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• Preface-- List of abbreviations-- Introduction: performing Mao's revolution--
• 1. The revolution will be dramatized: Red drama troupes--
• 2. Acting against Japan: drama troupes in North China--
• 3. Playing soldiers and peasants: civil war and agrarian reform--
• 4. Staging rural revolution: land reform operas--
• 5. State agents and local actors: cultural work in the early PRC--
• 6. Peasants on stage: amateur actors in socialist China--
• 7. Tradition in conflict: professional drama troupes and the PRC state-- Conclusion-- Select bibliography.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

Charting their training, travels, and performances, this innovative study explores the role of the artists that roamed the Chinese countryside in support of Mao's communist revolution. DeMare traces the development of Mao's 'cultural army' from its genesis in Red Army propaganda teams to its full development as a largely civilian force composed of amateur and professional drama troupes in the early years of the PRC. Drawing from memoirs, artistic handbooks, and rare archival sources, Mao's Cultural Army uncovers the arduous and complex process of creating revolutionary dramas that would appeal to China's all-important rural audiences. The Communists strived for a disciplined cultural army to promote party policies, but audiences often shunned modern and didactic shows, and instead clamoured for traditional works. DeMare illustrates how drama troupes, caught between the party and their audiences, did their best to resist the ever growing reach of the PRC state.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Prologue The avant-garde in the twenty-first century: the return of the living dead?
• Introduction : The avant-garde in China : contexts, concepts, chronologies
• Behind the red curtain : experimental theatre in China after Mao
• Performing dissent and marginality : the 1990s
• Avant-garde, arrière-garde, or pop avant-garde? : experimental theatre into the new millennium
• An absurd journey to the west : European theatre in post-Tiananmen China
• Uneasy homecomings : parody, deconstruction and the subversive rewriting of tradition
• Intercutural hybrids, pop strategies and "Meng-style delight' : toward a new concept of the avant-garde
• Epilogue : From pop- to trans-Chinese avant-garde(s)?

"Pop Goes the Avant-Garde" is the first comprehensive review of the history and development of avant-garde drama and theater in the People's Republic of China since 1976. Drawing on a range of critical perspectives in the fields of comparative literature, theater, performance, and cultural studies, the book explores key artistic movements and phenomena that have emerged in China's major cultural centers in the last several decades. It surveys the work of China's most influential dramatists, directors, and performance groups, with a special focus on Beijing-based playwright, director, and filmmaker Meng Jinghui - the former enfant terrible of Beijing theater, who is now one of Asia's foremost theater personalities. Through an extensive critique of theories of modernism and the avant-garde, the author reassesses the meanings, functions, and sociohistorical significance of this work in non-Western contexts by proposing a new theoretical construct - the pop avant-garde - and exploring new ways to understand and conceptualize aesthetic practices beyond Euro-American cultures and critical discourses.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)