Life

Jo Riley graduated from the University of Cambridge. After working for a number of small touring companies, she went to Asia to explore a different kind of theatre. In the early 1980s, after learning Mandarin Chinese, she was one of the first foreign students at the Central Academy of Drama in Beijing, where she learned to act in the Chinese theatre (example pictured at right).

She has since then helped teach and direct traditional Chinese theatre in Salzburg, Mainz, and Bayreuth. She's also been at intercultural workshops with Cardiff Laboratory Theatre and Pan Projects at Goldsmiths College, London. In addition, she has written articles and books on Chinese theatre, especially Chinese Theatre and the Actor in Performance (1997, see Works section), and has edited or translated several plays or books on European and intercultural theatre.

She currently teaches drama at Munich International School in Germany.

Works

In 1997, Cambridge University Press published Riley's Chinese Theatre and the Actor in Performance, a book often cited on the topic of Chinese theatre. It covers not only jingju (Beijing opera or Peking opera, example pictured at right) but also Chinese puppet theatre and shadow play, as well as Chinese exorcism and ancient animation rites at the tomb, to explore how the Chinese create presence on a stage. In a 1999 review for the Asian Theatre Journal, China specialist Prof. Colin Mackerras (author of The Cambridge Handbook of Contemporary China, brother of Malcolm Mackerras) noted how the book "looks at the skills of the Chinese actor from the insider's point of view — not that of the Westerner or the student of China." Indeed:

Jo Riley is one of the few people in the West qualified to undertake such a study because she not only knows Chinese but has learned to act in the Chinese theatre. She has traveled widely in China and examined the various styles of regional theatre that are so abundant and important in China. Although nobody can really divorce himself from his own culture, nor is it sensible to try, Jo Riley does speak as an insider of the Chinese theatre in a way few non-Chinese can match.

Riley also made, under the title The Other Side (1997), the first English translation of the controversial play The Other Shore (1986) by Nobel Laureate in Literature playwright Gao Xingjian.

As editor

Edited or co-edited publications include:

• 1990: The Dramatic Touch of Difference: Theatre, Own and Foreign, by various
• : Collected essays edited by Erika Fischer-Lichte(in German), Jo Riley, & Michael Gissenwehrer, Forum Modernes Theater, vol. 2, Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1990, ISBN 3-8233-4023-9, , , GBOOK BoB6jbZqbhgC; 287 p., illustrations, paperback ... Co-credit was to "Josephine Riley".
• 1997: The Show and the Gaze of Theatre: A European Perspective, by Erika Fischer-Lichte(in German)
• : Collected essays (1986—1995) edited (and some translated from the German into English) by Jo Riley, Studies in Theatre History and Culture, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, November 1997, ISBN 0-87745-608-9, , , GBOOK HF3wu1vVm2gC; 426 (x, 412) p., illustrations, paperback. (Hardback: February 1998, ISBN 0-87745-607-0)

As author

Publications include:

• 1997: Chinese Theatre and the Actor in Performance
• : Cambridge studies in modern theatre, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, June 1997, ISBN 0-521-57090-5, , , GBOOK OIAiYaIfFagC; 360 (xii, 348) p., illustrations, hardback. (Paperback: December 2006, ISBN 0-521-03523-6, .)

As translator

Translations include:

• 1997: A Contemporary Drama Without Acts, by Gao Xingjian
• : Translated from the Chinese Bi An (1986; {{zh|c=彼岸|p=bǐ'àn