I would like to draw your attention to my new book Ruling the Stage: Social and Cultural History of Opera in Sichuan from the Qing to the People’s Republic of China (Brill, 2022).

In it, through an innovative interdisciplinary reading and field research, I analyse the history of the development of opera in Sichuan, arguing that opera serves as a microcosm of the profound transformation of modern Chinese culture between the 18th century and 1950s. I investigate the complex path of opera over this course of history: exiting the temple festivals, becoming a public obsession on commercial stages, and finally being harnessed to partisan propaganda work. The book analyzes the process of cross-regional integration of Chinese culture and the emergence of the national opera genre. Moreover, opera is shown as an example of the culture wars that raged inside China’s popular culture.

For more details please see the book’s webpage: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004519398

Igor Chabrowski <i.chabrowski@uw.edu.pl>

NEW PUBLICATION: Selected Plays of Stan Lai, edited by Lissa Tyler Renaud

Stan Lai (Lai Shengchuan) is one of the most celebrated theatre practitioners working in the Chinese-speaking world. His work over three decades has pioneered the course of modern Chinese language theatre in Taiwan, China, and other Chinese-speaking regions. He has been declared “the preeminent Chinese playwright and stage director of this generation” (China Daily) and “the best Chinese language playwright and director in the world” (BBC). Lai’s works include masterpieces of the modern Chinese language theatre, such as Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land, The Village, and his epic eight-hour A Dream Like a Dream, all of which are in this collection.

The collection was edited by Lissa Tyler Renaud, who is known internationally as a master teacher, actor-scholar, invited speaker, writer, critic, and 2nd generation editor.

The three volumes feature works from across Lai’s career, providing an exceptional selection of a diverse range of performances, and are available individually or as a set.

Volume 1 contains:

Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land
Look Who’s Crosstalking Tonight
The Island and the Other Shore
I Me She Him
Ménage à 13 Continue reading →

NEW PUBLICATION
How to Read Chinese Drama: A Guided Anthology
Edited by Patricia Sieber and Regina Llamas
Columbia University Press, 2022

NEW PUBLICATION: Transforming Tradition: The Reform of Chinese Theater in the 1950s and Early 1960s, by Siyuan Liu
University of Michigan Press, 2021
Explores the history and lingering effects of governmental reform of Chinese theater, post-1949

Description

Shortly after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the PRC launched a reform campaign that targeted traditional song and dance theater encompassing more than a hundred genres, collectively known as xiqu. Reformers censored or revised xiqu plays and techniques; reorganized star-based private troupes; reassigned the power to create plays from star actors to the newly created functions of playwright, director, and composer; and eliminated market-oriented functionaries such as agents. While the repertoire censorship ended in the 1980s, major reform elements have remained: many traditional scripts (or parts of them) are no longer in performance; actors whose physical memory of repertoire and acting techniques had been the center of play creation, have been superseded by directors, playwrights, and composers. The net result is significantly diminished repertoires and performance techniques, and the absence of star actors capable of creating their own performance styles through new signature plays that had traditionally been one of the hallmarks of a performance school. Transforming Tradition offers a systematic study of the effects of the comprehensive reform of traditional theater conducted in the 1950s and ’60s, and is based on a decade’s worth of exhaustive research of official archival documents, wide-ranging interviews, and contemporaneous publications, most of which have never previously been referenced in scholarly research. Continue reading →

Tam, Kwok-kan. Chinese Ibsenism: Reinventions of Women, Class and Nation. Springer, 2019. xi+298. pp. ISBN: 978-981-13-6303-0 (eBook); 978-981-13-6302-3 (hardcover); 978-981-13-6305-4 (softcover).

Book Overview

This book is a study of the cultural changes brought about by the introduction of Ibsen to China from the 1910s to the 2010s. It is a companion to Kwok-kan Tam’s two other books, Ibsen, Power and the Self: Postsocialist Chinese Experimentations in Stage Performance and Film (Oslo: Novus Press, 2019) and Ibsen in China: A Critical-Annotated Bibliography of Criticism, Translation and Performance (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2001). A special feature of the book is that the stage performances, especially those that were performed 80 years ago, are well illustrated with stage photographs which are now difficult to find. Particularly noteworthy is that the front cover shows a color image of Nora from one of the most memorable performances with Ji Shuping playing the lead role in the Beijing A Doll’s House in 1956.

The study is based on forty years’ collection of Chinese materials extracted from library, newspapers and theatre archives from all over the world. Supported by detailed analyses of translations, literary experiments and theatrical performances involved in the cultural debates, the study provides the most comprehensive view of the critical reception of Ibsen in China in the past 100 years. It is moreover a study of the relation between theatre art and ideology in the Chinese experimentations with new selfhood as a result of Ibsen’s impact. It explores Ibsenian notions of the self, women and gender in China and provides an illuminating study of Chinese theatre as a public sphere in the dissemination of radical ideas. As the major source of modern Chinese selfhood, Ibsenism carries notions of personal and social liberation and has exerted great impacts on Chinese revolutions since the beginning of the twentieth century. Ibsen’s idea of the self as an individual has led to various experimentations in theatre, film and fiction to project new notions of selfhood, in particular women’s selfhood, throughout the history of modern China. Continue reading →

Rethinking Chinese Socialist Theaters of Reform: Performance Practice and Debate in the Mao Era
Xiaomei Chen, Tarryn Li-Min Chun, and Siyuan Liu, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2021

Diverse perspectives on the effort to reform modern Chinese theater according to socialist cultural policies

Description

The profound political, economic, and social changes in China in the second half of the twentieth century have produced a wealth of scholarship; less studied however is how cultural events, and theater reforms in particular, contributed to the dynamic landscape of contemporary Chinese society. Rethinking Chinese Socialist Theaters of Reform fills this gap by investigating the theories and practice of socialist theater and their effects on a diverse range of genres, including Western-style spoken drama, Chinese folk opera, dance drama, Shanghai opera, Beijing opera, and rural theater. Focusing on the 1950s and ’60s, when theater art occupied a prominent political and cultural role in Maoist China, this book examines the efforts to remake theater in a socialist image. It explores the unique dynamics between official discourse, local politics, performance practice, and audience reception that emerged under the pressures of highly politicized cultural reform as well as the off-stage, lived impact of rapid policy change on individuals and troupes obscured by the public record. This multidisciplinary collection by leading scholars covers a wide range of perspectives, geographical locations, specific research methods, genres of performance, and individual knowledge and experience. The richly diverse approach leads readers through a nuanced and complex cultural landscape as it contributes significantly to our understanding of a crucial period in the development of modern Chinese theater and performance.

Xiaomei Chen is Distinguished Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Davis.
Tarryn Li-Min Chun is Assistant Professor in the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame.
Siyuan Liu is Associate Professor of Theatre at the University of British Columbia.

Rossella Ferrari, Transnational Chinese Theatres: Intercultural Performance Networks in East Asia. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020

Description

Transnational Chinese Theatres is the first systematic study of networks of performance collaboration in the contemporary Chinese-speaking world and of their interactions with the artistic communities of the wider East Asian region. It investigates the aesthetics and politics of collaboration to propose a new transnational model for the analysis of Sinophone theatre cultures and to foreground the mobility and relationality of intercultural performance in East Asia. The research draws on extensive fieldwork, interviews with practitioners, and direct observation of performances, rehearsals, and festivals in Asia and Europe. It offers provocative close readings and discourse analysis of an extensive corpus of hitherto untapped sources, including unreleased video materials and unpublished scripts, production notes, and archival documentation. Continue reading →