Contemporary Chinese Theatre: Martin E Segal Theatre Center

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Contemporary Chinese Theatre: Faye C. Fei, Janice Sze Wan Poon, Shixing Guo, + William H. Sun

Playwrights, theatre artists and scholars Faye Chunfang Fei (Shanghai), Janice Sze Wan Poon (Hong Kong), Shixing Guo (via Skype from Beijing), and and William Huizhu Sun (Vice President, Shanghai Theatre Academy) join us to discuss plays, playwrights, aesthetic trends, and social context in contemporary Chinese theatre. Readings of excerpts from selected works in translation will be followed by a panel discussion addressing questions such as: how are playwrights addressing China’s recent rapid economic and social changes? How do the theatre scenes compare across China’s major cities? Under what circumstances do contemporary Chinese playwrights create their work? Presented with support from Theatre Without Borders (Roberta Levitow).

An artist-scholar of theatre, Professor Faye Chunfang Fei (费春放) of East China Normal University has been teaching and writing about theatre since earning her doctorate at CUNY/Graduate Center in 1991. Her professionally produced intercultural plays have reached diverse audiences in Asia, Europe and the US. Since 2006, she has successfully collaborated with William H. Sun on a number of verse-drama adaptations of Ibsen and Strindberg in classical forms of Chinese theatre.

Janice Sze Wan Poon (潘詩韻) is a writer and theatre professional from Hong Kong who is researching dramaturgy and new play development in the United States through a 2010-2011 Asian Cultural Council fellowship. Poon is the first Chinese playwright in the Creative Lab of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. She began as an arts journalist and then created Hong Kong’s first literary department as a member of PIP Theatre Limited, where she also inaugurated the first annual Hong Kong Playwright Festival and a Conference on Contemporary Performing Arts. Poon has edited five publications on Hong Kong theatre and culture; created and performed original solo works and collaborated on major productions; and had three of her plays received staged readings in the Hong Kong Playwright Festival.

Guo Shixing (过士行), resident playwright of National Theatre in Beijing, is China's leading dramatist. Best-known for his 1990s Trilogy of Dilettantes–Birdmen (Niaoren, 1991), Chessman (Qiren, 1994 ) and Fishman (Yuren, 1997),  Guo's plays are provocative psychological, cultural and environmental inquiries into everyday life. His more recent plays include Toilet (Cesuo, 2004) and Frog ( Qingwa, 2006) .

William Huizhu Sun (孙惠柱) is professor and vice president of Shanghai Theatre Academy. A playwright and director with a doctorate in Performance Studies, NYU, he has taught at four North American universities before returning to Shanghai in 1999. A consortium editor of TDR (New York) and editor-in-chief of THEATRE ARTS (Shanghai), he focuses his research and writing on social performance studies and intercultural theatre, with four major scholarly books and over a dozen plays seen in China, U.S., Japan, Singapore, Norway, France, Germany, Spain, Romania, and India.

Monday, March 21, 2011, 6:30 p.m.
Martin E. Segal Theatre. Free!