Modern Theater and Mixed Media Performances
Traditional and modern forms of Chinese theater have been developing in tandem. Early scholarship tended to overstate the rupture between the traditional musical drama and modern spoken drama. Recent research has acknowledged that many cultural practitioners in Republican China (1911-1949) were simultaneously engaged with traditional theater, modern theater, and filmmaking. Hence, these arts invariably imprinted themselves upon one another and such cross-fertilization gave rise to creative new syntheses.
In the newly founded PRC, such traffic across forms continued. The acknowledged master of the form of Yuan zaju plays, playwright Guan Hanqing (fl. thirteenth century), and the most famous female actor-singer of the dynasty, Zhu Lianxiu, became the subject of a major historical play in 1958 when Guan Hanqing was recast as a revolutionary author as part of a broader CCP-led effort to fashion historical antecedents for the socialist practice of targeting particular segments of the elite.
In recent years, playwrights in the Chinese-speaking world as well as the diaspora have taken up some of the old plays and imbued them with radically new meanings. Among the most popular of these have been various takes on The Orphan of Zhao, a gripping and perplexing story of political intrigue and fearlessness.
MODULES ON MODERN THEATER AND MIXED MEDIA PERFORMANCES
- Rescuing One’s Sister in the Wind and Dust (2021)
- "Ghosts as an Intercultural Bridge," a module on the English-language spoken play adaptation of Saving a Courtesan.