther Long, David Belasco, Giacomo Puccini and Claude-Michel Schönberg/Alain Boublil. I contextualize the selected narratives within their socio-political frameworks, but also consider the ramifications of the past and present-day adaptations from the 21st-century perspective, in the light of current struggles for (adequate) representation. Lastly, I examine the production of Miss Saigon (2019–22) at the Music Theatre of Łódź, Poland to compare how the staging of such a musical in a predominantly racially homogenous country affects the perception of Orientalist works. As such this section is a case study based on personal interviews conducted by the author with the producers and cast members.

From Madame Butterfly to M. Butterfly: Changing Narratives of Oriental Womanhood

Throughout its performance history, Madame Butterfly (1904) by Giacomo Puccini has attracted significant intrigue and controversies. Through its protagonist Cio-Cio San, the opera depicts Asian femininity as weak-willed, servile and ultimately powerless in the face of Western forces. This paper will examine the trajectory of this narrative of Orientalism through Madame Butterfly and its two modern adaptations, Miss Saigon (1989) and M. Butterfly (1993). Through an analysis of both informal and formal sources, this study will show how the Orientalist womanhood is first accepted and embraced by the native audiences of Madame Butterfly, is rejected by the audiences of Miss Saigon and finally subverted in M. Butterfly. The transformations in critical receptions of the three works alongside changing historical and political contexts reflect a gradual evolution in society’s views of East-West power relations, national identity, and the constructs of femininity and gender.

Miss Saigon: The Asian Experience in the Perspective of the White Man

Stuart Hall defines stereotyping as a way in which mediamakers separate and excludegroups of people, a hegemonic practice that works to maintain a social order (Hall, 1997). Theproducers and writers of the musical film Miss Saigon aim to show a tragic love story between aVietnamese woman and a white GI soldier during the Vietnam War; however, the mediamaker’snarrow perspective on the war causes the musical to feel limited in showing and understandingvarious experiences of Asian immigration. While mediamakers believe that Miss Saigonencourages Asian representation, by framing the immigrant experience through the perspectiveof white male producers, the musical film depicts Asians as exotic and inferior and createslasting stereotypes. This form of “othering” creates and maintains fixed differences between the“insiders” and “outsiders” as the experiences of minorities are told by people in positions ofpower.

Ethos is not enough

Strictly applied Aristotelian models of rhetoric limit possibilities of communication to the binary roles of speaker and hearer, and as such reinforce binary notions of power across lines of gender and race. A brief case study of a cancelled conversation about the white-centred storytelling and harmful stereotypes in the musical Miss Saigon at the Overture Center for the Arts in Madison, Wisconsin, reveals the harm that can be inflicted by the rigidity of ancient rhetorical models. Feminist rhetorical models offer an alternative, and unless institutions recognize that there is ethos in our audiences and value the labour that produces ‘organic dramaturgy’ in our communities, the contemporary call for new collective forms of storytelling will be left unanswered.

The behaviour of some hyacinth varieties in forced culture

Abstract This paper presents the behaviour of five hyacinth varieties: ‘City of Haarlem’, ‘Blue Jacket’, ‘Miss Saigon’, ‘Jan Boss’, and ‘Double Prince of Love’ in forced culture under the influence of different culture substrates. For this purpose, the following parameters were monitored concerning the main characteristics: number of flowers from inflorescence, length of stem flower, earliness of flowering period, and the flowers’ blooming period. The results of this work show that in culture substrate garden soil and sand (1:1) the best results were obtained regarding the length of the floral stem, number of flowers from inflorescence, and flowering period, and less favourable results were obtained for bloom precocity.

Inspiration from the "Really Real": David Henry Hwang's Yellow Face and Documentary Theatre

Inspiration from the "Really Real":David Henry Hwang's Yellow Face and Documentary Theatre William C. Boles (bio) According to David Henry Hwang, two literary influences for his Obie-winning play Yellow Face were Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie and Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night, both of which rely on a stand-in character for the author as he revisits painful autobiographical memories.1 In writing Yellow Face, Hwang did not want the same thing to happen to his literary doppelgänger DHH that happened to Tom Wingfield and Edmund Tyrone, namely, paling in comparison to the rest of the play's richly defined characters. However, the more he wrote, the less concerned Hwang became: "I found that…creating a character that I actually gave my name to…liberated me to make him a character…. It's kind of counterintuitive, but by naming him after myself he became more of a character."2 Aiding Hwang in separating himself from the fictional DHH was his recent performative turn in Greg Pak's short film Asian Pride Porn, where he played himself hawking "politically correct Asian porn."3 By embracing, in part, his highly self-conscious and at times self-parodying creation, Hwang imbued his literary double with much less seriousness than Williams and O'Neill did. While the inspirational roots of the main character DHH can be traced back to two canonical American plays and playwrights, the play's format stems from the realm of documentary theatre (also known as verbatim theatre), and its influence over Yellow Face and Hwang is far more significant than that of Williams and O'Neill. Over the two decades prior to the play's premiere in 2007, the documentary play had reappeared to much fanfare. In England, London's Tricycle Theatre produced numerous [End Page 216] tribunal plays, with its most successful being Richard Norton-Taylor's The Colour of Justice, while the National Theatre produced David Hare's The Permanent Way and The Power of Yes. In the United States, docudrama was equally successful with productions such as Moisés Kaufman and his Tectonic Theater's The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde and The Laramie Project; Anna Deavere Smith's Fires in the Mirror and Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992; Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues; and Anne Nelson's The Guys. This form of drama relies on myriad informational sources, including government documents, public hearings, trial testimony, media outlet transcripts, newspaper pieces, letters, and personal interviews, all of which are used as informative as well as authoritative statements about the topic being theatrically explored. The source-based format intrigued Hwang and, in turn, jump-started his creative process. He admitted: "I'd been wanting to fix my play Face Value [which closed on Broadway in previews] for the past 17 years, but I couldn't figure out how to do it."4 Face Value had been Hwang's farcical and biting response to the yellow casting of Jonathan Pryce as The Engineer in the Broadway premiere of Miss Saigon and he intended for his play to challenge multiple misguided conceptions about ethnic identity and stereotypes. In his later return to this subject matter, he "started thinking about the stage documentary form—making it a mock stage documentary that would poke fun at some of the absurdities of the multicultural movement."5 In regard to the "mock" part of his documentary play, he created a fictional narrative surrounding Marcus Gee, a white actor, who is mistaken as Asian by DHH and is cast as the lead in Face Value, whereby Gee then goes on to garner great success as an Asian-American actor. Surrounding this fictional story line, Hwang uses newspapers, magazines, and government sources to document specific incidents in the 1990s, including Hwang's protest against Pryce's casting, the critical and financial failure of Face Value, the rising sense of "yellow peril" associated with Chinese Americans in the 1990s, and his father's role in a campaign finance scandal surrounding Bill Clinton's run for President. Leigh Silverman, the play's director, noted that what "we ask people to believe in in the play is that everything...

D. H. Hwang’s Changes in Representations of Asian Women in Yellow Face

This paper examines D. H. Hwang’s changes in representations of Asian women and his search for subjectivity as a minor writer in Yellow Face (2007). Face Value (1993), which was his second Broadway production, turned out to be a great failure. Hwang blames a woman for his involvement in the Yellow Face casting controversy on the production of Miss Saigon. Therefore, he represents her as a stereotype of Asian women, a femme fatale, like the Dragon Lady in Face Value. However, its failure offered the inspiration for his Obie Award-winning Yellow Face, so the play is no longer a failure. The factors that caused the success of Yellow Face were the changes in representations of women from the Dragon Lady to real women with strong subjectivities as Asian Americans; and, what is more, he appropriates their subversive power of sexual politics through becoming a minor writer.

Producing Miss Saigon

This essay examines Western representations of Saigon as a feminine and sensual place, providing examples of continuity between French colonial portrayals of the city and print journalism during the u.s. presence in Vietnam from the mid-1950s to 1975. Femininity and sexual allure feature prominently in an array of 19th Century works about Saigon, yet those writings vary considerably. By the early 20th Century, Western writers had begun to personify Saigon as a woman engaged in a relationship with a Western man. In similar ways, femininity and sensuality figured prominently in how Western journalists covered Saigon throughout the Vietnam War. Such representations cast a mold for tragic postwar narratives—a genre that the celebrated musical Miss Saigon best exemplified. Weighing the possibilities and shortcomings of collectively interpreting these writings as an Orientalist discourse, this article surveys more than a century of work that describes Saigon as a sensual maiden whom the West courted, exploited, and abandoned.

Here is a Story For Me: Representation and Visibility in Miss Saigon and The Orphan of Zhao

This article places The Orphan of Zhao casting controversy into dialogue with another problematic theatrical representation of East Asians, Claude-Michel Schönberg, Alain Boublil, and Richard Maltby Jr.’s musical Miss Saigon. Drawing on his personal experiences of playing the role of Thuy in Miss Saigon in 2005, Chow suggests that the problematic hyper-visibility of East Asian performers in a number of stereotypical roles in Miss Saigon may actually lead to moments in which the labour of the East Asian actor might be perceived in excess of the character. Therefore, while Miss Saigon’s narrative constructs an orientalist vision of the East, its embodiment in the theatre creates moments of possible resistance. Understanding the relation of actor to role in this way, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s (RSC) casting of The Orphan of Zhao can be seen as exclusionary, as its particular distribution of roles polices East Asian embodiment, presence, and speech. Chow suggests that rather than being problematic for the use of ‘yellow-face’, the RSC’s casting of non-East Asian actors in East Asian roles was troubling for a different reason: it silenced its East Asian actors and hid them in plain sight, therefore replicating the way East Asian subjects are hidden and silenced within contemporary British discourse.

Shakespeare by Elçin (review)

Reviewed by: Shakespeare by Elçin Marvin Carlson SHAKESPEARE. By Elçin. Directed by Himli Zafer Şashin. Municipal Theatre, Istanbul. 14 March 2014. Although Azerbaijan was one of the first Muslim-majority nations to present theatre and opera in the Western style, and now has a strong theatrical tradition in this style going back almost a century and a half, Azerbaijani plays and dramatists remain almost totally unknown in the United States and much of [End Page 458] Europe. They are more common in the repertoire of nearby Turkey, however, and I was fortunate enough to see there a recent Azerbaijani work with very strong Western echoes. Elçin’s Shakespeare was first presented in an elegant new theatre in Baku in 2007 and revived seven years later in the Municipal Theatre of Istanbul. The dramatist, whose full name is Elçin Ilyas Oglu Afandiyev, is generally known by the single name Elçin and is one of the best-known writers in his country; he is also its deputy prime minister. After enjoying great success in novels and cinema, Elçin turned to the theatre. Shakespeare is his tenth play. The play echoes the Western repertoire in several ways, and not only in the evocation of its greatest dramatist. Like Marat/Sade, it takes place in a rather theatricalized mental hospital and, like Peter Schaffer’s Equus, features a narrator/psychiatrist (Ertuğrul Postoğlu) who helps others, but feels a kind of existential emptiness within himself. As is often the case in such works, the “crazy” inmates of the hospital possess insights denied to the learned doctor and his staff. The central inmate (played by the leading Azerbaijani actress Selma Kutluğ) believes she is Sarah Bernhardt, who, in turn, believes that Shakespeare in general, and Romeo and Juliet in particular, elevate humanity to a new level of happiness and harmony. The only inmate sympathetic to her vision is Slash 13 (Murat Kuner), even though theatre does not exist on the planet Vanderprandur from which he claims to come. He explains to the doctor that on his planet everyone tells the truth, so theatre is not necessary to express true feelings. Nevertheless, he feels envy for the experience that Sarah champions and demonstrates. Much less impressed is an inmate who fancies himself Josef Stalin (Senzai Aydin) and is primarily concerned with insisting that history has made him appear far worse than he actually was. Among the other, less central inmates are a schizophrenic (Acts Atemgüe) who fancies herself both a husband and wife, and another purported space traveler, this one from Venus. Sarah’s campaign meets with little success until Slash 13 agrees to perform a love scene from Shakespeare’s play to demonstrate to the others what the playwright offers. In the Turkish production, they performed the scene in strong overhead lighting that reduced the watchers to dim silhouettes surrounding the action. Their performance of the scene was powerful and deeply moving, not only for the little audience onstage, but for the larger real audience assembled in the theatre. Sarah clearly makes her point about the emotional power of theatre, and the audience laughs and applauds in support; even the crusty Stalin proclaims, “this is better than Marx.” Not long after this key scene, the production offered an even more spectacular stage effect. Somewhat in the manner of the famous helicopter in Miss Saigon, an enormous spaceship filled the area above the stage, bathing all in dazzling light. It is the colleagues of Slash 13, come to take him back home. Before he leaves, however, he urges all those left behind to heed the lessons of Shakespeare that Sarah has tried to impart to them. Whether their lives have, in fact, been altered we do not learn, but it is clear that the psychiatrist, who was not present for the extraterrestrial visit or for the Shakespearian scene, has not been able to profit from either, apparently considering the first a mass hallucination, and the second a foolish game played by the inmates. He ends the play alone in his office, still searching for the mental comfort that so closely passed him by. Aside from excellent performances, the...

PURO ARTE: Filipinos on the Stages of Empire by Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns (review)

Reviewed by: PURO ARTE: Filipinos on the Stages of Empire by Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns Emmanuel Raymundo PURO ARTE: Filipinos on the Stages of Empire. By Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns. New York: New York University Press. 2013. Puro arte, the word, describes the “labor of overacting, histrionics, playfulness and purely over the top dramatics.” Puro Arte, Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns’ thoughtful examination of its deployment (and cited as a 2013 Outstanding [End Page 113] Book in Cultural Studies by the Association of Asian American Studies), is “a way of approaching the Filipino/a performing body at key moments in U.S.-Philippines imperial relations.” Puro Arte, then, theatricizes and historicizes puro arte. Filipinos pose a challenge for theater. The possibilities for theater’s conceit of transformation is troubled when its actors are a group of people who are often understood as forgotten, invisible or misrecognized. Spanning the twentieth century, Puro Arte broadens the stage in which the Filipina/o body is displayed and acts out in an admirable attempt to depict how these figures transcends history’s shadow. The opening chapter, “Which Way to the Philippines? United Stages of Empire,” examines the dramatization of Filipino-American relations during the years leading to, during, and immediately after the Spanish-American War. Chapter two locates dance taxi halls as the site for the acting out of white male anxieties about labor displacement by Filipinos in the 1920s and 1930s. The third chapter, “Coup de Theater: The Drama of Martial Law,” is focused on dramatizations of Marcos’ dictatorial rule through the works of Sining Bayan (“Theater of the People”) and the first production of Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters (1990) in the Philippines. The fourth chapter, “How in the Light of One Night Did We Come So Far?” looks at Miss Saigon (2000), Filipino actors, and the genre of the mega-musical as the intersection of frayed colonial histories involving Vietnam, France, and the U.S. Expanding what constitutes the stages of performance, Puro Arte is not constrained by physical, national or disciplinary walls. Not only is the mythical fourth wall broken down, disciplinary walls are breached. When the colored curtain is pulled back, what is revealed is the Third World, the Global South, or the diaspora that make up how contemporary history is understood. Duped by Americans whom they thought were their allies against the Spanish but who turned out to be their colonizers, the Philippines is a country of false starts and multiple potential beginnings. This is evident in Cory Aquino’s 1986 “People Power” that overthrew Marcos and resurfaced in 2001 as “People Power 2” when Joseph Estrada was toppled by Gloria Arroyo who, now, languishes under house arrest in a military hospital with charges of electoral fraud and theft. On the surface, this is the recycling of struggles between the masses and the elites or the elites and the even more elites or dynastic turf wars under the guise of “democracy” (popular, cacique, or otherwise). Underneath the regularity of the people’s call to and for power is the desire for a just political system that has yet to find its proper voice or appropriate body. In the meantime, all it has is its ability to act out or to embody puro arte as a way to fight back. Until then, we also have Puro Arte, Lucy Mae San Pablo Burn’s book, that is foregrounded in deeply observed historical context and a well-measured assessment of culture and politics imbued with thoughtful and caring sentiment. Puro Arte is an important study not only for those with interest in theater studies but important for students and scholars of ethnic studies, postcolonial theory, and Asian American history. [End Page 114] Emmanuel Raymundo Tulane University Copyright © 2014 Mid-America American Studies Association

무대의상에 나타난 다원적 절충주의 경향에 관한 연구 - 세계 4대 뮤지컬을 중심으로 -

The purpose of this study is to examine the trend of plural eclecticism in costumes appearing on the stages of the world's top 4 musicals based on the general researches and establishments made of the mentioned concept. The conclusions of this study are as follows. First, the aspects of eclectics appearing in overall pieces can be defined as situational eclecticism. It can be attributed to the dramatic elements contrasted in the storyline of the musical and occurs in mixture with various situations. Showing combinations of costumes from varying situations at once in the same stage makes the audience feel the dynamic elements of the piece. Second, the aspect of temporal eclecticism, which can be seen in the 'Phantom of the Opera' regarding mixture of crinoline style and art nouveau style, resulted from the partial mixture of classical elements for maximizing visual beauty in the historical pieces. Third, the aspect of spatial eclecticism can be observed in the musical 'Miss Saigon', which used costumes that combined multicultural elements by exposing different spaces and cultures such as America and Vietnam. It eclectically expresses the unique cultures and costumes of each country. Fourth, 'Les Miserables' shows the aspect of situational eclecticism, through its use of mixture of situations in various aspects, and in particular, the male and female costumes that blur the boundaries of life, death, and costume, the mixture of people's costume and aristocrat's costume, and the situational elements where the good and evil are contrasted are integrated eclectically to make the story dramatic.

Puro arte: Filipinos on the stages of empire

1. Which Way to the Philippines? United Stages of Empire2. Splendid Dancing: Of Filipinos and Taxi Dance Halls3. Coup de Theatre: The Drama of Martial Law4. How in the Light of One Night Did We Come So Far? Working Miss Saigon Coda: Culture Shac

Vietnam is a country, not a war-trauma and nostalgia in the anthology The Perfume River

ABSTRACTVietnam is a country not a war. But the Vietnam/American war is hard to forget in the Western context; even almost 40 years on, many Western introductions to Vietnam is through American war veteran movies and musicals like Miss Saigon. The scholarship on Vietnamese diasporic literature is similarly limited with only one major monograph. This is what I choose to tell by Isabelle Pelaud published in 2010 about Vietnamese diasporic writing in English. So the question must be asked who is creating Vietnam in the Western context? Vietnamese diasporic writers, I argue, are driven by ethics, partly due to the trauma suffered by the diasporic communities and partly because of the importance placed in Vietnam on the literature. By contrast, many Western perceptions of Vietnam are driven by nostalgia and orientalism, of a colonial past. This article will critique the anthology The Perfume River edited by Catherine Cole, which was released in 2010. It will look at short stories by Nam Le, Chi Vu and Catherine Cole.

The Transnational Vision of <i>Miss Saigon</i>: Performing the Orient in a Globalized World

At the beginning of the new millennium, the Philippines welcomed Miss as the nation's event of the decade (Pride par. 1). In 2000, the musical generated phenomenal ticket sales and renewed what journalists termed Saigon Mania from the early 1990s in Manila (Tolentino), where local critics declared it worth watching even if you have to pay leg and an arm (Miss Is Home par. 33). Its sponsor was the Ang Bayang Makulay Foundation, established by Joseph Victor Ejercito, the son of former president of the Philippines Joseph Estrada. Also the recipient of endorsements and security assistance from leaders of the opposing political parties, Miss Saigon, Manila, was seen as unifying the Philippines (Miss Unifies). Manila was the only Asian city where the original British production team held auditions in their ostensibly worldwide search for the female lead, Kim, and where they found Lea Salonga for the premiere and other young Filipinas in following years. Manila was the first city to stage the musical for its international tours in Asia, and the only Asian production that received immediate coverage on CNN network (Ressa). After Manila, Miss traveled to major cities in East and Southeast Asia, including Ho Chi Minh City, Singapore, Hong Kong, and most recently Seoul, where it has consistently enjoyed box-office success. I examine the transnational productions of Miss in London, New York, and Manila as case study of the post-Cold War circulation of American neocolonial cultural expressions? I use the term transnational, because each location is part of a world system, in which the exchange of commodities, the flow of capital, and the iterations of cultures know no borders (Fishkin 8). Different nations' economic and political systems have historically been brought into increasingly closer cooperation by integrated market capitalism in the past centuries. (2) On the one hand, globalization points to the homogenizing effect of this development. On the other hand, multidirectional interaction, intersection, contact, conflict, appropriation, and synergy and synapse between nations, cultures, and individuals inform the hybridities and fluidities that define the transnational aspect of this world system (Fishkin 7-8). This study of Miss as terrain of struggle and negotiation provides new meanings of Americanness and Filipino/a identity. Just as the Philippines appeared on the US imperialist map as America's gateway to Asia at the turn of the twentieth century, Manila has been vital site for the transnational production of Miss at the turn of this century. Building on and extending the Asian American Studies scholarship on Miss and cultural studies approaches of political economy, I examine this musical at the tenuous intersections between national identities, colonial history, orientalist heteropatriarchal fantasies, and globalized capitalism. (3) Miss is commercially popular and critically contested musical closely associated with Filipino/as and Asian Americans. Despite the publicity surrounding the protests from Asian American theater and activist communities, the musical was hailed legend at its 1991 New York premiere (Kroll). The buzz resulted in the largest advance ticket sale in Broadway history (Pogrebin par. 5). Later that year, Salonga, the Filipina actress who originated the title role of Kim, became the first Asian to win the Tony Award for Best Actress. The musical is the eleventh-longest-running Broadway musical in musical theater history. To date, Miss is ranked the third most successful musical in British theater history; it has won thirty major awards and entertained more than thirty-one million people in eighteen countries and in nine languages (Miss Sets). Miss Saigon's storyline is simple: as remake of Madama Butterfly, it relates the romance between Kim, Vietnamese bar girl working for Eurasian man known as the Engineer, and Chris, US Marine, in Saigon, 1975; Kim forsakes her betrothed cousin Thuy, Viet Cong, to marry Chris; Chris retreats with American forces, and Kim flees to Thailand to work in the Engineer's bar, raise Chris's son, and wait for Chris; three years later, Chris returns with his American wife; enacting the ultimate sacrifice, Kim kills herself so that Chris will take her son to America for better life. …

Effects of Paclobutrazol Sprays on Inflorescences of Three Potted Moth Orchid Clones

Inflorescences of some moth orchid (Phalaenopsis and Doritaenopsis) hybrids can become very tall, which can pose shipping challenges for commercial producers and be unwieldy for consumers. We determined the efficacy of paclobutrazol as a foliar spray to inhibit inflorescence elongation of these genera and intergeneric hybrids. A single application of 15, 30, or 45 mg·L−1 palcobutrazol at a volume of 0.2 L·m−2 was applied to Doritaenopsis Miss Saigon, Doritaenopsis Andrew, and Phalaenopsis ‘Smart Thing’ grown at 23 °C to induce flowering. Applications were made after inflorescence emergence but before flower initiation (inflorescences were 1 to 2 cm long) or after flower initiation (inflorescences were 10 to 18 cm long). None of the paclobutrazol applications inhibited total inflorescence elongation of ‘Smart Thing’ or Miss Saigon. However, paclobutrazol inhibited inflorescence elongation from treatment until first flowering of Andrew by 19% to 23% when plants were treated with 15 or 45 mg·L−1 before flower initiation and 30 or 45 mg·L−1 after flower initiation. One or more concentrations of paclobutrazol applied after flower initiation reduced the length of the internode between the first and second flower on all three orchid clones. Paclobutrazol delayed flowering only on Miss Saigon (by 2 days) and only when applied after flower initiation. Paclobutrazol application did not affect the number of inflorescences or flowers, diameter of the first flower, number of new leaves formed, or increase in leaf span. Growers are advised to perform small-scale trials with paclobutrazol solutions starting at 30 to 45 mg·L−1 within 1 week of inflorescence emergence, although higher concentrations may be appropriate for the most vigorous varieties. Furthermore, a late spray application can cause unwanted crowding of the flowers.

The hypersexuality of race: performing Asian/American women on screen and scene

In The Hypersexuality of Race , Celine Parrenas Shimizu urges a shift in thinking about sexualized depictions of Asian/American women in film, video, and theatrical productions. Shimizu advocates moving beyond denunciations of sexualized representations of Asian/American women as necessarily demeaning or negative. Arguing for a more nuanced approach to the mysterious mix of pleasure, pain, and power in performances of sexuality, she advances a theory of “productive perversity,” a theory which allows Asian/American women—and by extension other women of color—to lay claim to their own sexuality and desires as actors, producers, critics, and spectators. Shimizu combines theoretical and textual analysis and interviews with artists involved in various productions. She complicates understandings of the controversial portrayals of Asian female sexuality in the popular Broadway musical Miss Saigon by drawing on ethnographic research and interviews with some of the actresses in it. She looks at how three Hollywood Asian/American femme fatales—Anna May Wong, Nancy Kwan, and Lucy Liu—negotiate representations of their sexuality; analyzes 1920s and 1930s stag films in which white women perform as sexualized Asian characters; and considers Asian/American women’s performances in films ranging from the stag pornography of the 1940s to the Internet and video porn of the 1990s. She also reflects on two documentaries depicting Southeast Asian prostitutes and sex tourism, The Good Woman of Bangkok and 101 Asian Debutantes . In her examination of films and videos made by Asian/American feminists, Shimizu describes how female characters in their works reject normative definitions of race, gender, and sexuality, thereby expanding our definitions of racialized sexualities in representation.

From spotlight to fluorescent bulb: aesthetic dimensions of personal, practical knowledge in an actor training to be a high school teacher

This paper can be conceived as one story embedded in a second story, in which the ‘outer’ narrative, involving the theoretical and methodological framework, is that of my search for a means of defining, articulating and implementing an aesthetic epistemology in both academic research and in teacher education/development (a search that is advanced but not resolved in this article). In the ‘inner’ story, I present the report of a qualitative research study with a participant in transition from a career as a theatre professional to one as a high school drama teacher. The inquiry focuses on the aesthetic dimension of personal, practical knowledge, an aspect of personal, practical knowledge previously unacknowledged. This study focuses on one research participant, who in the midst of a successful career as an actor in mega-musicals decided to become a high school teacher. ‘Ella’ has performed in Miss Saigon, Beauty and the Beast, and Showboat in Toronto and around North America, and her story foregrounds the pedagogical role of storytelling, being ‘on’, nuance, discovering the familiar in the new, and drama as a methodology.