Chinese Opera: Aesthetics and Politics of the Performing Body

Catalog description

Explores traditional Chinese drama, which has always been a music theater, from the perspective of contemporary cultural theory, and in a comparative and interdisciplinary context. Analyzing classical plays in relation to their staging in today's regional operas, this course will first examine the dialectics of "prettiness and artistry" in traditional Chinese theater aesthetics and its implications in gender politics. It will then move on to investigate issues of cross-dressing and erotic desire in Chinese drama of the late imperial period in comparison with that of early modern England. Lastly, the ramifications of Chinese opera as a national imagination in modern cultural politics, as embodied in the play M. Butterfly, the film Farewell My Concubine, and the Beijing opera version of Turandot, will be addressed.