research

Revolutionary Stagecraft: Theater, Technology, and Politics in Modern China (University of Michigan Press, 2024)

Revolutionary Stagecraft draws on a rich corpus of literary, historical, and technical materials to reveal a deep entanglement among technological modernization, political agendas, and the performing arts in modern China. This unique approach to Chinese theater history combines a close look at plays themselves, performance practices, technical theater details, and behind-the-scenes debates over “how to” make theater amid the political upheavals of China’s 20th century. The book begins at a pivotal moment in the 1920s—when Chinese theater artists began to import, use, and write about modern stage equipment—and ends in the 1980s when China’s scientific and technological boom began. By examining iconic plays and performances from the perspective of the stage technologies involved, Tarryn Li-Min Chun provides a fresh perspective on their composition and staging. The chapters include stories on the challenges of creating imitation neon, rigging up a makeshift revolving stage, and representing a nuclear bomb detonating onstage. 

*Winner 2025 Association for Theatre in Higher Education Outstanding Book Award in Innovative Achievement

Rethinking Chinese Socialist Theaters of Reform: Performance Practice and Debate in the Mao Era (University of Michigan Press, 2021) Edited by Xiaomei Chen, Tarryn Li-Min Chun, and Siyuan Liu

Winner of the 2022 Association for Theatre in Higher Education Excellence in Editing Award! The profound political, economic, and social changes in China in the second half of the twentieth century have produced a wealth of scholarship; less studied however is how cultural events, and theater reforms in particular, contributed to the dynamic landscape of contemporary Chinese society. Rethinking Chinese Socialist Theaters of Reform fills this gap by investigating the theories and practice of socialist theater and their effects on a diverse range of genres, including Western-style spoken drama, Chinese folk opera, dance drama, Shanghai opera, Beijing opera, and rural theater. Focusing on the 1950s and ’60s, when theater art occupied a prominent political and cultural role in Maoist China, this book examines the efforts to remake theater in a socialist image. It explores the unique dynamics between official discourse, local politics, performance practice, and audience reception that emerged under the pressures of highly politicized cultural reform as well as the off-stage, lived impact of rapid policy change on individuals and troupes obscured by the public record. This multidisciplinary collection by leading scholars covers a wide range of perspectives, geographical locations, specific research methods, genres of performance, and individual knowledge and experience. The richly diverse approach leads readers through a nuanced and complex cultural landscape as it contributes significantly to our understanding of a crucial period in the development of modern Chinese theater and performance.

journal articles

• “Surface Classicism: Aesthetics, Poetics, and Remediation in Digitally Enhanced Chinese Performance.” Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature 20.2 (2023): 462-286.  

• “Wang Chong and the Theatre of Immediacy: Technology, Performance, and Intimacy in Crisis.” Theatre Survey 62.3 (2021): 295-321.  

• “Mediated Transgression and Madame White: Technology and the Nonhuman in Contemporary Stagings of a Chinese Folktale.” Theatre Journal 71.3 (2019): 307-326.  

• “Critical Acts—Spoken Drama and its Doubles: Thunderstorm 2.0 by Wang Chong and Théâtre du Rêve Expérimental.” TDR: The Drama Review 63.3 (2019): 155-163.   

• “Revolutionary Illumination: Stage Lighting, Politics, and Play in 1930s Shanghai Theater.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 30.2 (2018): 87-140.    

• “Adaptation as Hospitality: A Performance Series at the Shanghai Theatre Academy (STA) Winter Institute, 2013.” TDR: The Drama Review 58.1 (2014): 108-117. 

• “Shengsi Shaoxing: Lu Xun yu xiju de fuhuo qianli 生死紹興：魯迅與戲劇的復活潛力 (Life and Death in Shaoxing: Lu Xun and the Resurrective Potential of the Stage). Translated by Nan Hu. Wenxue《文學》(2014): 178-195. 

book chapters

• with Amanda Culp, Arnab Banerji, Jyana S. Browne, Po-Hsien Chu, Jennifer Goodlander, Claire Pamment, Shayoni Mitra, Yining Shang, and Satoko Shimazaki, “Roundtable on Teaching and Studying Asian Theatre in the American Academy.” In Charles O’Malley, ed., Toward a Just Pedagogy of Performance: Historiography, Narrative, and Equity in Dramatic Practice, 53-91. Routledge, 2023.

• “Modern Drama Script Anthologies.” In Literary Information in China: A History, ed. by Jack W. Chen, Anatoly Detwyler, Xiao Liu, Christopher M. B. Nugent, and Bruce Rusk (Columbia University Press, 2021): 277-283. 

• “Sent-Down Plays: Yangbanxi Stagecraft, Practical Aesthetics and Popularization during the Cultural Revolution.” In Rethinking Chinese Socialist Theatres of Reform: Performance Practice and Debates in the Mao Era, 242-269. University of Michigan Press, 2021.  

• “Introduction: Chinese Socialist Theatre between Revolution and Reform.” In Rethinking Chinese Socialist Theaters of Reform: Performance Practice and Debates in the Mao Era, 1-33. University of Michigan Press, 2021.  

• “A Monumental Model for Future Perfect Theater.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China, 619-624. Harvard University Press, 2017.

• “Resurrecting a Postlapsarian Pagoda in a Postrevolutionary World.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China, 883-888. Harvard University Press, 2017. 

• “Theatre for the People, by the People: Penghao Theatre and The Story of Gong and Drum Lane.” In Ruru Li, ed., Staging China: New Theatres in the Twenty-first Century, 215-232. Palgrave MacMillan, 2015.