Pop Goes the Avant-Garde

Experimental Theater in Contemporary China

Rossella Ferrari

Pop Goes the Avant-Garde

Rossella Ferrari

Distributed for Seagull Books

365 pages | 40 halftones | 6 x 9 | © 2011
Enactments
Paper $25.00 ISBN: 9780857420459 Published May 2013 World sales rights except India
Pop Goes the Avant-Garde: Experimental Theatre in Contemporary China is the first comprehensive review of the history and development of avant-garde drama and theater in the People’s Republic of China since 1976. Drawing on a range of critical perspectives in the fields of comparative literature, theater, performance, and culture studies, the book explores key artistic movements and phenomena that have emerged in China’s major cultural centers in the last several decades.
 
It surveys the work of China’s most influential dramatists, directors and performance groups, with a special focus on Beijing-based playwright, director and filmmaker Meng Jinghui—the former enfant terrible of Beijing theater, who is now one of Asia’s foremost theater personalities. Through an extensive critique of theories of modernism and the avant-garde, the author reassesses the meanings, functions and socio-historical significance of this work in non-Western contexts by proposing a new theoretical construct—the pop avant-garde—and exploring new ways to understand and conceptualize aesthetic practices beyond Euro-American cultures and critical discourses.
Contents
Acknowledgements

Prologue
    The Avant-Garde in the Twenty-First Century: The Return of the Living Dead?
Part 1: An Avant-Garde Trilogy: Experimental Theatre in Contemporary China
    1. Introduction: The Avant-Garde in China: Contexts, Concepts, Chronologies
    2. Behind the Red Curtain: Experimental Theatre in China after Mao
    3. Performing Dissent and Marginality: The 1990s
    4. Avant-Garde, Arrière-Garde, or Pop Avant-Garde?: Experimental Theatre into the New Millennium
Part 2: Aesthetics of Delight: The Theatre of Meng Jinghui
    5. An Absurd Journey to the West: European Theatre in Post-Tiananmen China
    6. Uneasy Homecomings: Parody, Deconstruction and the Subversive Rewriting of Tradition
    7. Intercultural Hybrids, Pop Strategies and ‘Meng-Style Delight’: Toward a New Concept of the Avant-Garde
Epilogue
    From Pop- to Trans-Chinese Avant-Garde(s)?

Bibliography
Appendix
Index
Review Quotes
CHOICE
"Ferrari offers a rich, detailed survey of avant-garde and experimental theater in China after 1976 as well as a theoretical inquiry into the usefulness, indeed appropriateness, of categorizing any contemporary theatrical work as avant-garde in the wake of Burger’s declaration. . . .This is a resource for those interested in Chinese contemporary theater, interculturalism, the theatrical avant-garde, experimental theater, and performance studies. . . .Recommended."
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