Date: 17 May 2021 (Monday)
Time: 9:30 am – 11:00 am
Language: English
Registration: https://forms.gle/dYbu4qMMLn6A8Bqu5
*This seminar will take place via Zoom
Topic:
Performing the Socialist State
Introduction:
The lecture offers a quick overview of her forthcoming book manuscript, Performing the Socialist State: Moments, Crisis and Success of Modern Chinese Theater. It begins with the theatrical achievements of Tian Han, Hong Shen, and Ouyang Yuqian, three founders of spoken drama, and ask how their legacies in the Republican period played important roles in constructing socialist theater under Mao. She will demonstrate how these outstanding performing leaders provided the blueprints for the Maoist theater in the PRC, contrary to the conventional claim that the PRC regime suppressed their creative energies. To this end and in this context, she will reflect on the continuities with the performing culture in the Republican period through examinations of “Rightist satiricacomdies” in the 1950s, women’s theater and film “red classic” in the 1960s, scientists on stage in the Maoist and post-Maoist periods, and soldiers in transformation from the Republican, to the socialist, and finally, to the post-socialist era. She will also explore issues with regards to the relationships between science and theater, music and theater, and artists and their collective identities.
Speaker:
Professor Xiaomei CHEN [Distinguished Professor at the University of California at Davis]
Professor Xiaomei Chen is Distinguished Professor at the University of California at Davis where she teaches modern Chinese literature, film, and theater. She is the author of Occidentalism (1995), Acting the Right Part (2002), and Staging Chinese Revolution (2016). She is the editor of Reading the Right Text (2003) and Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Drama (2010) and co-editor, with Claire Sponsler, of East of West: Cross-Cultural Performances and the Staging of Difference (2000)”; with Julia Andrew, of Visual Culture in Contemporary China (2001), with Števen Siyuan Liu, Hong Shen and the Modern Mediasphere in Republican-Era China (2016), and with Tarryn Chun and Siyuan Liu, Rethinking Socialist Theater Reform (2021).
About Centre for Greater China Studies (CGCS)
CGCS aims to provide a platform to enhance interdisciplinary research concerning Greater China region.