This book traces the transformation of traditional Chinese theatre’s (xiqu) aesthetics during its encounters with Western drama and theatrical forms in both mainland China and Taiwan since 1978. Through analyzing both the text and performances of eight adapted plays from William Shakespeare, Bertolt Brecht, and Samuel Beckett, this book elaborates on significant changes taking place in playwriting, acting, scenography, and stage-audience relations stemming from intercultural appropriation. As exemplified by each chapter, during the intercultural dialogue of Chinese and foreign elements there exists one-sided dominance by either culture, fusion, and hybridity, which corresponds to the various facets of China’s pursuit of modernity between its traditional and Western influences.

Intercultural theater is a prominent phenomena of twentieth-century international theater. This books views intercultural theatre as a process of displacement and re-placement of various cultural and theatrical forces, a process which the author describes as 'the poetics of displacement'.

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and discourse analysis of an extensive corpus of hitherto untapped sources, including unreleased video materials and unpublished scripts, production notes, and archival documentation.

This dissertation examines how classical Chinese theatricality, including its aesthetic features, gender dynamics, usage and conceptions of body and space, and most importantly its philosophical orientations, is continuously reinvented and restaged in various textual and visual forms of contemporary transnational performances. It engages with ideas of theatricality and interculturalism in an interdisciplinary scope and elaborates Chinese theatricality in comparison with those of mimesis, representation, and theatricality in the Western tradition. A particular focus is placed upon the innovative redeployment of dramatic texts, body and space, gender dynamics, and visual representations of classical Chinese theater and culture in different genres of contemporary transnational performances, including avant-garde and intercultural theater, film, modern dance, and body art. It participates in the broad scholarly discussion on theatricality and dramatic history by tracing complex temporal genealogies of performance traditions and mapping the spatial reconfigurations of Chinese theatricality in contemporary global performances.

Chinese theatre underwent a great experiment under the cultural revolution. Using the reformed Beijing operas as models, the whole range of theatre arts, from straight plays to acrobatics and from ballet to ballads saw a profound transformation. Alongside the professional theatre, an upsurge of workers’ and peasants’ amateur theatre stimulated new developments. This book, first published in 1978, sketches the historical background to these changes and offers a factual survey of the main forms and characteristics of Chinese theatre at the time. It traces the rise of the new drama since 1949 and explores the political principles underlying the reforms. It examines the new amateur theatre and describes typical plays and operas staged in China.

Featuring the work of renowned scholars, this anthology provides an introduction to Chinese aesthetics and literature.