An insightful analysis of more than a dozen Chinese stage productions, Staging China illustrates how Chinese society is reflected by and even constructed through theatre. Scholars from around the globe explore wide-ranging topics including recent approaches to classical theatre, propaganda theatre, and the challenges of independent theatres.

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.

This book provides a critical study of how China was represented on the historical London stage in selected examples from the late seventeenth century to the early twentieth century—which corresponds with the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), China’s last monarchy. The examples show that during this historical period, the stage representations of the country were influenced in turn by Jesuit writings on China, Britain’s expanding material interest in China, the presence of British imperial power in Asia, and the establishment of diasporic Chinese communities abroad. While finding that many of these works may be read as gendered and feminized, Chang emphasizes that the Jesuits’ depiction of China as a country of high culture and in perennial conflict with the Tartars gradually lost prominence in dramatic imaginations to depictions of China’s material and visual attractions. Central to the book’s argument is that the stage representations of China were inherently intercultural and open to new influences, manifested by the evolving combinations of Chinese and English (British) traits. Through the dramatization of the Chinese Other, the representations questioned, satirized, and put in sharp relief the ontological and epistemological bases of the English (British) Self.

Shashibiya is an intriguing discussion of the levels of 'filtering' that any Shakespeare performance in China undergoes, and a close examination of how these filters reflect the continually-changing political, social and cultural practices. The study traces the history of Shakespeare performance in China over the past hundred years, focussing in detail on eleven productions in mainstream, operatic and experimental forms in the post-Mao era. Li Ruru's intimate knowledge of her subject makes this the most up-to-date research available on staging Shakespeare in China.

In this study Lei focuses on the notion of 'performing Chinese' in traditional opera in the 'contact zones', where two or more cultures, ethnicities, and/or ideologies meet and clash. This work seeks to create discourse among theatre and performance studies, Asian and Asian American studies, and transnational and diasporic studies.

In Staging the World Rebecca E. Karl rethinks the production of nationalist discourse in China during the late Qing period, between China’s defeat in the Sino-Japanese War in 1895 and the proclamation of the Republic in 1911. She argues that at this historical moment a growing Chinese identification with what we now call the Third World first made the modern world visible as a totality and that the key components of Chinese nationalist discourse developed in reference to this worldview. The emergence of Chinese nationalism during this period is often portrayed as following from China’s position vis-à-vis Japan and the West. Karl has mined the archives of the late Qing period to discern the foci of Chinese intellectuals from 1895 to 1911 to assert that even though the China/Japan/West triangle was crucial, it alone is an incomplete—and therefore flawed—model of the development of nationalism in China. Although the perceptions and concerns of these thinkers form the basis of Staging the World, Karl begins by examining a 1904 Shanghai production of an opera about a fictional partition of Poland and its modern reincarnation as an ethno-nation. By focusing on the type of dialogue this opera generated in China, Karl elucidates concepts such as race, colonization, globalization, and history. From there, she discusses how Chinese conceptions of nationalism were affected by the “discovery” of Hawai’i as a center of the Pacific, the Philippine revolution against the United States, and the relationship between nationality and ethnicity made apparent by the Boer War in South Africa.

Staging Tianxia explores the ancient Chinese vision of world order known as tianxia (all under heaven) by focusing on the historical, performative, and rhetorical processes of expressive arts and cultural heritages that inform a vision of China as a historically multiethnic and cosmopolitan nation. Author Lanlan Kuang unites multimedia ethnographic research and theoretical insights from ethnomusicology, philosophy, religious studies, performance studies, and cognitive science, with a focus on Dunhuang bihua yuewu, a modern interpretation inserted into the Chinese classical dance and theatrical arts tradition. Staging Tianxia thus aims to redefine Silk Road studies and Dunhuangology, a transdisciplinary field dedicated to studying the texts and art of Dunhuang, a UNESCO World Heritage Site that connected China via the Silk Road with Central Asia, South Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. Staging Tianxia is a careful ethnographic study that looks at the importance of performance tradition and poetics in the arts and aesthetic theory of China.

Want to have homebuyers knocking down your door? Home Staging For Dummies delivers all the secrets to making your home stand out, sell faster, and bring in more money! It shows you how to make improvements room by room and generate a higher profit in the most cost- and time-effective way. Featuring eight full-color pages of instructive before-and-after photos, this completely practical guide demonstrates how and why to eliminate clutter, make repairs, arrange furnishings, and pave the way for buyers to make an emotional connection to your house. You’ll get a handle on what buyers want and how to show it to them, find plenty of do-it-yourself tasks that add real value to your home, and get tips on producing photos of your home that will have buyers craving to see more! Discover how to: See your home as prospective buyers will see it Know what needs doing and what doesn’t Master the three-step home staging process Add real value to your home without breaking the bank Decide whether to DIY or call in the pros Create curb appeal Make a great first impression with a beautiful entryway Spruce up your kitchen, bathroom, living, and dining rooms Turn your bedrooms into a buyer’s dream Whip your mechanicals into top shape Avoid staging nightmares Get top dollar for your home — all you need is a little help from Home Staging For Dummies!

An insightful analysis of more than a dozen Chinese stage productions, Staging China illustrates how Chinese society is reflected by and even constructed through theatre. Scholars from around the globe explore wide-ranging topics including recent approaches to classical theatre, propaganda theatre, and the challenges of independent theatres.