Backstaging Modern Chinese Theatre
Intellectuals, Amateurs, and Cultural Entrepreneurs, 1910s–1940s
First comprehensive English-language exploration of huaju during its formative decades, delivered from the perspective of the backstage
Description
Modern Chinese theatre once entailed a variety of forms, but now it primarily refers to spoken drama, or huaju. Backstaging Modern Chinese Theatre looks beyond scripts to examine visuality, acoustics, and performance between the two World Wars, the period when huaju gained canonical status. The backstage in this study expands from being a physical place offstage to a culturally and historically constructed social network that encompasses theatre networks, academies, and government institutions—as well as the collective work of dramatists, amateurs, and cultural entrepreneurs. Early huaju was not a mere imitation of Western realist theatre, as it is commonly understood, but a creative synthesis of Chinese and Western aesthetics. Charting huaju’s evolution from American colleges to China’s coastal cities and then to its rural hinterland, Man He demonstrates how the formation of modern Chinese theatre challenges dominant understandings of modernism and brings China to the center of discussions on transnational modernities and world theatres.
Man He is Associate Professor of Chinese at Williams College.
Reviews
"In this major English-language monograph on the history of huaju (spoken drama) in early 20th century China, Man He delivers more than new findings on empirical ground. Her bold intervention, conceptually and methodologically, invites readers to consider a new way of constructing and understanding the history of theatres at other times and in other places."
- Wing Chung Ng, University of Texas at San Antonio