Revolutionary Stagecraft 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 modern China. This unique approach to Chinese theater history combines a close look at plays themselves, performance practices, technical theater details, and behind-the-scenes debates over “how to” make theater amid the political upheavals of China’s 20th century. The book begins at a pivotal moment in the 1920s—when Chinese theater artists began to import, use, and write about modern stage equipment—and ends in the 1980s when China's scientific and technological boom began. By examining iconic plays and performances from the perspective of the stage technologies involved, Tarryn Li-Min Chun provides a fresh perspective on their composition and staging. The chapters include stories on the challenges of creating imitation neon, rigging up a makeshift revolving stage, and representing a nuclear bomb detonating onstage. In thinking about theater through technicity, the author mines well-studied materials such as dramatic texts and performance reviews for hidden technical details and brings to light a number of previously untapped sources such as technical journals and manuals; set design renderings, lighting plots, and prop schematics; and stage technology how-to guides for amateur thespians. This approach focuses on material stage technologies, situating these objects 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 theater artists and technicians of the 20th century envisioned and enacted their own revolutions through the materiality of the theater apparatus.

Among the most significant playwrights and theatre-makers of postcolonial India, Utpal Dutt (1929-1993), was an early exponent of rethinking colonial history through political theatre. Dutt envisaged political theatre as part of the larger Marxist project, and his incorporation of new developments in Marxist thinking, including the contributions of Antonio Gramsci, makes it possible to conceptualise his protagonists as insurgent subalterns. A decolonial approach to staging history remained a significant element in Dutt's artistic project. This Element examines Dutt's passionate engagement with Marxism and explores how this sense of urgency was actioned through the writing and producing of plays about the peasant revolts and armed anti-colonial movements which took place during the period of British rule. Drawing on contemporary debates in political theatre regarding the autonomy of the spectator and the performance of history, the author locates Dutt's political theatre in a historical frame.

This book offers the reader an in-depth understanding of Utpal Dutt’s entire career in drama. Covering Dutt’s career in proscenium, street theatre and Jatra, it analyzes the interesting exchange of dramatic art with politics in his theatre. Owing to a plethora of unsubstantiated opinions, Dutt is either revered by his followers or dismissed by his opponents, but hardly ever studied with necessary objectivity and intellectual rigour. The book attempts to bust the myth that Dutt was primarily a political propagandist who used theatre only as a means to achieve his political end. The remarkable range of Dutt’s subject matter makes him as internationally significant as he is loved by Indian theatre enthusiasts. His work has been discussed on various reputed international platforms. Yet there is a stark lacuna when it comes to intellectual attention devoted to Dutt’s theatre. This is the first book which attempts to introduce Dutt’s theatre comprehensively to an international readership. The book looks briefly at Dutt’s life, the impact of his politics on his theatre, the art of his characterization, his dramaturgy and stage technique, and the legacy of his work in theatre. It also offers the reader with a chronological list of the first performances of his original theatrical works and an exhaustive bibliography, which, it is hoped, shall prove especially useful for researchers. The book is designed for lay theatre enthusiasts as well as advanced students of theatre.

An authoritative reference covering primarily actors, playwrights, directors, styles and movements, companies and organizations.

How did the French try to understand their revolution? How have writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries portrayed so unprecedented an upheaval? Dr. Parker examines contemporary representations of the Revolution—political rhetoric, journals, theatre, festivals, pictures and prints—concentrating on two special themes. First, the creators of these representations were part of an attempt to found anew the social order. Second, they sought to adapt their forms of culture so as to constitute through them the united community that was to be the agent of this historic new order. The second half of the book considers a representative selection of the many histories and theoretical writings on the Revolution from France, England and Germany: from Barnave and de Stael; to the nineteenth-century founders of social science and romantic historians, such as Michelet; to post-war comparative political writers and post-structuralist marxists influenced by Gramsci and Foucault. By bringing together an analysis of contemporary cultural responses to the Revolution and an account of subsequent cultures’ understanding of it, the author reveals the complex interplay between culture and agents of historical change, which modern views have often failed to realize.