BMO Lab Performance Infrastructures Series: Tarryn Li-Min Chun

In this talk, Dr Chun will introduce 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.