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. 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, 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 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 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: Riley also made, under the title The Other Side, the first English translation of the controversial play The Other Shore 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, Jo Riley, & Michael Gissenwehrer, Forum Modernes Theater, vol. 2, Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1990,,,, GBOOK ; 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
: Collected essays edited by Jo Riley, Studies in Theatre History and Culture, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, November 1997,,,, GBOOK ; 426 p., illustrations, paperback.
As author
Publications include:
1997: Chinese Theatre and the Actor in Performance
: Cambridge studies in modern theatre, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, June 1997,,,, GBOOK ; 360 p., illustrations, hardback.
As translator
Translations include:
1997: , by Gao Xingjian
: Translated from the Chinese Bi An into English by Jo Riley, in Martha P. Y. Cheung & Jane C. C. Lai, An Oxford Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Drama, p. 149–184, Hong Kong & New York: Oxford University Press, September 1997,,,, GBOOK ; 900 p., hardback – Part of an anthology of 15 plays. This play was later retranslated by someone else as The Other Shore for a different collection of plays.
2001: History of European Drama and Theatre, by Erika Fischer-Lichte
: Translated from the German Geschichte des Dramas into English by Jo Riley, London, UK & New York: Routledge, December 2001,,,, GBOOK ; 432 p., hardback.
