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Xiaomei Chen offers a new account of the origins, evolution, and legacies of key trends in twentieth-century Chinese theater. Instead of seeing the Republican, high socialist, and postsocialist periods as radically distinct, she identifies key continuities in theatrical practices and shared aspirations for the social role of performance.
List of contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I: Theater Founding Fathers: Liberal Aesthetics in the Republican Period
1. Tian Han and His Legacy: Proletarian Modernism and “The Theater of Dramatists”
2. Hong Shen and His Discontent: Canonicity Through Theory and Practice
3. Ouyang Yuqian and His Theater Dream: Cross-Dressing, Drama Schools, and Theater Reforms
Part II: Chinese Socialist Theater and Its Afterlife: Shifting “Classics” and Their Place in Cultural Transformation
4. Is Socialism Good? Satirical Comedy and the Gray Theater of the 1950s
5. The Tales of the Wives: The Mao-Era Metamorphosis of the “Red Classics” and Their Postsocialist Reinscriptions
6. “The Song of the Geologists”: Remembering Scientists Onstage
7. Monumental Theater: Soldier Plays and History Plays
8. Singing “The Internationale”: One Hundred Years of Sonic Theater
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Xiaomei Chen (Indiana PhD) is professor of Chinese literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of Staging Chinese Revolution: Theater, Film and the Afterlives of Propaganda (CUP, 2016); Occidentalism: A Theory of Counter-Discourse in Post-Mao China (Oxford, 1995; second and expanded edition, 2002), Acting the Right Part: Political Theater and Popular Drama in Contemporary China (Hawai'i, 2002); and editor of Reading the Right Text (Hawai'i, 2003) and The Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Drama (CUP, 2010; abridged edition 2014).
Summary
Performing the Socialist State offers an innovative account of the origins, evolution, and legacies of key trends in twentieth-century Chinese theater. Instead of seeing the Republican, high socialist, and postsocialist periods as radically distinct, it identifies key continuities in theatrical practices and shared aspirations for the social role and artistic achievements of performance across eras.
Xiaomei Chen focuses on the long and remarkable careers of three founders of modern Chinese theater and film, Tian Han, Hong Shen, and Ouyang Yuqian, and their legacy, which helped shape theater cultures into the twenty-first century. They introduced Western plays and theories, adapted traditional Chinese operas, and helped develop a tradition of leftist theater in the Republican period that paved the way for the construction of a socialist canon after 1949. Chen investigates how their visions for a free, democratic China fared in the initial years after the founding of the People’s Republic, briefly thriving only to founder as artists had to adapt to the Communist Party’s demand to produce ideologically correct works. Bridging the faith play and “antiparty plays” of the 1950s, the “red classics” of the 1960s, and their reincarnations in the postsocialist period, she considers the transformations of the depictions of women, peasants, soldiers, scientists, and revolutionary history in plays, operas, and films and examines how the market economy, collective memories, star culture, social networks, and state sponsorship affected dramatic productions.
Countering the view that state interference stifles artistic imagination, Chen argues that theater professionals have skillfully navigated shifting ruling ideologies to create works that are politically acceptable yet aesthetically ingenious. Emphasizing the power, dynamics, and complexities of Chinese performance cultures, Performing the Socialist State has implications spanning global theater, comparative literature, political and social histories, and Chinese cultural studies.
