This 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and discourse analysis of an extensive corpus of hitherto untapped sources, including unreleased video materials and unpublished scripts, production notes, and archival documentation.

Built by Sid Grauman in 1927, the most famous motion picture palace in the world towers majestically above the 6900 block of Hollywood Boulevard. The Chinese Theatre's Forecourt of the Stars attracts more than two million visitors annually. Throughout its history and up to the present day, the theatre has served as a magnet to thousands of fans and tourists who flock to the site daily to view the flamboyant architecture and the historic cement squares in the theatre's forecourt. The footprints, handprints, and signatures of 176 of Hollywood's most famous celebrities have been placed here, plus those of three comedy teams, one group of quintuplets, two robots and a villainous sci-fi character, on ventriloqist's dummy, a radio character, and the world's best known duck.

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.

This volume is the first concise introduction to the splendid variety of the Chinese theatrical tradition. It presents a rounded perspective on the development of Chinese theater by considering all of its major aspects—history and social context, performance, costume, makeup, actors, playwrights, and theaters—and by discussing all the major forms of Chinese theater, including the Beijing opera, which arose in the eighteenth century, and the spoken play, an entirely twentieth-century form. Its contributors are uniquely qualified to write about the Chinese theater. They have enjoyed an intimate relationship with their subject, both as academics and as theater workers, and they have combined a deep knowledge of Chinese theater with a high regard for its long tradition and continuing vitality. The book is intended for general as well as more specialized readers. Those with an interest in theater as a worldwide phenomenon and those wanting a new light on Chinese culture and society will find it equally useful. To those with a particular interest in Chinese theater, it will be a rich and important resource.

This work gives an 'inside' view of Chinese theatre and the actor in performance for the first time. It challenges western theatre artists such as Brecht, Grotowski, Barba and Schechner, who have extracted from Chinese theatre elements which might enrich their own theatres. It is based on personal observations of and dialogue with Chinese actors, experiences which were impossible before 1980. Riley's study is well illustrated with photographs and diagrams and is accessible to anyone interested in theatre, even those with no knowledge of Chinese or Chinese theatre.

Chinese opera has a history of over 800 years. However, since the early twentieth century, following increased contact with the West, drama without music has also become popular in China. The development and prosperity of modern drama has created a new landscape for Chinese theater, which, as a whole, has become more diverse.

In her study of Chinese shadow theatre Fan-Pen Li Chen documents and corrects misconceptions about this once-popular art form. She argues how a traditional folk theatre reflected and subverted Chinese popular culture.

In eleventh-century China, both the living and the dead were treated to theatrical spectacles. Chambers designed for the deceased were ornamented with actors and theaters sculpted in stone, molded in clay, rendered in paint. Notably, the tombs were not commissioned for the scholars and officials who dominate the historical record of China but affluent farmers, merchants, clerics—people whose lives and deaths largely went unrecorded. Why did these elites furnish their burial chambers with vivid representations of actors and theatrical performances? Why did they pursue such distinctive tomb-making? In Theater of the Dead, Jeehee Hong maintains that the production and placement of these tomb images shed light on complex intersections of the visual, mortuary, and everyday worlds of China at the dawn of the second millennium. Assembling recent archaeological evidence and previously overlooked historical sources, Hong explores new elements in the cultural and religious lives of middle-period Chinese. Rather than treat theatrical tomb images as visual documents of early theater, she calls attention to two largely ignored and interlinked aspects: their complex visual forms and their symbolic roles in the mortuary context in which they were created and used. She introduces carefully selected examples that show visual and conceptual novelty in engendering and engaging dimensions of space within and beyond the tomb in specifically theatrical terms. These reveal surprising insights into the intricate relationship between the living and the dead. The overarching sense of theatricality conveys a densely socialized vision of death. Unlike earlier modes of representation in funerary art, which favored cosmological or ritual motifs and maintained a clear dichotomy between the two worlds, these visual practices show a growing interest in conceptualizing the sphere of the dead within the existing social framework. By materializing a “social turn,” this remarkable phenomenon constitutes a tangible symptom of middle-period Chinese attempting to socialize the sacred realm. Theater of the Dead is an original work that will contribute to bridging core issues in visual culture, history, religion, and drama and theater studies.

Women in Traditional Chinese Theatre seeks to introduce Western readers to Chinese classical drama as well as investigate how women have traditionally been portrayed on stage by presenting original translations of six plays from the fourteenth to twentieth centuries. Framed with a comprehensive introduction to the Chinese theatre and its representation of women, each play is preceded by an interpretative summary of the plot, and an analysis of each play's theme and significance. The selections in this volume feature women representing the most popular female archetypes in Chinese literature: the paragon of virtue, the stoic sufferer, the faithful wife, the femme fatal, and others. Appealing to both scholars and general enthusiasts of theatre, literature, and women's studies, this book reveals how the cultural constructs of Chinese women are represented in dramatic literature, and how the theatre, in turn, shapes this representation into the cultural perception of women.

The first English-language anthology that traces the centuries-long evolution of Chinese thought on theater and performance