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Breaking out of the Main Melody: Meng Bing and His Monumental Theater

Sat, March 28, 10:45am to 12:45pm, Chicago Sheraton Hotel & Towers, Floor: Level 2, Ontario

Abstract

In post-socialist China, where culture has supposedly been “going capitalist” ever since the 1990s, Meng Bing’s “main melody plays” (zhuxuanlü xiju) have gained popularity in the opposite direction—“going socialist” in their thematic concerns, theatrical styles, and ideological critique. Main melody plays are usually considered as boring propaganda, but Meng’s productions unexpectedly created a “Meng Bing phenomenon,” culminating in a large-scale drama festival in 2011 that staged fourteen of his plays, performed by thirteen prestigious theater troupes.

Meng embodies the interwoven discourses of Chinese literary modernity that this panel highlights. He is at once politically correct, artistically innovating, and commercially successful. His “soldier plays” have seemingly inherited a socialist realist tradition in praising heroic soldiers with strong official backing. At a deeper level, however, his plays side with the still oppressed poor people at the bottom of Chinese society fifty years after the “liberation” had supposedly made them masters of their own fate. Meng’s plays challenge the new rich and the new era, and point to the impossibility of change from a “feudalist” to a “socialist” China, and from a “socialist” to a “post-socialist” China. At the same time, Meng has pioneered a commercial avant-garde style with aesthetic innovations, ingeniously blending dramatic scenes of the rural with the cosmopolitan, communist with Christian, and socialist dreams with capitalist realities. The Meng Bing phenomenon provides a much-needed insight into the lively revolutionary stage in a non-revolutionary time, and its enduring public appeal to audiences with their own private sentiments and concerns.

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