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School of Chinese Scholar Seminar

The Future is (the Past of) a Foreign Country:

Envisioning Futurity Through Adaptation in Postmillennial Chinese Theatre

Speaker: Prof. Rossella Ferrari

(Professor of Chinese Studies in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Vienna, Austria)

Date & Time:  Feb 27, 2026 15:30-17:00 (HKT)

Language: English
Venue: Room 730, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU

Delivery Mode: Face-to-face

Registration:

https://hku.au1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_3yLBwVhXFiovXDM

ABSTRACT

This lecture explores visions and critiques of prospective futures in postmillennial Chinese independent theatre. Especially since the pandemic, projections of future-oriented sensibilities and alternative human and posthuman scenarios have emerged on China’s physical and online stages. These scenarios may arise from troubled pasts or register present conditions of precarity and uncertainty, ranging from technophobic prophecies of digital doom to ambivalent heterotopias and virtual fantasies of escape. Just as the association of futurity and technology permeates both official discourse and popular consciousness, practices of future-making in twenty-first-century performance frequently intertwine with technological innovation and imagination. Performance engages with technology as both a dramaturgical trope and an aesthetic tool to envision futurity. The lecture focuses on theatrical adaptations of European classics that draw on textual repositories and memories of foreign pasts to address present realities in China, while probing the potentials and pitfalls of technology in shaping individual and collective futures. One example is the 2021 production of The Metamorphosis, presented by the New Youth Group and directed by Li Jianjun as part of a “posthuman trilogy” of adaptations of works by Franz Kafka, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Created in the early post-pandemic period, the trilogy reflects on contemporary socio-historical conditions through innovative stage technologies and techno-futural imaginaries. In The Metamorphosis, Kafka’s protagonist is recast as a Chinese delivery driver who transitions into a virtual idol – part human, part vermin, and part cyborg. This adaptation revisits modernist articulations of alienation, animality, and abjection to offer a critique of labour precarity and media objectification in the context of twenty-first-century digital capitalism.

BIO

Rossella Ferrari is Professor of Chinese Studies in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Vienna, Austria, and she has previously worked at SOAS University of London, UK. Her research focuses on the contemporary theatre and performance cultures of the Chinese-speaking region. She is the author of Pop Goes the Avant-garde: Experimental Theatre in Contemporary China (2012), Transnational Chinese Theatres: Intercultural Performance Networks in East Asia (2020), and Performance and Postsocialism in Postmillennial China (2025), and co-editor of Asian City Crossings: Pathways of Performance Through Hong Kong and Singapore (2021). She is the Principal Investigator of the research project, “Performing Postsocialism in Twenty-First-Century China” (10.55776/PAT9791923), funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF).

ALL are welcome*
*Pre-registration (Click HERE) is required.