East Asian literature, Cinema and Dance are Spotlighted in Symposium

A demonstration featuring a choreographer of the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics and the North American premiere of films by Kanai Katsu are among the highlights of a symposium taking place on campus Friday-Sunday, Feb. 27-March 1.

Titled “East Asia in Motion: Literature, Cinema, Dance,” the event seeks to extend the breadth of current scholarship on East Asia by focusing on the literary, cinematic and choreographic manifestations of movement.

The symposium is sponsored by the Council on East Asian Studies, the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures and the Whitney Humanities Center. All events take place in the auditorium of the Whitney Humanities Center, 53 Wall St.

The symposium will begin at 7 p.m. on Friday with a screening of two films by Katsu: “The Desert Archipelago,” winner of the Grand Prix at the Nyon International Film Festival (1969) and “Goodbye” (1971).

A roundtable discussion featuring the filmmaker will ­follow at 9 p.m. A pioneer of the independent filmmaking movement in Japan and Korea, Katsu uses film to engage with issues of politics and identity.

Saturday’s events begin at 10 a.m. with a panel on “Moving Images of Empire.” A second panel, titled “Becoming Animal: Zones of Exchange and the Post-Human Organism” will take place at 2 p.m.

Choreographer, director, dancer, painter and designer Shen Wei will be featured in a lecture-demonstration at 7 p.m. Wei helped choreograph the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics and is widely recognized for his vision of an intercultural, interdisciplinary, original mode of movement-based performance. He will discuss his vision, past and current projects, and the ways in which his work pushes the boundaries of what it means to “move” as a dancer in a transnational context.

Wei will also take part in roundtable discussion about his work at 8:30 p.m.

The concluding roundtable, “Moving Forward: Further Questions and Trajectories,” will be held at 10 a.m. on Sunday.

The weekend’s roundtable participants include doctoral students and faculty from Yale, New York University and the Universities of California, Chicago, Minnesota, Michigan and Hawaii.