Download or read book Maoist Model Theatre written by Rosemary A. Roberts and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2010 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here is a convincing reflection that changes our understanding of gender in Maoist culture, esp. for what critics from the 1990s onwards have termed its erasure of gender and sexuality. In particular the strong heroines of the yangbanxi, or model works which dominated the Cultural Revolution period, have been seen as genderless revolutionaries whose images were damaging to women. Drawing on contemporary theories ranging from literary and cultural studies to sociology, this book challenges that established view through detailed semiotic analysis of theatrical systems of the yangbanxi including costume, props, kinesics, and various audio and linguistic systems. Acknowledging the complex interplay of traditional, modern, Chinese and foreign gender ideologies as manifest in the 'model works', it fundamentally changes our insights into gender in Maoist culture.
Download or read book Rethinking Chinese Socialist Theaters of Reform written by Xiaomei Chen and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2021-03-01 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Staging Revolution written by Xing Fan and published by Hong Kong University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-11 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Staging Revolution refutes the deep-rooted notion that art overtly in the service of politics is by definition devoid of artistic merits. As a prominent component shaping the culture of the Cultural Revolution, model Beijing Opera (jingju) is the epitome of art used for political ends. Arguing against commonly accepted interpretations, Xing Fan demonstrates that in a performance of model jingju, political messages could only be realized through the most rigorously formulated artistic choices and conveyed by performers possessing exceptional techniques. Fan contextualizes model jingju at the intersection of history, artistry, and aesthetics. Integral to jingju’s interactions with politics are the practitioners’ constant artistic experimentations to accommodate the modern stories and characters within the jingju framework and the eventual formation of a new sense of beauty. Therefore, a thorough understanding of model jingju demands close attention to how the artists resolved actual production problems, which is a critical perspective missing in earlier studies. This book provides exactly this much-needed dimension of analysis by scrutinizing the decisions made in the real, practical context of bringing dramatic characters to life on stage, and by examining how major artistic elements interacted with each other, sometimes harmoniously, sometimes antagonistically. Such an approach necessarily places jingju artists center stage. Making use of first person accounts of the creative process, including numerous interviews conducted by the author, Fan presents a new appreciation of a lived experience that, on a harrowing journey of coping with political interference, was also filled with inspiration and excitement. “This fascinating study is ground-breaking and timely. Xing Fan masterfully demonstrates how the creative choices made by playwrights, directors, musicians, actors, and designers intersected with one another in creating an aesthetics of the model theater during the Cultural Revolution. A must-read for anyone interested in Chinese literature and drama, theater studies, and comparative literature.” —Xiaomei Chen, University of California, Davis “Though no longer in fashion, the model revolutionary operas of the Cultural Revolution are still occasionally performed. Xing Fan has done us a great service by analyzing them in detail and reminding us of their merits. I thoroughly enjoyed this engaging book and learned a lot from it. I recommend it strongly.” —Colin Mackerras, Griffith University
Download or read book Women Warriors and Wartime Spies of China written by Louise Edwards and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-04-07 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores China's most famous women warriors and wartime spies, shedding new light on the relationship between gender and militarisation.
Download or read book Chinese Traditional Theatre and Male Dan written by Guo Chao and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-01-31 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines male dan, a male actor who performs female roles in Chinese theatre. Through the rise, fall and tenuous survival of male dan in Chinese history, Guo Chao reflects the transformations in the social zeitgeist in China, especially the politics of gender and sexuality. The breadth of this study reflects a diversified set of sources, ranging from classical to contemporary texts (texts of jingju plays, memoirs, collections of notation books) and other commentaries and critical evaluations of dan actors (in both English and Chinese languages) to video and audio materials, films and personal interviews. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of East Asian/Chinese studies across the fields of theatre, history, culture and literature.
Download or read book Performing the Socialist State written by Xiaomei Chen and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2023-02-07 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Gender Legacy of the Mao Era written by Xin Huang and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2018-07-11 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shows that the feminist interventions of the Mao era (1949–1976) continue to influence contemporary Chinese women. This book traces how the legacy of the Maoist gender project is experienced or contested by particular Chinese women, remembered or forgotten in their lives, and highlighted or buried in their narratives. Xin Huang examines four women’s life stories: an urban woman who lived through the Mao era (1949–1976), a rural migrant worker, a lesbian artist who has close connections with transnational queer networks, and an urban woman who has lived abroad. The individual narratives are paired with analysis of the historical and social contexts in which each woman lives. Huang focuses on the shifting relationship between gender and class, fashion and shame in the Mao and post-Mao eras, queer desire and artwork, and contemporary transnational encounters. By rethinking the historical significance and contemporary relevance of one of the twentieth century’s major feminist interventions—socialist and Marxist women’s liberation during the Mao years—The Gender Legacy of the Mao Era provides insight into current struggles over gender equality in China and around the world. Xin Huang is Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee.
Download or read book Revisiting Women s Cinema written by Lingzhen Wang and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-14 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Revisiting Women’s Cinema, Lingzhen Wang ponders the roots of contemporary feminist stagnation and the limits of both commercial mainstream and elite minor cultures by turning to socialist women filmmakers in modern China. She foregrounds their sociopolitical engagements, critical interventions, and popular artistic experiments, offering a new conception of socialist and postsocialist feminisms, mainstream culture, and women’s cinema. Wang highlights the films of Wang Ping and Dong Kena in the 1950s and 1960s and Zhang Nuanxin and Huang Shuqin in the 1980s and 1990s to unveil how they have been profoundly misread through extant research paradigms entrenched in Western Cold War ideology, post-second-wave cultural feminism, and post-Mao intellectual discourses. Challenging received interpretations, she elucidates how socialist feminism and culture were conceptualized and practiced in relation to China’s search not only for national independence and economic development but also for social emancipation, proletarian culture, and socialist internationalism. Wang calls for a critical reevaluation of historical materialism, socialist feminism, and popular culture to forge an integrated emancipatory vision for future transnational feminist and cultural practices.
Download or read book Surveillance in Asian Cinema written by Karen Fang and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-02-24 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Critical theory and popular wisdom are rife with images of surveillance as an intrusive, repressive practice often suggestively attributed to eastern powers and opposed to western liberalism. Hollywood-dominated global media has long promulgated a geopoliticized east-west axis of freedom vs. control. This book focuses on Asian and Asia-based films and cinematic traditions obscured by lopsided western hegemonic discourse and—more specifically—probes these films’ treatments of a phenomenon that western film often portrays with neo-orientalist hysteria. Exploring recent and historical movies made in post-social and anti-Communist societies such as China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Vietnam and South Korea, the book picks up on the political and economic concerns implicitly underlying Sinophobic and anti-Communist Asian images in Hollywood films while also considering how these societies and states depict the issues of centralization, militarization and technological innovation so often figured as distinctive of the difference between eastern despotism and western liberalism.
Download or read book Working the System written by Qiliang He and published by Hong Kong University Press. This book was released on 2023-01-03 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Working the System: Motion Picture, Filmmakers, and Subjectivities in Mao-Era China, 1949–1966, Qiliang He inquired into the making of the new citizenry in Mao-era China (1949–1976) by studying five preeminent Shanghai-based filmmakers. These case studies shed light on how individuals’ subjectivities took shape in the cinematic arena under a new sociopolitical system after 1949. He suggests that a filmmaker’s subjectivity was not fixed or stable but constantly in flux, requiring a host of “subjectivizing practices” to (re)shape and consolidate it. These filmmakers endeavored to reap maximal benefits from Mao’s sociopolitical system and minimize the disadvantages that would make them victims under the system. In short, Qiliang He argues that the filmmakers not only worked under the socialist system imposed upon them but also worked the system in their best interests. “Through five chosen filmmakers’ creative control and their negotiation of their professional status within China’s newly adopted socialist system, the author presents a compelling case that illustrates how individual filmmakers constantly adjusted themselves professionally and ideologically to survive in a fast-changing industry and a highly politicized society.” —Lin Feng, University of Leicester “This book is a strong example of how much more we can learn about Mao-era Chinese culture if we approach it less as alien due to Cold War prejudices and instead think of artists as creating under professional constraints in China just as they do everywhere.” —Jason McGrath, University of Minnesota
Download or read book Gao Xingjian s Idea of Theatre written by Izabella Łabędzka and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2008-08-31 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that Gao Xingjian's Idea of Theatre can only be explained by his broad knowledge and use of various Chinese and Western theatrical, literary, artistic and philosophical traditions. The author aims to show how Gao's theories of the theatre of anti-illusion, theatre of conscious convention, of the "poor theatre" and total theatre, of the neutral actor and the actor - jester - storyteller are derived from the Far Eastern tradition, and to what extent they have been inspired by 20th century Euro-American reformers of theatre such as Antonin Artaud, Bertolt Brecht, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Jerzy Grotowski and Tadeusz Kantor. Although Gao' s plays and theatre form the major subject, this volume also pays ample attention to his painting and passion for music as sources of his dramaturgical strategies.
Download or read book Memory Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema written by Qi Wang and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2014-09-19 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema provides a historically informed examination of independent moving image works made between 1990 and 2010 in China. Showcasing an evolving personal mode of narrating memory, documenting reality, and inscribing subjectivity in over sixteen selected works that range from narrative film and documentary to experimental video and digital media (even including a multimedia avant-garde play), this book presents a provocative portrait of the independent filmmakers as a peculiarly pained yet active group of historical subjects of the transitional, post-socialist era. Through a connected investigation of cultural and cinematic concepts including historical consciousness, personal memory, narrative, performance, subjectivity, spatiality, and the body, Wang weaves a critical narrative of the formation of a unique post-socialist cultural consciousness that enables independent cinema and media to become a highly significant and effective conduit for historical thinking in contemporary China. Covering directors such as Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, Jia Zhangke, Jiang Wen, Lou Ye, Meng Jinghui, Wang Bing, Wang Guangli, Duan Jinchuan, Cui Zi'en, Shi Tou, and Tang Danhong, this book is essential reading for all students and scholars in Chinese film.
Download or read book Acting the Right Part written by Xiaomei Chen and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2002-01-31 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Acting the Right Part is a cultural history of huaju (modern Chinese drama) from 1966 to 1996. Xiaomei Chen situates her study both in the context of Chinese literary and cultural history and in the context of comparative drama and theater, cultural studies, and critical issues relevant to national theater worldwide. Following a discussion of the marginality of modern Chinese drama in relation to other genres, periods, and cultures, early chapters focus on the dynamic relationship between theater and revolution. Chosen during the Cultural Revolution as the exclusive artistic vehicle to promote proletariat art, "model theater" raises important questions about the complex relationships between women, memory, nation/state, revolution, and visual culture. Throughout this study, Chen argues that dramatic norms inform both theatrical performance and everyday political behavior in contemporary China.
Download or read book A Continuous Revolution written by Barbara Mittler and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-03-17 with total page 511 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cultural Revolution Culture, often denigrated as nothing but propaganda, was liked not only in its heyday but continues to be enjoyed today. A Continuous Revolution sets out to explain its legacy. By considering Cultural Revolution propaganda art—music, stage works, prints and posters, comics, and literature—from the point of view of its longue durée, Barbara Mittler suggests it was able to build on a tradition of earlier art works, and this allowed for its sedimentation in cultural memory and its proliferation in contemporary China. Taking the aesthetic experience of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) as her base, Mittler juxtaposes close readings and analyses of cultural products from the period with impressions given in a series of personal interviews conducted in the early 2000s with Chinese from diverse class and generational backgrounds. By including much testimony from these original voices, Mittler illustrates the extremely multifaceted and contradictory nature of the Cultural Revolution, both in terms of artistic production and of its cultural experience.
Download or read book Staging Chinese Revolution written by Xiaomei Chen and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2016-11-08 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Staging Chinese Revolution surveys fifty years of theatrical propaganda performances in China, revealing a dynamic, commercial capacity in works often dismissed as artifacts of censorship. Spanning the 1960s through the 2010s, Xiaomei Chen reads films, plays, operas, and television shows from an interdisciplinary and comparative perspective, demonstrating how, in a socialist state with "capitalist characteristics," propaganda performance turns biographies, memoirs, and war stories into mainstream ideological commodities, legitimizing the state and its right to rule. Analyzing propaganda performance also brings contradictions and inconsistencies to light that throw common understandings about propaganda's purpose into question. Chen focuses on revisionist histories that stage the lives of the "founding fathers" of the Communist Party, such as Chen Duxiu, Mao Zedong, and Deng Xiaoping, and the engaging mix of elite and ordinary characters that animate official propaganda in the private and public sphere. Taking the form of "personal" memories and representing star and youth culture and cyberspace, contemporary Chinese propaganda appeals through multiple perspectives, complicating relations among self, subject, agent, state building, and national identity. Chen treats Chinese performance as an extended form of political theater confronting critical issues of commemoration, nostalgia, state rituals, and contested history. It is through these reenactments that three generations of revolutionary leaders loom in extraordinary ways over Chinese politics and culture.
Download or read book Red Legacies in China written by Jie Li and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-10-26 with total page 438 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What has contemporary China inherited from its revolutionary past? How do the realities and memories, aesthetics and practices of the Mao era still reverberate in the post-Mao cultural landscape? The essays in this volume propose “red legacies” as a new critical framework from which to examine the profusion of cultural productions and afterlives of the communist revolution in order to understand China’s continuities and transformations from socialism to postsocialism. Organized into five parts—red foundations, red icons, red classics, red bodies, and red shadows—the book’s interdisciplinary contributions focus on visual and performing arts, literature and film, language and thought, architecture, museums, and memorials. Mediating at once unfulfilled ideals and unmourned ghosts across generations, red cultural legacies suggest both inheritance and debt, and can be mobilized to support as well as to critique the status quo.
Download or read book Third Cinema World Cinema and Marxism written by Ewa Mazierska and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2020-09-17 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Third Cinema, World Cinema and Marxism offers an analysis of Third Cinema and World Cinema from the perspective of Marxism. Its starting point is an observation that of all cinematic phenomena none is as intimately related to Marxism as Third Cinema, which decries neoliberalism, the capitalist system, and the Hollywood model of cinema as mere entertainment to make money. This is largely to do with the fact that both Marxism and Third Cinema are preoccupied with inequalities resulting from capital accumulation, of which colonialism is the most extreme manifestation. Third Cinema also defines cinematic modes in terms of representing interest of different classes, with First Cinema expressing imperialist, capitalist, bourgeois ideas, Second Cinema the aspirations of the middle stratum, the petit bourgeoisie and Third Cinema is a democratic, popular cinema.
