Theatre was the most prominent venue of cultural production in China in the Mao era. Theatre reform from 1949 to 1976, involving all genres, spearheaded the artistic construction of socialist China. The ten contributors bring much-needed attention to the breadth and the multiple localities of this government-led initiative. Many of the contributors are seasoned scholars who offer new materials, approaches or methodologies.
The volume begins with Mar L. Bohnenkamp's ‘Neither Western Opera, Nor Old Chinese Theatre: The Modernist “Integrated Art-Form” and the Origin of the Maoist “New Music-Drama”’, which demonstrates the debt of this theatre to both global stimulation and local stories. He traces the inspiration of Gesamtkunst (integrated art form) in the creation of the new national musical drama, The White Haired Girl. He argues convincingly that this German Romantic aesthetic, which advocates incorporating the clear and meaningful expression of folk legend, was communicated to Chinese intellectuals well before the inception of the play in Yan'an in the 1940s.
Emily Wilcox provides another solid instance of the national/international origins with her examination of the invention of China's national dance drama in the 1950s. Instead of taking the term ‘national dance drama’ at face value, Wilcox unveils the fact that music dance develops under the tutelage of Soviet experts. While a majority of music dances retain a hybrid form, Wilcox incisively speculates that even Dagger Society, which is noted for the ‘Chineseness’ of its choreography, received its stimulation from communist international cultural assemblies, such as the World Festival for Youth and Students. In this sense, Dagger Society is a historical bellwether. Significantly, the staging of world revolution in the spoken drama of the 1960s provides a time-sensitive variant of the national theme. Christopher Tang suggests that bringing the world to the Chinese stage ushers in a switch to a ‘Sinocentric master narrative taking China as the center of a worldwide revolution’ that resonates with China's perception of the world after the Sino-Soviet split (p. 218).
Compared with the few new genres and contemporary works developed in the 1950s as the expression of the new socialist China, traditional theatre reform involved many more theatrical genres. The nationwide repertory reform held all existing stage work of traditional operatic drama to the criteria of relevant ‘moral and social values’ (p. 110). The preservation or removal of a play from the active repertory depended on whether or not it fell into the good graces of the Improvement Committee's criteria. Although repertory reform stifled the creativity of many practitioners, Maggie Greene, Anne Rebull and Liang Lo show that the ambiguous labelling of undesirable works as ‘superstitious’ also ‘left the door open for widely different interpretations’ (p. 115). It may come as a surprise that many popular stage works owe their survival or revival to the word fights in the politically more relaxed early 1950s.
Siyuan Liu's ‘The Campaign against Scenario Plays in China in the 1950s’, on the other hand, shows the devastating impact of the officially enforced modernization of performance style on popular genres in Tianjin. Popular entertainment for those of low social status was literally invalidated if they were unable or unwilling to change their improvisation-based stage performance and centre on the script/director. Amateur theatres in rural areas were similarly outlawed for their folk affiliation.
Tarryn Li-Min Chun invites the reader to rethink theatrical space. In her examination of the popularization of model theatres, for example, she reveals that promotion successfully contributes to the public's ideological identification with the work, even when it is not possible to stage the play.
This volume serves vastly different readers. For scholars and graduate students of China, it can be used as a source book on Chinese theatre, cultural history of the twentieth century and comparative socialism. At the same time, it is accessible to a wider public of general readers. The introduction and epilogue thoughtfully provide the context and perspectives of those who lived through the period examined in the articles.
In short, this volume provides a gateway into the complexity of socialist theatre of reform. From the creation of new genres, the repurposing of traditional genres and the impact on the artists, it initiates a re-evaluation of the role theatre plays in the socialist period and its legacy for contemporary Chinese culture.
