part of the 2024 BMO Lab Lecture Series, “Performance Infrastructures” curated by Doug Eacho.
In this talk, Dr Chun introduced her forthcoming book, Revolutionary Stagecraft: Theatre, Technology, and Politics in Modern China, which draws on a rich corpus of literary, historical, and technical materials to reveal a deep entanglement among technological modernization, political agendas, and the performing arts in 20th century China. This unique approach to Chinese theatre history combines a close look at plays themselves, performance practices, technical theatre details, and behind-the-scenes debates over “how to” make theatre amid the political upheavals of China’s revolutionary century. The book begins at a pivotal moment in the 1920s—when Chinese theatre artists began to import, use, and write about modern stage equipment—and ends in the 1980s when China’s scientific and technological boom began. Overall, it argues for the importance of thinking Chinese theatre through technicity and situating material stage technologies equally in relation to their technical potential, their human use, and the social, political, economic, and cultural forces that influence them. In each of its case studies, Revolutionary Stagecraft reveals the complex and at times surprising ways in which Chinese theatre artists and technicians have envisioned and enacted their own revolutions through the materiality of the theatre apparatus.
The 2024 BMO Lab Lecture Series, “Performance Infrastructures,” aims to broaden our conceptualization of the technological to include the broad array of tools, practices, and techniques that have determined the course of the modern performing arts — and our performative world. Guests have discussed the politics and aesthetics of theatre architecture, costume design, childcare, and lighting. In doing so, we hope to wrest upon the images of what kind of theatre counts for thinking about “media,” and which theatre artists count as engaging with “emerging technologies.”
CDTPS Associate Professor Xing Fan served as a respondant.
Tarryn Li-Min Chun is Assistant Professor in the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame. She is author ofRevolutionary Stagecraft: Theater, Technology, and Politics in Modern China (University of Michigan Press, forthcoming June 2024) and co-editor with Xiaomei Chen and Siyuan Liu of Rethinking Socialist Theaters of Reform: Performance Practice and Debate in the Mao Era (University of Michigan Press, 2022). Her work has appeared in as Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, Prism, Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, TDR, and Asian Theatre Journal, and several edited volumes. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (USA) and numerous other awards.
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