Xiqu 2.0: Expanded Chinese Opera in Digital Times

Author(s)

Rossella Ferrari

Abstract

Xiqu 2.0 designates an experimental approach to adapting and updating the classical theaters of the Sinophone region (xiqu) and a form of expanded Chinese opera in digital times. It highlights strategies of versioning and serialization of classical texts and tropes in (post-)modern performance environments and foregrounds media and textual interactivity, networking, and participatory contexts of production, reception, and circulation—including the production, reception, and circulation of cultural memory in the contemporary Sinosphere. The stage practice of Hong Kong–based multi-genre artist Danny Yung of Zuni Icosahedron and his long-term work with Tang Xianzu's Peony Pavilion (1598) illustrate the multiple dimensions of xiqu 2.0. Representative productions include the digital Kun opera Sigmund Freud in Search of Chinese Matter and Mind (2002, 2016) and the series The Interrupted Dream, launched in 2018. The latter links Tang's oneiric imaginary to the postcolonial critique of orientalism through references to seventeenth-century chinoiserie at the court of Louis XIV. Updated for livestreaming during the COVID-19 pandemic, the series served as a virtual channel of mediated memory across the digital Sinosphere in the aftermath of the 2019–20 Hong Kong protests and as a commentary on ancien and modern regimes, past and present revolutions, old and new Chinese dreams.

Organisation(s)

Department of East Asian Studies

Journal

Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature

Volume

20

Pages

265–296

No. of pages

32

ISSN

2578-3491

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1215/25783491-10992720

Publication date

09-2023

Peer reviewed

Yes

Austrian Fields of Science 2012

602045 Sinology

Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Literature and Literary Theory, Linguistics and Language

Portal url

https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/30434412-524e-42df-92e7-cfce5fc6ca24