High-Performance Performance: Digital Technologies in Contemporary Chinese Theatre

Description

In the last decade, large-format LED panels, extended and augmented reality, and artificial intelligence interfaces have appeared with increasing frequency in theatre and dance performances from the PRC, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. These high-tech experiments have reinvigorated old debates over liveness and mediatization, but also raise new questions in contexts where political power and technological development are closely intertwined. This talk will use case studies from the PRC to explore several key issues: how do we understand connections between the performing arts and technological infrastructures, especially in light of the environmental and humanitarian dimensions of constructing and maintaining those systems? What happens when the arts become implicated in nationalistic narratives of technological progress via use of new technologies? How might theoretical formulations at the intersection of theatre and media studies grapple with the complexity of these entanglements?

Speaker

Tarryn Li-Min Chun is Associate Professor in the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame, where she holds a concurrent appointment in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures and is a Faculty Fellow at the Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies. Her research focuses on intersections of performance, technology, and media in modern and contemporary Sinophone theatre. She is author of Revolutionary Stagecraft: Theater, Technology, and Politics in Modern China (University of Michigan Press, 2024), winner of the 2025 Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) Outstanding Book Award for Innovative Achievement, as well as numerous scholarly articles, chapters, and reviews. She also is co-editor with Xiaomei Chen and Siyuan Liu of Rethinking Socialist Theaters of Reform: Performance Practice and Debate in the Mao Era (University of Michigan Press, 2021) and currently serves as online editor for Theatre Journal. Other scholarly distinctions include a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (2021) and an ATHE Excellence in Editing Award (2022).