Stage Technology in Modern China: The Media of Revolution and Resistance

Abstract

This dissertation examines how the introduction of new stage technologies—from electric spotlights to live-feed digital cameras—into modern Chinese theater has shaped dramatic text, performance practice, and artistic theory from the 1930s to the present. Extant scholarship on modern Chinese performing arts acknowledges the importance of technical elements like scenography and lighting, but generally treats such elements as secondary to the artistic labors of actors, directors, and playwrights. In contrast, my study foregrounds the material and medial components of live performance and demonstrates that they are in fact central to both the aesthetics and politics of modern theater in China. Using a methodology that combines literary and performance analysis, I argue that the modernization of the stage apparatus in China has propelled a reconceptualization of drama as a technology in the service of political and ideological goals. Yet, at the same time, the very technologies that have facilitated this shift also have galvanized aesthetic innovation, enabled new forms of critique, and connected Chinese dramatists to global trends in theater arts.

The project is structured around periods of innovation in modern Chinese theater, examined through specific performance case studies: lighting in early spoken drama (1930s), architecture and political theater (1950s), the body as anti-technology in “little theater” (1980s), and new media in avant-garde performance (2010s). For each case, I use sources such as literary texts, technical drawings from theater periodicals and archives, memoirs and essays by theater artists, and interviews with living directors and designers to reconstruct the real and imagined material conditions of performance at distinct historical moments. These materials enable me to examine the intersection of technology and theater on three interrelated levels: how practical advances influence the writing (or adaptation) of scripts and facilitate production; how conceptual innovations refashion the craft of performance; and how human agents mobilize in service of (or against) the stage apparatus. Together, these cases demonstrate that the entanglement of technology, performance, and politics has been and continues to be a defining force in the development of Chinese theater.