Staging Revolution

Author : Xing Fan
Publisher : Hong Kong University Press
ISBN 13 : 9888455818
Total Pages : 308 pages
Book Rating : 4.12/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Staging Revolution written by Xing Fan and published by Hong Kong University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-11 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Staging Revolution refutes the deep-rooted notion that art overtly in the service of politics is by definition devoid of artistic merits. As a prominent component shaping the culture of the Cultural Revolution, model Beijing Opera (jingju) is the epitome of art used for political ends. Arguing against commonly accepted interpretations, Xing Fan demonstrates that in a performance of model jingju, political messages could only be realized through the most rigorously formulated artistic choices and conveyed by performers possessing exceptional techniques. Fan contextualizes model jingju at the intersection of history, artistry, and aesthetics. Integral to jingju’s interactions with politics are the practitioners’ constant artistic experimentations to accommodate the modern stories and characters within the jingju framework and the eventual formation of a new sense of beauty. Therefore, a thorough understanding of model jingju demands close attention to how the artists resolved actual production problems, which is a critical perspective missing in earlier studies. This book provides exactly this much-needed dimension of analysis by scrutinizing the decisions made in the real, practical context of bringing dramatic characters to life on stage, and by examining how major artistic elements interacted with each other, sometimes harmoniously, sometimes antagonistically. Such an approach necessarily places jingju artists center stage. Making use of first person accounts of the creative process, including numerous interviews conducted by the author, Fan presents a new appreciation of a lived experience that, on a harrowing journey of coping with political interference, was also filled with inspiration and excitement. “This fascinating study is ground-breaking and timely. Xing Fan masterfully demonstrates how the creative choices made by playwrights, directors, musicians, actors, and designers intersected with one another in creating an aesthetics of the model theater during the Cultural Revolution. A must-read for anyone interested in Chinese literature and drama, theater studies, and comparative literature.” —Xiaomei Chen, University of California, Davis “Though no longer in fashion, the model revolutionary operas of the Cultural Revolution are still occasionally performed. Xing Fan has done us a great service by analyzing them in detail and reminding us of their merits. I thoroughly enjoyed this engaging book and learned a lot from it. I recommend it strongly.” —Colin Mackerras, Griffith University

Author : Peter J. Chelkowski
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 322 pages
Book Rating : 4.79/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Staging a Revolution written by Peter J. Chelkowski and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book to examine this colossal political event through the images that set it in motion. With previously unpublished historical sources and essays by Peter Chelkowski and Hamid Dabashi.

Author : Xiaomei Chen
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231541619
Total Pages : 378 pages
Book Rating : 4.19/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Staging Chinese Revolution written by Xiaomei Chen and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2016-11-08 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Staging Chinese Revolution surveys fifty years of theatrical propaganda performances in China, revealing a dynamic, commercial capacity in works often dismissed as artifacts of censorship. Spanning the 1960s through the 2010s, Xiaomei Chen reads films, plays, operas, and television shows from an interdisciplinary and comparative perspective, demonstrating how, in a socialist state with "capitalist characteristics," propaganda performance turns biographies, memoirs, and war stories into mainstream ideological commodities, legitimizing the state and its right to rule. Analyzing propaganda performance also brings contradictions and inconsistencies to light that throw common understandings about propaganda's purpose into question. Chen focuses on revisionist histories that stage the lives of the "founding fathers" of the Communist Party, such as Chen Duxiu, Mao Zedong, and Deng Xiaoping, and the engaging mix of elite and ordinary characters that animate official propaganda in the private and public sphere. Taking the form of "personal" memories and representing star and youth culture and cyberspace, contemporary Chinese propaganda appeals through multiple perspectives, complicating relations among self, subject, agent, state building, and national identity. Chen treats Chinese performance as an extended form of political theater confronting critical issues of commemoration, nostalgia, state rituals, and contested history. It is through these reenactments that three generations of revolutionary leaders loom in extraordinary ways over Chinese politics and culture.

Author : Amina ElHalawani
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 1040002536
Total Pages : 168 pages
Book Rating : 4.37/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Staging Revolutions and the Many Faces of Modernism written by Amina ElHalawani and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-04-25 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book explores how theatre, with its performative capacity, has the power to engage with and affect the politics of its day. It sets the stage for the reader to discover the revolutionary traditions of Egyptian and Irish theatre, very distinct in their histories and cultures, and understand their enduring relevance in today’s world. The volume takes Ireland as a case study of the interplay between cultural nationalism and politically engaged theatre and compares it to the role of the theatre in Egypt during its Golden era in the 1960s. Through a selection of Egyptian plays by Tawfiq al-Hakim, Mikhail Roman, Yusuf Idris, and Salah Abdul-Saboor, alongside Irish plays by Brian Friel, Frank McGuinness, Christina Reid, and Samuel Beckett, it maps the political aesthetics of unsteady times and seemingly disparate places to reflect on the dynamics of revolt as a staged act in and of itself. Further, the book examines how playwrights from both nations have engaged with theatre as a medium, focusing on how their contemplations, hesitations, frustrations, and protest have been translated onto the stage in their various plays, and comprehends the transformative role the theatre has always played in politics in shaping history across time and space. Bridging together discussions on transnational modernisms with nuanced cultural histories of protest, this critical work will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of literary studies, identity politics, cultural studies, theatre and performance studies, and political studies.

Author : Astrid Oesmann
Publisher : State University of New York Press
ISBN 13 : 0791483606
Total Pages : 244 pages
Book Rating : 4.02/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Staging History written by Astrid Oesmann and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Staging History analyzes the commitment to social change present in the theatrical and theoretical writings of Bertolt Brecht. Challenging previous notions, Astrid Oesmann argues that Brecht's work was less dependent on Marxist ideology than is often assumed and that his work should be seen as a coherent whole. Brecht used the stage to release political ideas into experimental spaces in which actors and spectators could explore the relationships between abstract thought and concrete social life. Oesmann places Brecht within the context of the major leftist theorists of the twentieth century, particularly Adorno, Benjamin, and Lukàcs, focusing on their discussions of realism, aesthetics, natural history, and mimesis. Oesmann elaborates upon the vision of a "counter-public sphere" in a number of Brecht's theoretical texts and plays—especially The Three Penny Trial and Fear and Misery of the Third Reich—that present the emergence of such a sphere in the face of fascism. By exploring Brecht's theoretical writings, selected plays, and recently published theatrical fragments, Oesmann reveals unpredictable constructions of history and surprising distinctions among various political ideologies, while also proving that Brecht remains vitally relevant to a "post-communist" world.

Author : Rebecca E. Karl
Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780822328674
Total Pages : 332 pages
Book Rating : 4.74/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Staging the World written by Rebecca E. Karl and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2002-04-22 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVAn historical analysis of how the Chinese constructed their understandings of their place in the world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries./div

Author : Mark Darlow
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199773807
Total Pages : 416 pages
Book Rating : 4.00/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Staging the French Revolution written by Mark Darlow and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-05-03 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the last decade, the theatre and opera of the French Revolution have been the subject of intense scholarly reassessment, both in terms of the relationship between theatrical works and politics or ideology in this period and on the question of longer-scale structures of continuity or rupture in aesthetics. Staging the French Revolution: Cultural Politics and the Paris Opera, 1789-1794 moves these discussions boldly forward, focusing on the Paris Opéra (Académie Royale de Musique) in the cultural and political context of the early French Revolution. Both institutional history and cultural study, this is the first ever full-scale study of the Revolution and lyric theatre. The book concentrates on three aspects of how a royally-protected theatre negotiates the transition to national theatre: the external dimension, such as questions of ownership and governance and the institution's relationship with State institutions and popular assemblies; the internal management, finances, selection and preparation of works; and the cultural and aesthetic study of the works themselves and of their reception. In Staging the French Revolution, author Mark Darlow offers an unprecedented view of the material context of opera production, combining in-depth archival research with a study of the works themselves. He argues that a mixture of popular and State interventions created a repressive system in which cultural institutions retained agency, compelling individuals to follow and contribute to a shifting culture. Theatre thereby emerged as a locus for competing discourses on patriotism, society, the role of the arts in the Republic, and the articulation of the Revolution's relation with the 'Old Regime', and is thus an essential key to the understanding of public opinion and publicity at this crucial historical moment. Combining recent approaches to institutions, sociability, and authors' rights with cultural studies of opera, Staging the French Revolution takes a historically grounded and methodologically innovative cross-disciplinary approach to opera and persuasively re-evaluates the long-standing, but rather sterile, concept of propaganda.

Author : Michael Burden
Publisher : Bodleian Library
ISBN 13 : 9781851244560
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.65/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Staging History written by Michael Burden and published by Bodleian Library. This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, historical subjects became some of the most popular topics for stage dramas of all kinds on both sides of the Atlantic. The medium of drama ensured that the telling of these histories--the French Revolution and the American War of Independence, for example, or the travels of Captain Cook and Christopher Columbus--were brought to life through words, music and spectacle. The scale of the productions was often ambitious: a water tank with model floating ships was deployed at Sadler's Wells for the staging of the Siege of Gibraltar, and another production on the same theme used live cannons which set fire to the vessels in each performance. Exploring contemporary theatrical documents and images including playbills, set designs, musical scores and prints, this illustrated collection of essays examines a number of extraordinary dramatic productions and casts light on their role in shaping a popular interpretation of historical events."--

Author : Kath Kenny
Publisher : Upswell
ISBN 13 : 1743822758
Total Pages : 328 pages
Book Rating : 4.53/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Staging a Revolution written by Kath Kenny and published by Upswell. This book was released on 2022-09-01 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Claire Dobbin, Helen Garner, Evelyn Krape, Jude Kuring and Yvonne Marini mocked the ocker character beloved by Pram Factory playwrights, and performed monologues about men, sex, and how they felt "as a woman". Directed by Kerry Dwyer and produced by the Carlton Women's Liberation group, the play's frank revelations stunned audiences and shocked the Pram Factory world. Set against a backdrop of moratorium marches, inner-city cafes and share houses, and the rising tide of sexual liberation and countercultural movements, Kath Kenny uses interviews and archival material to tell the story of Betty Can Jump. On the 50th anniversary of this ground-breaking play, she considers its ongoing impact on Australian culture, and asks why the great cultural renaissance of women's liberation has been largely forgotten. She sets out her stake in this story, as a theatre reviewer today and as a child born into the revolutionary early 1970s. And she asks why feminism keeps getting stuck in mother-daughter battles, rethinking her own experience as a young feminist who clashed with Garner over the publication of The First Stone.

Author : Mark Darlow
Publisher : OUP USA
ISBN 13 : 0199773726
Total Pages : 436 pages
Book Rating : 4.25/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Staging the French Revolution written by Mark Darlow and published by OUP USA. This book was released on 2012-05-31 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Staging the French Revolution, author Mark Darlow offers an unprecedented opportunity to consider the material context of opera production, combining in-depth archival research with a study of the works themselves. He argues that a mixture of popular and State interventions created a repressive system in which cultural institutions retained agency, compelling individuals to follow and contribute to a shifting culture. Theatre thereby emerged as a locus for competing discourses on patriotism, society, the role of the arts in the Republic, and the articulation of the Revolution's relation with the 'Old Regime', and is thus an essential key to the understanding of public opinion and publicity at this crucial historical moment.