Theatre

posts on drama in Greater China

Backstaging Modern Chinese Theatre review

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Barbara Jiawei Li’s review of Backstaging Modern Chinese Theatre: Intellectuals, Amateurs, and Cultural Entrepreneurs, 1910s-1940s, by Man He. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/jiawei-li/. My thanks to Shaoling Ma, our media studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

Backstaging Modern Chinese Theatre: Intellectuals,
Amateurs, and Cultural Entrepreneurs, 1910s–1940s

By Man He

Reviewed by Barbara Jiawei Li

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright December, 2025)

Man He, Backstaging Modern Chinese Theatre: Intellectuals, Amateurs, and Cultural Entrepreneurs, 1910s-1940s Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2025. 360 pp. 9780472057559 (Paperback), 9780472077557 (Hardcover), 9780472905119 (Open Access).

Theatre is inherently a three-dimensional art form. Its essence lies not merely in texts, but in the dynamic interplay of acting, scenography, spatial design, and audience reception, which constitutes the Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art). Because of this, scholars of theatre history are usually wary of two tendencies—namely, an overemphasis on scripts and a lopsided concentration on theatrical production. The former risks producing an incomplete, sometimes even distorted, historical narrative; the latter may be equally insufficient in reconstructing historical reality. All this is to emphasize that the evanescence of theatrical performance poses great challenges to historiography: performances end and documentation remains fragmented.

Seen in this light, Man He’s Backstaging Modern Chinese Theatre: Intellectuals, Amateurs, and Cultural Entrepreneurs, 1910s–1940s delivers on both counts: through extensive archival research, the book analyses playtexts while grounding them in their performance contexts. Man He calls this approach “backstage.” Backstage is “more than just a physical location”; it is “the nebulous realm through which an idea manifests, makes its first steps toward actualization, gains institutional support, and ultimately secures hegemonic power” (2). This approach requires attention both to texts and to the behind‑the‑scenes work that enables them, such as rehearsals, training, stage design, backstage rules, and the institutions and people who support the productions. It encourages scholars to tease out the archival traces of theatrical labor and thus reconstruct theatre history with greater details.

Through the lens of the backstage, Man He looks at the growing domination of modern Chinese theatre (huaju 話劇) between the two World Wars. The author focuses on huaju because she sees it as a central cultural arena where the idea of modern China was actively shaped (4). Rather than treating huaju as simply a Western‑influenced spoken drama that replaced traditional theatre, He shows that its real significance lies in the backstage worlds where scripts were revised, actors trained, costumes designed, institutions built, and political visions negotiated. These backstage processes brought together overseas students, cosmopolitan intellectuals, rural amateurs, government officials, and wartime refugees, all of whom used huaju to articulate China’s place in a global modernity. Continue reading Backstaging Modern Chinese Theatre review →

Revolutionary Stagecraft review

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Yizhou Huang’s review of Revolutionary Stagecraft: Theater, Technnology, and Politics in Modern China, by Tarryn Li-Min Chun. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/yizhou-huang/. My thanks to Shaoling Ma, our media studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

Revolutionary Stagecraft:
Theater, Technology, and Politics in Modern China

By Tarryn Li-Min Chun

Reviewed by Yizhou Huang

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright October, 2025)

Tarryn Li-Min Chun, Revolutionary Stagecraft: Theater, Technology, and Politics in Modern China University of Michigan Press, 2024. 338 pp. 9780472056569 (paper); 9780472076567 (cloth); OPEN ACCESS.

Tarryn Li-Min Chun’s Revolutionary Stagecraft: Theater, Technology, and Politics in Modern China reconsiders modern Chinese theater history from the 1920s to the 1980s through the focal point of stage technologies such as scene design, lighting, and stage properties. It is a much-welcomed departure from existing studies of Chinese theater history that foreground major historical events, figures, texts, and productions. This is not to say that Chun deliberately steers away from these more conventional topics but that she brings fresh perspectives to canonical as well as lesser-known performances by employing “technics as method” (20). This entails expanding the archives to include “contemporaneous technical manuals, treatises, handbooks, and even scientific and technical materials and histories” (21), asking targeted questions such as how did theater makers create illusions of the thunderstorm in Cao Yu’s 曹禺 Thunderstorm (雷雨, 1934), and “examining technical objects in situ” (21). The dynamic relationship between theater and technology in China’s century of revolutions, Chun shows, was always imbricated with the specific historical moment and its particular social politics. Continue reading Revolutionary Stagecraft review →

Backstaging Modern Chinese Theatre

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NEW PUBLICATION
Backstaging Modern Chinese Theatre: Intellectuals, Amateurs, and Cultural Entrepreneurs, 1910s–1940s (University of Michigan Press, 2025)
By Man He

Modern Chinese theatre once entailed a variety of forms, but now it primarily refers to spoken drama, or huaju. Backstaging Modern Chinese Theatre looks beyond scripts to examine  visuality, acoustics, and performance between the two World Wars, the period when huaju gained canonical status. The backstage in this study expands from being a physical place offstage to a culturally and historically constructed social network that encompasses theatre networks, academies, and government institutions—as well as the collective work of dramatists, amateurs, and cultural entrepreneurs. Early huaju was not a mere imitation of Western realist theatre, as it is commonly understood, but a creative synthesis of Chinese and Western aesthetics. Charting huaju’s evolution from American colleges to China’s coastal cities and then to its rural hinterland, Man He demonstrates how the formation of modern Chinese theatre challenges dominant understandings of modernism and brings China to the center of discussions on transnational modernities and world theatres.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Chapter One: When S/He is not Nora: Chinese Theatres and Cosmopolitan Students in Post-World War I America
Chapter Two: Script to See: Spectatorial Subjects and Enlightened Eyes in Chinese Realist Theatres of the 1920s
Chapter Three: Out of the Box-Stage: Huaju’s Relocation to the Rural Modern
Chapter Four: Institutional Theatrics: Techniques, Prompts, and Plays to Serve the Nation
Chapter Five: Canonizing the Backstage: Gossip, Annals, and the Politics of Making Theatre History
Conclusion

Man He is Associate Professor of Chinese at Williams College.

Chinese Theater Collaborative new modules

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NEW PUBLICATION: Additional Modules Released on Chinese Theater Collaborative

The Chinese Theater Collaborative (CTC) (https://chinesetheatercollaborative.org/ctc/index) has released three new modules about modern adaptations of three different traditional Chinese plays: The Orphan of Zhao 赵氏孤儿 (2005), a Yueju opera performance, by Susanna Sun; Crimson 红娘 (1976), a Beijing opera film, by Olivia Bobak; and The Peony Pavilion 牡丹亭 (1986), a Kunqu opera film, by Jason Wang. Enjoy!

Patricia Sieber <sieber.6@osu.edu>

Performing Postsocialism–cfp

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CALL FOR PAPERS
Symposium Performing Postsocialism: Cultures of Performance-Making in Twenty-First-Century China

Symposium Dates: 9-10 April 2026
Venue: University of Vienna (Jura Soyfer-Saal, Hofburg)
Deadline: 30 May 2025
Submission guidelines: See below and here

Organized as part of a research project funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), this symposium invites proposals that address the relationship between performance and postsocialism in twenty-first-century China. Since its initial formulations in the late 1980s and 1990s, the notion of postsocialism has captured the ideological ambiguities and cultural contradictions brought about by China’s late-twentieth-century transition to a socialist market economy and integration into the global capitalist system in the new millennium.

Postsocialism denotes a fluid condition of socioeconomic unevenness and temporal dissonance that mirrors the stratification of traditional values with historical experiences of revolution and reform, and the persistence of socialist-era practices and institutions alongside the affirmation of new societal dynamics and cultural formations. The postsocialist turn has informed scholarly debates in several fields, ranging from literature and intellectual history to media and visual cultures. However, research on the impact of postsocialist transformation on the theory and practice of performance and on the reconfiguration of performance ecologies, aesthetics, and epistemologies since the turn of the twenty-first century has been limited. Continue reading Performing Postsocialism–cfp →

Summer Translation Collaborative III

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Summer Translation Collaborative III
with Julia Keblinska and Patricia Sieber
May 12-16, 2025 (May 11 arrival, May 17 departure)
The Ohio State University (Columbus, OH, U.S.A., in person)

Developing modules for the “Chinese Theater Collaborative”

Fig.1 Excerpt from “Khubilai Khan Hunting” 元世祖出獵圖 (1280, by  Liu Guandao 劉貫道, painting); Courtesy of the open-source database of the National Palace Museum, Taipei

In this week-long workshop to be held on the OSU campus, CTC co-editors Julia Keblinska and Patricia Sieber will guide a small group of participants in authoring new modules for the Chinese Theater Collaborative (CTC) digital resource center. The program will feature presentations on how to handle different texts and diverse media, hands-on module development, and spirited peer review. This year’s workshop will focus on the modern afterlives of plays featuring Eurasian peoples, diasporic communities, ethnic minorities and foreigners (e.g., Jurchen, Mongols, Manchus, tribute delegations from around Eurasia, etc.) in any media (e.g., different traditional theatrical/operatic styles, spoken drama of any tradition, films, animation, TV drama, graphic renditions, prints, etc.). The goal is to create workable draft modules that can eventually be published on CTC.

We would like to recruit a lively cohort of advanced undergraduate and graduate students as well as recent MAs and PhDs. Required qualifications: Advanced command of modern Chinese, professional fluency in spoken and written English. Experience with translation, theater or other media is desirable, but not required. We welcome participants who are interested in developing either individually authored or collaboratively written modules. CTC modules are backed by scholarly research but presented in an accessible and visually appealing style to cater to a broad range of audiences. Continue reading Summer Translation Collaborative III →

Chinese Theater Collaborative expansion

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We are delighted to share that the Chinese Theater Collaborative digital resource center has added a new section entitled “The Injustice to Dou E and Other Plays by Guan Hanqing” to its coverage of modern adaptations of traditional Chinese plays on stage, screen, and other media. The new modules on different plays by Guan Hanqing cover opera film, television, and live theatrical performance, highlighting the intermedial relationships between cinematic and theatrical forms. The expansion includes contributions by Wenbo Chang, Savanna Eggens, Ka Kei Lau, Francesco Papani,  Xiaoqiao Xu, and Kaixuan Yao. If you would like to find out more about how to become a contributor to CTC, consider signing up for the AAS Pre-Conference Workshop “Chinese Theater Collaborative (CTC): Writing for Public Facing, Open-Access Digital Humanities” to be held on March 13, 2025.

Chinese Theater Collaborative Content Co-editors

Dr. Julia Keblinska (Visting Scholar) <keblinska.1@osu.edu> & Professor Patricia Sieber
Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures
The Ohio State University

RMMLA Asian Drama and Performance Session–cfp

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CFP: Asian Drama and Performance Session
Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association 78th Annual Convention
Date: October 16–18, 2025
Location: Spokane, WA

In an era marked by global interconnectivity, rapid cultural change, and social transformation, Asian drama and performance emerge as vital sites of aesthetic negotiation and political intervention. Through embodied practices, transmedial production, and creative expressions, drama and performance have shaped how Asian and Asian diasporic communities remember, resist, and reimagine their place in the world.

Perceiving Asian drama and performance as a critical force of negotiation, resistance, and (re)imagination, this session seeks to address the following questions: How do performances engage with histories of colonialism, migration, and cultural exchange? In what ways do performers negotiate between individual expression and collective memory? How do performances address historical, political, and environmental concerns? What roles do performance spaces – physical, imaginary, or digital– play in shaping cultural discourses and aesthetic conventions?

We seek papers that interrogate how performance practices both reflect and challenge established paradigms of cultural expression, social hierarchy, and artistic innovation. We welcome topics including but not limited to: Continue reading RMMLA Asian Drama and Performance Session–cfp →

Cutting micro-dramas down to size

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Source: China Media Project (1/9/25)
Cutting Micro-Dramas Down to Size
China’s government has signaled stricter rules this year for micro-dramas, a bite-size entertainment format with mega market potential.
By Alex Colville

Micro-dramas — TV series cut into short snippets of one to 15 minutes — are becoming a huge business worldwide. The global market for this new, bite-size format is said to be worth two billion dollars a year, with forecasts that this could double by the end of 2025. And that’s excluding China, which has emerged as a global leader in the production and consumption of weiduanju (微短剧).

Chinese micro-dramas: heavy on history and romance, light on Xi.

With the PRC’s micro-drama market growing at a blistering 250 percent annually, bringing in some RMB 37.4 billion (5.2 billion dollars) in 2023 according to state media reports, the authorities are also acting quickly to figure out how they can control this new entertainment format and ensure it serves their interests. On January 4, the National Radio and TV Administration (国家广播电视总局), or NRTA, publicized its plan to create hundreds of short videos on Xi Jinping’s political thought — for example, by promoting his vision of uniting classical Chinese culture with the latest technology and teaching netizens about the benefits of Xi’s version of the rule of law. Continue reading Cutting micro-dramas down to size →

Mo Yan’s ‘Crocodile’ premieres in Suzhou (1)

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A note/correction on a China Daily article posted on May 13 of this year.  The article does not mention previous plays written by Mo Yan (mistakenly says that Crocodile is his first). His previous plays are:

  1. 我们的荆轲 written in 2003 and staged at Beijing People’s Art Theatre (directed by Ren Ming) in 2011/12.
  2. 霸王别姬 (co-written by Wang Shuzeng), staged at Beijing People’s Art Theatre (directed by Wang Xiangming) in 2000.
  3. 锅炉工的妻子 staged reading by three actors from Shanghai Theatre Academy at the Shanghai Library in February 2023.
  4. 离婚 written in 1978 and never performed (no longer extant).

Claire Conceison <claireco@mit.edu>

Acting Modern China conference

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An International Digital Conference on “Acting Modern China:
A Transcultural Affair”
Organized by The Department of English, The Hang Seng University of Hong Kong,
October 22 to December 3, 2024

This conference aims at further advancing the existing scholarship with comparative and interdisciplinary approaches to Chinese Performance Studies. It critically examines crucial events of theater culture in the past century in Hong Kong, Mainland China, Taiwan, and their trans-continental paths to Chinatown in San Francisco, Japan, and beyond. It features leading scholars from diverse fields of translation, theater studies, anthropology, musicology, East Asian Cultural Studies, and English. Fourteen speakers will each presents a bird’s eye view history from 1910s to 2020s, with a focus on a landmark event in each decade, and its continuous history across regional, national, and international boundaries to delineate a new roadmap of cross-cultural, trans-national, and inter-disciplinary performance studies.

Nancy Yunhwa RAO, in Week One, for example, starts with a crucial year in 1924, which witnessed the opening of Mandarin Theater in San Francisco, and move back and forth in history to examine critical issues such as sojourner communities, global theater, and the allure of theater in translating culture, language, and heritage. Siyuan LIU couples this cross-ocean theater story with a study of the influence of Japanese leftist Avant-Garde theater as seen in the introduction of European-style proletarian puppet theatre to Tokyo and then to Shanghai in the last 1920s. The essay points to the ideological and artistic vocabularies shared by the worldwide proletarian theatre movement inspired by the Soviet Revolution, while also complicating the notion of “sharing” as the specific ideological and artistic environment in each country affected the dramatic/performatic circumstances. Continue reading Acting Modern China conference →

Theater and Politics in Socialist China: A Review Essay

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Letizia Fusini’s review essay, “Theater and Politics in Socialist China,” which treats recently published books on modern Chinese drama by Maggie Greene, Siyuan Liu, and Xiaomei Chen. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/fusini/. My thanks to Jason McGrath, our soon-to-be-former book review editor for media, film, and drama studies, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

Theater and Politics in Socialist China:
A Review Essay

Resisting Spirits, by Maggie Greene
Transforming Tradition, by Siyuan Liu
Performing the Socialist State, by Xiaomei Chen

Reviewed by Letizia Fusini
MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright May, 2024)

Maggie Greene, Resisting Spirits: Drama Reform and Cultural Transformation in the PRC Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019. 260pp ISBN: 9780472074303 (hardcover)

Siyuan Liu, Transforming Tradition: The Reform of Chinese Theater in the 1950s and Early 1960s Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021. 472pp. ISBN: 9780472132478 (hardcover); 9780472128723 (ebook)

Xiaomei Chen, Performing the Socialist State: Modern Chinese Theater and Film Culture New York: Columbia University Press, 2023. 384pp. ISBN: 9780231197762 (hardcover); 9780231552332 (ebook)

Nearly a decade ago, in Autumn 2016, I had the opportunity and the privilege to teach an undergraduate survey course on the history of Chinese theater, the only one of its kind in the UK back then. I was a freshly minted PhD graduate and that was my first teaching post. Aside from developing my lecturing skills, the main challenge was to find creative strategies to make the subject more accessible to students who were majoring in theater studies and knew almost nothing about Chinese culture and history. The task became even more daunting when, due to time constraints, I had to condense the history of the rise of modern drama (huaju 话剧) and the transformations of classical theater (xiqu 戏曲) throughout the late-Qing, Republican and early socialist epochs within the space of a couple of hours. Since I wanted to avoid information overload, I began to look for a unifying thread that could hthelp me connect these three periods and, in my research, I came across an excerpt from a text written by Chen Duxiu 陈独秀 in 1904, where the future founder of the CCP eulogizes theater as the best “vehicle for social reform” (120), tracing the paternity of this idea to Confucius, who once said that “nothing is better than yue [乐, the performing arts lato sensu] at transforming social conventions” (118). These thoughts, written just before the dawn of the Republican period and yet rooted in the Confucian tradition, prefigured the Zeitgeist of the New Culture and May Fourth Movements, which, in turn, would be lauded by Mao Zedong in his essay “On New Democracy” as “having pioneered an unprecedentedly great and thoroughgoing cultural revolution” (361) whose only fault was that it failed to serve the interests of the masses of workers, peasants, and soldiers. Through these connections, I was able to visualize the (r)evolution of Chinese theater in the first half of the twentieth century as a tree growing out of Confucian roots and projecting its branches and foliage in a Marxist direction culminating with the Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976. My goal was to convey to my students the impression I had gotten vis-à-vis that short statement by Chen Duxiu about the power of theater to effect social change. The fact that in China, the attribution of a pedagogic and political function to theater is a traditional concept rather than a twentieth-century novelty, hence not an exclusive prerogative of the Communist period or of the Cultural Revolution, was the unifying thread I was looking for. What was initially a mere perception on my part, found confirmation in Richard Schechner’s foreword to the collection in which I originally found Chen Duxiu’s text, where he notes that “the roots of Mao’s attitude—that theater is an excellent educator and that rulers ought to use it as such—go deep in Chinese history. From an early date, theater was seen as a way of reaching ordinary people who could not read” (x). Continue reading Theater and Politics in Socialist China: A Review Essay →

Mo Yan’s ‘Crocodile’ premieres in Suzhou

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Source: China Daily (5/8/24)
Nobel laureate Mo Yan’s debut drama ‘Crocodile’ premieres in Suzhou
By Chinadaily.com.cn

A still from the play, Crocodile, May 3, 2024. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]

The much-anticipated stage version of Nobel laureate Mo Yan’s inaugural drama, Crocodile, premiered at the Suzhou Bay Grand Theatre in Suzhou, East China’s Jiangsu province, on May 3.

Crocodile is the first original drama script penned by Mo Yan, which was published in June 2023. Celebrated for his imaginative and humanistic fiction, Mo Yan won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2012.

The plot of Crocodile revolves around the protagonist, Shan Wudan, and a crocodile he received as a gift for his birthday. Through an infinitely growing crocodile, the story delves into the complexity of human nature and explores the theme of “desire”. Continue reading Mo Yan’s ‘Crocodile’ premieres in Suzhou →

‘Shawshank’ in China

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Source: NYT (2/16/24)
‘Shawshank’ in China, as You’ve Never Seen It Before
A stage adaptation of the film featured an all-Western cast, was performed in Chinese and raised questions about translation, both linguistic and cultural.
By Vivian Wang and Claire Fu (Vivian Wang reported from Beijing, and Claire Fu from Seoul)

Two women pose for pictures in front of a promotional billboard for the stage production of “The Shawshank Redemption.”

A stage production of the film “The Shawshank Redemption,” cast with Western actors speaking fluent Mandarin Chinese, opened in Beijing in January. Credit…Gilles Sabrié for The New York Times

When a stage production of “The Shawshank Redemption” opened recently in China, it was cast entirely with Western actors speaking fluent Mandarin Chinese. But that may have been the least surprising part of the show.

That the show — an adaptation of the Stephen King novella that became one of the most beloved movies of all time — was staged at all seemingly flew in the face of several trends in China’s cultural sphere.

Chinese audiences’ interest in Hollywood films is fading, with moviegoers turning to homegrown productions. China’s authoritarian government has stoked nationalism and cast Western influence as a political pollutant. Censorship of the arts has tightened.

Yet the production reflects how some artists are trying to navigate the changing landscape of both what is permissible and what is marketable in China. And its success shows the appetite that many Chinese still have for cultural exchange. Continue reading ‘Shawshank’ in China →

The Peony Pavilion in HK

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Experience the entire kun opera classic The Peony Pavilion the way author Tang Xianzu originally intended. After years of planning, the Shanghai Kunqu Opera Troupe is presenting the Hong Kong debut of the faithfully restored, complete 55-scene saga at the Hong Kong Arts Festival. Structured into three parts and performed over two days, this jewel of the kun opera genre reveals renewed perspectives into the wider social landscape of the Song dynasty, transforming the familiar love story into an unforgettable tale of oppression and emancipation.

A Rotating Poetic World

Explore the ethereal world of The Peony Pavilion through a rotating set design that seamlessly transports the audience from one scene to the next. This unique design also heightens the dreamy landscape of the production, filled with innovative visual effects.

Continue reading The Peony Pavilion in HK →