Keynote speakers

Keynote Speakers

Daphne

Prof Daphne Lei, University of California, Irvine

Daphne Lei is Professor of Drama, at the University of California, Irvine, USA. She received her PhD from Tufts University and was a Mellon postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University. She is internationally known for her scholarship on Chinese opera, Asian American theatre, intercultural, transnational and transpacific performance. She is the author of three monographs: Operatic China: Staging Chinese Identity across the Pacific (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), Alternative Chinese Opera in the Age of Globalization: Performing Zero (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), Uncrossing the Borders: Performing Chinese in Gendered (Trans)Nationalism (University of Michigan Press, 2019). Uncrossing the Borders: Performing Chinese in Gendered (Trans)Nationalism was the Finalist of the 2019 Theatre Library Association’s George Freedley Memorial Book Award and the Finalist of the 2020 Outstanding Book Award (Association for Theatre in Higher Education). Daphne Lei is also the co-editor of The Methuen Drama Handbook of Interculturalism and Performance (Bloomsbury, 2020, with Charlotte McIvor) and is currently co-authoring Theatre Histories: an Introduction (Routledge, 4th edition) with Tobin Nellhaus, Tamara Underiner and Patricia Ybarra.

Daphne Lei is the former president of American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR, 2015-2018). At UC Irvine, she serves as the Associate Dean of Graduate Affairs of Claire Trevor School of the Arts and the interim director of Illuminations, the Chancellor’s Arts and Culture Initiative.

Steve

Prof Steve Dixon, LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore

Steve Dixon is President of LASALLE College of the Arts in Singapore, and is an expert and pioneer in the use of computer technologies in the performing arts. He was co-director of the Digital Performance Archive and is the co-founder and Advisory Editor of the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media (Routledge). His 800-page book, Digital Performance (MIT Press, 2007) is recognised as the most comprehensive scholarly work on the subject, and won international awards. His latest book, Cybernetic-Existentialism: Freedom, Systems and Being-for-Others in Contemporary Arts and Performance (Routledge, 2020) fuses ideas from philosophy and systems sciences to present a bold and original aesthetic theory of recent arts and performance.

Throughout his career, Steve has continued to create multimedia theatre productions as Director of The Chameleons Group, as well as telematic and interactive works for CD-ROM and Internet. Recent works include a one-man multimedia interpretation of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and an immersive Virtual Reality drama, Virtually No Exit. His current AHRC-funded research project, A Telepresence Stage (with Paul Sermon) involves collaboration with eight UK theatre and dance companies to develop new platforms for digital performances. In response to the pandemic’s impact on the performing arts sector, the project is identifying new and creative ways for actors and dancers to rehearse and interact together in shared online spaces and to produce collaborative live performances from remote sites.

Stephanie

Prof Stephanie Schroedter, University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna

Stephanie Schroedter has been active in musicology and dance studies. She worked as a research assistant at the University of Salzburg’s Department of Musicology (with an emphasis on music theatre and dance research) while completing her PhD on shifts from “Affect”- to “Action”-based dramaturgies in French, English and German dance performances from the late 17th to the early 18th century (supported by the FWF Vienna and awarded with the “Tanzwissenschaftspreis Nordrhein-Westfalen” 2001). Afterwards she became a research fellow at the University of Bayreuth’s Department for Music Theatre Research. Fellowships from the DAAD (“Maison des sciences de l’homme” program) and Deutsches Historisches Institut Paris (DHI) enabled her to pursue research in Paris for the development of a project on Music in Motion: Dance Cultures of the 19th Century, from 2008 to 2012 subsidized by the DFG. Additionally she worked in a SNF-project focussing on dance in 19th-century French operas, later on followed by a DFG-project on artistic and aesthetic translation processes exemplified by co-productions of Pina Bausch’s “Tanztheater Wuppertal” under the direction of Prof. Dr. Gabriele Klein (Performance Studies at the Hamburg University). For her second monograph (“habilitation”) entitled Paris qui danse. Bewegungs- und Klangräume einer Großstadt der Moderne (Movement and Sound Spaces in a Modern City) she received the “venia legendi” (“Venia docendi”) for musicology and dance studies from the Freie Universität Berlin (2015).

Stephanie taught as visiting and substitution professor for musicology, dance studies, theatre and media studies (Universities of Bern/CH, Bayreuth, Berlin and Heidelberg etc.) and organised several international conferences focused on intertwinings of music, dance, theatre/performance and media art. Additionally to her work as book editor she made more than 100 contributions to collective volumes, journals and lexika and gave talks on conferences in Europe as well as in the US and Canada. Her latest research project “Bodies and Sounds in Motion” (supported by the DFG) aims at theory-based methodical approaches to the analysis of intertwinings of music/sound and dance/movement in performances of the 20th/21st-century. She will continue this project within her professorship at the University for Music and Performing Arts Vienna, starting in 2021.