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Registration is now open for 6th ICTM PASEA Symposium. If you experience any issues, please update a new version of the browser on your computer or device.
You are kindly reminded that the deadline for uploading your presentation is July 15. This allows our team to organize gigabytes of data into the proper order, conduct quality control for audio/visual broadcasting, and troubleshoot other issues that can arise in preparation for a virtual symposium.
Please note that the deadline for registration has been extended to July 22, 2021.
Update 07.11 2021
About the Symposium
Organizers
Introduction to ICTM Study Group on Performing Arts of Southeast Asia
The ICTM Study Group on the Performing Arts of Southeast Asia (PASEA) began organizational meetings in 2008 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and was formally established under the rules of the International Council for Traditional Music (ICTM) in 2009. From discussions that began in 2007-2008 among scholars on music and dance of Southeast Asia, it was clear that better communication and interaction was needed among all scholars, and that emerging scholars in the field needed greater encouragement and more opportunities.
This Study Group is open to all ICTM members who are involved in research and documentation on the performing arts (including music, dance and theatre) of Southeast Asia. Current members have initiated three sub-study groups, i.e. Sub-Study Group on Performing Arts of Muslim Communities in Southeast Asia; Sub-Study Group on Performing Arts in Royal Contexts; and Sub-Study Group on Popular Performing Arts Industries of Southeast Asia.
The ICTM Study Group on PASEA holds a symposium every two years at different locations in Southeast Asia. In 2010, the 1st Symposium was held and hosted by the Republic Polytechnic in Singapore; In 2012, the 2nd Symposium was held at the National Commission for Culture and Arts at Intramuros, Manila, The Philippines; In 2014, the 3rd Symposium was held at the Indonesian Institute of the Arts Denpasar, Bali, Indonesia; In 2016, the 4th Symposium was held and hosted by the Universiti Sains Malaysia in Penang, Malaysia; and in 2018, the 5th Symposium was held at the Sabah Museum in Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, Malaysia.
The ICTM Performing Arts of Southeast Asia Study Group is dedicated to the study and research on music, dance and theatre as found throughout Southeast Asia, and also includes Southeast Asian performing arts elsewhere around the world. The Study Group intends to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas, new approaches and current research among established as well as young ICTM scholars around the world. The Study Group also strives to increase communications and interaction among scholars working in Southeast Asian performing arts, and to promote future research initiatives in areas of Southeast Asia where there has been little or no research.
Introduction to Tainan National University of the Arts (TNNUA)
The mission of TNNUA is to nurture a high level of research talent in the professional arts fields. The university boasts a wide range of academic fields in related areas, comprising the College of Music, College of Visual Arts, College of Sound and Image Arts, College of Letters and Cultural Heritage, and Commission for General Education. It has yielded outstanding results in education since its founding. Under the leadership of professional faculty and artistic environment, TNNUA has successfully trained outstanding professional art talents in the field of art creation and research, establishing it as one of the most outstanding academic institutes specializing in professional arts research and practice.
In recent years TNNUA has invested significant effort in exploring the possibilities of combining the humanities and arts with technology. It has formed cross-sector alliances with local industries from the field of digital technology, and proactively showcases the universities creative capabilities in different fields of the arts. It assists in cultural rehabilitation and the building of a local ‘humanities consciousness’ through continuous efforts in work creation and research. Through art exchanges, the school connects to the global community, bringing Taiwan’s art experts into the international stage and demonstrating Taiwan’s potential in the field of arts.
Symposium Themes
THEME 1: Movementscapes and Soundscapes
This theme investigates sound and movement within their spaces of production as determining features in the performing arts of Southeast Asia. Over half a century of soundscape studies have focused on the intersecting issues of acoustic space, perception and sound properties. Today soundscape studies include meaning and relationships between sounds, living things, and place. The much more recently coined term ‘movementscapes’ (Hammergren 2014; Hoppu 2014) concerns bodies experiencing diverse intersections of music with movement and dance with sonic events. As examples, Malaysian Bharatanatyam choreography flows into the grooves of Jakarta jazz or Mindanao kulintang moves into salsa bands to accompany Bangkok modern ballet. The theme provides openings for a number of questions relevant to Southeast Asia: How has the internet enabled the transmission of music and dance resulting in the exceleration of ‘overlapping bodies’ in Southeast Asian performing arts? How do local ontologies conceive mind and body connections with nature, the spiritual, the physical place or the social setting as relevant to soundscapes and movementscapes? What extramusical sounds and extra-choreographic motions are present and how do they influence performance or not? And finally, how do sound- and movementscapes as topics relate to music and dance, but also environment, identity, rituals, communication, ecology, consumership bodily perception, and audience-performer relations? The theme and its issues argue for a methodology that is dynamic rather than fixed, one in which bodies and environment are in constant motion, continually creating meanings and connections. Southeast Asia provides a platform for such a methodology.
THEME 2: Expressing Heritage - Inviting Encounter: Intersections between Scholars and Performing Artists in Southeast Asia
Often the salient insights and stimulating discussions emerging from papers on traditional arts and society delivered at academic conferences in Southeast Asia remain within a small circle of foreign and local scholars bound either by language or dissemination constraints. This small circle may omit groups or individuals who feel overlooked, voiceless and lack empowerment to express their own modes of presenting a performing arts heritage. PASEA 2021 in Taiwan designs a conference whereby the format and discourse of engagement with heritage - both performative and descriptive - are inclusive for performers and non-scholars as they participate with metropolitan scholars in navigating the difficulties and celebrations which traditional arts performers currently encounter in the fast-approaching mid 21st century. What frameworks of transmission in an Internet age are lost or gained when encountered by new generations? What strategies can be shared that invite new audiences and present alternatives to the stereotyped trope lamenting “catastrophic loss of tradition”? This trope propagates an unchallenged collective forgetting and devaluation of heritage. It easily subdues the imagination from untangling a more complicated institutional and individual psychology of avoidance and contempt for cultural legacies in the performing arts among the rising middle class.
THEME 3: New Research
This theme covers all new research topics by members of the PASEA Study Group.
