Sorting out the many interests of new Theater Studies professor Claire Conceison is no easy task: A short list starts with directing Chinese theater, gymnastics and figure skating, Catholicism and her pet maltipoo.
Somehow Conceison, who arrived from Tufts University earlier this year, manages to weave each of these varied interests into her everyday life.
For instance, during morning classes this semester, Conceison the former gymnast and figure skater led a rousing discussion of sport as performance. In the afternoon, she taught an undergraduate seminar focusing on the changes in modern Chinese theater.
In between classes and research, she found time to attend daily Mass and participate in the campus Catholic community. And we'll get to the maltipoo later in this story.
"As far as I know, I am the only Sinologist who is also a specialist on sport in a performance context, and the only professor teaching courses specifically on sport as performance," Conceison said.
"These two trajectories developed independently and rarely intersect. So, during semesters when I am teaching courses on both sport and Chinese theater, I alternate identities during the day, and my students in one class encounter a completely different side of my scholarship than students in the other class.
"For me, it is an exciting -- if slightly schizophrenic -- combination, and it emerged from different aspects of my personal and educational experiences."
Conceison, who earned a master's in East Asian studies from Harvard and a Ph.D. in theater studies from Cornell, regularly returns to China, where she immerses herself in the theater community there. "I spend much of my time at rehearsals, observing and conducting interviews with the artists as a theater community and seeing how censorship and other matters affect them. You have to be on the ground to get at these things."
The ancient tradition of classical Chinese theater is renowned as a high-art form, but Western-style theater based on dialogue is only a century old in China and has brought a new element. Conceison knows many of the landmark figures in China's contemporary theater, from controversial director and playwright Meng Jinghui (whose plays she has directed in the United States) to the late actor Ying Ruocheng.
Ying's Life
Ying may be best known to American audiences as the prison warden who befriends the emperor Pu Yi in "The Last Emperor." In American theater circles, he's famed for playing Willy Loman in a 1983 landmark Beijing production of Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman." The production, the only time Miller directed the play, used Chinese actors and turned the Loman family into Chinese-Americans living in Brooklyn. [See accompanying excerpt.]
"Ying was drawn to the play," said Conceison, whose theater class this semester discussed the production's continuing influence in China. "He believed Chinese theater audiences would be likewise drawn to it because of its compelling main character of Willy Loman, its unique aesthetic -- Willy could walk through walls and talk to people who weren't there -- and its universal theme of family relationships, especially the complex bond between father and son."
Conceison is using her personal ties to build stronger links between Duke and the Chinese theater community, including assisting one theater student from China, Eric Yang (son of renowned Chinese actor Yang Lixin), to transfer to Duke. Since 2006, she's traveled annually to Paris to work with Nobel laureate Gao Xingjian, an exiled Chinese writer living in Paris, and has translated his latest play from French into English.
Her theater class includes several Chinese students. Next semester she's bringing Shanghai playwright Nick Yu (Yu Rongjun) to campus for a performance as part of her workshop course on Chinese experimental theater.
Her other academic interest comes out of her participation in athletics since childhood, particularly in gymnastics and figure skating.
"These are perhaps the most theatrical of the sports," Conceison said. "I also performed in plays. Later, as I became trained as a scholar in theater and performance studies, I recognized sporting events as performances with all the characteristics of theater, and as spectacles and rituals that are performative in terms of race, gender and nation.
"Even when I knew I was interested in East Asian studies, I kept my ties to sports. As a student, my work-study jobs were in athletic departments. My first job as an undergraduate was to hold the first down marker at the football games. In graduate school, I worked for the football coaching staff and in sports communications, with duties ranging from the press table at basketball games to public address announcer at wrestling meets. So I had this immersion in athletics that was parallel to my academic development in Sinology."
When teaching sport, she uses the same ethnographic methods that help her study Chinese theater. Her class topics range from professional wrestling as performance to public representation of gender and sexuality in the sports context. Students took a field trip to a Durham Bulls game, writing essays on different aspects of the outing from the game itself to the sumo wrestling entertainment between innings.
As with her work on Chinese theater, she's found colleagues at Duke and started a Franklin Humanities Institute working group of faculty members -- from the social sciences and the humanities to law and public policy -- who conduct research on sport.
She said that outreach is one key reason why Duke was a good fit for her.
"I loved being at Tufts for five years. I was directing, teaching the curriculum I wanted to teach and training graduate students. But Duke presented me with an opportunity to be part of a growing theater studies program.
"What I like about Duke is the cross-disciplinary cooperation with both students and faculty, because I work in three or four different disciplines. At Duke, it's part of the very nature of the university. It's truly happening here."
When not in class, she's usually in her Page Auditorium office, a corner office on the Main Quad where her students often stop by her window to visit. She shares her office with her Maltese-poodle puppy, Bisou, who fills the space with energy that matches her own.
"I bring her into the office because I'm spending so much time here," Conceison said. As she talked, the puppy leapt into her lap, ears perked and eyes beaming.
"I didn't want to leave her alone for the entire day. Plus, the students enjoy being with her. They come by to talk about class, but I think they really come by to play with her."