Women Performing the Modern: Revue and the Heterotopia Space in Republic China (1920s-1930s)

Abstract

This thesis is an interdisciplinary study of the history and society of modern China through the examination of Chinese revue, an all-women-cast commercial concert performance in Shanghai in the 1920s and 1930s. Chinese revue is an undiscovered genre of modern Chinese performance. Revue is a modern commercial performance by female performers that originated in France in the early 19th century and flourished to its zenith in the United States in the 1920s. At the same time, Japanese Takarazuka Revue Company introduced revue that has been performed to this day; the Chinese Bright Moon Ensemble developed a local Chinese version widely known as 歌舞 剧 gewuju (song and dance drama), which, I argue, is in fact China’s revue.

Based on historiography, performance studies, and gender studies, this project challenges the research method of reducing history into results and, instead, proposes the inextricability between the essential character of performance and the “results” of history. The research method is based on primary source in Chinese and Japanese such as the memoirs of Li Jinhui, the script of gewujut, Shen Bao, the Shanghai Daily News, and the The Pei-yang Pictorial New Tientsin. Combining Foucault's theory of heterotopia and theories of kinesthesia from performance studies, this thesis argues that revue performance creates a near-future heterotopia space, and that the sense of near-future experienced by the audience in the theater is modernity at that specific historical moment. The modernity represented by Chinese revue roots in the inextricable result of the characteristics of all-female performances, rather than a historical accident.