LRCCS Noon Lecture Series | Lighting, Cameras, Action: Technological Revolutions in Modern Chinese Theater

From lighting units to digital projectors, the machinery responsible for the magic of the theater often remains hidden offstage, out of sight and out of mind. Beginning in the early decades of the 20th century, however, certain influential Chinese theater artists began to view the technical side of modernized stagecraft as the key to innovation in both the aesthetics and the political efficacy of this popular medium. This talk will counterpoise two key moments in the history of revolutionary theater—a performance of the international anti-imperialist hit, "Roar, China!," in 1930s Shanghai and stagings of the “revolutionary model operas” (geming yangbanxi) in the early 1970s—in order to explore the relationship between the use of technology in the theater and theater as a technology for producing affect and action.

Tarryn Li-Min Chun is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Study of China at the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies. Her work focuses on intersections of theater, literature, and visual media in modern and contemporary China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. She received her PhD from the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University, as well as an MA in Regional Studies-East Asian from Harvard and a BA in East Asian Studies from Princeton University. Her current book project, based on her doctoral dissertation, examines the relationship between technological modernization and aesthetic innovation in Chinese theater from the 1930s to the present. During her postdoctoral fellowship, she is working towards a new book manuscript chapter on the relationship between stage technology and ideology in the Cultural Revolution model operas and developing a digital humanities extension of her project.