The Pennsylvania State University

The Graduate School

College of the Liberal Arts

INTERCULTURAL BODIES:

POLITICS OF PERFORMANCE IN MODERN TAIWANESE THEATRE

A Dissertation in

Comparative Literature and Asian Studies

by

Wei-Chih Wang

© 2016 Wei-Chih Wang

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

August 2016

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The dissertation of Wei-Chih Wang was reviewed and approved* by the following:

Charlotte D. Eubanks Associate Professor of Comparative Literature Director of Graduate Studies Dissertation Advisor Chair of Committee

Shuang Shen Associate Professor of Comparative Literature

Jonathan Abel Associate Professor of Comparative Literature

On-Cho Ng Professor of History Head of Asian Studies

Sarah J. Townsend Assistant Professor of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese

*Signatures are on file in the Graduate School.

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Abstract

The nature of the historical relationship between aesthetics and politics in modern

Taiwanese theatre, especially after the lifting of martial law (1949–1987), remains a highly contested issue. At the same time, searching for a new Taiwanese body continues to be a major direction of theatrical experiments and is under-theorized. In regard to historical surveys,

Taiwanese scholars such as Chung Ming-Der, Ma Sen, Lin He-Yi, and Chi Wei-Jan have published considerable work on the development of modern Taiwanese theatre. Shih Wan-Shun,

Wang Li-Wen, Chang Ivy I Chu, Liang Pei-Lin, Cheng Fan-Ting, and Wu Chen-Tse have all, in their theses and dissertations, attended to questions of thematics and theatrics in modern

Taiwanese practice. However, so far, few works have examined the tension between the historical continuum of political oppression and the immediacy of theatrical performance. The continued sedimentation of politics and aesthetics embedded in bodily performance constitutes a dominant research emphasis in performance studies, but has yet to be fully explored in modern

Taiwanese theatre. Via a close reading from a biopolitical perspective of the body in text and on stage, my dissertation bridges the scholarly gap between historiography and theory as each pertain to the theatre. I argue that the body carries ideology-ridden messages, making corporeal existence a crucial site deployed by theatre participants to reconfigure the idea of Taiwan since the Japanese colonial period.

In my Introduction, I revisit the historical development of modern Taiwanese theatre pertaining to the body. Chapter One focuses on Tian Chi-Yuan (田啟元, 1964–1996) and his

White Water (白水, Baishui 1993). Concentrating on Tian’s multiple schemas of the body, I argue for a “constructivist” model of national identity to consider the experiment of modern

Taiwanese theatre as a critical hybrid of borrowing and rejecting local traditional resources and iv foreign cultural references. Chapter Two shifts the focus to two of the most significant playwrights and directors in modern Taiwanese theatre, Stan Lai (賴聲川, 1954– ) and Hugh K.

S. Lee (李國修, 1955–2013). The realistic style of performance, or “critical realism,” a term suggested by Tobin Nellhaus, of Lee’s Far Away from Home (西出陽關, Xi Chu Yang Guan

1988) and Lai’s A Dream like a Dream (如夢之夢, Ru Meng Zhi Meng 2000) foreground the nuanced flow between social realities and theatrical representations in which the enacted body can express memories and traumas in response to defining historical junctures. Chapter Three explores the work of Robert Wilson (1941– ) and Suzuki Tadashi (1939– ) and their intercultural, flagship productions in twenty-first-century Taiwan, with special attention to Wilson’s Orlando

(2009) and Suzuki’s La Dame aux Camélias (2011). Overall, I argue that modern Taiwanese theatre provides a powerful instance of intercultural performance functioning as a subjectivity reformed via an emotional articulation of a transfigured postcolonial, political, and cultural identity. In the Conclusion, I reiterate the ways in which the body continues to be an experimental site for challenging issues of identity in modern Taiwanese theatre.

By analyzing performances in the post–martial law era, I offer micro-reading of the body in performance and formulate an analytical angle on performance with sociopolitical specificities.

On this basis, I show that the concepts of modernity, trauma, and subjectivity—themes repeatedly tackled by scholars—are more than abstract notions and textual representations.

Instead, these concepts also constitute physical practice by reflexively generating knowledge and affect. I am, therefore, offering an argument in opposition to the idea of interpreting modern

Taiwanese theatre as an attempt to construct Taiwan. In my account, modern Taiwanese theatre functions as a biopolitical practice that refracts identity struggles captured in history and in the present day of an impossibly delayed “Taiwanese” identity. v

Note on the Romanization, Translation of Names, and the Figures

For East Asian names, mainly Chinese, Taiwanese, and Japanese, I have followed the local custom of putting the family name before the person’s given name. For Chinese names and

Taiwanese names, I rely principally on the Hanyu Pinyin system. Yet, if any person referenced has an established spelling or an English name, Stan Lai (賴聲川, Lai Sheng-Chuan, 1954–), for instance, I follow this practice out of respect for that person. The playwright’s or practitioner’s original name and birth year (if known) are given only if that person’s work is analyzed as a primary source. The names of scholars and researchers are only given in English. All English translations of texts are mine unless specified otherwise in the footnotes. Great efforts have been made to identify and contact copyright holders for all the images and figures used in this dissertation. However, image 6 can only be traced back to Shi Li’s thesis; its original source remains unknown.

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Table of Contents

List of Figures ...... vii

Acknowledgments ...... viii

Introduction ...... 1

Chapter One

Constructing Taiwan: Tian Chi-Yuan and Conscious Constructivism ...... 55

Chapter Two

Embodying Taiwan: Hugh Lee, Stan Lai, and Critical realism ...... 121

Chapter Three

Transgressing Taiwan: Suzuki Tadashi, Robert Wilson, and Intercultural Theatre ...... 183

Conclusion ...... 243

Works Cited ...... 270

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List of Figures

Figure 1. The hourglass model ...... 41

Figure 2. The “toy” model ...... 43

Figure 3. Tian’s explanation on his conception of walking, which emphasizes the changed

rhythm of moving feet ...... 75

Figure 4. Different styles of body in Tian’s training method ...... 76

Figure 5. Tian’s plan for acting training ...... 81

Figure 6. Tian with a “water lotus lamp” ...... 94

Figure 7. The poster of White Water (1994) ...... 95

Figure 8. The scene in which Old Qi asks Mi Mi to touch him ...... 150

Figure 9. The list of songs ...... 200

Figure 10. Min-Yao and Liu Yi’s pas de deux ...... 250

Figure 11. Imitation of a hand raised to answer a question ...... 250

Figure 12. A gesture of protest ...... 251

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Acknowledgments

I wrote this dissertation with the support of many people and institutions. My deepest gratitude goes to my advisor, Charlotte Eubanks, for her inspiring comments on my work. Her passion for scholarly endeavor and her humble approach of listening to the text first and attending to theory later, fundamentally changed my own approach to literature and theatre. My gratitude also goes to Shuang Shen, who was virtually a co-advisor to me. Her practice of proposing conceptual questions was instrumental in my development as a more critical thinker. I would like to express appreciation to my committee members, On-Cho Ng, Jonathan Abel, and

Sarah Townsend: they demonstrated the greatest patience by reading the draft of this dissertation and providing me with many insightful suggestions. Together, they pushed me to reflect critically on the significance of Taiwanese theatre and they helped me to elaborate my argument.

Without financial support from various institutions, my Ph.D. study would not have been possible. I certainly could not have finished my dissertation without some very kind assistance:

Many thanks to the United States Institute of International Education for the two-year Fulbright

Graduate Study Fellowship I was awarded for 2011 to 2013; to the Taiwan Ministry of

Education for the two-year Taiwanese Fellowship for Studying Abroad for 2011 to 2013; to the

Departments of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at Penn State for my tuition, stipends, teaching assistantship, and dissertation support for 2011 to 2016; to the Institute for Arts and

Humanities and the Research Graduate Student Organization at Penn State for grants for archival research and dissertation writing in 2015. Though not directly related to my dissertation, I would like to express my appreciation to the Japan Foundation in Osaka for the two-month Japanese

Language Program for Specialists in Cultural and Academic Fields in 2014 and to the

International Institute for Cultural Studies for the one-week academic Cultural Studies camp in ix

2016. These two events provided me with wonderful opportunities for interdisciplinary conversations with people outside my field.

My thanks also go to the theatre ensembles and individuals who provided me with research information and materials, including photographs and video recordings: the Critical

Point Theatre Phenomenon, the Ping Fong Acting Troupe, the Performance Workshop, the

Cyclops Troupe, Chung Te-Fan, Cheng Chih-Chung, Wang An-Qi, Lin He-Yi, and Joscha

Chung.

I would like to thank my colleagues and friends at Penn State, Grace Wu, Ben Pin-Yun

Wang, Wu Hsin Fang, Liza Yuen, Tang Kwok-Leong, Bo An, and Liz Li for the emotional and intellectual support they gave to me. They have accompanied me through all the challenges of this journey. Numerous friends have been supportive in many ways. My M.A. advisor Chi

Wei-Jan at National Taiwan University demonstrated tremendous guidance throughout my life as a doctoral student. Hsieh Hsiao-Mei, Huang Tzu-Chieh, Chiu Yi-Hsuan, Chen Yu-Ling, Huang

Yen-Lin, Cheng Fan-Ting, Wang Li-Wen, Wu Sih-Fong, and Jessica Kao all helped me so much by supporting my intellectual labor and my well-being likewise. I am sure, though, that I have missed some names at this moment of exhaustion and transition. However, my thanks go to everyone who extended themselves to me as I brought this work to completion.

My greatest gratitude goes to my family in Taiwan. Without their support and trust, it is unlikely that I would have completed my Ph.D. in the United States. Whatever I do, my family is always at the center of my life and always my destination.

Finally, my deepest appreciation goes to my girlfriend, Lin Fang-Ru. She helped me in every possible way to overcome the many challenges of life as a Ph.D. student. Her love and support gave me the energy and courage to complete this dissertation. 1

Introduction

On stage. The setting is a hospital room in Taiwan. A reunion is underway. It is the late

1990s.

Jiang Binliu, an old man, is in a wheelchair. Obviously weak, he slowly raises his hand to greet Yun Zhifan. She is now an old woman, but in her youth in Shanghai she was Jiang’s girlfriend. Yun walks to Jiang and holds his hand tightly. Separated by the Chinese civil war

(1946–1949), each had fled to Taiwan. Years passed, but they never found each other again.

Only at this last moment, Yun is here to meet Jiang, whose life is ebbing away. “My husband is a good man. He really is,” she says. She lets go of Jiang’s hand. “I really must be leaving.” After

Yun leaves, Jiang’s wife, who is Taiwanese, enters the room. At first, Jiang turns away, rejecting her. But after a few moments he holds his hand up to beckon her. She takes his hand and embraces him. This silent moment of gestural communication constitutes the denouement of the performance of Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land (暗戀桃花源, Anlian Taohuayuan, 1986).1

Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land is an iconic play and a major production of modern

Sinophone theatre. Written by Stan Lai (賴聲川, Lai Sheng-Chuan, 1954– ), the play tells the story of two theatre troupes that have coincidentally scheduled their rehearsals at the same theatre at the same time, and thus features two groups of people who argue, as each tries to take possession of the stage. One ensemble rehearses the play Secret Love, a melodramatic love story of two lovers’ last moments together in Shanghai. The other troupe enacts a comic version called

1 My description of the performance is based on the film version. See Lai, Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land. For an English version of the play, see Stan Lai (2010), 967–1025. 2

Peach Blossom Land, which is an adaptation of the original classical Chinese text by Tao

Yuan-Ming (365–427).

The rehearsals of the two plays combined with the off-stage quarrels of the performers about the right to use the stage contribute to the distinctly tragicomic atmosphere of Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land. At first glance, one might consider the hand-holding scene between Yun

Zhifan and Jiang Binliu as enacting their reconciliation with a past that so tragically divided them. But what does the subsequent silent interaction between Jiang Binliu and his wife mean?

For attentive audience members who possess even a basic knowledge of the convoluted history between Taiwan and China, this second moment is not just a touching reaffirmation of love between husband and wife. This moment, in fact, presents the symbolic reconciliation between the memory of war in China, the sense of dislocation of a Chinese diaspora (mainlander population) in Taiwan, and the emotional conflict between the Taiwanese (islanders) and the

Chinese (mainlanders) people. The scene can also be understood as suggesting the loss of

Chinese nationality, particularly if we consider the reference to Peach Blossom Land to be a dystopian narrative in which the main character enters a utopian land only to leave it and find himself unable to enter it again. An accumulation of everyday feelings and sublimated memories, these sentiments are not easily translated into words. The body, then, condenses these sentiments into gestural interactions, leaving the sensitive spectator to decipher the embedded cultural codes.

A warm embrace. A hand reluctantly lifted to touch another hand.

On this basis, performative action can carry messages in excess of the semantic contents of a playscript’s linguistic and textual levels. In this dissertation, I will argue that in the modern

Taiwanese context, the body in performance is freighted with an excess of information that is not necessarily distinguishable at the level of text, but finds itself expressed in and through the 3 performing body. Naturally, the body communicates meaning. But the problem is that of identifying the meaning and how and why it is expressed. What is the relationship between the body and performance? Why does a practitioner address an issue through bodily stance and gesture? In what ways does the deployment of the body raise issues particular to a Taiwanese context? In responding to these questions, I pursue the goals of unpacking modern Taiwanese theatre performances and of analyzing distinct ways in which the body communicates and complicates the specificities of modern Taiwanese society—a society that is still haunted by its colonial past and its ambiguous national status.

Of course, performance is always culturally conditioned. Thus, to analyze how performance is situated in Taiwan, I will offer close readings of multiple moments of contextual tension in performance, noting that these moments of tension are usually signposted by

(unintended, disruptive, strange, or otherwise remarkable) audience responses. In other words, my intention is to contextualize the embedded cultural, historical, and political references that complicate the meaning of performance in Taiwan.

To be clear, I do not intend to offer a new theoretical narrative of audience reception, which has been widely analyzed via a cognitive approach in theatre studies.2 This dissertation is not about the audience response per se.3 Instead, I take audience reception, including my own responses as an audience member, as a basis for re-historicizing Taiwanese experience, a process through which I unpack issues pertaining to the intersections of history, memory, and creativity, moving from the invisible to the perceptible in performance.

As we will see from the case studies that follow, through performance, local practitioners experiment with addressing dilemmas pertaining to subject formation and identity

2 For an account of how theatre scholars apply cognitive science in research, see McConachie 1–19. 3 For an account of audience response, see Bennett 86–165. 4 reconfiguration as embedded in particular Taiwanese contexts. However, just as there is no universal consensus on what performance is, there is no single, predetermined definition of

“Taiwan.” Nor is it my intention to propose a specific form of Taiwanese subjectivity and identity. In fact, the close readings of performance in this dissertation will demonstrate that local practitioners do not attempt to create a teleological narrative for articulating a shared, singular sense of “Taiwaneseness.” On the contrary, they complicate and problematize Taiwan as a place, a home, and a nation. Taiwan is operated upon as a problem, the solution to which is constantly postponed such that it never arrives. These much-needed interpellations of what Taiwan is and the difficulties of presenting a clear narrative of this island, is—as discussed in my analysis—exactly the symptom of a Taiwan burdened by its colonial past and by the realities of its postcolonial present.

Looking Back at History

Taiwan is an island with an unsettled and multifaceted identity. It has been ruled by a number of foreign forces—premodern China, Portugal, the Netherlands, Spain, and Japan—and its cultural activities reflect those transitions. The Portuguese gave the name Ilha Formosa

(Beautiful Island) to Taiwan when they first arrived on the island in 1517.4 From 1624 to 1662, the Dutch East India Company established its colony in Southern Taiwan to anchor commercial trade with China and Japan. At the same time, the Spanish also competed with the Dutch for land rights in Northern Taiwan but were expelled in 1642. With the advent of the Qing dynasty

(1644–1912), a large number of Han Chinese immigrants, previously the subjects of the Ming

Dynasty (1368–1644) fled to Taiwan under the leadership of Zheng Cheng-Gong (1624–1662).

Zheng defeated the Dutch and took Taiwan as the military headquarters for anti-Qing agitation.

4 Yet, this naming could itself be a myth. See Kaim Ang. 5

The Zheng regime ended in 1683. The Qing emperor held Taiwan until 1895. In the same year,

Japan defeated the Qing government in the first Sino–Japanese war, and Taiwan became Japan’s first colony, remaining as such until 1945 with the end of the Second World War. In 1949, the

Chinese Nationalist Party (the Kuomintang, or the KMT), led by Chiang Kai-Shek, was defeated in the civil war with the communist party and retreated from China to Taiwan.

The history of Taiwan consists of multiple transitions and a complex confusion of identities. The development of the modern theatre in Taiwan, in large part drawn from Japan and

China during the early twentieth century, gives voice to a subtle story of Taiwanese identity struggles across the periods of Japanese governance and the KMT’s rule.

In the Japanese colonial period (1895–1945), there were two almost opposite directions in regard to theatrical practice in Taiwan.5 One was more aesthetically oriented, treating theatre as an artistic form without any potential for direct political intervention. The most notable example, as explored in Yang Du’s study of the theatre movement, was Zhang Wei-Xian (張維

賢, 1905–1977) and his “Starlight Theatre.”6 Of course, avoiding direct political engagement is not the same thing as being apolitical. The emphasis of Zhang’s practice was that of enlightening the audience, who were mostly the oppressed in the colonial context, culturally and through indirect means. Also, because of strict censorship, a pure aesthetic experiment was next to impossible. In such a setting, everything one writes can be associated with politics by the censors.7 Understandably, in this social context, the opposite angle was to use theatre as a direct tool for initiating political protests and popular education. Zhang’s later theatre, associated with his Minfeng Theatre Seminar and with the general practices of Cultural Theatre, a naming of theatre designed for political intervention, were clear instances of this approach. To a certain

5 Yang 97. 6 Ibid., 66–74. 7 Ibid., 139–40. 6 extent, the two faces, direct and political versus indirect and cultural, are two sides of the same coin. Both were responses to the colonial condition of Taiwanese society and both sought to engage the audience with social reality and national consciousness.

Neither path really succeeded in founding a mature theatre in Taiwan, due in part to the ravages of war and the cultural disjunctions of, first, colonization and, then, the end of the war.

The colonial experience and the arrival of the KMT later silenced reflections on colonial trauma—including those of local practitioners. For the KMT government, local Taiwanese people were Japanese subjects, a “becoming Japanese” that has been described in detail by Leo

China. Thus, transforming Taiwanese people from Japanese to Chinese was indispensable.

However, linguistically, a large number of writers found it difficult to learn Mandarin. Politically, the shift of identity politics between Japan and China constituted a task that was quite simply too hard to complete.

In addition to the ruptures of war and colonization initiated by Japan, Taiwan’s cultural identity was also rocked by a third force, impinging from outside: namely, the massive influx of nationalist refugees from the Chinese continent. The KMT came to rule Taiwan in 1949. Taking an anti-communist position and adopting a policy of strict censorship, the KMT deployed theatre as an indispensable form of political propaganda. For instance, officials offered an enormous sum of money as the prize for a literature competition for anti-communist works. The first prize in the literary competition held by the Chinese Writers and Artists Association (an organization sponsored by the KMT) offered five thousand new Taiwanese dollars for a full-length play.8 To put this amount in perspective: At that time, the average monthly income for a government servant, which was one of the most highly paid occupations in Taiwan, was one hundred and

8 Chang Tao Fan 162. 7 ninety new Taiwanese dollars and thirty-six cents.9 Little wonder, then, that there was a boom in the number of anti-communist plays written and staged. With this carrot-and-stick approach, from the latter half of the 1940s, modern theatre in Taiwan had precious little autonomy, whether in regard to aesthetics or to politics. Instead, theatre was primarily a tool of the state.

In the 1980s, the KMT’s policies became less politically oppressive. And, in response, there was a backlash against the government’s constraints on styles and ideologies, and theatre entered a period of rapid change. Concerning aesthetics, the styles of performance in the theatre began to expand to non-realistic, stylistic, or even avant-garde approaches. Contextually, more and more practitioners abandoned the clichés of anti-communist propaganda or general celebrations of humanity and started instead to engage directly with social reality. Also, beginning in the 1960s, an increasing number of overseas students who had lived in the United

States and/or Europe began to return to Taiwan, bringing more direct experiences of modern theatre from elsewhere with them. Various terms and practices were introduced to Taiwan at this time—postmodern theatre, poor theatre, environmental theatre, and so on. The earliest examples of the eruption of these new terminologies and practices can be traced to the publication of the magazine Theatre, as I will discuss shortly. Briefly, the magazine included a focus on the

Theatre of the Absurd, the Theatre of Cruelty, and the new form of happenings in its pages. Still, these practices were nascent and remained marginal in the theatre and unknown to general readers and audiences.

Despite this rich influx of socially engaged theatre from the West in the 1960s, however, most Taiwanese practitioners tended not to directly touch on political issues, due largely to the previous suffocating political atmosphere which started shortly after the lifting of martial law to

9 The Organization of the Republic of China Yearbook, 459. 8 which Taiwan had been subject in the period of 1949–1987.10 The general picture of modern

Taiwanese theatre after the 1990s emphasized experimentation with aesthetic forms. This transition was undergirded by the tension between aesthetics and politics. Unlike the radical aesthetic experiment and the direct political engagement categorized as the little theatre movement (I will elaborate on this term shortly) in the late 1980s, modern theatre in the 1990s gradually became as apolitical as possible in terms of themes and narratives. As Li Huan-Hsung

(黎煥雄) describes it, “the unique, avant-garde character of [little theatre] was lost after 1992,

1993” (258). The major reason for this loss was the “institutionalization” or the “redistribution” of the official subsidy for theatre (265–66). Simply put, what caused the sentiment of being institutionalized was the ambivalent relationship between aesthetics and politics as these intersected with economic conditions. As Wang Mo-Lin (王墨林, 1949– ) stated,

[T]he inclination of current Taiwanese theatre practitioners, who see theatre as a

political site of ideological representation, has gradually weakened. But as for

how to construct a valid aesthetic system, no one has a clue. (23)

In Cheng Mei-Mao’s (陳梅毛) account, the impasse modern theatre faced in the late 1990s was as follows: “what the little theatre discusses is not ‘the body’ but the cliché of ‘auteurism’ […] no one talks about performance” (1996b 22). Cheng’s exposition is paradoxical in the sense that the body and performance cannot be separated. Rather, Cheng is criticizing the emerging direction of the commodification of theatre, in which practitioners became a marketing brand.

What does it mean to “talk about” performance? Even as current research studies are primarily in search of a way to describe the political characteristics of modern Taiwanese theatre,

10 In this dissertation, I primarily use the phrase “the lifting of martial law.” My concern is to mark the general shift in mentality and social structure that resulted from the end of the state, rather than to specify the particular historical moment that was “the lifting of the Order of the Martial Law.” 9 for theatre practitioners, the superficial intimacy between politics and theatre is ebbing.

According to Hong Hong, writing in 2016, “that kind ‘blooming’ of the protesting spirit of little theatre is, in fact, like the memory dyed with the nostalgia for old beautiful days” (14). In fact, a large contingent of theatre practitioners in the present day refrains from talking about the connection between politics and theatre. In this steady but chaotic paradigm shift, particularly after the late 1990s, I would argue, “experiments” performed by many practitioners were, in fact, essentially form-oriented and largely detached from social reality. If this tendency is also a reaction to the political context, then its political characteristics have yet to be fully investigated.

This uneasy relationship between politics and aesthetics continues to be unsettling and still requires critical investigation. To talk about performance is, then, to recontextualize the aesthetic innovations of the time with an awareness of the oscillation of performance between political embeddedness and artistic independence, to break this dichotomy, and to excavate a contact zone that is essentially politically disruptive.

For most of the twentieth century, “apolitical” theatre was, and in some ways, still is, the norm in Taiwan. But that norm is beginning to change.

The Historiography of Modern Taiwanese Theatre

The development of modern theatre in Taiwan has not been explored very much in

English. Most published scholarly works position Taiwanese theatre as an appendix to the theatre of the Greater China region. Alexander (Alexa) Huang’s Chinese Shakespeares: Two Centuries of Cultural Exchange and Daphne Lei’s Alternative Chinese Opera in the Age of Globalization:

Performing Zero are two representative examples. Whereas the cultural connection between

China and Taiwan cannot be overestimated, as the preceding section shows, the evolution of 10

Taiwanese theatre has its own distinct patterns and problems. The paradigm of center and periphery, or China and Taiwan, cannot fully account for the historicity of the Taiwanese context.

Other questions, especially, in regard to the search for a new Taiwanese body in the post–martial law era persisting as a major direction of theatrical experiments are still under-theorized.

Concerning historical surveys of Taiwanese theatre, some Taiwanese scholars such as

Qiu Kun-Liang and Lin He-Yi, have done considerable work on illustrating the development of

Taiwanese theatre in general, including traditional and modern theatres. Others elaborate on modern theatre in particular: Ma Sen (馬森, 1932– ), Chi Wei-Jan (紀蔚然, 1954– ), and Chung

Ming-Der (鍾明德, 1953– ) all focus on a specific historical period. Ma’s Twice Impacts upon

Chinese Modern Drama from the West tries to posit the development of modern Chinese Theatre, which includes Taiwan, according to Ma’s historiography, in the larger framework of “the modernization of Chinese culture” influenced by the West (16–17). Chi’s “Revisiting

Anti-Communist Drama of the 1950s: Later Historians vs. Contemporary Exponents” revisits the

“Freudian slip” of anti-communist plays in the 1950s and demonstrates the ideological struggles embedded in overly political writings (194). Chung records the practice of modern Taiwanese theatre from the perspective of the little theatre movement, a crucial and contested move that I will analyze in a subsequent section, Voices in the History of Modern Taiwanese Theatre.

Intellectuals in US and Taiwanese academia, Shih Wan-Shun, Wang Li-Wen, Chang Ivy

I Chu, Liang Pei-Lin, Cheng Fan-Ting, Wu Chen-Tse, and Yeh Ken-Chuan, to name those whose work is most relevant to my project, have all, in their theses and dissertations, attended to questions of thematics and theatrics in modern Taiwanese practice. Shih’s “Staging ‘Taiwan’:

Theatre, Modernization and Subjective Formation of Taiwan during the Japanese Colonial

Period (1895–1945)” continues Qiu’s research and presents a detailed historical survey of the 11

“origins of modern theatre” in Taiwan in the Japanese colonial period (5). Wang expands Chi’s revisiting of anti-communist plays and “examines the complicated interaction between politics and nostalgia in the early Cold War era” (2). Exploring the theatre practice of 1986–1997,

Chang’s “Remapping Memories and Public Space: The Theater of Action in Taiwan’s

Opposition Movement and Social Movements (1986–1997)” traces the transformation of the political characteristics of modern theatre from “‘sadness and resentment’ towards the carnivals of ‘hope and happiness’” in regard to the construction of a national identity (366). In

“Performing Nation, Imagining Taiwanese in Twenty-First Century Theatre in Taiwan,” Lin

Wen-Ling investigates modern Taiwanese theatre performance from 2000 to 2008 from a perspective of “bentuhua” or Taiwanization, of reconfiguring Taiwanese identity based on the notion of “ocean culture” (267). Cheng Fan-Ting’s “A Strafed, Tactical, Pugnacious Island:

Political Performances in Taiwan from 2000 to 2013” positions live performance, both in theatre and on the streets, as a demonstration of “national melancholia” and as a means of working

“against social norms” (27). In “Weaving a Tale of Many Voices—The Making of

Multiculturalism in the Contemporary Theatre of Taiwan,” Liang Pei-Lin, whose starting point is close to that of my dissertation, draws inspiration from the theory of multiculturalism and relies on a “comparative approach to examining the de-colonizing and localizing process undergone by

Taiwanese theatre across different ethnicities and cultures” (13). Articulating the transitional point of modern Taiwanese theatre in the 1970s and 1980s, Wu Chen-Tse in “On the Utopian

Ideal and Its Practices in Taiwan’s Experimental Theater” suggests that the materiality of the body functions as a tool for pursuing “self-enlightenment” by adopting traditional sources such as Tai Chi and yoga in performance (184). Yeh Ken-Chuan furthers Wu’s direction and analyzes the performative body from the 1960s to the 1990s as a “vehicle” for “cultivat[ing] the self,” a 12 theoretical proposition whereby Wu combines Jerzy Grotowski’s theatre theory and Michel

Foucault’s ideas of subjectivity and biopolitics (215–16).

Most scholars pay some degree of attention to the tension between the aesthetic experiments and political characteristics of modern Taiwanese theatre. However, so far, few works have examined the tension between the historical continuum of political oppression and the immediacy of theatrical performance. The continued sedimentation of politics and aesthetics embedded in the bodily performance constitutes a prevailing research emphasis in performance studies but has not been fully explored in modern Taiwanese theatre. My case studies follow a chronological order after the lifting of martial law, although this periodization is built on the awareness that theatre is always entrenched in historical traces and power relations. Therefore, I endeavor to bridge the scholarly gap between historiography and the theorization of theatre by proposing a close reading from a biopolitical perspective of the body in text and on stage at distinct historical junctures.

In contrast to most scholars’ understanding of performance as a way to recuperate national identity, my analysis envisions the essential feature of modern Taiwanese theatre as an identity struggle taking place in a context of multilayered negation. The more practitioners attempt to articulate Taiwanese identities in performance, the more the performing body postpones any concrete representation of Taiwan. Seen in this light, even though I agree with most current research according to which performance embodies an identity confusion on the part of the Taiwanese people, I think the question of how to rehistoricize the process of referenciation between the bodily performance and the building of Taiwanese identity in the realm of theatre practice still requires reconsideration. Through revisiting historical discourse in the following sections, I show that the conceptions of modern theatre itself have long reflected an 13 identity dilemma of this nature. In regard to the case studies presented herein, even though I take live performance as a major avenue of critical engagement, my research demonstrates that discourse, text, and performance are all means whereby practitioners can initiate an intervention in reconfiguring Taiwan. Like other scholars and practitioners, I also consider the body as an unparalleled angle for experiments. I argue that the body carries ideology-ridden messages, making corporeal existence the principal site deployed by theatre participants to destabilize the idea of Taiwan since the Japanese colonial period. Performance is, thus, a manifold practice that reveals the corporeality of practitioners and their cognizance of humanities in general and

Taiwanese in particular.

By juxtaposing a micro-reading of the body with a macro-association of social structure, I demonstrate that the identity struggle does not relate only to mentality and to some guarantee of resistance or liberation, but that it also connects to the physical state on stage and embodies the impasse of Taiwan’s reality as an island whose status is uncertain. As such, my research speaks to the fields of postcolonial studies and performance studies, in which Taiwan is mostly left unconsidered, and the existence of a nation state, no matter how precarious it is, is mostly taken for granted.

Experiments in the “Modern” Taiwanese Theatre

The terms “modern” and “modernism” are complex in the Taiwanese context, even though modernity has received considerable attention from literary scholars. Concerning literary modernity, the standard narrative, as David Der-Wei Wang describes it in Writing Taiwan: A

New Literary History, aligns with the historical shifts of Taiwanese political paradigms.

According to Wang, “Taiwan literature was first forced into its ‘modern’ existence at the 14 beginning of the twentieth century when Japan initiated its colonial regime” (vii). This experience of modernization, which continued for fifty years, was characterized by colonial struggles and mediated by Japanese conceptions and, remotely, the Chinese reception of modernity as opposed to the Japanese colonial project. The return of Taiwan to the KMT in 1945, in Wang’s view, was “the greatest watershed in Taiwan’s literary and cultural experience of modernity” (viii). Despite the sense of dislocation and the prevalence of anti-communist ideology, the modernist movement, especially in poetry, dominated the 1950s and 1960s. With accelerating social transformation in the 1970s and 1980s, Taiwan entered the stage of an indigenous movement and saw the diversification of aesthetic creations and the radicalization of political actions:

The search for, or disavowal of, the “authenticity” of the Chinese language proved

to be a catalyst igniting further contestation. Nationalist myth could be deciphered

as mere magical realism; Taiwan’s colonial experience could induce self-mocking

laughter. Gender, ethnic identity, sexuality, nationalism, environmentalism,

diaspora, and expatriatism, among all too many isms, briefly engaged writers and

readers, so compellingly that, in many cases, when the spasm of writing and

reading, came to an end, decisive political action followed. (Wang ix)

Wang’s description captures precisely the transitional period before and after the lifting of martial law and connects to the latest face of Taiwanese modernity in which “the media market” and “cultural and commercial exchange” have become the strongest forces shaping Taiwanese literary and theatrical productions. 15

Literary scholars, to a certain extent, build on this general narrative, supplementing, revising, or modifying nuances, especially in terms of the period after the 1980s.11 In opposition to the account whereby there is a decentralized flowering of the styles of Taiwanese literature after the 1980s as a further stage of modernity, or “postmodernism,” Cheng Fang-Ming argues that the evolution of Taiwanese literature should be recontextualized via the lens of colonial consequences and traumas. For Cheng, not only did Japanese governance constitute colonization, but the KMT regime since 1945 constituted “internal colonization.” In Cheng’s view, therefore, the formation of a variety of styles in Taiwanese literature has consequently been a response to a colonial past (26–28). Echoing Cheng, Sung Sheng Yvonne Chang suggests that “Taiwan’s experience of colonialism and postcoloniality is uniquely layered” (5). Yet, for Chang, analyzing

Taiwanese literature from the perspective of postcolonialism is not enough, as an account of this nature fails to capture local particularities. Drawing theoretical inspiration largely from Pierre

Bourdieu’s “habitus” and Raymond Williams’s “hegemony,” Chang proposes the addition of a third dimension to those of aesthetics and politics. In her view, “the market” is the major force at play in the changes undergone by Taiwanese literature after 1949. For this reason, she carefully examines the interplay between institutional power, market forces, and literary production (5–8).

Shih Shu-Mei and Liao Ping-Hui take a step further in Comparatizing Taiwan by conceptualizing Taiwan as “an open term,” “as a site and a product of relations with other entities and areas in terms of culture, geography, history, politics, and economy” (1). Here, Shih and Liao reject a predetermined definition of Taiwan to situate the country through the method of “comparatizing” in a dynamic conversation with global contexts, thereby allowing Taiwan to speak for itself from specific local contexts.

11 For conceptual frameworks used to analyze Taiwanese literary modernity, see Sung Sheng Yvonne Chang, 18– 29. 16

My own understanding of Taiwan’s literary modernity aligns with these critical perspectives. However, I would like to point out that theatrical texts, as a genre of literature, are often neglected by literary scholars. Adding the development of modern theatre to studies of

Taiwanese modernity, however, is a critical avenue, as the theatre does not follow the overall topography of literary development. For instance, although modernism dominated the general landscape of literary creations in the 1960s, the primary backdrop of modern theatre was social realism dominated by anti-communist plays. More importantly, theatre is a form of physical labor, and modernity is not just about linguistic representation, but also corporeal embodiment in everyday life. Reflecting on the issue of modernity through the lens of theatre consequently connotes a crucial method for examining how an individual imagines what is modern and how he/she becomes so.

Bridging the gap between the historiography of modern literature and theatre in Taiwan exceeds the scope of this research. Instead, with these concepts as a backdrop, I explore not the complexity of modernity in theatre per se but to analyze thoroughly how an individual text and performance are situated by a practitioner to embody and respond to a set of problems modern

Taiwan faces due to its specific sociopolitical and cultural condition. In other words, I follow

Shih and Liao’s advice by seeing Taiwan as an open question, and I consider theatre as a

“polysystem,” to borrow a term from translation studies suggested by Itamar Even-Zohar. I do not argue for a central, dominant force that shapes the evolution of modern Taiwanese theatre.

Instead, framing my research around the angles of theatre theory, memory, and trauma studies, and biopolitics, I present a dynamic reading of destabilizing existing concepts in Taiwan and in the modern theatre as a representative of these. Such an approach relies on the constructedness of the body as analyzed in phenomenology, gender, and sexuality studies, and performance studies. 17

Before exploring the nuances of modern Taiwanese theatre and research methodology, it is useful to step back and ask why should we bracket the concept of modernity in modern

Taiwanese theatre?

In the context of Western theatre, modern theatre has been conceptualized on the basis of the emergence of realism, and more narrowly, naturalism. Later on, the genealogy of modernism expanded rapidly to include symbolism, surrealism, expressionism, the Theatre of the Absurd, and Epic Theatre, to name just a few. A succinct, if somewhat reductive, summary of Western theatrical modernism might focus on counteracting the four central elements of dramatic theatre embodied mainly by realism and naturalism: an emphasis on story/plot/text, a belief in representing the world, an effort to shape the subjectivity of characters, and an organic arrangement of stage factors.12

In Taiwan, especially before the 1960s, however, the very first practice of modern theatre was closely associated with realism, precisely because most traditional Taiwanese and East

Asian theatrical forms read as non-realistic. Therefore, relatively realistic theatre, considered an iconic style of modern Western theatre, was enthusiastically welcomed by local practitioners.13

Nonetheless, modern theatre practice was soon predominantly deployed as a tool of political propaganda from the 1940s to the 1970s. Thus, realism was understood as relying on implicitly political connotations. The practice of modern Taiwanese theatre, strictly speaking, has two directions. The first is a dominant realism that was more or less political and institutional. The

12 For a further definition of modern Western theatre, see Lehmann 18–46. 13 Historically speaking, at the turn of the twentieth century, there were at least two major resources through which Taiwanese people could learn the practice of modern theatre. One was from China, the “Civil Play”; and the other was from Japanese, the “New Theatre.” Both were still at the stage of a fusion between traditional theatre and modern Western forms. For instance, the performance of the Civil Play concludes with the percussion music of Xiqu. New Theatre is accompanied by the music of Kabuki theatre. Thus, although it is true that these forms were distinct from the traditional performative genres in Taiwan, we can hardly claim a stable definition of modern theatre in Taiwan during that period. The gap, nonetheless, is that in the 1980s, the modern theatre was generally associated with realism, which had been considered a tradition that Taiwanese practitioners sought to overthrow. For an account of modern theatre in the Japanese colonial period, see Shih Wan-Shun. 18 second is the counter-practice of the “experiment,” which seeks to overthrow the dominance of realistic performance.

In other words, realism has been formulated in a complicated way in Taiwan. By the same token, though, the notion of theatrical experiment was also convoluted. Things that may have seemed realistic in Western theatrical practice appeared experimental to Taiwanese practitioners, and vice versa. Thus, experiment as a counter-concept of realism is an elusive term that rejects a specific definition. To some degree, it can only be understood as something transgressive, something that tries to break down old frameworks or conventions. This is the common structure for analyzing the historical development of the modern theatre in Taiwan.

Originally, the term experiment was directly used by local practitioners as part of the title of various theatre troupes, such as the Experimental Little Theatre (1935), the Chinese

Experimental Theatre (1943), and the Ken-Hsin Experimental Theatre (1976). In 1979, playwright and executive director of the Administrative Committee of Appreciating and Staging

Chinese Huaju [Modern Drama], Yao Yi-Wei (姚一葦, 1922–1997) organized an annual

Experimental Theatre Festival, which lasted for five years, from 1980 to 1984. In the first festival, the Lan Ling Theatre Workshop staged Ho-Chu’s New Match (荷珠新配, 1980), a performance that was a modern combination of the renewal version of the play Ho-Chu’s Match

(荷珠配) in Xiqu, or traditional Chinese theatre, and the performance conventions of Xiqu. The play met with an unprecedented level of success, which earned it, in the estimation of scholars such as Chung Ming-Der, recognition as the work that initiated the first generation of the little theatre movement in Taiwan. Thus, this performance is seen as marking a turning point whereby the dominant style of realism gave way to non-realistic performance in modern Taiwanese 19 theatre.14 “Experimental Theatre” then became a naming term that differed from realistic

Huaju.15 Later on, the title of the Experimental Theatre Festival was adopted by the National

Theatre for its festival, which began in 1988, and, some argue that it replaced the previous

Experimental Theatre Festival. The style of avant-garde and postmodern features dominated the second Experimental Theatre Festival, setting the tone for modern Taiwanese Theatre in the late

1980s and the early 1990s.

These few specifics about the experimental in Taiwan already suggest its complexity.

Every strand of narrative refers to ambiguous connotations, which can be the occasion of disagreement even among Taiwanese scholars. For some, such as Ma Sen, the genealogy of experimental theatre goes along with the dissemination of modern Western theatre from China and Japan to Taiwan in the early twentieth century.16 For others, such as Chung Ming-Der, experimental theatre is an umbrella term that designates anything anti-realistic in the postmodern

Taiwanese context. For Wang Mo-Lin, experimental theatre connects to national institutions.17

In short, the ambiguous moniker “experiment” becomes the normative perspective of describing the recent phases of the development of Taiwanese theatre. The thorny problem remains, however: When and how did the theatrical practice of the experiment start?

Whereas the scholars mentioned above focus on the debated understandings of

“experiment,” inquiries into “non-experimental productions,” or realistic performance, are largely missing in the histories of the modern Taiwanese theatre. Some practitioners, including

Hugh K.S. Lee (李國修, Lee Kuo-Shiou, 1955–2013) and Stan Lai, are mentioned by scholars in

14 In Taiwan, in the 1960s, Lee Man Kuei first borrowed the term for the official theatre movement for the purpose of encouraging amateur theatre. However, in Lee’s conceptualization, the purpose of modern theatre was to promote nationalism and Christianity. Lee’s version of the Little Theatre Movement, simply put, had little to do with the original Western one. 15 Chung Ming Der 120. 16 Ma Sen 35–42. 17 Wang Mo Lin 155–67. 20 theatre history for their early practice staging experimental works. Yet, their later and major practices in realistic texts and performances are scarcely analyzed.

In this dissertation, I do not intend to join the complex debate over the genealogical development of the aesthetic experiments of modern Taiwanese theatre (although I will do so in future work), except to note that I see theatrical modernity and modernism in general as a biopolitical refraction of the oscillation between the shaping of the subject by power and the imagined, but unfulfilled, reconfiguration of the self. Modernity is a performative status constituting an impasse in which the subject is entrapped by the historical past and sociopolitical realities and reveals at present, on stage, a dynamic presentation of the question of who I am without answer. However, I do plan to rethink the dichotomy between realism and experiment and the related question of sociopolitical references embedded in theatrical practices. The purpose of this dissertation is, therefore, to offer a critical investigation into the convoluted historical formation of modern Taiwanese theatre and to reveal the critical interplay between aesthetics and politics on stage in that the body always presents imagined transgressions of reality and the ideological constraints on these. My approach focuses particularly on the body in performance, for it reveals how practitioners transform usually ineffable suffering arising from the political and ideological oppression of the Taiwanese people into a sensually available performance.

The following introductory sections lay the groundwork for later chapters. I start with the historical discourse of modern Taiwanese theatre. In the introduction, I present a few important figures as examples and offer an account of the tensions embedded in theatre by describing three major strata: local people’s imaginings of the nation, practitioners’ understandings of Western modernity, and the discourse and deployment of the body. Following this introduction, the 21 individual chapters shift the focus to the performances proper. Modern theatre in Taiwan is highly intercultural and political, and how the nuances are changed and embedded in performance is the essential question this dissertation addresses. The body in performance as an analytical angle, I argue, reveals not only the constructedness of the nation and the shaping of modern theatre but, more importantly, demonstrates practitioners’ and spectators’ persistent efforts to transform and reconfigure the self in the face of a chaotic and changing modern

Taiwan.

Voices in the History of Modern Taiwanese Theatre

Lu Shu-Shang

Lu Shu-Shang (呂訴上, 1915–1970), practitioner and scholar of Taiwanese film and theatre, published the first complete history of Taiwanese performance in 1961. His History of

Taiwanese Film and Drama summarizes theatre activities during the Japanese colonial period.18

In this study, Lu records the Western origins of modern theatre and its dissemination in Taiwan and proposes to utilize modern theatre practices for political propaganda—building a theatre of

“the three principles of the people” [三民主義, sanmin zhuyi], a slogan clearly referencing the political philosophy of Sun Yat-Sen, the founder of the Chinese Nationalist Party (546). As an islander, Lu worked as a police officer in both the Japanese and the KMT period. Given this official position, Lu’s proposal of the theatre as political propaganda might seem natural. Indeed, from Lu’s perspective, theatre, culture, and politics are by nature inseparable:

Theatre is culture. In order to develop a proper spirit, people should have this

nutrition of the soul. No matter how delicious it [food] is; things lacking

18 For a description of Lu’s theatre career, see Qiu Kun Liang 110–41. 22

“vitamins” or “calories” are not “nutrition.” […] Without the “vitamins” and

“calories” of culture, how we can expect the good education of the spirit of people?

(546–47)

For Lu, therefore, the functionality of theatre as a way to enlighten the audience is beyond any doubt.

Lu’s early discourse already anticipates the later development of modern Taiwanese theatre. First, in the evolution of modern Taiwanese theatre, deploying theatrical practice in order to articulate political messages is common among practitioners at least until the 1990s. Second, modern theatre in Taiwan is generally perceived as having an obligation to engage with the general public. This focus is both supported and undermined by political subsidies from the government and usually results in debates pertaining to the function of modern theatre—whether the theatre should function as art for art’s sake or explicitly for the sake of political engagement.

Lastly, we can already discern a nascent connection between theatre and the body in Lu’s discourse, insofar as Lu imagines modern theatre as an exterior object that has a disciplining, pedagogical influence on the body. Starting from this point, the juxtaposition of modern theatre and the body becomes a regular trope in the discourses of theatre practitioners in Taiwan.

Lee Man-Kuei

In the 1950s and 1960s, entering the early period of the KMT government, the modern

Taiwanese theatre’s engagement with political propaganda became pronounced and extreme, and the audience decreased drastically, a phenomenon resulting from the promotion of lackluster anti-communist plays.19 Hence, increasing the number of theatergoers became a primary task between the 1950s and 1970s. Lee Man-Kuei (李曼瑰, 1907–1975), a mainlander, scholar,

19 Lin Ho Yi 215–17. 23 playwright, and legislator with a master’s degree in theatre from the United States, proposed a variety of theatrical movements such as a New World Theatre Movement and the Little Theatre

Movement and founded the Three-One Theatrical Arts Company with the aim of revitalizing modern Taiwanese theatre.20 Lee was one of the first to promulgate modern theatre in Taiwan.

One idea, common to the respective discourses of both Lu and Lee, is that modern theatre is, and should be, used to enhance national consciousness. But Lee took this idea further. Unlike

Lu, who was relatively unimportant in political circles, Lee was a member of the Legislative

Yuan (parliament) and had the power to request state resources, which enabled her to organize national theatre movements and competitions. At the same time, she emphasized the educational function of modern theatre much more than Lu did. “Not all plays,” she maintained, “can lead people toward goodness and have an educational function”:

There are bad plays in theatre just like there are poisons in medicine. Good

medicine cures people; poison kills [...]. Thus, needless to say, we have to

promote artistic and educational performances […].21

For Lee, the proper purpose of modern theatre is not only that of improving national consciousness but also of enhancing moral discipline and ensuring the continued health of the state.

In her passionate discourse, Lee invoked the image of the body: theatre as medicine to be swallowed, the theatergoer as flesh to be healed. From these two contemporaries, we can already see a clear connection between theatre and politics, both of which are articulated through physical metaphors. What is intriguing in Lee’s expression is a shifted analogy of the relationship between modern theatre and the body from the natural to the artificial. In Lu’s

20 For a description of Lee’s theatre career, see Li Huang Liang 84–116. 21 Lee, “Theatre and Education.” 24 discourse, theatre is natural nutrition that is good for the health of our soul. The evidence of human control is not obvious, even though modern theatre is already associated with politics and education. By contrast, Lee’s discourse suggests the artificial characteristics of theatre: not food, but poison. Although her metaphor of poison is negative, this imagery reveals that she understands theatre as a practice of human intervention and a mode of composition for, or intervention into, real life. Hence, one of Lee’s reasons for promoting theatre activities for children is that she understands theatre as a sort of kinesthetic training that can shape the human body to fit into precast molds of specific moral disciplines and virtues.22 Other practitioners, such as the members of Theatre magazine, examined below, developed this aspect of Lee’s thought further. Yet, in contrast to Lee’s stance, they turn the body into an indicator of the loss of local cultural confidence.

Compared to Lu’s full embrace of modern theatre as a model of Western culture, Lee’s knowledge of modern theatre created an initial sense of theatre as an intercultural practice: a space where cultures could meet and mix, rather than a space where Western culture could simply be imported wholesale. Lee’s theatre company, the Three-One Theatrical Arts Company, was named on this basis. “Three-One,” according to Lee, refers to a combination of meanings of the “three unities” in Greek theatre, the Trinity of Christianity, and the Three Principles of the

People, fusing these three into one.23 Lee’s understanding of the varieties of theatre derives from her educational background in modern Western theatre and her knowledge of Chinese culture.

Although the juxtaposition of West and East is anything but smooth in Lee’s plays, most of which propose a love of nation and the belief system of Christianity, in the later practice of modern Taiwanese theatre, the happenings of intercultural exchange became more regular and

22 Lee, Collections 286–87. 23 Ibid., 277. 25 increasingly subtle. The body as an analogy for the development of modern theatre and theatrical practice as a field of intercultural imaginary: these two concerns, seemingly unrelated in Lee’s articulation of theatre, would gradually converge.

Theatre

Roughly at the same time, during the 1960s, the acculturation of modern theatre traditions and the formation of local identities were articulated more radically in the discourse of

Theatre, a coterie magazine that circulated from 1965 to 1968 with nine issues in total. Theatre was founded by a group of young intellectuals and writers, including the later-famous leftist novelist Chen Ying-Zhen (陳映真, 1937– ). The goal of Theatre members was to translate and introduce trendy Western theories and works of film and theatre. The major aesthetic model they imitated was Western modernism, including the Theatre of the Absurd and the Theatre of

Cruelty.

The discourse of Theatre raised more problems in dealing with issues pertinent to building a local identity, the desire to be cosmopolitan, and a questioning of self-reflexivity through the image of the body. Unlike Lu and Lee, who each held a positive view on the connection between theatre and political intervention, not to mention moral education, the members of Theatre rejected all existing political control by positing theatre as a field of resistance via a focus on the autonomy of aesthetic experiments. They believed that through aesthetic autonomy, the Taiwanese people would be able to recuperate a shared sense of belonging, disentangled from the prevailing confusion over what constituted Taiwanese identity.

As Zhuang Ling (莊靈, 1938– ), one of the editors of Theatre, stated, 26

It is not film, not broadcast, not an unnatural “combination of art” of literature,

architecture, painting and music; nor is it by any means a vehicle for morality, or

vehicle of education, or vehicle of … anything. It is nothing, and this is theatre.

(115)

Yet, the denial of the efficacy of political propaganda does not mean Theatre is apolitical. On the contrary, Theatre is still building its own particular version of a Taiwanese national identity.

In their first performance, members of Theatre staged two plays: The Prophet, an original play written by a member of Theatre, and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. The staging of these productions was significant, says Jian Zhi-Xin (簡志信, 1935– ), an actor who performed in that production of Waiting for Godot, for the following reasons:

[T]here has been no real theatre in China, and thus we have to start from scratch.

No matter what The Prophet and Waiting for Godot contribute, we have a

beginning. (132)

These performances were, however, insignificant and soon buried in the archives of history.

Concerning the issue of cultural development, there is a sense of belatedness in the eyes of Taiwanese intellectuals when comparing local culture to a Western model. Western artwork and theories of art serve as a paragon for local artists and writers: the starting point for local people is to imitate the West. Therefore, in order to build a local cultural identity, the incorporation of Western culture is primary and indispensable. Such an action of imitation and incorporation conveys a hidden ironic logic. Without absorbing Western culture, local cultural confidence cannot be built. Another actor from the Theatre cast of Waiting for Godot, Chen

Yao-Qi (陳耀圻, 1938– ) asserts that “the biggest task is to create a theatre that belongs to China, and at the same time, to subsume the essence of western theatre bravely and tolerantly” (130). 27

Despite its clear rhetorical and emotional importance, however, the specifics of how an autonomous theatre can be realized remain vague.

What kinds of autonomy did the members of Theatre seek, and is there a connection between a cultural identity and a national one? Liu Da-Ren (劉大任, 1938– ) writes in Theatre:

Members of Theatre all deeply feel that in the movements of modernization, in all

calm or disturbing attitudes that despise romanticism, in the modern efforts of

adjusting traditions and accepting the West in order to rebuild a pure China […],

we turn to the school of romanticism which is anti-romanticism […]. We are all

impotent […]. Hence, the two plays of Theatre do not desire to be

groundbreaking or to launch any movements […]. The only thing Theatre wants

to do is to perform. (266)

In the discourse of Theatre, cultural independence for the local is complicated by the unstable sense of the nation, the audience whom the editors of the magazine implicitly address in their publication. The content of a nation, as proposed by Benedict Anderson, “is an imagined community—both inherently limited and sovereign” (6). In Taiwan, after the 1950s, such an imagined community was incomplete because it had been distorted by the defeat of the KMT in

China, which took over Taiwan from the Japanese. People in Taiwan had to call themselves

“Chinese,” but at that time, China had already become a name that paradoxically highlighted the lack of sovereignty in Taiwan. Such a limitation of national consciousness lends weight to the observation that Taiwan and China cannot easily be identified with each other. What “China” is, in the context of Taiwan, became a confusing issue for intellectuals at that time, who were responding to an externally imposed determination of nomenclature (be it “Japanese colonial” or 28

“Chinese”), which only served to obscure and further obfuscate identitarian claims based on localness and built from the ground up.

Simply put, the idea and the identity of China was impure now in Taiwan. The paradox inherent in the discourse and practice of Theatre was that, on the one hand, intellectuals were against narrow nationalism (i.e., the KMT), and performance became a site for building an alternative national identity. On the other, their knowledge of performance was borrowed almost completely from the West, such that the reconfiguration of any local identity that sought to eschew Japanese colonial and/or continental Chinese claims was perversely routed through yet another external: the theatrical practices of drawing on paradigms from the West. This kind of hybrid sense of cultural practice, again, was in conflict with practitioners’ longing for local agency. Hence, a sense of the double, or even triple, negative appears: “not Chinese” (not in

China), “not not Chinese” (that is, not Japanese colonials), and also “not not not Chinese” (not

Western rather than Chinese). Thus, theatrical practitioners in Taiwan, and indeed the Taiwanese people more generally, cannot think of their nation without suffering from identity confusion and cannot imagine a national identity without the influence of Western culture, understood as the wedge, the cultural difference, that enables them to become differentiated from the overarching label of “Chinese.”

In addition to these already complex circumstances, national identity in Taiwan has at least one more important layer, that of the indigenous. That is, in contrast to those residents who conceive of themselves as “Chinese” in a limited sense, as a nostalgic home especially for mainlanders who were immigrants from China to Taiwan, we must also acknowledge Taiwan, as a natural home especially for local islanders who are relatively “native” residents of the island.24

24 The awareness of self-determination of “indigenous groups” in Taiwan, in fact, further complicates the issue. From the perspective of indigeneity, even islanders should be considered immigrants who migrated from China to 29

Thus, the exact content of national identity becomes more and more vague: there is simply no easy correlation between land, language, history, and identity. Under such a logic, a sense of impotence is present in the writings of the Theatre group. This historical context becomes a source of Taiwanese, of local consciousness, which, in the development of modern theatre, articulates a distinctive discourse and practice of searching for and building a Taiwanese body.

The body again appears in the discourse of Theatre. We can sense a desire to search for representations of multiple Taiwanese bodies from the above accounts. In the respective discourses of Lee and Lu, the body still has an objective existence that is waiting to be shaped by the theatre. By contrast, in Theatre, the body, with the emphasis on sexual disempowerment

(impotence in its literal, medical sense) now becomes connected to subjectivity. The sense of impotence expresses the confusion over national identity that is conveyed through the description of the body. Struggles of identity and the mix of cultures are to be felt on the level of the physical human body, not merely registered within the abstract realm of discourse.

Modern Taiwanese Theatre and Its Connotations

These three broad-brush strokes of earlier historical figures associated with the modern

Taiwanese theatre reveal different faces of the connection between theatre and society. In the

Japanese colonial period (Lu’s context), the concept and practice of modern theatre had just been recently disseminated to Taiwan. Practitioners had to learn this new form and to explore the possibility of engaging society in its vocabulary, which was under the domination of colonizers.

As we can see from Lu’s discourse, elevating the theatre with its political potential was a principal approach. From the very beginning, theatre was deeply implicated in political struggle.

Taiwan largely in the Ming and Qing dynasties. The problem of how to present the connection between indigenous people and Taiwan becomes an important issue that some theatre practitioners started to tackle via performance. See “Departing from the Origin of the Body” < http://pareviews.ncafroc.org.tw/?p=18780 >. 30

In the context in which Lee was working, principally during the KMT and anti-communist period, modern theatre was again mobilized as a way to disseminate political propaganda. However, Chinese communists were the enemy this time. The over-politicized teleology of theatre productions bored the audience. In these conditions, Lee, as an official legislator with significant power, sought to revive the theatre, proposing lots of theatre events, writing, and producing theatrical works. Lee went further than Lu, attempting to use the theatre as a way to discipline the audience. Not surprisingly, her efforts bore little fruit.

Whereas Lu and Lee each understood theatre entirely in reference to realism in the

Western context, the members of Theatre translated and conceptualized theatre from a Western modernist genealogy. Performance became their weapon in articulating their resistance to political domination. Nevertheless, Theatre remained marginal. Largely imitating the Western avant-garde, Theatre failed to connect Western aesthetics with local cultural conditions. As a result, audiences did not, on the whole, appreciate the group’s experiments.25 In this context, although practitioners of Theatre were aware of Western influences, they had yet to determine how to realize aesthetic autonomy in their own practice. They still assumed a certain kind of relation between aesthetic creation and national identity such that the purpose of achieving aesthetic autonomy was coupled with Greater China sentiments. This debated term suggests the linkages of cultural, economic, and political constructions shared by Chinese-speaking regions that form a hyper-national identification.

In these matters, the three narratives are not unrelated. One very noticeable aspect of their mutual entanglement is, of course, that the distinct concepts of theatre articulated by these three sets of commentators were all influenced by Taiwan’s political condition as a conceptual construct, “Taiwan” as a place or name of belonging. In these distinctive sociopolitical contexts,

25 Kung Min 22–23. 31 modern theatre exists in conjunction with the project of nation building, and how to promote theatre partly depended on how the practitioners perceived and imagined the nation: that is what funders, theatergoers, and art critics were demanding. Furthermore, there are strong connections in their varying rhetoric when it comes to articulating the ways in which theatre should influence society. Their chosen metaphors are mediated by the images of the mind and the body: colonial-era theatre as “nutrition for the soul,” a pedagogically defined “medicine that cures people,” and a KMT-influenced state of impotence. The mind that depicts practitioners’ conception of theatre obviously relates to the pursuit of political intervention and national consciousness as well as to national identity and to aesthetic autonomy. The embodiment of those sentiments are mediated by the images of the body and realized at the level of physical status.

In other words, for twentieth-century Taiwanese theatrical practitioners, the body constituted an experimental field that signified the possibility of change. The body is the site that needs nutrition and medicine, things that can help one to move beyond a state of impuissance engendered by the harsh political climate. From the invocations of the body, we see a picture of some of the ways in which reality and possibility, present and future, politics and aesthetics are interwoven.

In this picture, we find a triangular system: theatre, the body (and the embodied mind), and politics. Despite the competing meanings embedded in these three angles, this schema, in fact, persists in the evolution of modern theatre in Taiwan, especially when theatre encountered a watershed in the history of sociopolitical transformation: the lifting of martial law in 1987. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the tension among the triad of aesthetic practice, corporal existence, and political references reached its peak, and the search for “the Taiwanese body” occupied a 32 pivotal position in the realm of acculturating modern theatre in local contexts.26 However, this paradigm provokes more questions than it answers: What exactly is the relationship between theatre, politics, and the body? How and why do local theatre practitioners turn to the body as a method of exploring alternative visions in comparison with the oppressive conditions of

(post)colonial and (post)cold war Taiwanese society? What are the possibilities or limitations of the body as an experimental site that enables or disables theatre practice in a time-space specific framework? Based on these interrelated questions, I initiate the quest of this dissertation with the goal of re-historicizing and re-contextualizing the convoluted meanings of the body in modern

Taiwanese theatre. In my analysis, I evaluate the interplay between theatre and political realities at the particular historical juncture of the lifting of martial law and its immediate aftermath, and I investigate how bodily performance responds to the tensions between aesthetics and politics.

In the following two sections, through revisiting Chung Ming-Der’s and Wang

Mo-Ling’s writings, we can better understand the sociopolitical atmosphere and the responses in theatre after the lifting of martial law. At the same time, from the different ways Chung and

Wang conceptualize the practice of modern Taiwanese theatre, we can also see how the body became a competing site for the reconstruction of identity.

Chung Ming-Der

The era of martial law in Taiwan was a time of tremendous political control that extended to the intensive management of every individual citizen. Various methods were used to enact and maintain the totalitarian domination of martial law, including censorship, the proscription of social parades and protests, “the ordinance for the control and punishment of rebellion and sedition,” and collective punishment, to name a few. This harsh oppression, however, did

26 Chen Mei-Mao, “The Report” 120–37. 33 engender opposition, principally in the shape of the Tangwai Movement, or literally, the “outside the [KMT] party movement.” The Tangwai Movement was, in fact, a collective term that was generally used to refer to people who participated in political movements and elections that opposed the suppression of political dissent. The Tangwai Movement ended with the formation of the DPP (Democratic Progressive Party) in 1986, and the subsequent lifting of martial law in

1987.

Chung described the flowering of modern Taiwanese theatrical practice after the lifting of martial law, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as the little theatre movement in that it shared common characteristics with the Western category of the little theatre. In the original Western context, the term little theatre movement described the experiments initiated in Europe and the

United States between the end of the nineteenth century through the first several decades of the twentieth century. The practices of little theatres were usually in opposition to those of the prevailing commercial theatre such that the former performed in small spaces in which intimacy between performers and spectators was an important emphasis.

In the 1980s, Chung returned to Taiwan from the United States with a Ph.D. in performance studies from New York University, and he adopted (and adapted) the term to describe theatre practice in Taiwan. He categorized the Taiwanese little theatre movement into two generations—the first was embodied by the Lan Ling Theatre Workshop and Ho-Chu’s New

Match, indicating their conscious disentanglement with the previous dominant forms of realistic performance; the second generation moved toward an avant-garde theatre, in which three distinct directions could be observed: environmental theatre, postmodern theatre, and political theatre.27

To be brief, almost anything nonrealistic and experimental can be covered by the term, as it was realized in Taiwan in the 1980s and 1990s. Obviously, this explanation complicated existing

27 Chung Ming-Der, Little Theatre 121–28. 34 confusion regarding the idea of little theatre as employed in Taiwan rather than addressing it.

Today, little theatre in Taiwan connotes very little in regard to its original Western references.

Rather, it loosely signifies any performance in a small theatre space.

In Chung’s theorization, the little theatre movement functioned as a wholesale term in regard to introducing modern American theatre features, among which postmodernism remained his major emphasis. From Chung’s perspective, postmodernism in modern Taiwanese theatre spontaneously gained a presence in the late 1980s when the economy and society entered “the phase of late capitalism,” a concept Chung borrowed from Fredric Jameson (Little Theatre 129).

For Chung, Jameson marked the postmodernist theatre from the perspective of the emergence of non-realistic, non-linear performance. Of course, whether Taiwanese society can accurately be described as postmodern during that period remains a topic of debate.28 Also, Chung’s periodization of the development of modern theatre is problematic, especially because the first and the second generations existed at roughly the same time.29 Despite these problems, it is clear enough that Chung’s discourse is a further development of Theatre in terms of a shared desire to assert Taiwanese cultural independence.

Like the members of Theatre, after returning to Taiwan, Chung became a cultural mediator who introduced Western (theatre) theories and practice, including postmodernism, to

Taiwan. For example, Chung adapted Marat Sade in order to create Marat Taipei first staged in

1987 and also wrote introductory books about Western (post)modern theatre. Chung’s model for understanding Taiwanese theatrical styles is in parallel with Western theories and cultures. In this process, he attempted to foreground the agency of Taiwanese cultures by emphasizing the

28 Chen Fang-Ming, Postcolonial Taiwan 14–16. 29 Wang Mo-Lin, “Palimpsests” 61–62. 35 spontaneity of Taiwanese postmodernism.30 However, there is a gap in his model. On the one hand, he insisted that Taiwan has its own original version of a distinct little theatre movement.

On the other, the spontaneity, politicality, and radicality of modern Taiwanese theatre are all defined, for him, according to the American standard. What is “Taiwanese” about Taiwanese little theatre, thus, remains elusive. In short, Chung further developed the phenomenon we find in

Theatre in embracing Western culture in the project of rebuilding national identity.

Wang Mo-Ling

To some extent, because of Chung’s preference for Western postmodernism, how to reconfigure local cultural identities without relying too heavily on Western influence became an issue. Wang Mo-Ling is probably the most active and influential practitioner in the Taiwanese theatre. Since the late 1990s, while many practitioners of modern Taiwanese theatre have avoided direct political engagement, Wang has continued to insist on using the theatre to disseminate sociopolitical criticism. His attacks on the perceived impotence of the acting body and his assertions concerning the reclamation of bodily awareness still occupy a dominant position in his theorization and in his practice likewise.

In this context of searching for the national body, Wang took an alternative route. His experience of studying in Japan during the period of 1982–1985 and his witnessing of the White

Terror wrought by the KMT during the era of martial law rendered his criticism of modern theatre relatively Japanized. Wang, with an apparent penchant for modern Japanese theatre, was strongly opposed to Western theatrical practice. In responding to Chung’s idea of a spontaneous local postmodernism and the (for him) resultant little theatre movement, Wang considered

Chung’s historical perspective to be limited, i.e., as confined to Western culture and personal

30 Postmodernism 24–36. 36 experience. For Wang, Chung was “creating a historical play imbued with personally subjective sentiments” (“Palimpsests” 60). Thus, from Wang’s perspective, Chung failed to attend to both the inner heterogeneity of local culture and to modern Taiwanese theatre more generally.31 In other words, Wang’s point is that the writing of history and the representation of theatre cannot escape from the intervention of personal ideologies. What he attempts to do is to intervene in the formation of modern Taiwanese theatre by offering an alternative perspective on the Taiwanese body and theatre in his two collections of essays: City, Theatre and the Body and On the

Taiwanese Body.

For Wang, the experiment of building a national body in theatre is not an ideologically neutral practice. It is a mixture of locally cultural elements and, more importantly, the appropriation of foreign theatrical training methods. Little theatre, from Wang’s perspective, is an aesthetic field constructed by actors’ bodies.32 Inspired by modern Japanese theatre practitioners such as Suzuki Tadashi and Hijikata Tatsumi, Wang considered that the modern theatre, ideally, should function as a tool for initiating social change and for “capturing the sentiment of contemporaries” (City 148). It is on the basis of such logic that Wang struggled to develop his discourse on the Taiwanese body.

Theoretically, Wang’s discourse on the body has a purpose of constructing an analytic framework to reveal ideologies imposed upon the body and to reclaim the agency of the local

Taiwanese people, thus enhancing awareness of the possibilities of reconfiguring the body. In

Wang’s framework, our bodies are subjected to and alienated by capitalism and consumer

31 City 63. 32 Ibid., 147–48. 37 society. Therefore, Wang called for the reformation of the body, which is essentially a process of discovering the origin of the body.33

In Wang’s words, “the body of different nationalities contains distinct cultural spirits”

(City 8). Yet, this process also had external points of reference. For Wang, the ideal model of practice is modern Japanese theatre and dance. In particular, Butoh, from Wang’s perspective, is the practice that captures the origin of a Japanese body, or an Eastern agricultural body, which is fundamentally different from the Western Christian body.34 Based on this stance, Wang is not far away from Chung and other theatre practitioners. He urged modern Taiwanese theatre practitioners to learn from Japanese experience, instead of from the Western theatre, as a first step in the search for the origins of the Taiwanese body.

As noted, modern Japanese theatre practice is one of the starting points of modern

Taiwanese theatre. Wang’s contribution is that he re-emphasizes the inherent traces of Japan in the development of modern Taiwanese theatre and opens an alternative perspective for rethinking the shaping of theatre. Despite the fact that Wang’s search for the origin of the body risks the danger of essentialism, his efforts to promote a search for a Taiwanese body are still influential on today’s Taiwanese stage. From the respective discourses of Chung and Wang, we can find that the key problem is not so much what the local is, but what kinds of sources Taiwan should appropriate. Based on this kind of ideology and in this social context, attempts to create the Taiwanese body, ironically, generate a sort of hidden cultural universalism for modern

Taiwanese theatre, a principal problem analyzed in the following chapters.

The Body as an Intercultural Problem

33 Body 180. 34 City 113–19. 38

As we can see from the historical exposition, the body has been regarded as a field for artistic creation and a practice for formulating cultural identity. For both Lu and Lee, the body is a moral lack, and theatre Is a means of supplementing this deficiency. In the discourse of Theatre, the body is a symbol of a fragile cultural confidence in dealing with local national consciousness.

In this context, there is limited vision or practice capable of providing a particular direction for what the body could contribute to the development of modern Taiwanese theatre and national consciousness.

For Chung, the body is not just a symbol of a confused national identity. Instead, the body stands as a field of experiments within which representations of the body are recognized as an embodiment of nationality. Hence, searching for, adjusting, and building the Taiwanese body became an indispensable task during the development of modern Taiwanese theatre for most local practitioners. Chung’s problem lies in the paradox whereby the agency of Taiwanese culture must be defined and measured through the development of a Western culture locally, which, ironically, is something local people, including Chung, long to eliminate.

Wang is similar to Chung insofar as both rely on a foreign (here, Japanese) paradigm to understand the potential of bodily experimentation in theatre. Unlike Chung’s celebration of the liberation of the body in modern Taiwanese theatre, however, Wang is more aware of the political constraints on local subjects. His perspective on the connections between nation, body, and theatre, therefore, have much in common with Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics.35

For Wang, the body is the site where the state disciplines its subjects, especially in periods of extreme political conditions, such as those associated with martial law. In this context, what

Wang is seeking is an alternative route by which an individual can be resilient in the face of, for

35 Wang Mo-Lin, Body 108–10. 39 example, an oppressive government. Theatre, then, constitutes just such a radical space for experimenting with reconfiguring the process of subjective formation.

What exactly does the body mean for theatre productions? How can the deployment of the body in theatre be connected to political engagement and identity reformation? How do foreign factors contribute to such a process? Revisiting those forerunners’ discourses on modern

Taiwanese theatre, we can easily find that its development involves multiple mediations. Neither

“Taiwan” nor “theatre” in modern Taiwanese theatre is ever purely local. The understanding and promotion of theatre have been in step with the political climate of Taiwanese society.

Thus, the body comprises a point at which politics, theatre, and cultural factors all converge. The body is the site in and through which individuals are subjected to “discipline,” to borrow Foucault’s term. Hence, for practitioners, one form of resistance resides in the reconfiguration of the body, an action usually undertaken with the aid of foreign sources. Seen in this light, and taking the body as a competing site, Taiwan and theatre are always “intercultural.”

Hence, this work positions interculturalism as a locus of inquiry, with the goal of uncovering the intercultural construction of modern Taiwanese theatre and problematizing the meaning and significance of the body in terms of understanding theatre and performance in a modern

Taiwanese context.

Models of Intercultural Theatre

In the field of performance studies, intercultural theatre has long been an important topic of debate. The term “interculturalism” was first suggested by Richard Schechner in the early

1970s in order to provide a contrast with “internationalism.”36 Whereas internationalism describes the cultural exchange at the level of national exchange, interculturalism moves beyond

36 Schechner, “Script.” 40 national boundaries toward cultures and individuals.37 In this context, interculturalism describes the cultural exchange–focused productions undertaken by Western directors such as Peter Brook,

Jerzy Grotowski, and Eugenio Barba, whose practices incorporate various non-Western performance traditions.38 Later, the concept expanded to non-Western practitioners such as

Suzuki Tadashi and Hijikata Tatsumi, as their productions intersected with Western conventions.39 From Schechner’s articulation, interculturalism is a descriptive term adopted by scholars in considering exiting experiments of directors in world performance. Here, interculturalism emphasizes the sense of a practitioner’s aesthetic autonomy, rather than a necessarily theoretical or critical point of view.40

According to Patrice Pavis’s later theorization, intercultural theatre is a combination of

“hybrid forms drawing upon a more or less conscious and voluntary mixing of performance traditions traceable to distinct cultural areas” (8). In this articulation, Pavis restates the autonomy that practitioners possess during the creative process. Unlike Schechner, who adopts a relatively positive and liberal view of interculturalism, Pavis is keener on the possible problems of intercultural theatre. “The hybridization [of intercultural theatre] is very often such that the original forms can no longer be distinguished” (8). The process of intercultural exchange is not without a price. In his ongoing discussion of the phenomenon, in 1992, Pavis proposed an

“hourglass” model, which subsequently became the orthodox summative model of intercultural theatre, as we can see from his chart below:

37 Pavis, Intercultural 42. 38 Ibid., 43–53. 39 Ibid., 43. 40 Daphne Lei shares this point of view: “the most important criterion for success in international and intercultural collaboration remains […] the artists and cultural contexts” (Alternative 146). 41

Figure 1. The hourglass model. Pavis, Crossroads 185.

By deploying the imagery of an hourglass with its linear flow of sands and narrow neck,

Pavis simultaneously articulates various phases that practitioners engaged in producing an intercultural performance must face. Notice that Pavis puts the aesthetic, or say, the practical aspects on top of the social and cultural phases. Thus, he justifies the unavoidable transformation of the source cultures, which inevitably results from the passage through the narrow neck of the hourglass that is intercultural exchange. In other words, Pavis, via this allegory of the hourglass, seeks to address two sentiments that are not entirely congruent: a high level of confidence in the ideals of intercultural practice as a voluntary integration of cultures, and also, simultaneously, the unwilling admittance of the seeming impossibility of achieving an equal exchange in intercultural theatre. As Pavis suggests, “the intercultural debate has great difficulty in remaining 42 on the level of ‘equality’ of cultures and exchanges” (14). In this context, how can genuine communication become possible?

Certainly, the hourglass model is problematic. It assumes a top-down, one-way flow in the process of cultural exchange, indicating a strictly linear flow of artistic elements. The hourglass can only be turned upside-down. It cannot be spun on its side, so to speak, in order to create a change in the power structure. Its content, sands, are stored in a restricted space. If we use Pavis’s model to discuss intercultural practice, we, in fact, foreclose any possibility of intercultural exchange. In this context, we would want to ask, Who has the right to “turn” this model of intercultural exchange? Who decides which culture is on top? How can the possibility of enhancing mutual understanding among disparate cultures be actualized?

Starting from the view that Pavis’s hourglass model is inspiring but also debatable,

Jacqueline Lo and Helen Gilbert suggest their own model, one inspired by a children’s toy from their cultural backgrounds in Malaysia and Australia:41

41 They describe the toy as follows: “[It] consisted of a piece of elastic strung through the middle of a plastic disc. The elastic string is held at each end with the disc supported in the center. By rotating the hands in a circular motion, the disc is rotated outward. Once the disc is rotating, the elastic is alternately tightened and released to continue the spinning of the disc. The disc moves in either direction along the string depending on whether the tension is generated by the left or the right hand” (Lo and Gilbert 44). 43

Figure 2. The “toy” model. Lo and Gilbert 45.

Their purpose is to reverse Pavis’s top-down hourglass model in order to “encourage more mutuality and an attempted representation of the mutuality that has already existed at some level” (44). It is true that in Lo and Gilbert’s model, the dynamics become horizontal rather than vertical. Yet, the problem the model attempts to address does not differ much from that considered by Pavis. Who has the right to control the flow of cultural exchange? If the purpose of the model is to demonstrate the mutuality of an intercultural encounter, this symmetrical shape shows a reversed picture that depicts a balanced power structure. Put another way, for readers who are familiar with the background image, the model implies a dynamic toy, such that the analogy is relatively accessible. But for readers who do not possess the relevant cultural 44 knowledge to conceptualize the process, it is not clear whether this model is actually more hybrid than the one presented by Pavis. Unlike a widespread understanding of an hourglass in everyday life, this model is more culturally conditioned. In short, Lo and Gilbert’s alternative model is itself already an intercultural practice. I would suggest that the fundamental problem in proposing a model for interpretation is that intercultural exchange is always case-by-case. Thus, proposing a universal model is ultimately less productive than seeking useful tactics in the moment of exchange.

Rustom Bharucha is one of the critics who digs most deeply into the problems of intercultural theatre. In fact, he gives particular attention to the cultural conditions where intercultural encounters take place. Rather than evaluating the interior factors of a theatre performance universally, Bharucha focuses more on the exteriority of theatre in its social politics and makes a sharp critique of the phenomenon of current global cultural exchanges through a set of inter-related theoretical frameworks, which he refers to as “interculturalism,”

“intraculturalism,” “multiculturalism,” and “secularism.” These terms are based on Indian cultural contexts and are meant as a tool to help practitioners explore interculturalism as an umbrella term in need of a more nuanced approach. Taking something of a middle route between

Schechner and Pavis, Bharucha suggests that interculturalism happens “within the framework of voluntarism and circumscribed autonomies of individuals and non-official cultural groups” (4).

Although Bharucha does not reject the potential autonomy practitioners might possess, he is aware of the limitations superimposed on them by their national contexts. Thus, Bharucha also contemplates the term “intracultural” as an alternative narrative that seeks the “dynamics between and across specific communities and regions within the boundaries of the nation-state”

(6). By emphasizing the complexity that exists within national boundaries, Bharucha criticizes 45 the predetermined assumption of interculturalism on the free flows of social individuals and economic activities. Intraculturalism consequently challenges the homogeneous picture depicted by interculturalism. Through juxtaposing interculturalism and intraculturalism, disclosing the intricacy of the process of cultural exchange, Bharucha points to the blind spot of multiculturalism—which is, of course, another term usually, and more widely, associated with cultural exchange. In practical usage, the terms “multiculturalism” and “interculturalism” are not particularly distinct. Yet, what makes multiculturalism less persuasive and more problematic, as suggested by Bharucha, is its utopian expectations, its obsession with having “we” as a co-prosperous group, the commitment to bringing good to society (10). In other words, multiculturalism is a top-down vision of collaboration among cultures that also homogenizes the possibilities of cultural negotiations.

In tackling these obstacles to cultural exchange and concentrating on the sociopolitical specificities of India, Bharucha proposes to revisit the idea of secularism, or as Edward Said puts it “secular criticism,” which points generally to a decentered practice of criticism focusing on worldly human experiences.42 Borrowing Bruce Robbins’s elaboration of secularism as a form of cultural consciousness in opposition to positioning nationalism as a belief system, Bharucha defines the problem in the Indian cultural context as follows: In India, where “God is neither officially nor philosophically dead” (13), the problem does not lie so much in resistance to the national, but in the fact that the nation should be recognized as plural. Hence, the very first step in practicing secularism involves “speculating on the possibilities of retrieving the pluralists of religion for secular consideration” (13). In short, cultural practice includes convoluted dynamics that cannot easily be generalized by a single term. Thus, what Bharucha demonstrates in his work

42 Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic 20–27. 46 are ways to complicate the issues of naming cultural practice through concrete experiences in

Indian theatre.

If Pavis’s problem is a failure to propose a universally applicable model for understanding interculturalism, Bharucha’s is that his analysis is so embedded in India that it is challenging for outsiders to apply his perspective to other cultural contexts. Still, learning from

Bharucha’s analysis, I tend to agree with his idea of theatre as a social institution for both ideological oppression and reformation. Bharucha correctly points out that theatre has a unique language because of the presence and usage of human bodies, and thus theatre could be a unique means of historiography that engages narratives in everyday life. For Bharucha, intercultural performance means taking action with our bodies for social change in the face of a clash between cultures.43 It is in intercultural exchange that the audience can imagine alternate selves, and “it is at this critical juncture that ‘the body’ can be pitted against ‘the world,’ even as it has been marked, shaped, regimented, and violated by its disciplinary codes” (159). Yet, concerning the question of actualization, Bharucha insufficiently articulates the meanings of the body regarding its significance as a way to imagine performance as a mechanism of change.44 The problem, which Bharucha attempts to explore but does not resolve, is that of how to envision theatre as a form of empowerment.

Through this brief theoretical review, I would like to emphasize that any interpretation of intercultural practice is itself culturally conditioned. Despite the current favorable view of interculturalism among scholars, the vision it depicts is no less contestable than those offered by other terms. Again, the articulation of the term “intercultural theatre” already has its dissonance.

43 Bharucha 151–162. 44 This problem, as Bharucha himself was aware, derives in part from the lack of readings of live performance: “While at one level it could be argued that there is far less documentation of actual performances and productions in this book than its title would suggest, I would also emphasize that I could not have addressed the overlapping narratives of globalization, communalism, and culturalism without the concrete insights that I have gained about these phenomena through the immediacies of theatre” (17). 47

On the one hand, “intercultural” is a descriptive term used by scholars including Schechner to describe the prevailing custom of borrowing, especially of appropriating non-Western theatre traditions as done constantly by Western theatre directors. On the other, the practice of theatrical productions is hardly a pure aesthetic process. Theatre is infused with social factors. Theatrical practitioners and critics are not exempt from the influence of society. Hence, the encounter of two or more cultures is not just a challenge for aesthetic interpretation, but a social intervention, too. How to contextualize an intercultural production and how to connect it to local particularities are two issues at the heart of current debates in the field.

In Taiwan, interculturalism is normative insofar as it has become a wholesale term for interpreting the development of modern Taiwanese theatre.45 For instance, Shih Kuang-Sheng

(石光生, 1954– ) in Intercultural Theatre: Diffusion and Interpretation argues that the dissemination of modern theatre from the West, mediated by China and Japan to Taiwan, has already functioned as a practice of interculturalism. Historically speaking, I tend to agree with

Shih’s stance. However, his way of pinning down the intercultural exchange is more textually oriented. As his model of the dissemination of theatrical culture demonstrates, the four stages—“the performance of the original,” “the performance of the translation,” “the adaptation of the translation,” “the creation of the local original based on the techniques of the source plays”

(12–13)—in fact, speaks to an ontology of theatre creation as textually founded. In this way,

Shih’s approach mixes the long-term process of adaptation and acculturation with interculturalism and does not directly address the particular negotiations between the encounter of cultures in the conditions of globalization and postcoloniality.

45 Another useful study in this area is Tuan Hsin-Chun’s Alternative Theater in Taiwan: Feminist and Intercultural Approaches. However, Tuan focuses more on feminism and gender studies than on interculturalism. 48

In Taiwan, the term “intercultural” did not became popular until the late 1990s, when East Asian countries, influenced by globalization, initiated a variety of nationally funded art festivals. As

Lin Ke-Huan argues (林克歡, 1941– ),

Needless to say, the intercultural conversation in performance arts in East Asia

gradually received people’s attention. This situation is closely in sync with

commercial, financial, technological processes vis-à-vis the rise of globalization

and multiculturalism. (2001)

In other words, the condition of intercultural theatre in East Asia is twofold. Intercultural theatre is the result of, and one response to, rapid social changes (Westernization) in everyday life. At the same time, it is usually a voluntary practice with national subsidies incentivizing the production of art festivals. Intercultural theatre, then, might be understood in East Asia as a mechanism for supporting national confidence, as we will see in the case of the Taiwan

International Festival of Arts (TIFA), which is the subject of Chapter Three. In short, intercultural performance carries tensions arising from multiple negotiations, and the case of

Taiwan is no exception precisely because its intercultural theatre is closely associated with the cultural, economic, and political climate.

The focus of this dissertation is consequently to demonstrate the problems of intercultural exchange in an embedded cultural context, i.e., contemporary Taiwan, and simultaneously to participate in the discussions of interculturalism as a set of concepts and practices by uncovering the material conditions and power structures operating beneath the surface of nominally

“intercultural” theatre in Taiwan. Given how the term is appropriated in Taiwan, as my analysis in Chapter Three will demonstrate, intercultural performance in Taiwan after the millennium speaks to the above theoretical issues. Yet, intercultural theatre is not merely a descriptive term 49 of practice. Adding to Shih Kuang-Sheng’s exposition of intercultural theatre, I consider the

“conceptualization” of modern Taiwanese theatre as intercultural, a condition that is imbued with foreign cultural elements. As a result, in this project, I avoid imposing a particular preexisting model but rely instead on close readings of the particularities of performance to explore the ways in which intercultural cognition and practice influence local practitioners’ reconfiguration of identity formation on stage.

Methodology

With a focus on interculturalism, the major task of this dissertation is to examine how the body has been represented, deployed, and perceived, especially in response to significant historical junctures and various cultural contexts in Taiwan. By putting the body in the spotlight,

I further reflect on the idea of live performance as a mode of communication capable of revealing and influencing tensions between abstract concepts and the real world. That is, a discussion of the live performing body can elucidate how the body influences practitioners’ awareness of distinctive sociopolitical constraints. My analysis will reveal how practitioners utilize or imagine the body as a utopian field for negotiating historical struggles and the construction of identity.

The purpose of this project is not to propose a new understanding of the body in performance. Instead, the body in performance is seen as engaged in a process of communication that creates and embodies tensions between practitioners’ expectations and spectators’ experiences. The key is what is communicated and the kinds of theatrics that make the communication process fruitful. The enacted body in theatre will be observed as an intercultural institution for the inscription of social and theatrical conventions as well as an experimental site 50 in which practitioners and audience alike contend with the tension between exterior social experiences and an interior desire to transgress existing realities.

The primary goal of this dissertation is to formulate a critical theoretical angle in order to, situate theatre practitioners and their work in distinctive sociopolitical milieus, to investigate the ways participants engage with the aesthetics of the theatre, to evaluate how performers transform social and cultural reality into bodily performance, and, most importantly, to bring the perspective of audience reception into performance analysis. The central theoretical framework of this study relies on diverse understandings of the body in performance, theoretically, aesthetically, and culturally, in seemingly disparate sociohistorical and political contexts. In this dissertation, the body thus functions as a network of references in conjunction with performance studies, theories of memory and trauma, postcolonial studies, phenomenology, and, to a limited extent, cognitive studies.

Seen in this light, the way this project problematizes the body and its politics in performance does more than to show how the body is subjected to a particular sociopolitical milieu, though this is, indeed, important. More importantly, the goal is to emphasize practitioners’ agency by unpacking their aesthetic innovations and spectators’ agency through incorporating audience response into critical analysis. The actual politics of the society, the deployment of the body in performance, and the creative experiments of theatre are all mutually reinforced.

Ultimately, the body in theatre functions as a node of negotiation for the audience to construct their own understanding of exterior social specifics.

In particular, this dissertation deals with the period from the lifting of the Order of

Martial Law in 1987 to the present. In Taiwan, this has been a time of rapid economic growth and social protest during which theatre has begun to disentangle itself from political control and 51 to adopt a reflexive angle on its position vis-à-vis society, as we have already seen in our discussion of Chung and Wang. Specifically, I consider how specific aspects of Taiwanese society and international forces (mainly China, Japan, and the US) are represented, translated, and challenged through the process of intentional intercultural performance.

Each chapter focuses on one or more highly influential practitioners and a specific theatrical production in modern Taiwanese theatre. The analytic work takes into account distinct points of view that affect our interpretation of performance as expressed in directors’ notes, audience perceptions, critics’ reviews, actors’ responses, and so on. Thus, the materials analyzed herein include plays, video clips, photographs, performance reviews, and scholarly criticism. By tackling specific scenes in selected productions for each practitioner and making connections to the abundant archives of modern Taiwanese theatre, the process of performance in the present functions as a link between uncovering the past and foreshadowing the future of Taiwanese society in a global context.

Chapter Outline

Chapter One focuses on Tian Chi-Yuan (田啟元, 1964–1996) and the Taiwanese little theatre movement. In the context of modern Taiwanese theatre, Tian remains a significant figure.

He was one of the leading practitioners in the little theatre movement in Taiwan in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a period during which Taiwan underwent a drastic social political reconfiguration, as Hong Hong (鴻鴻, 1964– ), one of Tian’s contemporaries, recalls in The

Conference of Modern Taiwanese Theatre: 1986–1995. Tian’s plays and directorial pieces embody a struggle for identity that simultaneously rejects predominant political ideologies and deconstructs the kinship between the Taiwanese locality and Chinese cultural heritage. He takes 52 a critical stance on combining and reorganizing preexisting cultural codes and translating them into a playscript. He also deploys performance as a means of transgression and as a basis for the apprehension of an alternative local identity. Tian’s works can thus be understood as giving expression to the complexities of modern Taiwanese social struggles in terms of a theatrical movement. Grounding my analysis in Tian’s White Water (白水, Baishui 1993) and focusing on his mimicry of traditional bodily gestures from specific performance styles, I highlight the constructedness of national identity and argue for a “conscious constructivism,” to borrow a term from the Japanese visual avant-garde. Thus, I consider the integration of cultural traditions as a definitive characteristic of the little theatre movement in Taiwan.

Chapter Two focuses on two of the most significant playwrights and directors in the development of modern Taiwanese theatre: Stan Lai and Hugh K.S. Lee. It is worth mentioning, too, that Lee was a leading actor in his company, the Ping-Fong Acting Troupe. Like Tian, these two practitioners pioneered modern Taiwanese theatre in the 1980s. However, unlike Tian, whose work remains marginal and experimental, Lai and Lee set the standard in the commercial market of modern Taiwanese theatre and remain influential to this day. Lai and Lee are both second-generation representatives of the Chinese diaspora in Taiwan. In the era of globalization,

Lee and Lai travel to China frequently, which signifies the increasing cultural exchange between

China and Taiwan, as noted by critics such as Lin Nai-Wen. My attention is drawn to their works, especially those analyzed in this chapter: Lee’s Far Away from Home (西出陽關, Xi Chu Yang

Guan 1988) and Lai’s A Dream like a Dream (如夢之夢, Ru Meng Zhi Meng 2000), in which dramatic renditions, nostalgia, diasporic experience, and sociopolitical specificities of Taiwanese society intersect. Their plays repeatedly tackle the politics of time and memory. Realistic performance, or “critical realism,” a term borrowed from Tobin Nellhaus, foregrounds and 53 complicates how the enacted body can express memories in response to historical junctures, especially in regard to the problematic relationship between China and Taiwan. This chapter, therefore, focuses on memory/trauma as a theatrical device that contributes to the construction of a cathartic subjectivity understood in the context of specific historical events and processes in

Taiwan.

Chapter Three explores the work of Robert Wilson (1941– ) and Suzuki Tadashi (1939– ) and their flagship productions in twenty-first-century Taiwan, with special attention to their works in Taiwan, Wilson’s Orlando (2009), and Suzuki’s La Dame aux Camélias (2011). Both directors are prominent in terms of their respective directorial styles expressed in part through specific patterns of bodily movements. I consider the ways in which the boom in transnational collaborations between foreign directors and local practitioners has led to productions that have become idealized and celebrated from a perspective that valorizes subject formation. Problems pertaining to intercultural exchange and the possibilities and limitations of the enacted body in the intercultural theatre have received very little attention in Taiwan and East Asian contexts, a phenomenon Daphne Lei addresses in Alternative Chinese Opera in the Age of Globalization.46

In this vein, Wilson and Suzuki are important for the ways in which they actually collaborated with practitioners in Taiwan. In the working process, performers’ bodies become a site that guarantees the communicability of culture, at least for the local side. Such an assumption of the

(in)translatability of bodily performance will be carefully reconsidered and reevaluated through the angles of the economic and political forces embedded in intercultural projects. I will argue that the intercultural exchanges fundamentally imply a bodily practice through which practitioners shape the stage into a haunted identity-burdened space and understand the theatre as

46 Lei primarily addresses the problem of intercultural theatre from the evolution of Jingju in Taiwan (Lei, Alternative Chinese Opera 36–38). I tend to consider the problem as inhering in a tension between the politics of the body and performance. 54 struggling to renew itself in layered temporal and transnational contexts. Modern Taiwanese theatre provides a powerful instance of intercultural performance functioning as a subjectivity reformed via an emotional articulation of a transfigured political and cultural identity against a setting of postcolonial melancholy.

In the Conclusion, I summarize the results of my analyses of bodily performances in

Taiwan by returning to question some key assumptions about the representation and reception of bodily performance as pertaining to the interplay between aesthetics and politics. The production of meaning and affect in theatre is, in fact, a complex and extended process that involves distinct perspectives concerning sociohistorical factors, aesthetic experiments, the audience’s interpretations, and on-stage performance. In Taiwan’s postcolonial context, the process of engendering affect and knowledge in theatre has been mediated by various understandings of history, power, and identity struggles with intercultural influences. I, therefore, suggest that modern Taiwanese theatre is a biopolitical practice that refracts the identity struggles of histories and realities in which Taiwan has been questioned and never realized.

55

Chapter One

Constructing Taiwan: Tian Chi-Yuan and Conscious Constructivism

Four male actors enter an almost bare stage, torsos erect but hips dropped toward the ground, swaying in time with an enchanting hymn. The actor on the upper-right stage shakes his hands slowly and dramatically in a circular fashion on both sides of his body. He raises his legs high and stamps his feet. In front of him, the second actor waves two white strips of various sizes in undulating trajectories. On the opposite side, the two other actors sway their hands and bodies like waves. One lifts his hands horizontally, another vertically. With their distinctive posture, the four actors slowly wander onto the stage, creating a disordered and chaotic visual effect. From their movements, we can hardly determine who or what they are attempting to perform. Then gradually, they converge at stage left and stand in a kite shape. Gently, they all start to sway their hands up and down, again, like waves, as they all say the very first lines of the 2001 version of

Tian Chi-Yuan’s famous play White Water.1

As noted in the Introduction, the primary perspective proposed by Taiwanese scholars in conceptualizing the practice of modern theatre in Taiwan after the lifting of martial law is through the specific and highly debated lens of Western postmodernism, a concept that emphasizes a tendency to disentangle theatre from political control. Through an analysis of some of the work of playwright and director Tian Chi-Yuan, arguably one of the most important figures in the Taiwanese little theatre movement in the late 1980s and a detailed investigation of his most renowned work White Water, I will demonstrate that the performing body in Tian’s theatrics is intercultural in a complicated way. Through exploring the relationship between the

1 This description is based on the 2001 performance of Tian’s play, which took place on an outdoor stage. Location unknown. See http://www.eti-tw.com/show.php?itemID=cptp010&id=18. 56 cultural references in White Water and the specifics of Taiwanese society, I will re-historicize

Tian’s practice as a kind of cultural constructivism. Originally used to designate European avant-garde movements in the early twentieth century, in theatre, the term constructivism has been used to describe Vsevolod Meyerhold’s (1874–1940) experiments with stage settings and the mechanics of bodily movements.2 I suggest that by incorporating a variety of bodily codes,

Tian complicates and questions the idea of human beings in general, and of Taiwanese subjects in particular. Tian’s theatrics are fluid, such that the audience witnesses his attempts to construct and reconfigure the cultural identity of Taiwan. This liquid condition, then, invites us to carefully reconsider the “postmodern” condition of modern Taiwanese theatre after the late 1980s.

Through Tian’s case, I argue that Taiwan’s little theatre in the late 1980s formed a “liquid” modernity in which intercultural references were incorporated such that both local traditions and avant-garde elements were featured and rejected in performance.

One purpose of this chapter is to reread White Water and to consider the development of modern theatre. Yet, I do not attempt a full account of Tian and his theatre career.3 It is also not my intention to come up with a new historical narrative of the little theatre movement in Taiwan in the late 1980s. Rather, as my analyses in this chapter as well as the following chapters will demonstrate, close readings of staged productions of some practitioners can uncover how the artistic labor of theatre intersects with cultural, historical, and sociopolitical specificities. With special attention to textual and performative nuances, this dissertation offers a contrast to most current scholarship, which attempts to create Taiwanese subjectivity as the ultimate goal of modern Taiwanese theatre. Instead, my analysis shows that bodily performance can help practitioners question, challenge, and suspend a concrete understanding of Taiwan. Tian in this

2 See Braun 170–87. 3 Tian’s life and career has been thoroughly recorded by Shi Li in his MA thesis. 57 light offers a clear example of work that articulates the overlooked tension between politics and aesthetics, which is a practice of questioning and reconfiguring Taiwanese identity through the body in performance.

Tian Chi Yuan and White Water

Tian, who graduated with a degree in fine arts from National Normal University, is an iconic figure in Taiwan’s little theatre movement because of his ability to incorporate a mixture of language styles as a writer and to invent idiosyncratic bodily postures on stage as a theatre director. His plays, such as Love Homosexual in Chinese (毛屍, Maoshi 1988) and Socialism in the Capitalized Nude (夜浪拍岸, Yelang Paian 1988), demonstrate his provocative sarcasm toward conservative Taiwanese society under conditions of extreme political oppression. This aggressive style was a rare practice at the time given that the KMT government had only just abrogated the Order of Martial Law in 1987, and the prosecution of censorship cases was still ongoing. In addition, Tian’s identity as a gay man and theatre practitioner, and the corresponding incorporation of homosexual issues into his performances, also challenged his audience’s biases and confronted associated social realities. Accordingly, Tian has played a pivotal role in the history of modern Taiwanese theatre.

Tian’s theatre was popular among young intellectuals and practitioners. In the twenty-first century, largely due to Tian’s death and the disbandment of his theatre troupe, the

Critical Point Theatre Phenomenon, most of Tian’s plays have become part of history such that they are rarely performed. This phenomenon is not surprising. In a context in which aesthetic innovation is of central importance, an informal convention for the practitioners of modern

Taiwanese theatre is that most of the theatre troupes stage either foreign classics or original plays 58 written by local practitioners for their own ensembles. Very few local plays become a shared asset that can cross the boundaries of theatre ensembles. However, Tian’s White Water, which premiered in 1993, was not only reproduced by Tian in several versions with various casts but has also been staged by other theatre groups,4 which makes it unusual in the realm of modern theatre in Taiwan.

Different versions of White Water produced by Tian included the original version with four male actors, which premiered in July 1993 at the Evergreen Department in Taipei; the second version, with the title Water Spirits [水幽], with five actresses, was taken on an outdoor tour in May 1995; the next version was performed by seven actresses at Tong Hai University in

November 1995; and, in May 1996, the next version had one actor and three actresses. In that same year, Tian passed away. In June 2001, actors and actresses who had performed in previous productions of White Water in its various versions restaged the play according to the original performing style, on an outdoor stage. The video recording of the original version of White Water has yet to be found. Recordings of other performances of the plays, however, are available on

YouTube. My analysis is based on the 2001 version, as this version is also archived in the official online database of modern Taiwanese theatre, the Electronic Theater Intermix in Taiwan.5

One reason for the popularity of White Water may be its topic. White Water is an adaptation of The Legend of White Snake (白蛇傳, Baishechuan), a folkloric narrative, which has had a checkered history in Sinophone letters.6 The earliest attempt to render the story in a print format was in the Ming dynasty, after which it was adapted widely in various literary genres, especially in Xiqu plays, or traditional Chinese theatre, due to its popularity among ordinary

4 Ma Sih-Yuan 43–69. 5 The database is maintained by the Research Center for Theater and Performance Studies at National Central University . 6 Tseng Yong-Yih 411–27. 59 people.7 To a certain extent, The Legend of White Snake is part of the collective memory of the

Han people. It tells the story of a love affair between the young intellectual Xu Xian and a woman known as White Snake. Originally, a snake spirit [Yao], she transforms in the course of the story into human shape. Xu Xian and White Snake marry each other but their married life does not last long. Soon, Xu Xian is informed by Fa Hai, a monk, about the actual identity of

White Snake. Out of fear, Xu Xian leaves White Snake and goes to the Jin Shan Temple where he seeks Fa Hai for protection. Out of rage, White Snake and Green Snake (a loyal servant, also a snake spirit) go to the Jin Shan Temple and fight with Fai Hai. The story follows Fa Hai’s triumph over White Snake. Although the overall structure of the story stays the same, the actual details of the plot vary drastically in distinctive versions and genres.8

As Tian also deploys the main characters and the scenario, it is not surprising that critics regard White Water as a modern version of The Legend of White Snake. Tian’s play appears to be based on Fang Cheng-Pei’s adaptation of Leifeng Pagoda (雷峰塔, Leifengta) in Chuanqi in the

Qing dynasty.9 Yet, even though Tian’s White Water can be linked to the genealogy of the adaptations of The Legend of White Snake, the connection between the two should not be overemphasized. Tian’s White Water, in fact, features only a few slices of the original story, focusing on the separation between the two main characters. In his vastly truncated version of the story, Tian zeros in on the climax of the original tale, mainly the fight between White Snake and

Fa Hai after Xu Xian discovers his wife’s true identity as a snake spirit. In White Water, background information is minimized. For example, the acquaintance between White Snake and

Xu Xian, the revelation of White Snake’s real identity, and the outcome of their love affaire are all eliminated from the play. From the way Tian deals with the plot, we can already see that he

7 Ibid., 560–63. 8 Ping Yi-Yun 126–33. 9 Chung Te-Fan 80–86. 60 shows no interest in creating a new version of The Legend of White Snake, at least not in the sense of reproducing the complete story. In the following analysis of the complicated meanings of the body in the play and performance, I will argue that by transforming The Legend of White

Snake into White Water, Tian is, in fact, seeking to re-enact the construction of contemporary

Taiwanese identity.

The Text and Its Cultural References

Other than trimming the plot of the story, Tian adds his own dramatic devices to the text of White Water, making the play, at the sentence level, a reference point of multicultural elements.

The opening lines are as follows:

All:

Who is there, sitting lonely and disconsolate?

Who is there, staying isolated and depressed?

Who is there, being heartbroken?

Who is there, shaking … shaking … shaking gently?

Who is there, frowning deeply?

Who is there, weeping deeply?

Who is there, being sorrowful, being drunken,

Struggling to speak, casting the eyes down with tears—

White Snake:

Ay—

I—

I— 61

I—My husband Xu Xian, who did not listen to my advice, insists on going to the

Jin Shan Temple to meet with Monk Fa Hai. Ay, thinking of that Fa Hai, who will

definitely reveal my background and force my husband, Xu Xian, to become a

monk […]. (67)

At the level of syntax, there is a clear repetition in regard to sentence structure, which relies on the refrain “Who is there?” Though difficult to present in a translation, these sentences rhyme and incorporate both classical Chinese and vernacular Mandarin. The collective effect of the sentence structure, rhymes, and sounds, enunciated by “All,” results in a quasi-poetic sense, whereas the characters’ individual lines are comparatively more colloquial. The intersection between a poetic and vernacular sense indicates the imitation of the style of lines in Xiqu, which deploys a distinction between “rhymed lines” and “colloquial lines.” Yet, this kind of similarity does not entirely align the play with Xiqu in the strictest sense, which is a form of total theatre that requires songs, speeches, dance, and acrobatics, a point of some importance that I will come back to later.10

As noted in previous research, this part of the opening scene resembles the chorus in the ancient Greek theatre.11 To some degree, this comparison is understandable because as the list of characters indicates, the four male actors needed to play the roles of White Snake, Green Snake,

Xu Xian, and Fa Hai, also perform the roles of the bystanders Jia, Yi, Bing, and Ding.12 That is, the lines for “All” are spoken by the bystanders played by the actors when they are not performing the parts of the central characters. Indeed, the technique of collective speech is presented in a manner similar to that characteristic of Greek theatre. The parts of the bystanders

(the Taiwanese theatrical term for a chorus of this sort) function like a Greek chorus, making

10 For a description of the aesthetics of Xiqu and its brief history, see Lei, Operatic China 1–23. 11 Chung Te-Fan 94–104. 12 In Chinese, this is an expression of order, which is just like A, B, C, D, with no special meaning. 62 comments on the action of the main characters or the development of the plot. However, even without delving into the complexity of the chorus in Greek theatre, a difference between it and

Tian’s play is readily apparent. That is, the bystanders are unlike a chorus in the way that they sometimes speak from the perspective of characters, thereby acting as a close double of the character. For example, consider the moment when White Snake argues with Fa Hai concerning the distinction between humans and spirits:

White Snake: What is the use of talking about humans, beasts, spirits, or saints,

and having this skin?

Wish to be the river, surging to the sea, eternity … eternity …

All: Wish to be the river, surging to the sea, eternity … eternity …

Fai Hai: Monster! Amitābhā …

All: Monster! My god of the Western Buddha orders me to get … you, monster,

beast. (71)

In this scene, the voice of All channels the perspectives of both White Snake and Fa Hai.

The voice of All can function like a chorus, but can also echo or ventriloquize a given character.

This form of performance brings to mind watari zerifu (渡り台詞), a technique in the Japanese theatrical form Kabuki. Specifically, watari zerifu refers to a technique in which two or more minor characters take turns enunciating sections of a long speech.13 Tian may be appropriating from Kabuki theatre, or from Greek theatre, or he may have arrived at this technique independently. Regardless, this switch in perspectives and its ambiguous cultural association demonstrate that the bystanders do not have a stable identity.14 The shared speech of All does not comment on the characters from an objective narrative point of view. Rather, it is closer to

13 Cavaya, Kabuki 69. In Tian’s own discourse, we also find that he knew Kabuki, though the extent of his knowledge is uncertain. See Tian, “Drama, I Love, I do.” 14 The moments in which the bystanders speak individually also comply with the same logic. 63 the individual character’s emotions in responding to the conflicts of the plot. In short, the incorporation of these voices creates a dramatic effect that links the text of White Water with other performing traditions, including Xiqu, Greek theatre, and possibly Japanese theatrical technique, while at the same time, the lines generate their own particularity. The question then is this: What effect does Tian create by incorporating the voices of intersubjective bystanders?

In White Water, the dramatic technique of deploying bystanders stabilizes a relatively fixed structure in the text. Yet, at the same time, it illustrates a subject in a fluid status. The play opens and ends with lines spoken by the bystanders, which function as a meta-framework through which the characters express their thoughts and emotions and enact the condensed and fragmented plot of the original story, as discussed earlier. On the other hand, as the opening lines start with the repeated question of “Who is there?” the issue of subjectivity is presented and problematized.15

Here, in the context of White Water, subjectivity connects to the most basic questions pertaining to what it means to be a human being. The person in question is depicted by both exterior appearance—“frowning,” “weeping,” and “shaking”—and interior status—“heart broken” and “drunken” with a sense of movement. What complicates the issue is that there are multiple narrative perspectives in the scene. If the “who” signifies White Snake, then who is the observer or observers? Who is or are the interlocutors of these observers? Again, the indication of absent subjects disturbs a stable interpretation of what a subject is. In response to these questions, White Snake sighs and then actually pronounces “I” three times. This repetition could be an emphasis on White Snake’s depression if considered from the plot, as it is the moment

15 The definition of subjectivity can be extremely convoluted. Simply put, the idea of the subject can be understood linguistically, politically, philosophically, and corporeally. As Nick Mansfield suggests, “‘Subjectivity’ refers, therefore, to an abstract or general principle that defies our separation into distinct selves and that encourages us to imagine that, or simply helps us to understand why, our interior lives inevitably seem to involve other people, either as objects of need, desire, and interest or as necessary sharers of common experience” (3). This sense of self is always connected with other people. 64 when Xu Xian leaves White Snake. However, after those three “I”s, there is an em dash in the text, a mark, which could indicate the prolonging of a sound (“Aaaaaaaayyyy.”), a change of tone (“I,” “I?”), or the enumeration of things (“I, I, I, I, I …”). In short, the use of the em dash renders the meaning of “I” ambiguous.

The sense of ambiguity is strengthened by various images and the function of water in the play, which is a literary reference to the original story. In brief, in the original story, water has two layers of meaning. Firstly, it represents a medium of emotional communication, a distinctive temporal occasion that generates the love affair between White Snake and Xu Xian. Water also signifies a mixture of mischief and coincidence. From Xu Xian’s point of view, the encounter with White Snake is a mere coincidence. Yet, White Snake summons the rain in order to create an opportunity for her to meet Xu Xian. In this regard, water is something positive and joyful.

Second, water connotes the capacity to destroy, embodying White Snake’s supernatural power.

Water, in this vein, is disastrous and mythical. The dual meanings of water reveal the ways in which it serves as complicated imagery for human emotions, which enhances the dramatic tension of the story.

In Tian’s text, water becomes a prevailing sign, which embodies various emotions and conditions associated with being human. It is a floating signifier that points not to one steady signified but to multiple references. A “storm” depicts the separation between White Snake and

Xu Xian (67). “Lotus out of water” (芙蓉出水, Furong chushui) offers a symbol for the beauty of White Snake when the voice of All comments on the transient nature of this husband and wife’s happiness (68). “The roaring waves of desire in Love River” (愛河裡慾浪滔滔, Aihe li yulang taotao) constitutes Fa Hai’s condemnation of White Snake (72). 65

Accordingly, in White Water, Tian did not create the play from scratch but manipulated adapted texts of The Legend of White Snake, playing with bits and pieces of a cultural archive. At the same time, the text demonstrates extreme caution in regard to any preconditioned meaning of the cultural codes embedded in the original story as well as the corresponding archives. The text, therefore, suggests an attempt to complicate the sign of the text through incorporating multiple references, as something more than an archival trace. In other words, in Tian’s deployment of water, on the one hand, he demonstrates the fact that the return of a sign is compulsive, embedded in the text. It is simply unimaginable to dissociate the story of The Legend of White

Snake from the sign of water. On the other, we return to the basic idea of Ferdinand de

Saussure’s semiotics that the connection between signifier and signified is a random one.16

Indeed, the meaning of a sign is multilayered, especially in live performance.17 In fact, we can also see Tian’s manipulation of the multivalent sense of “water” vary powerfully in the blocking for a 2001 performance, in which dripping water on the stage, together with the stripping of actors, creates the emotional climax. In this silent scene, the meaning of water is debatable. Just like the vagueness of the subject in the opening questions, the crux here is not how many ideas the images of water can generate, but the fact that water is there, as a reference repeatedly coming back, literally a floating signifier. Tian forces water, originally a linguistic sign, to become visible and unstable. In this light, water is not just a linguistic sign, but a real figure with its own productive dynamic. In other words, the intriguing point of Tian’s dramaturgy and theatrics is that by making a seemingly steady structure unstable, the process of signification between a signifier and signified is disturbed and complicated. Yet, what would be the purpose of

16 Saussure 100–18. 17 Knowles 1–10. 66 this destabilization? Before elaborating on the complex meanings of his performance, it is worth sticking to the questions of text and subjectivity for a further analysis.

The Archive and the Body

Diana Taylor proposes a comparison between the archive and the repertoire as two distinctive ways of organizing knowledge and performing cultural interventions, in which a linguistic text is closer to an archive in so far as it leaves material, bookish traces that can be preserved and, therefore, spark interpretations over time. Performance, on the other hand, is an embodied form of knowledge, a repertoire.18 For Taylor, the distinct nature of knowledge and its embodiments is definitely not a fixed structure, and the tension embedded in the production and preservation of knowledge cannot be reconciled easily.19 Although Taylor’s focus is to reclaim the understudied complexity of the knowledge of repertoire, her implicit goal is to problematize the reception of knowledge production by analyzing how perceiving the staged repertoire can be a form of empowerment. This goal of complicating the production and reception of knowledge, I argue, is also the primary focus of Tian’s experiment with text and theatrics, as we can see from the previous examples of the ways in which Tian destabilizes the sense of subjectivity and the references to water. This logic of destabilizing the referent can be scrutinized with more nuances in the ways the body is conceptualized in the text. I want to turn to another example, in order to bring into sharper relief the tension Tian is trying to achieve.

In this second example, Fa Hai chastises White Snake for deceiving Xu Xian and thereby tricking him into marriage: “You are originally a snake spirit, logically dwelling in this world with the body of a snake. / Why transform into human shape, alluring a human mind and

18 Taylor, The Archive 16–33. 19 Ibid., 28–36. 67 bringing disgrace on yourself?” (71). For Fa Hai, the body is a physical marker that guarantees the uniqueness of humans and ensures the order of morality and ethics in the world. For him,

White Snake’s transformation from a snake into a human, as an intruder in a human form, is thus intolerable.

If Fa Hai’s cognizance of the body relies on the visual appearance or the exteriority of the body, White Snake’s contextualization focuses more on the interiority of the body: “Ay … How to differentiate a beast from a human? How to differentiate a beast from a human? Heart, liver, bones, blood, flesh, body, / eyes, ears, nose, mouth, anus. / Wholehearted treatment, unparalleled genuineness” (70). Here, White Snake sees the body as a site and as an embodiment of the mind, as well as the locus of emotions and feelings. More than that, whereas Fa Hai sees difference in corporeality from the aspect of natural appearance, White Snake emphasizes the microorganism of the body. What is inside the body is the abstract idea of affect as well as actual organs. For

White Snake, the similarity between two kinds of body, human and snake, lies in the functionality of each. In other words, seen in terms of the actual dynamics of the body, the line of demarcation between snake and human becomes blurred.

Xu Xian’s struggle is somewhere in between the positions of Fa Hai and White Snake.

For Xu Xian, the body is both about actuality and interpretation. After seeing White Snake, who came to the temple to bring her husband home, Xu Xian plainly shows his fear and hatred of his wife: “In the past, she seemed to be charming and captivating. / In the present, she seems to be two pig intestines” (74–75). The problem is not right now, White Snake is literally in human shape, as Xu Xian asks, “Can a snake grow hands and feet? / Can a snake cook and make dishes?”

(69). White Snake’s perspective on the functionality of the organs does not work out here. The body for Xu Xian is an interpretative accumulation. Even though the current appearance of 68

White Snake is human, she nevertheless had a snake’s body in the past. Because of the stereotypical image of snakes, White Snake’s current corporeal existence is ignored by Xu Xian.

White Snake’s body becomes a sign that points to primitiveness and memory. The body is thus subject to change on the basis of perception.

Fa Hai, White Snake, and Xu Xian present three distinctive strands of thought about the self. In Fa Hai’s perspective, the self is a transcendent being that is not affected by actual existence. A Snake is, after all, a snake. However, appearance is just the surface. The body has depth, a combination of the abstract and the concrete, constituting the communicability of the body. White Snake might, therefore, argue that although we do not share the same body, we do share the same elements of the body with the same ability to sense. The self here is more than a physical object, but an existence with the capacity to live and to love. To some degree, Xu Xian oscillates between Fa Hai and White Snake. His dilemma over whether to restore his relationship with White Snake derives from the emotions vacillating between positioning the self as permanent or as subject to interpretation—a dilemma that remains unresolvable at the textual level. In the end, Green Snake attempts to kill Xu Xian in revenge for his desertion of her master.

Xu Xian, turning to White Snake, yells his final lines: “Ay! Help me” (75). Then they all become bystanders again. No real ending, in the sense of closure or conclusion, of the text is offered.

Departing from the Text

From the ways Tian destabilizes structure and signs as well as the unresolved ending, a sense of questioning both the idea of self and the sufficiency of the text is evident. To some extent, he shows no interest in reduplicating the canon. By revising the plot and thus intensifying the tension among those characters, Tian alienates the audience from the traditional text, adding 69 another layer of narrative—the bystanders—and leaving the ending unresolved. Tian implicitly demonstrates suspicion toward the text. Comparing the text and the performances of White Water, an analysis I will elaborate in the following pages, we can find that this text for Tian is more like a scenario than a script. His attitude toward the text of the play echoes White Snake’s attitude toward the body: it is internally negotiable.

From Tian’s ambivalence toward a linguistic text and his elaboration of each individual performative aspect, I argue that, in fact, his understanding of theatre is fairly close to Antonin

Artaud’s idea of the theatre of cruelty. As one of the founders of modern Western theatre, Artaud dedicated himself to separating theatre practice from linguistic text: “the theater, an independent and autonomous art, must, in order to revive or simply to live, realize what differentiates it from text, pure speech, literature, and all other fixed and written means” (106). For Artaud, theatre has its own language: “I say that the stage is a concrete physical place which asks to be filled, and to be given its own concrete language to speak” (37). This language is not in a written form. It is

“intended [to come] from the senses” and “had first to satisfy the senses, [such] that there is a poetry of the senses and as there is a poetry of language” (37). In other words, the language of theatre is a physical one, addressing itself to our bodily senses. The theatre of cruelty, in Artaud’s conceptualization, is a total mobilization of all the theatrical elements on stage, which creates a novel and shocking effect on the audience.20

Jacques Derrida offers a perceptive comment on Artaud and his theatre: “the grammar of the theatre of cruelty, of which he [Artaud] said that it is to be found, will always remain the inaccessible limit of a representation which is not repetition, of a re-presentation which is full presence, which does not carry its double within itself as its death, of a present which does not repeat itself, that is, of a present outside time, a non present” (57). From Derrida’s point of view,

20 Artaud 84–100. 70

Artaud’s refusal of linguistic text is a rejection of a logos embedded in the action of writing as a repetition of the world. Derrida, thus, implicitly suggests that what Artaud attempts to create on stage is original experience. In order for this experience to be original, the performance should reject any repetition and be forgotten in order to live in the present. However, what exactly does the rejection of repetition mean?

Christopher Innes argues that in Artaud’s writings, the real content of cruelty is uncertain, and most scholars have interpreted Artaud from a discursive level and ignored his actual practice.21 Although he concludes, from an examination of Artaud’s records of his experiences of performance that Artaud intended to create a non-representative performance in order to challenge Western civilization, Innes points out that, in fact, Artaud relied on strict rehearsals through which he seemed to wish to eliminate any and all uncertainty from performance (93). In other words, Artaud’s performance is itself a repetition. We can also infer from Innes’s analysis of Artaud that he thinks Artaud does not actually differ much from his contemporaries in that he, too, seeks inspiration from non-Western traditions and was very influenced by Western aesthetics and cultural elements.22 In short, judging from Artaud’s performance, Innes insinuates that

Artaud does not actually make things as new as his followers would imagine.

Here, I do not intend to dig into interpretations of Artaud’s work in order to suggest any definitive answer; I bring the matter up rather to point out that the key issue in the debate around his discourse and theory revolves around whether he can really undermine the exclusive significance of the linguistic text, a problem that might be justified at the discursive level, as

Derrida shows. However, theatre is a space in which to “do” something, as Innes strongly

21 Innes 59–61. 22 Ibid., 89–93. 71 implies by making a distinction between linguistic text and live performance.23 In Artaud’s practice, the bridges between texts and stage remain almost imperceptible. Even though he imagines theatrical happenings as a sensational experience, how to achieve this goal is precisely the problem to which Artaud’s followers seek an answer in his mystic writings in vain.

To what degree Tian had knowledge of Artaud is uncertain. In fact, Tian ambiguously denies this association: “Many people said that I am very ‘cruel,’ pretty close to ‘Artaud.’ Facing many questions like these, I only asked myself: ‘what are my members and I doing?’” (“body”

232). Yet, what connects Tian to Artaud is exactly Tian’s alienation from canonical texts and interpretations (including those produced by Artaud). We certainly can find echoes of Artaud’s vision in Tian’s practice. Through incorporating elements of rhymed lines and bystanders, Tian creates a distinct pattern pertaining to the structure of the play. Such a structure, however, does not create a stable textual world. The sound of the play emphasizes the aural effect of the lines, an attempt seemingly used to evoke the association of the convention of classical Chinese literature. The story itself is partly a heritage object, which has been transformed from oral folklore to the plays of Xiqu. The deployment of bystanders further disturbs the process of identification for both performers and readers/spectators. All these techniques, despite the various dramatic effects, demonstrate that the construction of an enclosed, concrete textual world can hardly have been Tian’s goal.

As I noted in the Introduction, the late 1980s and early 1990s was a time during which local modern theatre practitioners were searching for ways to break the prevailing framework of realism as well as the aesthetics of Huaju, in pursuit of a more local Taiwanese identity and forms. For many Taiwanese practitioners, the primary task was to get rid of the previous conservatism in theatre that was entangled with Greater China sentiment, as imposed by the

23 Ibid., 93–94. 72

KMT in the promotion of anti-communist plays in the 1950s and 1960s. Thus, practitioners in the 1980s and 1990s shared a sense of ambivalence toward dramatic plays. Through such an adaptation of The Legend of White Snake, Tian complicates the issue of representation in theatre in his deployment of quasi-chorus characters via which he ponders the problem of subjectivity.

By presenting the debate among Fa Hai, White Snake, and Xu Xian, he vaguely addresses the constructedness of the body, an important point that I will elaborate in the later sections of this chapter. In short, given so many techniques incorporated in such a short one-act play, Tian only opens a set of questions, a phenomenon I will consider as the symptom of Tian’s desire to say something more, not through text, but via live performance. Indeed, the bodily performance has its own expressivity and delivers messages that always exceed the framework of text.

What Performance Can Do?

Why does enacted performance matter so much to Tian? Through incorporating cultural references to performance as a mode of becoming, Tian, in fact, experiments with the possibility of shaping the Taiwanese body. In a newspaper article, “Drama, I Love, I Do,” Tian notes that his conception of theatre may partly be influenced by Brecht’s epic theatre and Alienation Effect. He also mentions his idea that “social structure yields cultures, arts, and value systems,” which he connects to the thought of Durkheim.24 Tian suggests that “This viewpoint pushes me to reflect on our society. To what degree can theatre reflect social truth?” Then, he recalls his memory of social turmoil, such as “the 228 incident”—in which the clash between Chinese immigrants

(mainlanders) and Taiwanese people (islanders), resulting in death, became the primary unspeakable trauma of the Taiwanese people—and the so-called “White Terror” of the severe

24 As the source was a newspaper article, and at that time, Tian was only an undergraduate student, it would be fair to think, at least in this article, that Tian did not really cite Durkheim in an academic way but was more likely to appropriate the name and articulated his own ideas. 73 political oppression inflicted by the KMT government during the period of martial law. He concludes by stating again that “theatre should be a social conversation.” Tian appears to be arguing, following Brecht, that theatre should be a form of social interrogation. Even so, Tian never clearly articulates how Brecht influenced his works but only mentions that Brecht once embodied his ideal.

After articulating a linkage between theatre and society, Tian shifts his emphasis to the questions of “What is a Chinese body?” and “What is a Taiwanese body?” His thought starts from the idea of Chinese medicine and his work Ping Fan (平方, 1993), which was inspired by the concepts “Qi and blood” and their “circulation” in Chinese medicine. Tian, thus, emphasizes

“meridians,” “inner energy,” and the “breath” of the actors. He concludes that there should be another kind of body, a markedly Taiwanese body that differs from the Western one. The West has ballet and modern dance. Japan has Kabuki. “But what do we have?” asks Tian. Referring to the “fact” of biological difference, Tian begins to concentrate on the problem of “cultural difference” and proposes his own system of “human-culture-body-performance.”

This newspaper article is a rare textual trace attesting to Tian’s idea of the connection between society and theatre, his cognizance of the body, and his rationale for actors’ training. In brief, he talks about things he wants to do and why. Nevertheless, we can already detect certain problems in Tian’s conceptualization of these issues. How does theatre reflect society? What exactly can the body do to affect the participant? Looking forward from this early article, we might anticipate that Tian aligns himself with Brecht and leftist ideologies. Indeed, Tian’s early works, such as Love Homosexual in Chinese, do directly attack the social hierarchy and related social norms. However, in White Water, Tian’s criticism of ideologies and social norms is 74 interwoven with multiple cultural references embedded in the constructedness of the biological body.

In White Water, we see that Tian utilized the basic scenario of White Water as the site of his experiments on acting training. According to his private “Notes on Acting Training,” we can see that he brought his actors to wild nature, “hot springs,” “rivers,” and “seas” and invented lots of patterns of physical postures in order to explore the possibilities of actors’ bodies:

75

Figure 3. Tian’s explanation on his conception of walking, which emphasizes the changed rhythm of moving feet.

76

Figure 4. Different styles of body in Tian’s training method. Two figures are part of Tian’s “Notes on Acting Training.” unpublished. Credits: Theatre Phenomenon. The notes are provided in their entirety in Chung Te-Fan 153–188.

77

These notes record Tian’s early experiments with devising various bodily postures for the performance of White Water.25 In these specific styles, Tian sees the body as a medium for either imitating animals or communicating with the natural environment. To put it simply, Tian is exploring how to formulate the Taiwanese body. Whether or not we agree with Tian’s essentialist notion of a Taiwanese body, we can conclude that, for Tian, the existence of the biological body is never neutral or natural. Tian’s vision is of searching or reconstructing the cultural body through a reshaping of the biological body. Through complicating the existence of the body in performance, Tian contemplates the issues of what Taiwan and the Taiwanese body are. Given the fact that neither the text nor the performance exclusively depict a sense of closure or a conclusion, Tian’s answer to the open-ended question of the Taiwanese body might also be ambiguous. This sense of uncertainty, I suggest, should be contextualized in light of Tian’s perceptions of life and death, as I will show in the next section, and, more importantly, is related to the development of modern theatre in the Taiwanese context.

Tian’s Experiment as Conscious Constructivism

As noted in the opening to this chapter, in Tian’s work, we can find intriguing resonances with Artaud’s theatre of cruelty. Artaud’s vision of performance, is probably better, and more mystically, articulated in “An Affective Athleticism.” For Artaud, an actor should be like “an athlete of the heart,” who knows how to express the soul via the body.26 Artaud is not the only director who emphasized the body. As Innes suggests, one has to seek the explicit realization of

Artaud’s affective athleticism in Meyerhold and his theatre of biomechanics and constructivism

25 There are more than twenty styles in this set of training. See Chung Te-Fan 153. 26 Artaud 133–37. 78 in Russian theatre since the 1910s.27 Of course, Tian is a local Taiwanese practitioner. Yet, his attempts to reconfigure the Taiwanese body is loaded with cultural codes that connect him conceptually him with the genealogy of constructivism in theatre.

Constructivism, a term derived from the European avant-garde in the early twentieth century, together with the training method of biomechanics, describes Meyerhold’s theatre practice. Despite complexities in its dissemination and evolution in the European context, constructivism in Meyerhold’s hands means a practice of experimenting with theatrical architecture, which is based on a “scientific principle” that emphasizes the utilitarian function of stage setting.28 Thus, in actual practice, Meyerhold and the stage designers with whom he collaborated constructed sets with frames, platforms and lighting equipment, used techniques that break down the illusion of the proscenium arch in traditional representational theatre.29

“Biomechanics” is Meyerhold’s system of acting training that, under the influence of the idea of constructivism, was designed to maximize the performers’ bodily expressivity, so that actors can meet any demand from the director and consciously create a theatrical spectacle that evokes the spectators’ imagination.30 In Meyerhold’s words, “the actor must train his material (the body), so that it is capable of executing instantaneously those tasks which are dictated externally (by the actor, the director)” (198). In this kind of theatre, Meyerhold’s expectation is that “the actor reaches the point where he experiences the excitation which communicates itself to the spectator”

(199).

The conceptual objective of constructivism is to induce social intervention in theatre. In reality, Meyerhold’s historical era saw the revolution and war in Russia, specifically, and Europe

27 Innes 92. 28 Meyerhold, On Theatre 198. 29 Ibid., 183–97. 30 Schmidt xii–xiii. 79 in the first half of the twentieth century during which the simplicity of constructivism intersected with scientific power, political climate, and economic difficulty.31 For Meyerhold, the human

“gesture” can represent the past, on the one hand, and, on the other, anticipate the future, as it demonstrates “the notion of probability to human behavior” (Schmidt xiv). In short, Meyerhold’s theatrics rely on the expressivity of the human body in pursuit of theatrical aesthetics in opposition to the banal socialist realism of modern European society.

Through intercultural exchange, mainly that of non-Western overseas students, constructivism as well as the European avant-garde were introduced to Japan in the 1920s as a defining characteristic in the Japanese avant-garde movement Mavo. The leader of Mavo,

Tomoyoshi Murayama, proclaimed a theory of “conscious constructivism,” which designated a combination of the multilayered practice of European avant-garde and specificities of modern

Japanese society.32 Like the constructivism represented by Meyerhold, Mavo artists also applied geometric materialization in artistic creation, which explored the possibility of media and material with the goal of anti-realism to represent modern life in Japanese society. Unlike

Meyerhold, who jettisoned Freudian sexual motivation for individuality, Mavo artists sought personal pleasure in sexual representation that challenged the norms of social institutionalization.33 The impact of Mavo shrank after the 1930s, as did the practice of Japanese avant-garde performance in general. Both were disrupted by the Second World War and not revived until the 1960s. In the 1960s, the inception of Angura (literally “underground”—an avant-garde, post-shingeki, little theatre) designated a new form of Japanese modern performance that was heavily influenced by social and cultural experiences of war, the atomic

31 Berghaus 194–203. 32 Weinsenfeld 3–5. 33 Ibid., 217–19. 80 bomb, and the post-war social demonstrations triggered by the forced renewal of the ANPO

(Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan).34

The influence of Mavo on Angura and the ways in which the two are dissimilar are not the primary concern of my study here.35 The relevant point I draw from this historical connection is that in both movements, the body served as a contested site for practitioners to focus an attack on verisimilitude and to pursue an alternative, usually radical, relationship between performers and spectators. Such vision and practice have fascinated Taiwanese students pursuing studies in Japan since the 1960s, who, on returning to Taiwan, promoted similar ideas.36

From the performance of White Water, we can safely conclude that Tian’s interest is not in postmodernism per se, i.e., not in pursuing some random collage, but is rather closer to the genealogy of constructivism. In Tian’s context, the aesthetics of Western avant-garde performance (such as those staged by Artaud, Brecht, and Meyerhold, to name a few) had become critical knowledge for local practitioners who wanted to break the constraints of realism.37 In addition to Western influence, the idea of the body as a locus of rebellion had, in the eyes of Taiwanese practitioners, become a crucial, if not singular, aspect of modern Japanese performance, as represented by their perceptions of Japanese practitioners such as Hijikata

Tatsumi (Butoh) and Suzuki Tadashi (Suzuki Method). In Tian’s plan for acting training, we can see that he draws energy from both directions:

34 Senda 7–14. 35 It is worth noting that in the current scholarship on Japanese theatre studies, this is a palpable gap between the early twentieth century and after the 1960s that awaits exploration. For an account of Mavo, see Weinsenfeld. For an account of Angura, see Senda. 36 Wang Mo-Lin’s City, Theatre, and Body is the most representative example up to the present day. 37 Strictly speaking, starting from the 1960s, some Taiwanese practitioners had already proposed practicing the Western avant-garde. Partly due to political oppression, their influence has remained marginal, if not totally absent from the history. See the analysis of Theatre magazine in the Introduction. 81

Figure 5. Tian’s plan for acting training. Unpublished. Credit: Critical Point Theatre Phenomenon.

Here, Tian lists three main sections: “society, culture, body,” “performing methods,” and

“music, performance.” The second section offers a brief introduction to Western theatre, beginning with Greek theatre and Shakespeare and moving on to modern directors including 82

Stanislavski, Meyerhold, Artaud, Grotowski, and Brecht, as well as Eastern theatre represented by both Japanese traditional theatre (Noh and Kabuki) and modern performance (Suzuki Tadashi and Butoh), all paired with the traditional theatre in Taiwan, and Jingju (Peking Opera or Beijing

Opera). We do not know the depth of Tian’s knowledge of any of these performance traditions.

Strictly speaking, there is no direct evidence to show that Tian, as an amateur director and playwright, had any detailed or nuanced appreciation of the things listed. Still, it is clear that

Tian draws his inspiration from both the West and the East, especially in terms of the genealogy of constructivism. In “music and performance,” Tian thinks about rhythm, gesture, and space—elements that can be traced back to Meyerhold’s biomechanics and constructivism.38

When Tian talks about the body and society with an emphasis on social hierarchy and economic stratification, it can also be inferred that he values theatre as a social act. From the performance of White Water, we also can find that like those of the Mavo artists, Tian’s performance explores the issue of sexuality and its social constraints. In this outline, the body for Tian functions as a container that can potentially take in and enact various performance systems. Within this genealogy of constructivism from Europe to Japan, Tian relies heavily on techniques that foreground an expressiveness of the body that challenges realistic representations.

However, modern Taiwanese performance is missing in Tian’s training plan. Instead, Tian explores traditional rites and performances in Taiwanese society and the behavior patterns of the body in folk religions. There is no conceptual space here for “modern” Taiwanese performance, other than that of Tian’s making. The suspension of the discussion of modern theatre in Taiwan might be derived from Tian’s unfinished attempt to invent the Taiwanese body that should be pursued from both biological and cultural differences. In other words, the ultimate goal of this

38 We can also find evidence in live performance. For instance, in the video recording of Love Homosexual in Chinese, the actors performed on various platforms. For video recordings, see Electronic Theater Intermix in Taiwan. http://www.eti-tw.com. 83 training is to devise a Taiwanese body that, for Tian, does not yet exist. This process of realizing the Taiwanese body points to the distinction between Tian and the foreign predecessors of constructivism. Tian’s practice in playwriting and directing styles constitutes a “postcolonial constructivism” that is deeply implicated in Taiwan’s multilayered political and historical contexts. In this paradigm, there is no simple dichotomy between any construction and deconstruction of Taiwanese subjectivity. Rather, Taiwan remains a question yet to be answered.

In the following sections, I will explore the cultural references Tian included in White Water with an eye toward elucidating the concepts of the human and the Taiwanese body that he continued to pursue.

The Performing Body and Intercultural Codes

Just as the plot of White Water is appropriated from The Legend of White Snake, in regard to performance, the primary style can be recognized broadly as a borrowing from Xiqu, the specific instantiation of which turns out to be a collection of distorted performance codes. Tian incorporates abundant cultural, political, and biological references to Taiwanese society in performance. With this style, the performance of White Water does not merely connote traditional Chinese cultures. Instead, it becomes an intersection of intercultural codes. In my analysis, I will demonstrate that Tian’s practice of criticizing cultural traditions creates a paradoxical effect of not just deviating the modern from the classical—a result previously categorized by scholars with labels including little theatre, postmodernism, and political theatre39—but also of re-contextualizing the classical in the context of modern Taiwan. In other words, more than just challenging and deconstructing social norms, Tian’s work is a form of

39 See Chung Ming Der, The Little Theatre 211–17. 84

“conscious constructivism,” an experimental direction that highlights the interplay between aesthetic innovations and identity formations.

Xiqu

Traces of Xiqu are not difficult to find in the performance of White Water. The way actors speak relies on prolonging the syllables of Chinese characters, an aural effect close to the convention of speaking in Xiqu. At the beginning of the performance, after the collective performance of the bystanders, White Snake starts to deliver her soliloquy, beginning with a long sigh, in the style of falsetto. Adding to the rhythmic lines, the actor who performs as White

Snake, who is a female, quickly reminds the audience of the common practice of cross-gender acting in Xiqu. The actors also attempt to create a specific pattern of movements drawn from the repertoire of Xiqu, such as Fa Hai’s striding posture, White Snake’s imitation of the process of cleaning a house, and Xu Xian’s action of waving white strips.

In brief, for a general audience who is not unfamiliar with the aesthetics of traditional

Chinese theatre, these elements of performance bear a surface resemblance to the conventions of

Xiqu. However, at the same time, the performance delivers the message that it is by no means

Xiqu. For example, the visual effect, which I shall come back to later, of White Snake who is half-naked is obviously not part of the tradition of Xiqu. Being naked is a palpable marker that foregrounds the distinction between White Water and Xiqu. In other words, even as the main actors’ voices perform in a quasi-Xiqu style, their bodies enact something else entirely.

The practice of traditional Chinese theatre typically aims to create an effect of engulfing spectators through maximizing every possible theatrical technique. But the aesthetics of Xiqu vary drastically from mimetic to expressive. A Xiqu performance depends heavily on the pursuit 85 and demonstration of codified and beautified actions, including singing, speaking, acting, and acrobatic fighting. These four fundamental elements are performed in specific styles that are in accord with the integration of stage factors, such as music, costumes, cosmetics, and props. In addition, each character also has to be categorized into images of individual stock types and to act with designed gestures, expressions, and movements. In short, it is fair to say that every bit of performance in Xiqu follows a precise formalistic convention. Indeed, as Tan Fan and Lu Wei have claimed, “The art of traditional Chinese theatre [Xiqu] is a unique artistic system […]. The fundamental characteristics are conventions” (23–24). It is in this predetermined framework that actors pursue their artistic careers. Tian’s experiment with creating stylized postures in White

Water seems to imitate the aesthetics of Xiqu. However, to be considered a Xiqu work, a production must produce a collective effect through the amalgamation of various performing conventions. In White Water, however, the organic picture an audience might easily perceive in

Xiqu is missing.

In the original performance of White Water (1993), Tian deploys four male actors to perform the characters in The Legend of White Snake. The reconstructed version of 2001, the video archive my analysis is based, shows the same deployment. This means that White Snake and Green Snake are female characters performed by male actors. In the performative moments, the actor cast as White Snake endeavors to generate female characteristics in his performance, including speaking in a soft, high-pitched voice and gesturing with his fingers in curves with a relatively gentle, slow movement on stage. The style of gender-crossing performance has a long tradition in Xiqu, whereby performers transform themselves into the imagined characters through costumes, makeup, and performance. For instance, the character of White Snake in the context of

Xiqu is performed by a heroine type, or Dan, which requires feminine costumes and makeup that 86 create a sense of modesty and obedience in line with traditional ideas about the virtues of

Chinese women. Nonetheless, the appearance of those characters in Tian’s play, all in white and partly naked, noticeably differs from the costumes used in Xiqu. In White Water, White Snake is performed by a male actor, clad only in thong-like underwear. When the actor playing White

Snake attempts to perform in a corresponding feminine fashion, the revelation of his body clashes with the predetermined images of the classical (and biological) woman in the original story.

Similar examples are abundant. Unlike the stage of Xiqu, in the performance of White

Water, there is hardly a practice of singing and the accompaniment of musical instruments. The stylized movements of the actors are also far from dance. Singing, music, and dance are all indispensable elements of Xiqu. Hence, in the performance, what really reminds spectators of

Xiqu is merely a set of dissected and twisted postures.40 Put another way, the audience immersed in traditional Chinese culture can easily understand that Tian is drawing from Xiqu as a set of techniques, though not as an organic whole. Tian’s allocation of movements from the Xiqu repertoire is strategic and piecemeal, rather than holistic.

Why does Tian bring these Xiqu references into the performance of White Water? Given these tensions between Xiqu and White Water as a performance of modern theatre, two key questions arise: How do these traces of Xiqu influence the stage? How does the practice of incorporating the mimicked and distorted conventions of Xiqu affect the range of possible interpretations of White Water as a work of modern theatre? Here, I am not so interested in further analyzing a traditional question of mimesis, querying the degree to which Tian is faithful to the aesthetics of Xiqu. Most important to me is that, by invoking the impression of traditional

Chinese theatre, Tian’s directorial language seems to rely heavily on the performativity of actors’

40 This association with Xiqu can hardly be seen as positive. See Huang Cheng-Huang 109–10. 87 bodies. The acting body serves Tian as a laboratory in which traces of traditional performance techniques and bits of cultural knowledge are interpolated into an intriguing blend of the traditional and the modern. In the following analysis, I will argue that through incorporating those imitations or traces of performance techniques, Tian creates a sense of questioning and renewing the past of Taiwan. Evocations of Xiqu, thus, become a tool for strengthening the present.

Xiqu and Artaud

In discussing Tian in theatre studies in Taiwan, very few scholars have scrutinized the connection between Xiqu and White Water, the suggestion being that White Water is neither a

Xiqu play nor a performance in any Xiqu genre. For some critics, the play is just mimicry, unsuccessful mimicry at that.41 However, what does it mean to say that White Water is a performance of modern theatre given that the definition of modern theatre is far from clear? I want to argue, instead, that Tian’s ambivalence toward the expressiveness of the linguistic text and his fragmented inclusion of Xiqu mark his theatre, in fact, as close to Artaud’s conceptualization of modern theatre.

For Artaud, the ultimate goal of theatre was a heterogeneous happening in which every stage factor functions distinctively to accomplish a sensually totalizing effect. In this experience,

“violent physical images crush and hypnotize the sensibility of the spectator seized by the theatre”

(83). Despite this, Artaud never clearly articulated or fully realized his vision of performance in actual theatre experience. Still, it can safely be said that an orderly performance does not fit into the spectrum of Artaudian theatre, as least based on the way Artaud conceptualizes theatre. The

41 Huang Cheng Huang 109. 88

Theatre of Cruelty is, thus, an event that challenges the preexisting framework of the banal world and questions the efficacy of representation.

Xiqu and the theatre of cruelty are not without commonalities. Like the practice of Xiqu, the theatre of cruelty also seeks the highest intensity of performance. In the theatre of cruelty, performance is an action of expression rather than of representation inasmuch as every element on stage should have its own unique significance. These aspects do have, more or less, resonance with the general aesthetics of Xiqu. The connection between Artaud and White Water is more abstract. Artaud’s vision for the theatre of cruelty was to evacuate the audience, dragging them out of the dullness of daily life through the application of metaphysical violence on stage.

Similarly, in the performance of White Water, with its mimicry of or piecemeal borrowing from

Xiqu, the sense of violence is generated at an abstract level, embodied through a quasi-ritual form, which is essential to eliminating the dominance of linguistic representation.

The most striking moment in White Water is exactly the deployment of a ritualistic performance. In the scene where White Snake finally sees Xu Xian at the Jin Shan Temple, the latter remains at center stage, crouching on the ground and struggling with his simultaneous affection for and fear of White Snake. Fa Hai stands at the right of the stage in a “horse stance” with his hands moving in a circle back and forth (reminding us of the philosophy of Taiji in

Taoism, a point I shall come back to later). White Snake and Green Snake, at stage left, are also in a horse stance. But unlike Fa Hai, whose legs remain planted, White Snake and Green Snake stamp on the ground rhythmically together with their hands clapping once with each other and once slapping their thighs. They are humming a tune that evokes the ritual of an indigenous

Taiwanese people. At this moment, the application of this quasi-ritual performance oscillates between the stylization of Xiqu and a ritualistic template that may code, in its rhythm and 89 physicality (as much as in its appropriation of native ceremony), as somehow primitive. Xu

Xian’s internal struggle is dramatically visualized by Fa Hai and his opponents, White Snake and

Green Snake. One side is human nature and rationality, another, the supernatural and irrationality.

The stylized performance of the actors, then, creates an intense sensational experience that is rather abrupt and further deconstructs the dramatic illusion.

Can we then say that Tian is experimenting with juxtaposing the aesthetics of the theatre of cruelty with those of Xiqu? As already indicated by scholars invested in intercultural theatre, such as Min Tian, the intercultural communications between Asian theatrical traditions, mainly

Xiqu, and the constellation of Western modern theatre are infused with “displacement,” as the differences in cultural, social, political, and economic contexts cannot be easily eliminated.42

Echoing Min Tian’s insight, I do not wish to suggest that Tian is simply finding and duplicating some similarities between Xiqu and the theatre of cruelty. On a conceptual level, the dissimilarity between the two traditions is distinct. The theatre of cruelty in Artaud’s eyes is primarily a practice of decentralizing the importance of the linguistic text. Xiqu is not a performance of this sort. Literariness embedded in text is a crucial element for Xiqu, in which actors practice the art of singing as a fundamental part of the performance repertoire. In the Xiqu performance, what is central are the beauty and mastery of physical actions in both movement and articulation. The Xiqu performance, therefore, requires sophisticated appreciation on the part of the spectators both visually and aurally. Shocking and overwhelming the audience, as imagined by Artaud, is hardly the purpose of Xiqu. In short, although the superficial, material elements of Xiqu and the theatre of cruelty may bear some resemblance to one another, the audience’s primary affective response to that appearance is meant to be entirely different: deep familiarity in the case of Xiqu, alienation in the case of the theatre of cruelty.

42 The Poetics of Difference and Displacement 157–60. 90

The stage of White Water is actually an intriguing combination of the concepts of Xiqu and those of the theatre of cruelty. On the one hand, Tian attempts to simulate the aesthetics of

Xiqu more from a formalistic level. Actors do not follow a “genuine” set of conventions as in

Xiqu, which aims to generate a totalizing effect of beauty, but strive instead to create the distinct impression of stereotypical movement. The use of white strips, which reminds us of “water sleeves” in Xiqu, is just one example. In the original context of Xiqu performance, the performance of water sleeves mostly emerges at the emotional climax experienced by a character, as a technique to show an actor’s mastery of dance and singing. In White Water, Xu Xian merely keeps waving those white strips from the very beginning of the performance without any accumulation of emotional intensity. For most of the performance, the motion of the white strips is similar to a scenic decoration, along with Xu Xian’s constant strolling back and forth on the stage, such that he functions as a moving background while others are speaking. In this vein, the performance of waving white strips, in fact, contributes to a disconnection from emotion as well as from beauty.

On the other hand, rather than stemming from Xiqu practice, the way Tian manipulates stylistic patterns of performance draws energy from the Artaudian concept of theatre in that he underlines the individual existence on stage, bodily gesture, voice, blocking, and stage setting, for instance, with a disharmonious picture of performance.43 Again, after the opening segment of the performance, White Snake begins to recall the happiness of everyday life with Xu Xian through a sequence of physical actions of cleaning house and cooking, while the rest of actors move horizontally on stage, an assemblage that does not adhere to any particular spatial formulation. It can be said that White Snake’s performance at this moment is disturbed and

43 Tian “Vision, Acoustic, and then Feeling.” 91 disrupted by the rest of the actors, who are shuffling on the stage and waving their hands, forming a sense of collective disorder.

In brief, Tian belongs to neither of the two conventions. He does not pursue the effect of collectivity or beauty seen in Xiqu, nor does he attempt to overwhelm the audience with shocking events as in Artaudian theatre. The performance in White Water is relatively eclectic. What we see on stage is the conscious demonstration of the repetition of actions prescribed in other conventions, the incomplete shadows of various theatrical traditions, just as the text of White

Water is the combination of classical and vernacular articulations.

The key here is the sense of not belonging. Tian’s aesthetics are ambiguous. He creates tension by juxtaposing two kinds of performance: the predetermined conventions of Xiqu and the intensified rendition of the mise-en-scène of the Artaudian stage. If Tian demonstrates a certain sense of distrust toward the linguistic text, he also does not aim to create something stable in performance. He draws energy from distinct traditions, but does not really adhere to any conventions in any genuine or consistent way. What we see on the stage of White Water is not a creation built on binary opposition but an oscillation that is chaotic by design.

In White Water, performance is inclusive and evasive at the same time. Such performance, on the one hand, has its roots in the formality of Xiqu; on the other hand, it digresses and thereby incorporates other cultural elements, bringing counter-voices onto the stage without the intention of putting anything in order. Through this directorial rendition, clusters of cultural codes, both textual and performative elements, are floating on stage, positioning the performance in a state of fluidity. As Tian himself explains, commenting on the meaning of his theatre ensemble, the

Critical Point Theatre Phenomenon, the term “critical point” signifies the boiling point at which liquid and gas become intermingled and chaotic, and what he attempts to create on stage is to 92 turn a variety of theatre phenomena into “a kind of history” (Socialism 90). The sense of modern theatre, as seen in Tian’s practice, I argue, is precisely this liquid sense of performance, which creates a sense of continuous change.

Performing Death

In the opening scene, adding to the spectacle of the four actors dressed in white, attached to the stage with long white strips are six poles approximately 2 inches wide and 3 feet long, as part of the background setting. Three on the right stage, three on the left, these poles set up an invisible frame that designates the space of White Water, a place infused with cultural references.

Like the bodily movements the actors perform, insinuating the tradition of Xiqu, the long, thin strips of white cloth remind the spectators in a Han cultural milieu of death.44 In Han society, white is the color of death. For example, people today still give a white envelope to the relatives of the dead person at a funeral. White strips and white clothing are mostly used on occasions when death is imminent or actually present, such as in times of war and at funerals, as a sign to guide the ghost and to indicate the death. Thus, on a symbolic level, white strips assign an uncanny space for the coexistence of both the dead and the living, a liminal temporality during which the dead is emerging and departing for the afterlife but has not yet entirely left the secular world.

Drawing a parallel between performance and death might not be a surprising angle, as this has been a main concern for modern directors, such as Artaud. However, the question is this:

Why did Tian add the sense of death to the White Water performance, given that the original

44 I used the term “Han” here following the sense of “Imagined Communities” suggested by Benedict Anderson. I am fully aware of the permeability of this kind of demarcating concept, and the risk of using it. Yet, I risk deploying this term in order to show the process of uncovering the ideologies that Tian critiques in White Water. 93 story does not include this idea?45 What was Tian attempting to address by incorporating the shadow of death? In regard to the signification of death, can we (I) associate the setting with any specific cultural references? Taking a hermeneutic risk of interpreting the case study from the life of the practitioner, here I want to point out that Tian, as HIV positive who learned he was infected in 1987, was haunted by the prospect of his own death, something that is evident in his theatre, as this photograph of Tian (Figure 6) shows. This photograph was taken in 1996, the last year of Tian’s life when he attended the World AIDS Day event. In his hands is a “water lotus lamp,” a symbolic sacrifice for the ghost, a practice common in the “Ghost Festival” of East Asia.

In this photograph, Tian seems to be meditating. His dark figure forms a sharp contrast with the water lotus lamp. In this moment of his life, he was threatened with imminent death.

45 At least there is no reference to death for major characters in the story of The Legend of White Snake. 94

Figure 6. Tian with a “water lotus lamp.” The original source unknown. Qtd. in Shi Li 126.

The punctum, to borrow Barthes’s term,46 for me is that behind Tian, there are witnesses, some with their eyes closed as if conversing with the dead, remaining at a certain distance from Tian.

Tian, somehow isolated in space, might represent both the living and the dead at the same time.

Shi Li, the commentator of this photograph says that “it is as if Tian is prophetically mourning for his own death (126). Although this interpretation might be too rough and ungrounded, from this frozen moment, we can clearly see the coexistence of the sentiments of death and life.

46 Barthes 27. 95

That death and life are two sides of the same coin is a sentiment also conveyed in one of the advertising posters for White Water shown in Figure 7:

Figure 7. The poster of White Water (1994). Credit: Critical Point Theatre Phenomenon.

In this poster for White Water, we can see the head of a male, the right part of which is a skeleton and the left part of which has skin. On the skin, we can see marks from acupuncture. This design reflects Tian’s search for the Taiwanese body from a cultural difference partly derived from

Tian’s dedication to Chinese medicine. Clearly, Tian was haunted by the specter of death because 96 of his illness. It is, therefore, reasonable to infer that White Water, which premiered in 1993, three years before his death, inevitably reflects his own point of view on life and death.

From both the photograph and the poster, the juxtaposition of life and death might create a space of in-betweenness. Thus, the stage of White Water conveyed this limbo space undergirded by the nature of the performance, which is a reenactment of the ghosts. Tian himself also haunts the stage. The incorporation of the white strips on stage, therefore, not only carried a cultural reference to Han funeral colors but also functioned as an allegory of Tian’s own life.

Tian, as an HIV-positive gay man in 1980s Taiwan, was subjected to profound social discrimination.47 Such personal suffering in a conservative society sheds light on the schism in

Tian’s discourse between the biological and the cultural body. In White Water, the biological is always tainted by the cultural. As we will see in subsequent sections, Tian’s goal in his experiments of pursuing the Taiwanese body, further contributes to this intricacy. The convoluted interplay, I argue, must be bridged via his personal pain, which is transcribed into the bodily performance of White Water. The cultural connotation of white, the complexity of the body, and the condition of disease intersect in White Water. Symbolically, the application of white (color and strips), originally strongly referring to the idea of death, becomes a rhetoric whereby the live-ness of characters (and maybe Tian’s life) is re-articulated. In short, these references to cultural and social codes are reversed and opened up to interpretations that actually resist any fixed ideology.

Water and Liberation

Ultimately, Tian transforms his sense of death and life into the interplay between characters and water. From The Legend of White Snake to White Water, as the transition of one

47 Han Sen. 97 title to the next suggests, in White Water, we can perceive a strong sense of the imitation and representation of the flow of water. As noted, water in the original story connects the complicated feelings of love, fear, hatred, etc., to the characters. White Snake meets Xu Xian in the rain on a broken bridge where he lends an umbrella to her. Later in the story, when Xu Xian is detained in Jin Shan Temple by Fa Hai, White Snake attempts to flood the temple with water from West Lake. These are obvious instances. Despite its multiple meanings, in the original story, water is still an exterior element, which is not genuinely connected to the characters. In White

Water, however, water is interwoven with the presence and postures of the actors. The impression of water in the performance dominates the movements of actors’ body. Through the entire performance, the undulating movements of the actors’ bodies, especially their hands, prevails on stage. This posture may be an attempt to imitate the movement of snakes. Yet, at the same time, this physical motion also evokes the impression of water flowing as if the characters are surrounded by or are part of the water. This association between water and actors reaches a climax at the end of the performance.

In the very last scene, all four characters stand in a row, facing the audience, while the water drizzles from the roof of the stage. After finishing their lines, the actors turn to face stage rear, with their backs to the audience. Slowly they move toward the upper stage, and with the exception of Green Snake, they start to undress. White Snake, removes her short white pants, takes off his pants, and now clad only in a G-string is close to naked. Similarly, Fa Hai takes off his white cassock, and Xu Xian, his hat, to which the white strings are attached. Accompanied by the sound of a hymn, they step onto a platform on the upper stage. The lights dim until darkness prevails. Both the drizzling water and the actors’ backs vanish into the darkness. 98

Given the idea that costume contributes to the formation of identity,48 the status of the characters in this final scene is intriguing. In this last scene, in which the action happens after the end of the linguistic text, the characters stop arguing and fighting and all stand together in the drizzling water. The postures of the characters are identical, from which we can detect a sense of harmony. The water here generates a strong visual effect, making the four characters look much more similar to each other. A large part of the markers (costumes) that allow the audience to distinguish and formulate the identities of characters has been taken away. At this point, the action itself can be a symbolic act of unmarking, which debunks the abstract distinction between human and non-human and demonstrates a process of returning to the actors (rather than to the characters) on stage. In this circumstance, at this particular moment of undressing in a shower of rain, the difference between the bodies, the most significant conflict in this play, becomes blurred.

The characters, even the non-human ones, are performed by genuine human beings. In this happening, Tian reveals the representational constructedness of theatre.

What does Tian guide the spectators toward seeing in this performance? This question is closely tied to the problem of what the nature of an actor in performance is. As Richard

Schechner points out, an actor must face the challenge of the “double negative.”49 That is, an actor is a presence on stage who cannot entirely become a character, yet at the same time she/he cannot remain him/herself, either. In the performance, facing this dilemma over the incompleteness of self-transformation is the primary ordeal for the actors. In White Water, from the “natural” difference between non-human and human to the nature of an actor, in this precise moment, the distinction between actors and characters becomes unstable.

48 Roach, It 93. 49 Schechner, Between Theatre and Anthropology 38–41. 99

The use of actual water on the stage creates a dynamic visual effect, which also represents White Snake’s flows of desire, a concept taken from the original story. The actors’ bodies, exposed under the water, demonstrate the idea that the flow of desire exceeds biological and ideological constraints and further implies the vulnerability of all the characters in the performance. For those characters, despite their natural dissimilarity, the act of undressing makes the color white a mark that emphasizes the constraints deriving from the oppression of human life. For this reason, White Snake is, in fact, the only one who strips and, thereby, rids her/himself of whiteness. In contrast, Xu Xian and Fa Hai do not disrobe to the same extent as

White Snake does.

The complicated theatrics, the denotative meanings of cultural codes, and the physicality of the performers reveal that Tian’s real effort is grounded in the concept and practice of reversing the pre-existing order of ideology and value. At the textual and hyper-textual levels,

Tian brings a new perspective to the original story of The Legend of White Snake by incorporating the performance of cross-gender dressing via which the issue of homosexuality is articulated (I will elaborate on this aspect soon). On the other hand, Tian speaks and questions, through these seemingly avant-garde experiments, the traditional values of humanism, which are self-evident in Xu Xian’s fear, Fa Hai’s stubbornness, White Snake’s devotion, and Green

Snake’s loyalty. The status of the supernatural and the nonhuman is not brutal and barbaric, as Fa

Hai insists, but is, in fact, humanistic and compassionate, as White Snake demonstrates.

However, Tian probably did not intend to—given his social context of continued discrimination, probably simply could not—embrace an idea of total liberation, in which all ideological constraints are abolished, although this is a common interpretation scholars have 100 imposed upon Tian.50 In the final scene, in the process of undressing, we can see that Green

Snake remains unchanged. Compared with the other three characters, Green Snake, whose characteristics can be described as indignant and loyal, becomes the exception in this harmonizing movement. In other words, a changed exterior appearance as a mark of the flows of desire and, therefore, a transcending sentiment can hardly be perceived from the body of Green

Snake. The ambivalence of Green Snake’s presence is that in the performance, he is the one who shows the least individuality and agency such that he persists in the role of a bystander who is irrelevant to the emotional struggles of the main characters. It is true that Green Snake feels anger toward Xu Xian, but that is because of White Snake’s pain. Yet, despite his quick temper,

Green Snake is a passive character. He is close to a functional character who is used to reinforce

White Snake’s suffering. With the least agency, thus, in the final scene, Green Snake is the only one who retains his original appearance. Here, Green Snake metaphorically demonstrates a conservative stance in which transformation cannot be completed through a performative medium.

In sum, the intercultural codes embodied in the body in performance illustrate Tian’s gestures of rejecting replicating performance traditions, complicating the connotations of the biological body, and reconfiguring the feelings associated with a struggle over identity. The bodies of the characters, the performers, and even Tian constitute a locus of reference via which

Tian further questions the nature of performance and of what it means to be a human being. Yet, what has been revealed in White Water is by no means an answer to these questions. By treating the body as a converging point of cultural codes, Tian merely offers a surplus of information that makes the performance a puzzling game. What Tian seeks in performance is a dialectical

50 Chung Ming-Der, Little Theatre 211–17. 101 conversation between the personal and the national, as I will illustrate in the next section through

Tian’s elaboration on the tension between homosexuality and performance.

Politics, Gender, and Performance

Homosexuality

In the context of artistic creation in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a period of time during which local practitioners deployed theatre in order to presenting identity struggles derived mostly from the previous oppression of martial law, theatre was political as well as personal. At one level, theatre was used as a vessel in the search for local subjectivity, which had remained highly fragmented because of the repressive colonial past and the oppressively political present.

For example, inspired by Grotowski’s method of poor theatre, some practitioners, such as Liu

Ruo-Yu, went into the mountains and created a collective ritual in which the connection between the human body and the environment was emphasized.51 This kind of experiment, focusing on the inward search for identity, can be seen as a form of negative evacuation from a severe political exteriority.

At another level, the political factor backfired on Taiwanese practitioners. Despite some social protests in Taiwan in the late 1980s,52 politics was not a favored topic for practitioners thanks to the political propaganda of the anti-communist plays in the 1950s and 1960s. A direct political articulation in theatre performance was a rare phenomenon, and is still rarely to be seen in the current Taiwan market. In this vein, political engagement, if deployed in a performance, was usually mediated through and combined with other conditions such as homosexuality in response to which people are subjected to oppression.

51 Ibid., 178–85. 52 Wang Mo-Ling, City 129–75. 102

All these characteristics can be found in Tian’s earlier works. If we take a quick look at

Tian’s translation of the title of his work Maoshi (meaning Mao’s corpse) into Love Homosexual in Chinese, which is a pun on a cultural reference to classical Chinese literature, The Book of

Songs, and to Mao Ze-Dong, we can see Tian’s critique of the Greater China ideology the KMT has attempted to impose on Taiwanese people. The English translation Love Homosexual in

Chinese clearly articulates the issue of homosexuality through which Tian plainly attempts to penetrate and deconstruct the hypocrisy of Confucianism. Moreover, Tian was the first director to literally deploy a homosexual actor, Qi Jia-Wei (祁家威), on stage.53 Because of this, scholars and critics suggest that Tian forcefully articulated his defense of homosexuality and challenged sexual stereotypes through provocative styles of performance with a direct and strong political attack on the KMT. White Water, then, is also conceptualized by commentators via the lens of homosexuality.54

Indeed, the sense of homosexuality is evident in the casting of the four male actors, especially from the interaction between White Snake and Green Snake. Tian explains in his manuscript “Notes on Acting Training” that “‘It’ [Green Snake] might share homosexual desire with White Snake; ‘it’ likes White Snake very much. [And, thus,] “it is not like the traditional character of a maid; there is ambiguity in the master–servant relation that needs to be discussed.

It is too simple to categorize White Snake and Green Snake as master and servant.”55 Tian’s interpretation of Green Snake offers us a way to complicate the rendering of Green Snake, which clearly refers to the flow of homosexual desire. In the scene where White Snake and Green

Snake fight with Fa Hai and attempt to flood Jin Shan Temple, Green Snake sits on the floor with

53 “Exploring the Life of Homosexuality: The Diversified Perspectives of Maoshi.” 54 Chang Hung 1–3. 55 As Chung Te-Fan also suggests in his research, the actual sex of Green Snake in the genealogy of The Legend of White Snake can be both male and female. From here, Chung argues that Tian tries to defend universal love that is irrelevant to sexuality (126). 103 legs wide open. White Snake crouches in front of Green Snake with legs clasping Green Snake’s waist and two hands holding up Green Snake’s body. In this scene in which their supernatural power is exerted, the two snakes chant a hymn and twist their bodies together in what is an unmistakable act of sexual congress. A happening, in fact, is closer to a sense of sexual intercourse, a kind of theatrics, according to some critics, that can also be found in Xiqu performance.56

Yet, would it not be too easy to label this performance as homosexual in nature just because we saw two actors of the same sex on stage? In reality, every version of White Water has been very distinctive in regard to the style of performance and the casting, and the issue of homosexuality is definitely not to be stabilized. The original version (1993) and the version at the center of this chapter (2001) were each performed by four male actors. Yet, of the other three versions, one was performed by five women (1995, July), another by seven female actors (1995,

November), and the third by one male and three female performers (1996). We might further our exploration by asking whether if we take their non-human characters seriously, then the concept of homosexuality, which implies the priority of human existence and values might not work at all in this instance between two “snakes.”

In short, the issue of homosexuality raises its own set of questions. Unlike Mao Corpse, in which the obvious message of politics and homosexuality cannot be ignored, if Tian is still elaborating on the issue of homosexuality in White Water, what is his progress? What is Tian’s ideological target in the play and performance of White Water, if something other than homosexuality? What is at stake in Tian’s attempt to present the overly conventional masculinity and femininity of characters? Although Tian is undoubtedly addressing the issue of homosexuality in White Water, he does not intend to present homosexuality as a static condition.

56 Chung Te-Fan 124–28. 104

White Water is the revision of a romantic story represented by actors whose appearance is loaded with visual contrast between hypermasculinity and enacted femininity. In other words, Tian uses the problematization of homosexuality as a tactic for intervening in the tension of gender and sexuality pertaining to the performativity of the body. Just as incorporating intercultural codes in performance renders the body a node of interrogation, embodied in the representation of seeming sexual stereotypes, Tian’s depictions of those figures on stage challenges our cognizance of the biological body as natural existence. And, these depictions ultimately reveals the body’s ideological constructedness vis-à-vis identity formulation.

Identity

If we scrutinize again the appearance of the actors, there are more nuances. Like those mentioned above, the images of characters are shaped by material signs. The appearance of actors in White Water is carefully designed and confined to the nature and personality of characters in the play. For example, the audience can see a painting of a white snake on White

Snake’s chest and the actor wears three white ribbons on his head. For Green Snake, there are also green strips attached to the actor’s wrists, and a green circular band, again, on the actor’s head. The back of Green Snake’s head is further emphasized by a rectangular white plank, about a foot over the top of his head. As each is half naked, both White Snake, who is wearing white pants, and Green Snake, white trousers, demonstrate an intense sentiment of primitivism in line with their non-human nature.

In contrast to the two spirits in human shapes, the two human beings, Xu Xian and Fa Hai are better dressed, and thus a sense of relative cultivation arises. Like Green Snake, Fa Hai wears white trousers. However, he also wears a long white coat over his bare body, and on his head, a 105 big red round coronal.57 Less masculine than Fa Hai, Xu Xian is the only character who is fully dressed: He wears a white costume with a beret-style hat, attached with long white strips, which in performance functions in a similar way to the water sleeves in Xiqu, as previously noted. In fact, Xu Xian seems to be the most feminine character in the performance. This spectacle of resemblance with difference, thematized by the color of white, emphasizes a specific aspect of behavior that creates a sharp contrast to the images of characters pertaining to the issue of sexual representations and moves beyond the limits of homosexuality.

Let us consider the characters’ sexuality and gender performance. The characters of

White Snake and Green Snake, originally female, at least as ordinarily understood, are performed by male actors, but their sexual representations differ a lot from each other. For White Snake, the male actor adopts a relatively feminine style of performance, emphasizing the bodily curves and a high-pitched voice while speaking lyric lines, for instance. Green Snake, whose characteristics are supported by a muscular aspect and thundering voice could not be more masculine. In short, it can be fairly claimed that a clear representation of (homo)sexuality is not Tian’s only interest in this performance.

Such a contrast between hypermasculinity and femininity is further complicated by the bodily performance of Fa Hai, whose bodily posture has complex cultural resonance. In the opening scene, the way the actor stomps on the stage reminds the spectators vaguely of the posture of a painted male role or Jing, which emphasizes masculine bodily gestures in Xiqu. Yet while walking, Fa Hai obviously deploys a much slower rhythm, an action that creates an uncanny image, which alienates him from the impression of Xiqu. In regard to the aspect of affect, this pattern of movement quickly gives us an impression of Fa Hai’s toughness and

57 It also seems that Fa Hai wears a necklace, but because of the poor image quality, I could not identify any details of the necklace. 106 insistence on the absoluteness of natural law. At the same time, the way Fa Hai waves his hand regularly reminds local people of the image of “the seventh general and the eighth general” [Qi

Ye Ba Ye], who are regarded as gods from hell for hunting for souls who have gone astray in the human world in Chinese folklore. They represent the recuperation of justice maintained by a higher order of gods and thus appear widely in rites and temples in Taiwan society.

From Fa Hai’s case, we can infer that the representation of hypermasculinity is loaded with cultural references in which the body functions as a container. Fa Hai does not just make us think of the character of Xiqu, neither does he only evoke the local gods in Taiwan. He is

“haunted” by all these cultural images. In other words, both the associations with Xiqu and Qi Ye

Ba Ye are nodes of cultural codes. Jing, being a stock character, which in Xiqu, as a genre of performance loaded with Greater China ideologies in the eyes of younger Taiwanese theatre practitioners,58 enacts a man with extraordinary fighting skill. The bodily movement that wildly stretches as represented in this quasi-Jing style is, thus, the emphasis of masculine power. As for the association with Qi Ye Ba Ye, it echoes the characteristic of the original source, which is incorporated into supernatural fantasy and strengthens the primitive time flow of the story. These images of cultural references add to Fa Hai’s presence a sense of the depth of time that turns Fa

Hai from a neutral character to the sedimentation of cultural elements.

The problem here pertains to why Tian appears to intertwine hypermasculinity with a sense of primitivism. In what context does a representation of sexuality overlap with the issue of temporality? Dressed entirely in white, Fa Hai represents a shamanistic figure on the stage, such that the spectators think of ancient times in which theatre and ritual were inseparable.59 Upon his entrance, the actor playing Fa Hai exhibits an unnatural walking rhythm and bodily gesture that

58 Wang An-Qi, Contemporary Xiqu 74–76. 59 Most scholars agree that Xiqu originated from rituals. See Liao Ben and Liu Yan-Jun 6–41. 107 indicates his supernatural status and superhuman power. In the original story, Fa Hai is the incarnation of another sort of supernatural power.60 In contrast, in this world of White Water, he is a senior monk with sacred power that allows him to identify White Snake’s real identity and defeats those spirits. Faced with the supernatural power represented by White Snake and Green

Snake, Fa Hai demonstrates even more powerful wizardry by communicating with Heaven. By deploying his body in a non-human posture, Fa Hai reveals his ambiguous status in that he is more than an ordinary man. Enacting the role of coordinator, Fa Hai in white strictly pursues the harmony of order in human lives, a goal indicated by the way his hands draw circles back and forth—an ideal shape of harmony in Chinese philosophy and aesthetics, especially in Taoism.

The display of hypermasculinity establishes Fa Hai as a “noble savage,” who shows no mercy to anything in conflict with the ideal of human nature. Fai Hai’s shamanistic appearance further hints at the idea that his insistence is a shared communal value. In other words, the crux is the sense of shamanism, as a collective belief, and the traditional Confucian emphasis on human ethics overlap here. Through the enactment of Fa Hai, an alternative order beyond human rationale is revealed and resisted. Within this order, humans are not the only creatures endowed with intelligence and emotion, and the free will of human beings is far beyond assured.

White Snake to Fa Hai: they constitute two poles of the same spectrum from sensibility to rationality, illustrating the emotional struggles embedded in the human condition. The dramatic technique here is more like a morality play in the medieval West. On stage, there are more than the simple lives of the characters. Instead, the characters are also embodiments of value judgments. Unlike a morality play in which the existence of God guarantees compensation for human suffering in the fleshly world, White Water directly faces human struggles resulting exactly from human nature, a situation for which a solution seems to be absent.

60 Lin Li-Chiou 130–34. 108

The sad separation of lovers, though a human and a snake, with a mixed technique of cross-dressing adds complexity to this performance. A higher existence does not ensure redemption but is implicated in the struggles the characters experience. In this human condition, the crux worth exploring is not just a simple annexation between sexual desire and the resistance to social bias but also Tian’s directorial choice of bringing sexuality into alignment with Chinese cultural references. Fa Hai, representing hypermasculinity, is the only character representing a sense of consistency between sex and gender. He becomes an embodiment of patriarchal power, monitoring the emotional struggle between Xu Xian and White Snake, enacting the surveillance power of patriarchal Han society.

This twisted representation of a sexuality interwoven with cultural codes can also be found in the image of Xu Xian, who embodies the complexity of human struggles. The only character on stage who is fully dressed, Xu Xian functions as a model showing what it might mean to be trapped in a battle between uncompromising rationality and emotional struggle. The representation of him is extremely ambiguous also because of the color of white. In the pre-modern era, white was the traditional color for intellectuals in Han society, in which

Confucianism remained a dominant value system. The ideal image of the traditional intellectual in Confucian discourse was of a righteous, sedate, and mature person, for instance. Yet, Xu Xian, as we can see from the performance, conveys an almost entirely contrary picture. He is suspicious, unreliable, and timid. This representation of the Chinese intellectual as cowardly might not be unfamiliar to the audience of Xiqu, in which the transformation of the image of intellectuals from impotent to powerful would be an important emphasis. In other words, the representation of intellectuals in Xiqu is a process of embodying the recuperation of a 109 masculinity intertwined with the success shaped by a Confucian value and feudal system.

Nevertheless, this transformative moment depicted in Xiqu does not happen here.

Xu Xian, who through the entire performance remains in a state of hysteria, presents an image of a vulnerable person. Imitating the acting technique of water sleeves, the convention used in Xiqu to express intensifying emotion, Xu Xian expresses a sense of mental instability on discovering White Snake’s original form. White sleeves, originally an extension of the actor’s hands, are now in performance stretched over his head, the place of thoughts and rationality. The parodic use of white sleeves, rooted in other parts of the body, thus creates an effect of directly questioning and confronting the stability of masculine identity. It also hits the dichotomy between the body and the mind, which is exactly what White Snake positions herself against. Xu

Xian does not just have a female appearance, but his mentality, embodied by the performance of sleeves, is also expelled from the realm of stereotypical masculinity.

Xu Xian’s use of quasi-water sleeves can be seen as an unmistakable reference to traditional Chinese culture such that it leads the audience to reflect on the temporal scope of the performance. This means that an audience familiar with traditional Chinese cultural elements would notice that Xu Xian’s performance is loaded with cultural codes entangled with a long history. At the same time, clearly, authenticity is not the goal, as Xu Xian mainly waves the two strips “randomly.” Without adhering to any recognizable performance convention, Xu Xian’s performance of the quasi-water sleeves is a plain parody, undermining the admiration of traditions and also disrupting the presence of historical sentiment. This ambivalent construction of cultural sources becomes a further projection of identity instability and confusion, which are embodied in Xu Xian’s feminine appearance. On stage, Xu Xian is emotional, suspicious, and even paranoid especially once he has discovered his wife’s original form. 110

Xu Xian’s emotions, oscillating between love and fear, trust and doubt, echo the gender stereotype of femininity. It might not be difficult to associate Xu Xian and White Snake with homosexual desire. Is it true that the performance of Xu Xian and White Snake implies homosexuality? The problem might be more complicated if we consider the fact that the personality of White Snake is also emphasized by “feminine” virtues such as chastity, devotedness, and modesty. In this vein, the issue of homosexuality, if it exists, is a gender-crossing entanglement. White Snake, whose original sex is female, is performed by a male, but represents female characteristics. Xu Xian, whose original sex is male, is performed by a male, but represents strongly feminine characteristics. What the spectators see from the stage is a perplexing oscillation of sexual representation between heterosexuality (the characters Xu Xian and White Snake) and homosexuality (in that both performers’ biological sex is male), through which the performativity of gender is enacted on stage. In this performance, the issue of homosexuality is a sexual as well as a performative one. Via this directorial representation, Tian presents the instability and constructedness of both sex and gender. For instance, in the moment of watching the male snake enact a penetration of the female snake, the audience cannot fail to see the first male actor enact the penetration of the second male actor.

Judith Butler’s insightful analysis of gender and performance can be a useful lens here.

Traditionally, sex refers to the biological difference between human bodies, and gender connotes a sense of social convention imposed on the body as masculinity and femininity. The latter echoes performance. As Butler claims in “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution,” “the acts by which gender is constituted bear similarities to performative acts within theatrical contexts”

(272). Thus, Butler suggests the performative logic of gender construction. Gender stems from the repetitive enactment of social norms. Further, Butler blurs the line between gender and sex by 111 arguing that both are socially performative constructions. There is no clear distinction between the two. In Undoing Gender, she points out that “To understand gender as a historical category, however, is to accept that gender, understood as one way of culturally configuring a body, is open to a continual remaking, and that ‘anatomy’ and ‘sex’ are not without cultural framing” (9–

10). Social norms as well as the materials people encounter in everyday life construct the existence, operation, and cognition of the human body nurtured by social institutions. In other words, it is through repetitive performances of social norms that a person acquires a sex and thereby becomes gendered. Hence, each person must attempt to live with those limitations. Then, the challenge of how to face the oppression embedded in sexuality and gender turns out to be a question of how to perform and how to read a performance. As Butler argues in Gender Trouble, the “task is […] how to repeat or, indeed, to repeat and, through a radical proliferation of gender, to displace the very gender norms that enable the repetition itself” (234–35). Butler’s argument has been widely influential, including in theatre and performance studies.61 One thing that remains ambiguous in Butler’s argument, though, is the difference between the performativity of gender and live performance.

If we see White Water through the lens of the performativity of identity politics from

Butler’s discourse and feminist theatre, we could find that it is this tension between the biological body and the relevant ideological constructions that Tian seeks to complicate in White

Water. In the performance of White Water, through the intensified image of hypermasculinity and femininity, a spectator can easily perceive the schism between sex and gender and so become perplexed by the instability of the body. The spectators of White Water might have a concern in regard to attributing certain characteristics as “masculine” or “feminine” to the performance. Yet,

Tian’s staging complicates this concern even further. In this structure of sexuality and gender, the

61 See Case xiv–xv. McKenzie 217–35. 112 spectators see the ambivalence of sexuality and gender and perceive that the presentation of these is inordinately charged by cultural references and social norms. As Butler argues, gender is “a practice of improvisation within a scene of constraints” (Undoing Gender 1). Through the bodily postures and appearance of the actors, Tian demonstrates how ideologies of sexual desire, affection, and chauvinism, to name a few, are part of the constituent factors of our bodies.

Performance is a “mode of becoming,” to borrow Aleksandra Wolska’s idea, which suggests that we should see theatre as a place of empowerment, where the audience can take something with them after the last curtain call.62 But how the audience can create meaning and develop agency in accord with it remains unclear. In Tian’s staging, spectators can perceive the fundamental emotions of fear, rage, panic, and so on, from the characters or the embodiment of the performers—emotions that, in fact, transcend specific cultural boundaries. These “basic emotional systems” bridge the gap between the characters, the actors’ bodies, and the spectators by questioning the ontological status of human beings. In short, Tian presents the body as a problem pertaining to sexuality and gender and further contextualizes this problem in the context of Han culture and Taiwanese society by revealing the constructedness of the body as historically ridden. In this process of performance, through incorporating this kaleidoscope of cultural elements, Tian mobilizes the spectators and forces them to ponder questions of what it means to be human in general and what it means to be Taiwanese in particular.

“Little Theatre” and Its Liquidity in Modern Taiwan

Many scholars situated Taiwanese society during the period of the late 1980s as experiencing a transformation from a state of oppression to a state of liberation. Chen

Kuan-Hsing in Asia as Method uncovers some of the many connections between decolonization,

62 Wolska, “Rabbits, Machines, and the Ontology of Performance.” 113 de-imperialization, and Taiwanization. Analyzing modern Taiwan’s social contexts and cultural activities, Chen suggests that the decolonization of Taiwan did not happen until the late 1980s and that the accompanying process of Taiwanization was mediated by the desire to become an empire.63 In Chen’s words, “the old imperialist cultural imagination (in the form of the Greater

East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere and the Wallace Line) still conditions the imagined nation of the colonized [Taiwan]” (35). Why become an empire? Chen claims that this desire arose precisely because of Taiwan's unique history of colonization whereby the country Taiwan was trapped in a triangulated power structure consisting of Japan, China, and the United States.64 Drawing his theory from postcolonial studies, Chen argues that, although these nations deny the national sovereignty of Taiwan, they also provide the model of becoming a nation for Taiwan, a land long denied its own subjectivity.65 Chen Fang-Ming, corresponding to Chen Kuan-Hsing’s analysis, suggests that even though there have been a few debates on Taiwanese literature, the realization of Taiwanese literature had to wait until the late 1980s when Taiwanese society actually gained partial political and economic autonomy—although still under the threat of the possible conflicts between Taiwan and China.66 Chen Chuan-Xing, nonetheless, in his discussion on the development of Taiwanese arts, suggests that the 1980s was the period in which Taiwanese practitioners were yearning for Western modernism and were, thus, clamoring to supply a lack of local subjectivity with Western modernity.67

The liberation of society does not guarantee the recuperation of national subjectivity.

Cultural and artistic activities to various degrees refract the anxiety over and desire to become an autonomous, national self, a process we might call Taiwanization. As for the problem of how to

63 Asia as Method 5–13. 64 Ibid., 25–34. 65 Ibid., 34–37. 66 Postcolonial Taiwan 23–5. 67 Wood and Night, Which is Longer 14–34. 114 achieve such a goal, that is the question practitioners and scholars have been working on up to the present day. Chung Ming-Der’s claim that the 1990s witnessed the eruption of a

“spontaneous postmodernist theatre” in Taiwan, thus, reflects exactly this lack of identity.68

However, on claiming theatre practice in the late 1980s and early 1990s as the spontaneous emergence of postmodern theatre in particular and of the little theatre movement in general,

Chung’s label of the little theatre movement in Taiwan, as noted in the Introduction, gave rise to an intense debate and remains a contested concept in the history of modern Taiwanese theatre.69

Generally, little theatre in Taiwan in the late 1980s and early 1990s represented the avant-garde face of theatre practice. Chi Wei-Jan argues that Chung is entrapped by a formalist point of view, overemphasizing aesthetics and underestimating the influence of “non-theatrical factors—political, cultural, social, economic, and so on” (99). Instead, Chi suggests a Western understanding of little theatre in Taiwan: “anti-tradition, anti-bourgeoisie, anti-dominant culture, anti-capitalism” (99). Wu Chen-Tse conceptualizes the provocative characteristics of little theatre based on the Western concept of the “utopian ideal” and the dissemination of

Grotowski’s practice in Taiwan and argues that in the 1980s, “corporeal transcendence,” or the cultivation of the self, via religious practices and martial arts such as Tai Chi, formed the main basis of theatrical development (185). In this condition, a person could be concerned about the shaping of the physical body. The body in this condition, as suggested by Wu, is a response and resistance to the capitalist society in which the individual is dominated by the pleasure of commodification and the oppression of institutions (142). Here, from Chi’s and Wu’s discourses, we can find two poles of the spectrum defining little theatre in Taiwan. On the one hand, a

68 Chung Ming Der, Little Theatre 128. 69 Relevant discussions include Wang Mo-Lin, “Palimpsest” 58–63. Yao Yi-Wei, “Three Questions of Postmodern Theatre” 6–11. Ma Sen, “Rethinking and Challenging ‘Postmodern Theatre’” 72–77. Huang Mei-Hsu, “Close reading of ‘Resilient Postmodernism or a Resistance to Postmodernism’” 77–80. Chi Wei-Jan, “Little Theatre in Historical Contexts” 98–99. 115 reactionary and deconstructive understanding of little theatre values the avant-garde, marginal nature of theatre practice vis-à-vis active social intervention or participation, formulating an outward exercise that closely associates the theatre with social specifics. On the other, theatre practice is a subjective, voluntary pursuit of the reconfiguration of the self, and transcending social constraints based on aesthetic creation occupies a central role. This direction is an inward one that weighs individual formation primarily, though not in a way that is detached from society.

Of course, these two poles are not mutually exclusive, and taken together they describe a general picture of the evolution of modern theatre and performance, including the genealogy of constructivism from Meyerhold to Mavo and Tian.

As noted, Meyerhold’s biomechanics and constructivism, to a certain extent, through micromanaging and challenging the expressivity of the actor’s body, was a critical response to the modernization of society and the commercialization of theatre in Europe. Mavo and conscious constructivism (and the later performances of Angura and Butoh in the 1960s) complicated this direction by adding the psychological and sexual flows of the self in performance. In other words, in Mavo, it is not the extreme management of the body that has been practiced, but the practitioners presented in performance the emancipation of the body that challenges the traditional forms.

In the context of modern Taiwanese theatre, Tian’s case is an intriguing one in which both directions are in evidence. The training of the body is highly significant in Tian’s envisioned course. His construction of the body is a multidimensional combination of local traditions and foreign cultural elements. The representation of Tian’s theatrics is not a scientific and systematic manipulation of the body on stage such as we can find in Meyerhold’s. Rather, like Mavo, it is a stream of emotions channeled by the expressivity of the body. Therefore, Yeh 116

Ken-Chuan, following Wu’s exposition, also suggests that Tian’s theatre concentrates on capturing the self and the expression of the flow of desire, comparing Tian’s performance with

Butoh (131).

In short, in this analysis, the little theatre, the ability to resist social reality and the cultivation, reconfiguration, and reinvasion of the self define the major characteristics of

Taiwanese little theatre. My analysis, though still within the paradigm outlined, shows that in

White Water, what troubles Tian is not the “transcendence” of the body that imagines transgressing reality. Total liberation is never actualized. The reality of the political climate and discrimination against those with HIV and homosexuality more generally, as aforementioned, in modern Taiwanese society, haunt the body in White Water. It is the rootedness of the body in the

Taiwanese context that comes to be the problem. Tian’s theatre is, in fact, not transcendent but worldly. My investigation, which primarily emphasizes the interplay between aesthetics and politics, demonstrates that Tian’s theatre is not simply under the “anti-paradigm” as Chi defines it, but could partly be the reverse. It appropriates local traditions and interacts with the dominant

Western aesthetics of theatre. In theatre, Tian, as an intellectual trained in arts, consciously seeks to construct a national body. Thus, he engages in a grand narrative.

Tian’s theatre and capitalist culture are also, to some extent entwined. The rapid economic growth also affected theatrical production after the 1980s. Tian attended official theatre contests and was the recipient of multiple official subsidies. His theatre troupe was the first Taiwanese theatre ensemble to secure a place performing at an overseas international art festival.70 In other words, many Taiwanese practitioners and scholars worried about the consequences of an institutionalized theatre, funded primarily by receiving official subsidies, in the 1990s. In fact, Tian’s group was one of the iconic ensembles facing this dilemma, in which

70 Zhang Bo-Shun, 1993. 117 the production expenses usually exceeded five hundred thousand new Taiwanese dollars and even reached as high as almost one million Taiwanese dollars (roughly thirty thousand U.S. dollars) in 1995.71 Economic dependence of this nature, in Tian’s case, was usually at odds with his pursuit of an autonomous theatrical practice: “we constantly remind ourselves not to become that kind of pattern [how to receive a subsidy]” (1993b, 85). Again, Tian’s practice creates paradoxes rather than answers.

In short, in Tian’s practice, the physical markers and the situatedness of the body, sexuality, disease, death, and so on, in modern Taiwanese society question the understanding of human beings in general and Taiwanese identity in particular. Little theatre is, thus, not simply

“hybrid,” but “liquid,” constantly demonstrating its constructedness of, and oscillation between, factors that affect identity configuration without an anchor point.

In dealing with the complexity of modern society, Zygmunt Bauman proposed the intriguing, provocative term “liquid modernity,” announcing his conceptualization of the modern

Western world in contrast to Marx Weber’s famous metaphor for modernity as an iron cage.72

For Bauman, the defining marker of modern society is that everything, from commodities to human relations, is constantly in motion—there is no fixity, whether of the materiality of daily life, or of the abstract flow of capital and time.73

An entirely new project would be necessary if I were to analyze the issue of modernity and theatre in Taiwan. Here, invoking Bauman’s image, I want to suggest that White Water becomes the intriguing embodiment and the transgression of Bauman’s discourses of liquid modernity, its effects as well as its sentiments. This liquid sense in White Water arises from

71 However, the development of little theatre was followed mostly by the urban development of Taipei, the capital of Taiwan, and thus was Taipei-centered. In other words, outside Taipei, the connection between theatre, subsidies, and the economy, might be rather different. See Tai Chun-Fang 87. 72 Liquid Modernity 3–6. 73 Ibid. 13–15. 118

Tian’s conscious incorporation of the mimicry of traditional cultural resources as well as the twist of modern theatre practices, between which, a third possibility, Taiwaneseness is pursued.

Despite the transgression of the issue of gender and sexuality, among intercultural references,

Tian’s ultimate goal with his experiments is to search for and construct a Taiwanese body. In such perplexing details, the stage of modern theatre becomes a laboratory for Tian to mix and distill a potential outlet for current Taiwanese identities.

Whereas Bauman shows little interest in contextualizing his metaphor outside the

Western world, Tian’s White Water demonstrates an alternative paradigm in which the status of being liquefied is the direct consequence not just of changes in economics, technology, and life style—things that Bauman considers important in his discourse—but of postcolonial conditions that local society must continue negotiating in history and in the present day. White Water represents Tian’s comments on this stage and his efforts to uncover the complexity of Taiwan and to explore ways to shape Taiwanese identity. Shaping the Taiwanese body becomes his unfinished project, and local practitioners remember Tian primarily because of his intricately self-conscious experiments on the limits of texts as well as the possibilities of bodily performance, rather than his questioning of and experimenting with Taiwaneseness.

In the performance of White Water, we can see that Tian’s adaptation of The Legend of

White Snake, his evocation and parody of Xiqu, the abundant and floating cultural reference of traditional Han society on the modern stage, and the tension of sexuality oppressed by Confucian ideologies together suggest a dilemma pertaining to the remaking of identity. These cultural codes portray an intimacy between Greater China and Taiwan that haunts modern Taiwanese theatre. The cultural connection between Taiwan and China is based on many commonalities so that any local Taiwanese identity could not be realized in the 1980s and 1990s—the period 119 during which a process of Taiwanization came to the fore. From the direct adaptation of classical folklore in Chinese society, Tian’s ambivalent attitude toward Han culture is self-evident. China is the “intimate enemy” of Taiwan. In this vein, the body in White Water is infused with the ideologies of China and presents the mental instability of Taiwanese society. Put another way, the so-called Taiwanese identity in Tian’s White Water is built on the practice of challenging and excluding an inherent cultural tie between China and Taiwan. Thus, Tian emphasizes the biological differences among ethnic groups through which he pursues cultural autonomy.

In Matei Călinescu’s formulation, in the process of contrasting modernism with the avant-garde, the two “faces” of the aesthetic expressions of modernity, “the antitraditionalism of modernism is often subtly traditional” (140). If the avant-garde connotes a “sense of universal and hysterical negation,” modernism is a “tradition against itself” (140). We can easily associate

Călinescu’s exposition with the picture of Taiwanese little theatre, which, thus, is inextricably modern. In other words, the idea of being modern is always haunted by the tradition it tries to resist. Tradition in Taiwan is history-ridden and intercultural. Taiwan inaugurated an era of local identity formation domestically in the late 1980s and since then has endeavored to reclaim its national sovereignty, internationally. Yet, Taiwan’s liberation is mediated by Greater China,

Japan, and the West. In Taiwanese contexts, Taiwan’s colonial past and the ongoing postcolonial present consistently trouble the realization and transgression of being modern. One face of modern theatre in Taiwan, embodied by Tian’s practice, represents this internal struggle.

China, though the closest threat to Taiwan in terms of political reality, is not the only dominant force. Tian’s conscious constructivism pertaining to the tension of cultural codes in his practice is embedded in the postcolonial condition of Taiwan. In facing the cultural burden embedded in Taiwan’s history and reality, Tian’s strategy and the probable solution are to 120 juxtapose the multilayered others, China, Japan, and the West, on stage through bodily performance. In White Water, Tian consciously constructs the performance with the cultural fragments of those dominating powers without any concreteness, with a performative effect that is not just a reflection of the suspension of any Taiwanese subjectivity, but also a challenge to power as a holistic presence. Such an appropriation of cultural codes actually forms a sense of

“critical traditionalism,” to borrow Ashis Nandy’s term.74 By dissecting and reorganizing cultural forces via bodily performance, White Water becomes a site for the attempt to reconstruct the self.

“Repetition” and “improvisation” in performance constitute the possibility of change, in

Butler’s view and in mine likewise. Tian, as the self personally controlled by illness and the shadow of death, seeing the self of Taiwan dominated by its colonial specificities, indirectly presents a postcolonial past and present Taiwan on stage. The incessant experiments in the performance of White Water illustrate the fact that Tian’s purpose is that of repeating and improvising Taiwan’s past and present constraints without knowing the exact future picture.

Constructivism in Meyerhold’s and Japan’s context points to the future. Tian’s theatre, like his body, refers to the past and wrestles with the present.

74 The Intimate Enemy xvii–xviii. 121

Chapter Two

Embodying Taiwan: Hugh Lee, Stan Lai, and Critical Realism

In the first chapter, via an analysis of Tian and White Water, I proposed a specific perspective on the experiment of modern Taiwanese theatre and addressed a series of concerns pertaining to the risks of categorizing modern Taiwanese theatre from the perspective of postmodernism. Specifically, I argued, through a close reading of the performing body and its cultural references, that it is, in fact, the idea of constructivism—rather than the postmodern collage or deconstruction—that undergirds Tian’s work. Against this background, I do not aim to challenge the term “experiment” in my analysis of Tian, but to offer an alternative discourse on the ways in which the aesthetic experiment is conducted in Taiwan. However, as I have noted in the Introduction, the dichotomy between realism and experiment in modern Taiwanese theatre is contestable in the sense that they reinforce each other. In practice, although discussions after the late 1980s have primarily been circumscribed by the idea of “postmodernism” and thus focused on the avant-garde practices of theatre, realistic performance has become an understudied aspect in Taiwanese theatre studies.

In this chapter, through an analysis of Hugh Lee’s Far Away from Home and Stan Lai’s A

Dream like a Dream, I argue for a politics of “critical realism” both as a way to distinguish these practitioners’ realism from official KMT realism and as a method to read Taiwanese theatre back into social political specificities. In particular, critical realism aims to theatrically embody and imagine the notional state and social mentality of Taiwan. By analyzing Lee’s and Lai’s works, I suggest that it is problematic to overlook the “experiments” of those non-experimental works, in 122 which the realistic body, at both textual and performative levels, plays a vital role as a node of cultural references in reconfiguring Taiwanese identity, just as in the case of Tian.

It is true that Tian embodied one of the few provocative experiments on the possibility of sociopolitical engagement in theatre practice. Yet, after the lifting of martial law, theatre practitioners, despite using theatre as a tool for sociopolitical protest in the first few years after liberation, soon lost interest in delivering a discernible political message. However, theatre is always political, but in a much more subtle way in terms of the social trauma in Taiwan, and the question of how modern theatre remains political is the main concern of this project. Seen in this light, the respective work of Lee and Lai contributes to an intriguing twist on the convention of realistic performance, making it a critical intervention in responding to the identity confusion rife in Taiwanese history.

In terms of the ways in which Lee and Lai each use the body in text and performance, focusing on both producing affect and transcribing sociopolitical specificities, I suggest that their respective directorial tactics resonate with Tobin Nellhaus’s idea of critical realism. In Theatre,

Communication, Critical Realism, Nellhaus argues that communication is a mode of embodied knowledge in which meaning is materialized as social productions—speech, body gesture, writing, printing, electronics, and so on (24–9). Via these communication modes, the secondary produced knowledge people acquired furthered their knowledge of the world as the upshot of critical realism. As Nellhaus suggests,

[T]here’s a real world independent of our ideas about it, and we can have genuine

knowledge about that world even though knowledge is socially produced. This is

the position taken by critical realism. (11)

123

Nellhaus thereby focuses on the question of how in theatre, as one mode of communication, bodily gestures and texts both reproduce and express social mentality and formation:

“ontologically, theatre is a model of society, and specifically of social agency” (16). What is missing in Nellhaus’s writing, however, is that although he insightfully interprets the transformation of theatre styles from the perspective of social changes, how theatre, on the page and on stage, can shape participants cognizance of society in reverse remains unclear.

Formulating my analysis based on Nellhaus’s theory, I conceptualize the respective realistic performance staged by Lee and Lai as both elusive and constructive. Elusive in the way that these productions avoid representing sociopolitical specifics directly in order to stay away from the totalization of narratives. Yet, such a performance paradigm connects to society closely if we conduct a close reading of the deployment of the body in performance. It is the bodies of the performers that constitute a communicable avenue between the characters and the audience.

A realistic performance is, thus, constructive because Lee and Lai each invite the audience to concentrate on “the structure of feeling” of Taiwanese society and to seek the reorganization of identity politics in Taiwan. A realistic performance in this sense conveys more than the process of signification of the real world but a cognitive action that bridges the gap between characters and audience, stimulating the latter to reflect on the possibility of reconfiguring the self in the

Taiwanese context.

Hugh Lee and the Signification of the Body

Hugh Lee passed away in 2013. In that same year, Ink Press published his collected plays in a series of 27 volumes. To date, Lee is the only playwright in Taiwan to have achieved such a feat. Born in 1955 in Taipei, in the second generation of the Chinese diaspora, Lee discovered his 124 interest in theatre in the Lan Lin Theatre Troupe in the 1980s. In 1986, he founded the Ping Fong

Acting Troupe. Lee and Ping Fong are unique in that Lee literally writes, directs, and performs the plays, making him a total practitioner in the theatre. Lee is also versatile in shifting among the genres of playwriting. In Shamlet (莎姆雷特, Sha Mu Lei Te 1992), he successfully adapted

Hamlet to create a contemporary Taiwanese comedy. As a member of the second generation of

Chinese diaspora, Lee transcribes his parents’ stories about the Cultural Revolution into theatrical works, Apocalypse of Beijing Opera (京戲啟示錄, Jingxi Qishilu 1996) and Wedding

Memories (女兒紅, Nuerhong 2003), and enacts those memories in the Taiwanese context. Lee’s work is, thus, closely associated with the nostalgia for the Chinese diaspora and with the presentation of Taiwanese identity.

The diversity of Lee’s creations and the commercial success of Ping Fong have been recognized by scholars as a miracle of modern Taiwanese theatre.1 Given that Lee was born in

Taiwan and his primary concern is by and large Taiwanese society, it is understandable that as

Lee is a Taiwanese-born practitioner, his focus on and affection for Taiwan have been treated as self-evident and is seldom problematized.2 However, as the sociopolitical reality of Taiwanese society has always been in flux, how a theatre practitioner perceives and imagines Taiwan should not be easily dismissed from the narratives of his plays. How does Lee transform his affection for

Taiwan? To be more specific, how are Lee’s renderings of the common people as major characters vis-à-vis the representation of an exterior sociopolitical Taiwanese background mutually constructed? Revisiting Lee’s work and his relationship to Taiwanese society constitutes the major focus of this section. In particular, I focus on Lee’s Far Away from Home

(1988) and its performance archive of 2004 to show that Lee transfigures both the sociopolitical

1 Wu Jing-Ji 8. 2 In fact, there are just a few reviews and one article on Lee’s work in a research journal. See Tsai Chia-Ling. 125 specificities of Taiwanese society and humanistic concerns over the oppressed into his melodramatic, realistic style of text and performance. His proposal for emotional engagement in theatre opens up an alternative way to reconfigure personal subjectivity and national identity for

Taiwanese society.

Far Away from Home is a combination of stories surrounding Old Qi, the protagonist, depicting the very last moments of his life as a diasporic Chinese mainlander veteran in Taiwan.

The primary action of the play is the gradual revelation of his recollection of his earlier life in

China and his frustration and discontent with his current life in Taiwan. A close examination of this play is crucial to any attempt to understand Lee’s staging of Taiwaneseness. On a surface level, the play deals with the interplay between China and Taiwan. Indeed, the status of the mainlander soldiers has led critics to interpret the play from the perspective of nostalgia for

China.3 However, I will argue that Lee’s play is much more concerned with the concept of

Taiwan, particularly the state of Taiwan around the 1980s, and I will thus problematize Lee’s theatrics in regard to how they embody Taiwan. In other words, I will not complicate the concept of Taiwan based on the plot, in which Lee tackles people in and stories about Taiwan. This perspective of considering Taiwan as a textual construction falls into the trap of seeing theatre as a representative practice designed to genuinely reflect reality, whereas, in fact, the ways in which theatre and the world intersect are complicated.

As Lee himself claimed, after his early phase as a practitioner, he abandoned his efforts to inflict social criticism on audiences via the theatre, a dominant trend in the late 1980s, and concentrated instead on telling “a good story,”4 or creating “simple form, profound meaning.”5

3 Huang Ying-Xiong. 4 Lee, Far Away from Home 18–19. 5 Huang Chih-Kai (Ed.) 233. 126

For Lee, the primary goal of his work is for it to resonate with the audience.6 Far Away from

Home, written early in Lee’s career, has both traces of social criticism and also of an aesthetic elaboration behind the realist appearance, which transgresses any easy depiction of society. From here, I would like to ask this central question: What is the connection between theatre and society from this stance of avoiding social engagement? I will explore how live performance helps audiences to reconfigure Taiwanese identity. To read through the story and thereby apprehend the connection between theatre and reality in performance is one of my goals in this section. In short,

Far Away from Home provides an opportunity to explore another face of theatre development in the late 1980s and to analyze further how the sociopolitical specificities of Taiwan are transcribed in and through the complex drama of Lee’s theatrics. My analysis in the following sections is based on the play published in 2013 and a video recording of the 2004 production, provided by Huang Zhi-Kai, former assistant director of Ping Fong.

The Present Body and Embodied Taiwan

The plot of Far Away from Home is a collage of four narrative strands: the life of the younger generation, represented by Zhi-Ling, Wei-Han, A Di, and Xiao Yu Er; the offstage sorrow and suffering of the singers, Yu Da Jie, Mi Mi, and Zi-Juan; the present portrait of the customers, the old mainlander soldiers in Taiwan, Xiao Gau, General Liu (and Madam Liu), and

Old Qi; and, finally, the memory of Old Qi’s military life in China. These four fragmented stories are interwoven within the play. Each proceeds in a generally linear fashion, but because of the disparate temporalities, the sense of time keeps shifting between past and present. What we might notice in the play is the logic of temporal-spatial condensation in which Lee complicates the limits of realistic performance and constructs the memory of Taiwanese history—two

6 Ibid., 233. 127 characteristics that are foundational, in my view, to understanding Lee’s dramaturgy and theatrics.

As Lee talks about his notion of creativity, “First, why write this play? Second, what is the connection between the play and time?” (23) Let me turn to a specific scene to illustrate his dramaturgy.

One Sunday night, everyone gathers at the Xi Yang Guan cabaret. General Liu and

Madam Liu are discussing the affair between their son, A Di, and Xiao Yu Er, the daughter of Yu

Da Jie, a Xi Yang Guan cabaret singer. The conversation starts in medias res. While Madam Liu suggests that A Di ask for Yu Da Jie’s consent to the relationship, General Liu cannot stop scolding A Di, who is leaving to fulfill mandatory military service in six days’ time. Irritated by

General Liu’s comment predicting that she will “betray” A Di while he is away on military service, Xiao Yu Er talks back to General Liu:

Xiao Yu Er: (talks back to General Liu): What basis do you have for saying that I

will betray A Di during his service?

Yu Da Jie: (Scolding Xiao Yu Er): Mind your manners!

S: Xiao Yu Er and Yu Da Jie face with each other, silence.

Xiao Yu Er: (turns and hugs A Di, crying) Don’t listen to the old generation. Just

tell me whether you love me or not.

Yu Da Jie: I warn you, Xiao Yu Er. Let adults decide your business!

S: Madam Liu laughs and stops Yu Da Jie. Xiao Yu Er kisses A Di in front of all.

Madam Liu: (getting drunk, pointing to A Di and Xiao Yu Er): Oh! Look, they

are kissing …

S: General Liu and Old Qi turn away, embarrassed. Furious, Yu Da Jie stares at

Xiao Yu Er. 128

Xiao Yu Er: (Yells at Yu Da Jie): You don’t even know I am pregnant … What do

you want to decide for me? (145–46)

At this moment, everything flies out of control. Madam Liu slaps A Di’s face. Then, A Di, who has kept silent during the fighting, starts to confess that he is not the father of the unborn child, but that Da Wang Ye (meaning Royal Prince), Yu Da Jie’s paramour, is. Then, taking ten thousand New Taiwanese Dollars from Madam Liu, A Di leaves, following Xiao Yu Er, who is going to have an abortion.

The intriguing problem of dramaturgy and performance in this scene is that Xiao Yu Er’s pregnancy, despite the fact that it is the critical incident that brings forth the dramatic climax, is not the real concern of the characters. The audience, like the characters, does not know about the connection between Xiao Yu Er and Da Wang Ye in advance. Generally speaking, pregnancy is associated with the idea of impending new life.7 But the emergence of new life, depicted in Xiao

Yu Er’s case, is abruptly and disgracefully forestalled. After this conflict, no one talks about Xiao

Yu Er, and we as spectators do not even know whether she undergoes an abortion. Does the happening of the unexpected pregnancy function merely as a dramatic device that pushes the plot forward? Is this simply a dramaturgical flaw in this melodramatic production? That could be part of the reason, as Lee himself admitted that at this phase in his practice he was still learning how to write a play more than two hours long.8 Still, what we learn from the next scene makes both our guess and Lee’s claim partially implausible. Life and death go hand in hand in Lee’s work.

In the next scene, which takes place nine days later, Xiao Gao passes away unexpectedly.

The audience is informed that the incident happened before the scene, as everyone gathers at Mi

Mi’s place after Xiao Gao’s funeral. Mi Mi, who, as a singer, also has sexual relationships with

7 Lee, Far Away from Home. Program. 48. 8 Lee, Far Away from Home 19–20. 129 the veterans, is chatting with Xiao Gao’s “goddaughter,” Zi-Juan, who is also a singer. Zhi-Ling,

General Liu’s daughter, and her husband, Wei-Han, are also in attendance. Suddenly, Wei-Han says, “I know I shouldn’t talk about this, but I still want to share this news with you … Mr. Qing dynasty [Wei-Han] is going to be a father! Zhi-Ling is pregnant” (162).

Given Wei-Han’s personality as a man who does not read situations well, the reasons for his timing of the announcement are not completely clear. Yet, this abruptness, announcing a piece of good news immediately after a friend’s death, has a sense of sarcasm. Thus, directly after

Wei-Han’s announcement, Mi Mi makes a general comment about men: “(Criticizes coldly)

Look, Xiao Gao is dead. General Liu and Old Qi, do they even show a little sorrow?” (162). The following conversation between Mi Mi and Zi-Juan concentrates on the relationship between

Zi-Juan and Xiao Guo with the argument over history vis-à-vis reality, a significant point to which I will return in the following sections. Then, out of nowhere, again, without any specific hint in the previous scenes, Zi-Juan discloses her pregnancy, claims it is Xiao Gao’s child, and decides to keep the baby.

This kind of sudden switch in emotions is a typical technique of intermingling comic and serious incidents and it is what Lee is famous for as both a director and a playwright. In this scene, sex, economics, and a generation gap intersect in the form of a short fight. The characters’ background is far more complicated than can be seen from this surface glimpse, which is like the tip of an iceberg. Xiao Yu Er’s pregnancy, Xiao Gao’s death, Zhi-Ling’s pregnancy, and

Zi-Juan’s pregnancy all contribute to a shared pattern, which indicates that there is no predictability in life and death and that the body has no control at all. Through the bodily status of the characters, Lee creates a discursive effect that engages in the sociopolitical mentality of

Taiwan in the late 1980s. 130

The changes in of Taiwanese society have come about through a struggle between people who have yearned to change the current suffocating atmosphere and people who have acted as oppressors in concert with the dictatorial government. During the period of martial law, or the

White Terror, intellectuals, political activists, and, in fact, any member of society could be subjected to political persecution. The KMT as a totalitarian government was the origin of uncertainty; in the time of the play, one cannot yet know whether the society will be able to change or how it will survive such a totalitarian regime. Therefore, the termination of the Order of Martial Law in 1987 and the death of Chiang Ching-Kuo, president of Taiwan and leader of the KMT, constituted a watershed in Taiwan’s history, which then entered a stage of political liberation that brought with is a new personal freedom. Yet, with liberation came confusion. In the past, most social, political, and cultural events functioned as a counterforce reacting to

Chiang Ching-Kuo’s totalitarian authority. The future for the Taiwanese at that time was about either maintaining the status quo or fighting for change. After the late 1980s, and the transformation of Taiwan’s sociopolitical structure, the energy of resistance lost its foundation and stopped fighting the government as its principal enemy. With liberation in the present, the future became obscure. As Jerome Tseng noted, the student movements of the 1980s were to be the last dedicated to the project of enlightenment and zeitgeist.9 Of course, looking back at this history, we now know that the transformation of both politics and society, in fact, continues. Yet, for people living at the intersection of the 1980s and 1990s, the sense of confusion was natural and pervasive.

The development of the modern theatre in the 1980s and the 1990s also followed a path that closely paralleled the rearrangement of the sociopolitical sphere such that theatre practice itself was transformed. In 1987 and the years shortly thereafter, through the gradual loosening of

9 Jerome Tseng. Ed. Yang Ze. Sturm und Drang 80, 184. 131 political control, theatre became a major avenue through which young intellectuals, especially students in Taipei, expressed their discontentment with Taiwanese society. Thus, Chung

Ming-Der concluded that, in this era, every theatre practice in Taiwan was political.10 Chou

Hui-Ling also commented on the modern theatre in Taiwan, characterizing it as the angle of political resistance that became the main avenue for defining the practice of little theatre.11 In this trend of metamorphosis, Lee and his Ping Fong Acting Troupe were categorized by Chung as the first generation of theatre still haunted by traditional modernism, meaning realistic performance, in comparison with the following generation of little theatre, which entered the stage of postmodernism.12 As noted in the Introduction, Chung’s claim is highly problematic, and caution is also needed in identifying a practitioner of one kind of theatre practice with only one style. As Chou Hui-Ling has reminded us, it is problematic to conflate aesthetics with politics, to categorize the aesthetic development of modern Taiwanese theatre solely as

“resistance” to a certain kind of politics (21).

Lee’s dramaturgy and theatrics demonstrate the complexities involved in understanding aesthetics and politics. Lee’s play and performance are more than a melodramatic sentiment and superficial depiction of Taiwanese society. His creation, as we can see from an analysis of the presence of the characters’ bodies, rejects a direct, plain sociopolitical criticism (unlike Tian).

Instead, Lee transforms historical incidents and social structures from political issues to individual, affective bodily schemas on stage. The presence of the characters’ unchanged physical status functions as a sign that invites the audience’s imagination and construction for further references. The unpredictability and invisibility of bodily change, if seen as a dramatic technique that connotes social structure (an argument that has been made by Nellhaus) points to a

10 Chung Ming-Der, Little Theatre 199–236. 11 Chou Hui-Ling 20–23. 12 Chung Ming-Der, Little Theatre 114–15. 132 particular social mentality in regard to Taiwan since the arrival of the KMT. The tension between life and death and the concealment of the transformation of the physical body together create a strong sense of chaotic presentism, and such a mentality can be better understood as the refraction of Taiwanese society immediately after the lifting of martial law. In other words, in the play and performance of Far Away from Home, which premiered in 1988, during a time defined and haunted by the memory of the martial law period and the expectations of a new consumer society due to rapid economic growth, Lee captures the hidden zeitgeist of Taiwanese society. In this light, my analysis requires a more careful exposition of the shaping of characters and the sociopolitical, historical embeddedness of the self in Taiwan. Such a reading relies on a further examination of the ways in which the bodily status in Far Away from Home embodies the social scenario of Taiwanese society on stage, a rendering I elaborate in the next section.

The Gendered Body and Its Temporal Embodiment

The scene of Zhi-Ling and Wei-Han’s wedding, which constitutes roughly the first quarter of the play and sets up the comic tone at the beginning of the performance, opens with

Madam Liu recalling the details of the traditional wedding ceremony. Yu Da Jie asks Zhi-Ling, who is wearing Western clothing, whether she has put on the right dress:

Yu Da Jie: (reminds Zhi-Ling) Zhi-Ling! Did you wear the wrong dress? Should you not

have the traditional robe and coronet (feng guan xia pei) first?

Zhi-Ling: (laughs and clarifies): No. It is not until tonight’s ceremony that I will wear the

traditional wedding dress. (93) 133

Just as everyone is busy preparing for the ceremony, Wei-Han arrives, wearing traditional men’s wedding clothes, an appearance that directs the audience’s attention to the issue of temporal conflict:

Zhi-Ling: (points at Wei-Han, angrily) We are all set, except you!

Wei-Han: (confused) I am ready!

Old Qi: Wei Han! The traditional suit is for tonight’s wedding. (94)

In this scene, we can perceive various attitudes toward time. Zhi-Ling and Yu Da Jie, or say, women in this scene emphasize the significance of understanding the present. It seems that they must know when to do what. Wei-Han, on the contrary, appears to be confused by the layers of time such that he cannot determine the proper time at which to take a given action. It is also worth noting here that Old Qi also knows the specifics of the rite by heart, which hints at the complex nature of this protagonist. I will come back to Old Qi as a focus of analysis shortly. For now, the crux is the distinct perception and expression of biographical history among the characters. Focusing on the present in a detailed is a pattern for the female characters in this play.

Here, the issue of gender politics is embedded in this dramaturgical depiction.

Taiwanese women in the 1980s saw a rapid and far-reaching changes in their lives in many respects. In the 1980s, on the one hand, many Taiwanese women lived lives that were in some ways extremely conservative. For example, Taiwan imposed a regulation on students pertaining to how they wore their hair that remained in place until 1987.13 On the other hand,

Taiwan witnessed the advent of major fashion brands, including Lewis, Lee, Calvin Klein,

Christian Dior, and Comme des Garçons, to name a few.14 Women started to join cultural and political movements and sometimes won important positions, although more often they remained

13 Cheng Ying-Shu, Ed. Yang Ze. Sturm und Drang 80 123. 14 Gu Zhen-Feng, Ibid., 102–106. 134 in less prominent positions that those assigned to men.15 Sexual liberation was also of great importance in the 1980s.16 Against this general background, it is reasonable to surmise that being both oppressed and liberated, women in the 1980s may have desired to live in the present moment. However, the notion of the “present” is vexed in Taiwan at this time, as it was felt that

Taiwan remained stuck in the past in some ways, at least. In other words, the “present” did not fully exist in Taiwan. It was perceived as being elsewhere. The life patterns of women and the transformation of Taiwanese society were mutually constructed.

The picture of women in Far Away from Home, then, to some degree, alludes to the general social background of Taiwan. Some, such as Zhi Ling, led prosperous lives. Some, especially the singers, were exploited and trapped by the rapid growth of a consumer society, and, therefore, sought opportunities to change their lives. For the latter, a desire to focus on the present, thus, results, at least in part, from the fact that the present is fleeting. Inevitably, those female characters, too, transformed themselves from the oppressed to take on some of the characteristics of the oppressor, by, for example, swindling the veterans, General Liu, Xiao Gau,

Old Qi, and so on. The present is also daunting, as expressed in Xiao Yu Er’s situation, in which her body became a site of an unwanted bloodline, and her future is silence—a future that is not shown on the stage. We cannot be positive regarding whether Lee is consciously making a gesture of social criticism via those characters, as he only depicts nuanced circumstances in which the ways the characters suffer are highlighted. At stake is that from the details of the female characters depicted on the stage, we can sense a nuanced interaction between temporality and the deployment of the body on the stage to thereby formulate indexes of an exterior

Taiwanese society.

15 Cheng Chih-Hui, Ibid., 62–68. 16 Chen Wen-Hsien and Yang Du, Ibid., 79. 135

Such are some of the gendered politics of this play, but what about the male characters?

They, too, are embodied meditations on contemporary sexual politics, a sort of compulsory, if failed, masculinity. Wei-Han, because of his wrong timing in regard to donning his wedding attire and his tendency to ask irrelevant questions, is later referred to as Mr. Qing dynasty, suggesting that he is hundreds of years behind the times.

Examples are abundant. Old Qi’s attempts to court Mi Mi are a complete failure, as he never accepts his present status and so remains entangled with his past life in China. At the end of the play, he dies of ‘this disease of heartbreak.’ The point is that Old Qi’s musings on his time in China are not projections of his nostalgic longing for, or continued connection with, the continent. Rather, his concerns are much close to home: they should be understood as musings on his own lost masculinity in the chaos of social rupture that defines contemporary Taiwan. We cannot say this rupture is immune to China’s influence, but there is a sense of Taiwaneseness in the representations of the male characters. Gender politics, the body, and time are mutually reinforced in those characters. The right to forget and to remember, in this play, designates both the power and the weakness of men. In this play, too, men’s sense of presentism is thin. None of the men live peacefully in the present. They are haunted by both the past and the present.

The deconstruction of the patriarchal system, like the rise of female consciousness, is another major social theme in Taiwanese society in the late 1980s. Chiang Ching-Kuo and the

KMT had marked the patriarchal domination of Taiwan until the late 1980s, but their power was permeable, hollowed out by economic reality. Changes in consumerism, intellectual progress, and cultural creations, etc., permeated the totality of political oppression. Certainly, by the late

1980s, people had choices in regard to how they lived given the ready availability of the materials of foreign cultures, a pattern that challenged the unilateral political atmosphere. Then, 136 in 1986, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) was founded, foreshadowing the end of totalitarianism. In short, the 1980s is the period during which we saw the demise of the dictator and the end of political absolutism. It is the time the “father” dies literally and symbolically.

In Far Away from Home, the sex economy between the male audience and the female singers should be understood, I argue, as a performative mimicry of the gender tension between male and female in the emerging consumer society of Taiwan in the 1980s. The unexpected pregnancies are indicators of the changing status of women; the unanticipated death (and the impotence of men) illustrates the dissolution of the absolute patriarchal structure of Taiwanese society. The status of the body reveals this nuanced connection between the social mentality and

Lee’s theatrical transfigurations.

The Body as a Network of Feelings

Through the “realistic” performance, Lee seeks a reconciliation between the representation and the reality of Taiwanese society. The body is the site through which Lee intervenes in this process of reconfiguring Taiwan. In sacrificing some of the organic dramaturgical structure of the plot, Lee transforms the characters’ bodies from a physical existence into symbolic signs, foregrounding those convoluted forces. The body is intertwined with the past and the future, and thus generates feelings in the present. In writing the minor characters, through their bodies, Lee inserts the mentality of late 1980s Taiwan, in which a changing present is beyond expected logic and the sense of the future is both chaotic and daunting. In Lee’s words, “bodily gestures of actors are the extension of feelings, and some of the ‘semiotic’ bodily languages can be used to metaphorize internal issues of the play” (qtd. in

Huang Zhi-Kai 163). 137

In other words, the deployment of the body as a signifier undergoes shifts, from biological (pregnancy, death) to sociopolitical (gender). Through the competing concepts of the body, Lee intervenes in the construction of social mentality. The body, temporality, and social specificities all add up to the issue of shaping the self, as I will show in the following sections.

These factors, though they all have internal subtleties, are not a fixed structure but in a fluid state.

In Lee’s dramaturgy, the nuanced flow of Taiwanese society shapes his characters’ bodies.

We can see from Lee’s case that the subtleties of a theatre practitioner, as an individual member of society, can, consciously or unconsciously, condense social realities into patterns of characteristic differences—a process in which the body is seized as a battlefield. There are, therefore, two ways for the body to function in Lee’s work. First, the body constitutes a unique site for theatre, formulating a space that allows practitioners to enact stories and characters.

Second, and more complicated, Lee does not attempt to build a direct linguistic allusion to the exterior society. In other words, he does not say anything literally in the play about Taiwan under martial law. As he writes,

The story of the play is fictional, disparate; the feelings of the characters are real,

authentic. Through theatrics, we can vaguely sense, feel the beats of the heart of

insignificant people in the era of suffering; through theatrics, we recreate popular

memory ignored by history. (34)

Literally and metaphorically, to feel the body is one of Lee’s goals. For Lee, bodily performance creates a space for participants to feel empathy for others. Whereas to encounter others is not a new concept, Lee’s emphases on the form of performance and the deployment of the body on the stage demonstrate his intriguing rendering of bridging the characters and the spectators and communicating feelings. The body in this sense is not simply an individual corporeal existence, 138 but a multi-layered accumulation of physical contact, affective communication, and historical memory.

In sum, in Lee’s work, time, gender, body, and sociopolitical factors are all interwoven.

Theatre enables Lee to reconstruct the marginal characters who are usually invisible in the dominant narrative of history, and the body in performance provides Lee with the means to create lives for these characters that are credible. But whose mentality and humanity are presented? The central point here is that the sense of humanity is particularly conditioned by war and by the Taiwanese cultural and historical context. Chinese veterans are a distinct group in

Taiwan. They are important, certainly, but cannot represent Taiwan as a whole. Lee’s struggle comes from the attempt (and desire) to construct the memory of veterans as an integral element of Taiwanese collectivity, a goal that, in fact, cannot easily be actualized. Next, I turn to another scene, one that further demonstrates the subtle tension in Lee’s deployment of the body vis-à-vis

Taiwanese society.

Memory and the Shaping of the Self

In discussing the creation of Far Away from Home, Lee discloses his beliefs as a theatre practitioner:

“Space does not exist; time is meaningless” is my deep reflection on my years of

work on the dramaturgy of various topics. Space is probably not presented with

concrete images. Time is probably not depicted by anyone. Yet, our body, part of

it does not occupy space; neither is it limited by time. That is memory—Memory

of the past! (31). 139

These statement is loaded with complicated messages. First, the issue of space and time referred to here addresses, to some degree, the ontology of theatre, or the free flow of time and space, according to Lee. Also, theatre of this nature enables Lee to fabricate and stage a complicated story, in which forgotten memories of the past can be interpolated. Such memory, in Lee’s view, is embedded in the body as an omnipresent existence, not limited to time and space. In other words, here, the body is a universal container of memory as well as a tool of necromancy. In theatre, the audience will uncover the sediments of historical incidents reflexively.

Continuing his meditation on time, space, and the performing body, Lee also mentions the significance of space as a cultural metaphor.17 The Xi Yang Guan cabaret is one of the “red envelope cabarets” in Taiwan,18 which “are particularly Taiwanese in culture,” Lee suggests:

“Old songs carry the nostalgia for the beautiful past time of those people [veterans]; red envelopes represent a kind of transaction, delivering a sense of familiar warmth” (32). Through the progress of history and a changing Taiwanese society, those Chinese veterans gradually disappear from popular memory. Red envelope cabarets are the place to preserve the memory of those veterans, and Lee attempts to capture their atmosphere as a dying culture in late 1980s

Taiwan. Thus, he emphasizes his practice of conducting fieldwork and archival research.19 His goal is to “record” the old soldiers’ stories (33). In this exposition, Lee explains the connection between the body and time clearly: The body is to create a temporal-spatial specific situation on stage.20

Accordingly, a conflicting appears in Lee’s articulation of theatre and performance.

Whereas theatre is not limited to time and space, the purpose of bodily performance is to

17 Lee, Far Away from Home 31–32. 18 For a detailed account of red envelope cabarets, see Xu Pei Ling. 19 Ibid., 32–34. 20 For a description of issues of temporality in live performance, see Phelan’s idea of “the ontology of performance” 146–66 and Schneider’s “inter(in)animation” 138–68. 140 demarcate a conditioned happening. Space and time in this sense imply a boundary of presentism, a task that is, in fact, in opposition to the logic of theatre from Lee’s perspective. Lee, then, tackles this tension symbolically through presenting the dislocation of the body on stage. The body is for bringing back the forgotten past to the present. Yet, it is also for escaping from the present.

Hence, Lee’s male characters are all haunted by their memory to some extent. In this play, to remember formulates an evacuating space for these men. Xiao Gao’s story of being held captive by the Communists is viewed with skepticism by the other characters. When Mi Mi talks with Zi-Juan about the story, she criticizes Xiao Gao: “Maybe he lied! He fabricated a piece of history. He wanted your compassion” (163). Neither the audience nor the characters, however, get to know the truth, as Xiao Gao has already died. In other words, history here does not refer to an identifiable incident but is closer to individually narrated memory, an autobiographical fiction, and a sort of narrative self-fashioning. This self-fashioning affects the body as a contact zone through which the characters struggle with interpersonal relationships. Thus, for those characters, information and the memory of the past are fragmented. In performance, the limited past depicted in Far Away from Home is defined by recollections (and some enacted scenes) of war, suggesting that the past is not nearly as beautiful as it appears in the male characters’ recollections. Having encountered these characters as essentially fragmented, the audience is, in fact, invited to explore the details of their lives in a more attentive way.

The meaning of memory is also ambiguous in Lee’s oeuvre. On the one hand, Lee means the collective memory of Chinese veterans, the representation of which is an important goal in

Far Away from Home: “If no one records their [old soldiers] fading stories, old soldiers’ traces will be submerged by the archives of history” (33). Lee wants to inform the audience of this 141 piece of memory, which, in this sense, is close to an exterior archive. On the other, for Lee, memory implies an internal, private existence that resides in the body, which implies a container from which memory should be withdrawn. This kind of memory, like pain, then, is not necessarily communicable. That is only the one who has experienced it can understand it. Yet, even he/she is unlikely to fully comprehend even his/her own memory. Collective memory in this sense, then, has a double meaning: to recreate the memory of those insignificant characters via the enactment of performers and to help the audience remember them. In other words, through the representation of the bodily schemas of those characters, Lee attempts to

“collectivize” a particular form of memory, which, he imagined, Taiwanese spectators should remember and thereby avoid a simple monological historical narrative. In Far Away from Home, the bodily performance formulates the common ground of investing and embodying the tension and complication between history and memory.

Why does memory matter? From Lee’s rendering, we know that to recollect the past is an indispensable factor of the shaping of the self. The real tragedy comes from the situation in which past and present are not clear-cut, and cannot maintain a balance.

Like the other men in Lee’s play, Old Qi is bound by the past. For him, it is a past in which he married Yang Hui-Min during the Chinese civil war, a marriage that lasted just one year before it was disrupted by the war. Old Qi’s marriage is somewhat unconventional because, in that entire year, he did not touch Yang Hui-Min. The two did not have any sexual intercourse.

The chastity of Old Qi’s body, embodies the frozen past and so becomes a barrier against living in the present. After Xiao Gao’s funeral, at Mi Mi’s home, General Liu and Old Qi take up an inappropriate subject in that they engage in a discussion about the latter’s sexual experience:

142

General Liu: (surprised) In May 1948, you got married. In May 1949, we

retreated from Hainan Island. During that whole year, you did not touch her?

Old Qi: (looks around. Not once. He touches his groin.) Look, what is this? I

have kept this for her [Yang Hui Min] for my entire life. Never used it.

Projection:

“I have kept this my entire life.”

“Never used it.”

General Lui: (mocking Old Qi) I cannot believe you are still a virgin?!21

Old Qi: No kidding. Let me sing it for you—(sings) “I have two guns, different in

length. The longer is for shooting bandits; the shorter one is for shooting girls.

Look—(using his hand to imitate his sexual organ swinging in the air) —Look at

what my short gun is …“fraud!” (160)

Old Qi’s sense of belonging is disrupted by the fact that he has not had sexual experience with anyone, whether in China or Taiwan. Here, the problem of overcoming the past changes into one pertaining to sexual impotence. The body becomes a failed contact zone for articulating a nostalgia for home. In the play, ultimately, Old Qi’s courting of Mi Mi is not for marriage, but for sex.

Memory, history, and the (a)sexual body create the myth of Old Qi and result in his tragedy. The myth of female chastity and purity constitutes essentially the personality of Old Qi, who is haunted by the paradigms of patriotism and masculinity. The past, chastity, with the implication of impotence converge in Old Qi’s self-surveillance, changing him into a myth, a

21 At this moment, General Liu tries to touch Old Qi’s groin, a common play among young boys. 143 myth between Han Emperor and Wang Zhao Jun.22 Old Qi behaves like a traditional Chinese woman who lives for love and is, therefore, willing to sacrifice anything. Old Qi’s act of offering his life savings to Mi Mi despite knowing her lies is the best example. As an aspect of traditional

Chinese values, the state of chastity renders Old Qi less an individual person and more a representation of a collective idea. As General Liu comments, “he is more Wang Zhao-Jun than

Wang Zhao-Jun” (180). Wang Zhao-Jun here is not just a historical figure but also an attitude and a value choice. With the purpose of celebrating Old Qi’s patriotism and chastity, General Liu symbolically castrates Old Qi with his assessment. Old Qi’s presence and General Liu’s comments are thus representative. The physicality of the body and the fluidity of gender intersect in Old Qi’s body. Affectively, he transforms himself from a veteran to Wang Zhao-Jun. In this process of mythification, Old Qi, caste by the other characters as a kind of Wang Zhao-Jun, is metaphorically transgendered.

Ultimately, Old Qi’s frustrated sexual desire connects to a broader national history:

Zhi-Ling: (asks General Liu): Dad, you said uncle Qi is sixty and still a virgin … sounds

like a myth!

General Liu: In those days, the force of the KMT was four million and three hundred

thousand, and of the Communist party, one million and two hundred thousand. We were

outnumbered. After the war began, only a few years, nine million and six hundred

thousand square kilometers in the area of China fell to the Communists—this is the

absurdest myth in the world. (179)

22 The story of “Wang Zhao-Jun” is famous folklore in Han society. Wang was extraordinarily beautiful and was selected as a maid/concubine in the imperial palace. Yet, because she refuses to use bribery, Wang does not meet the Emperor Yuan of Han. Later, the emperor enters into a marriage to create an alliance with the Xiongnu Empire and sends Wang to Chanyu, the ruler of Xiongnu. Before Wang’s departure, however, the Emperor finally sees her and thanks to her beauty comes to regret this decision. Lee, Far Away from Home. Program. 115. 144

At times, Old Qi is a stereotypical man, focusing on the love of the nation, the ability to fight, and the need to prove sexual potency. His loss of masculinity and his self-imposed oppression of sexual desire become an allegorical depiction of the KMT’s loss of the civil war, as suggested by General Liu. The personal is, thus, the national. The nationalized individual is traumatized by war and its aftermath. The fall of the nation is not merely a piece of history, but also lives in the memories and traumas of those mainlander soldiers. Their bodies carry the traces of war, which continue to impact their present. The impasse of the present, as we see from the lives of those veterans, is never easy to change. The sense of nostalgia for China, which commentators ordinarily identify in Lee’s plays including Far Away from Home, is the desire to return home, a desire that is never fulfilled. As a veteran, he has lost his home—China. As a mainlander in Taiwan, Old Qi is alone, waiting for the chance to reunite with his wife.

Nevertheless, nostalgia also becomes myth. This sheer myth of the utopian past embedded in the body is demystified after Old Qi finally visits China and meets up with Yang Hui Min, only to learn that she did not make it onto the ship to Taiwan and married another man shortly thereafter.23 Now in possession of these facts from the past, Old Qi abandon his nostalgia for

China and faces the present. Returning to Taiwan, he recognizes Taiwan as his home at last. He continues to court Mi Mi. But she will never accept him.

In short, Old Qi is out of place and out of time as well. His body is rejected by both China and Taiwan. Old Qi rejects his past body, and by courting Mi Mi evinces a desire to change the present. This attempt to transform the body from a past to a new present through the contact of flesh fails. The woman he desires rejects him, and thus so does the present. The upshot of this condition is, I argue, a double-negative recognition of the body that constitutes an intersection of history, memory, and reality. In other words, Old Qi is not Taiwanese, but neither is he not not

23 Lee, Far Away from Home 159–60. 145

Taiwanese. He has a body—limp, effective, and unwanted though it may be—but it has no time and no place in which to be. An old man seeking a first sexual encounter, a Chinese Nationalist seeking to embrace, belatedly, a Taiwanese identity: the woman, and the nation, have no desire for him, and he is left a nomad, without connection. The rejection of the biological body connects to the denial of memory and history, and thus to the sociopolitical body.

If Lee’s sensitivity to social atmosphere helps him construct the nuances of characters’ genders and bodies that more or less echo a changing Taiwanese society, Lee is also aware of that issues such as gender and identity are not anything more than a predetermined picture. The body becomes a complex cage for Old Qi, in which death becomes an ultimate solution of recollecting the self.

From History to Memory

From those characters, we can sense a hidden tension between history and memory, and the complexity of memory itself as Maurice Halbwachs suggests in The Collective Memory.

Halbwachs proposes the idea of “collective memory” as a counter-narrative vis-à-vis history, given that history is implicated in and even consists of the violence of rational, linear narrativization during the process of recording facts. In Halbwachs’s words,

Despite the variety of times and places, history reduces events to seemingly

comparable terms, allowing their interrelation as variations on one or several

themes […]. In this way, it presents us a unique and total image of the past. (84)

The thorny problem of history, according to Halbwachs, is that history relies on periodization, shaping events with an organic logic, which belongs to the past. By transforming the past into the record, historical writing, in fact, prevents people from fully tackling their feelings toward the 146 past, the effects of which continue into the present. Hence, Halbwachs proposes the concept of collective memory as close to social practice, which emphasizes the continuous effect of memory on blurring any possible line between past and present, and resists any unilateral narrative voice.

Halbwachs, thus, explains, “In effect, there are several collective memories […]. Every collective memory requires the support of a group delimited in space and time” (83–84).

However, although Halbwachs insightfully foregrounds the significance of collective memory, some questions remain unanswered in his discourse. Who belongs to which group in remembering the past? How is memory, or memories, communicated, and with whom?

Memory, even collective memory, cannot be totalized, as Halbwachs reminds us. As a theatre practitioner, Lee attempts to intervene in the tensions between history and the shaping of collective memory. The practice in theatre is to reject the totalization and periodization of history, as hinted at in Lee’s discourse, in order to recreate the memories of the characters. Theatre, because of its free flow in time and space, can be a site for anything. Nothing is outdated in theatre. Thus, through bringing characters to life, Lee takes performance as a form of cultural repertoire that records not fact but the inflicted affect of biosocial specificities that still influence the audience in the present. At the same time, however, memory is hardly a fixed thing that can be embodied or shared. What Lee fails to articulate clearly is that the memory of the characters does not mean the memory of the audience. If there is a sense of “collectivity” in memory, as Lee expected to create in his theatre, then the shaping of collectivity does not simply rely on representing characters’ memory, but, I argue, depends on inviting audience participation.24 The connection between characters and spectators, however, remains vague both in Lee’s discourse and in his practice.

24 For a discussion of audience participation, see White 159–94. 147

In realistic performance, to create something genuine on stage requires a critical construction of bodily performance that shapes characters with multiple dimensions in a particular condition. However, just as the actors cannot completely become the characters, the spectators are not the characters, either. Drawing on cognitive science, Bruce McConachie tries to explain the audience’s process of identification with the characters in a more nuanced fashion.

Believing in a performance, as McConachie points out, relies on the audience’s “conceptual blending” ability, which is a dynamic oscillation among identities, characters, and performers

(42–43).25 This process is not a zero-sum game, and therefore, there is no steady reification of the characters. It all depends on the spectators. Based on Lee’s case, my questions in relation to

McConachie’s exposition are these: When will the audience be willing to identify with the characters more? And how can the emotional identification contribute to the construction of memory as Lee imagines it? I argue that it is the deployment of the body in contexts that undergird the connections among the characters, performers, and the audience, and this is also

Lee’s effort to search for a shared bodily language that can be communicable. How to create a character with its own time and space yet is in accord with the audience is the challenge confronted in Lee’s theatre.

In “The Movement of Shedding Tears,” Lee positions crying as an embodiment of sensibility that is in opposition to the rationality of modern society. As Lee explains,

Crying is a form of self-adaptation of our body. We are used to resolving

problems with rational thinking that helps us rapidly forget painful things. This is

our mind that is accustomed to escaping; you put the pressure of no crying on

yourself. (Life 207)

25 For a discussion of conceptual blending, see Fauconnier and Turner 39–58. 148

Here, Lee maintains the traditional dichotomy between the mind and the body and suggests that the rationality of the mind oppresses the body, which is emotional. Although a dichotomy of this nature has been shown to be plausible by recent developments in cognitive studies, Lee’s connection between the body, crying, and reconfiguring the self is intriguing. Shedding tears, for

Lee is a weapon for counteracting rational oppression of the individual in modern society. Lee loves crying and, therefore, proposes “the movement of shedding tears.” The place to practice crying is the theatre, whether film or a stage performance via “works that can touch us,” according to Lee (211). Far Away from Home, then, serves the function of making one cry for one’s own sake, says Lee plainly (211).

What is the meaning of crying? Emotions, and their corresponding representations, including tears, for some neuroscientists such as Luc Ciompi and Jaak Panksepp, are fundamental to human survival.26 Antonio Damasio explains that emotions as an unconscious action help one react to given situations and prepare our organs to respond.27 A detailed account of studies in cognitive science is beyond the scope of this research. Instead, the point I wish to make is that Lee believes in the power of crying, and in performance, he, in fact, emphasizes the production of an emotional engagement. The body—this combination of desire, history, and memory—does not merely function as a vessel for presenting the story of marginal characters but also operates as a set of scripts for transcribing the emotions associated with Taiwaneseness.

Such emotions are conditioned by the sociopolitical and cultural specificities of local society.

Whereas memory and history, or even reality, are heterogeneous and fragmented in nature and, thus, cannot be completely communicable, the correlated emotions embodied by the performative gestures of actors are more transmittable. It is in demonstrating Old Qi’s life

26 Ciompi and Panksepp 23–56. 27 Damasio 53–54. 149 journey that Lee conceptualizes the hidden tension of Taiwanese society and ponders the potentiality of reconfiguring the self, a task Old Qi can only achieve in his afterlife, as I will show in subsequent sections.

In brief, in Lee’s theatre, the story of those characters and the corresponding performance exist to allow the audience to witness traces of the people forgotten by history. The space of theatre in this sense is temporal-spatial specific, belonging to the world of the characters. The audience, then, in fact, stays at least partly in its own site and witnesses the reviving of the characters, connecting his or her own story with the happenings on the stage. Lee, to a certain extent, is aware of the audience’s agency.28 Through the suffering of the protagonist, what Lee might hope to see, I argue, is more than an identification with the characters and “their” memory.

The audience engage in a process of shaping memories in the theatre.

The Limitations of Realism

In Lee’s dramaturgy and theatrics, we can find the tension of reconfiguring the central

(history, popular) with the marginal (memory, veterans). Through the deployment of the body on the page and in performance, Lee, enacting Old Qi, explores the possibility of complicating and intermingling the two. However, the practice of realism is also the dominant practice in modern theatre. Yet, in Lee’s practice, we can also identify an effort to mark the limitations of realistic representation.

The day before Old Qi’s death, everyone gathered at Mi Mi’s place. As noted, the women talk about Xiao Gao’s death and later Old Qi seeks sexual contact with Mi but is rejected:

Old Qi: (Putting Mi Mi’s hand on his groin) Don’t be scared!

Projection: “Don’t be scared”

28 For a discussion of the spectators’ agency, see Ranciere 1–24. 150

Mi Mi: (In panic) What are you doing?

Old Qi: (slowly raises his hands, weeping, begging Mi Mi to touch his private

parts) Touch it—

S: Silence. Mi Mi abruptly withdraws her hand.

S: Old Qi, with his hands raised, shedding tears, standing in the living room.

Mi Mi: Father!—Why don’t you go home?! (169)

Figure 8. The scene in which Old Qi asks Mi Mi to touch him. With permission from Bella Lee, the copyright holder to quote the photograph. Qtd. in Huang Zhi-Kai (Ed.), 163.

The technique of projection is used repeatedly in the performance. While enacting Old Qi,

Lee imitates a Shandong accent. The subtitle then, naturally, offers a lens through which the

Taiwanese audience can come to understand Old Qi’s accent. The vernacular suggests the 151 difficulty of communicating linguistically as well as contextually. In other words, the projection of the sentences confirms the fact that in the most practical terms, very few people whether or not they are members of the audience can understand Old Qi. Thus, miscommunication is a frequent occurrence. In this light, functioning more than an auxiliary visual effect, the projection and subtitles draw our attention to Old Qi’s present status and thus express his inner impulse to be seen and heard. The projection, thus, serves as a commentary, repeating the words from a hyper-narrative point of view, suggesting the self-surveillance of the character. In short, the production is self-reflective. Simply put, the projection creates an ambiguous effect within the performance. Indeed, it is used to repeat a character’s lines to emphasize the emotional flow. Yet, the projection also marks the fact that the pure illusion of realism never exists.

The conflicting “realistic” style also connects with Lee’s identity as a director and an actor, who, most of the time, takes the role of the protagonist in his own plays, with a sense of psychological realism as represented in Konstantin Stanislavski’s “system,” which is one of the norms of both Western and Taiwanese theatre.29 In Stanislavski’s early system and its dissemination in the United States, the enactment of the characters and the correspondent social context must all be derived from an actor’s emotions, imagination, and experience, and the task of the actors is to translate these elements into the visible actions of their respective characters.30

Taiwanese practitioners in the 1990s mostly studied theatre in the United States and learned

Stanislavski’s system, and Lee’s emphasis on characters derived a great deal from Stanislavski’s idea of creating a role through exploring emotions.31 Yet, Lee is also aware that any methods for

29 Yet, the “system” for Stanislavski is never a fixed method. See Stanislavski 611–12. 30 This face of Stanislavski is prevalent, becoming “Method Acting” in North America. For this process of adaptation, see Carnicke 41–57. Yet, this direction had already been modified by Stanislavski in a later search for physical action in performance. See Zarrilli 13–21. 31 Huang Zhi-Kai Ed. 38–39. 152 framing characters realistically and the corresponding reception of those methods are both culturally conditioned.

Thus, if we refer to the photograph above (Figure 8),32 the shocking moment between

Old Qi and Mi Mi, Old Qi’s posture, performatively, becomes a multilayered situation. The performers’ body becomes a matrix of networking, which is “porous,” to borrow Jude James’s term (113). Old Qi’s raised hands may lead one think of the posture of surrender. But to whom does he capitulate? For what? It is, of course, a petition to Mi Mi. An exhibition of his final request. Also, as Old Qi is always haunted by his identity and memory as a Chinese veteran, his

“I surrender” posture might be associated with his wartime past, especially if we consider that

Old Qi is looking up, as if speaking to someone in the sky, a sort of “heaven help me” gesture of prayer, rather than looking at Mi Mi and seeking her understanding. If courting Mi Mi is Old

Qi’s ultimate attempt to recuperate his masculinity and make Taiwan his home, his action is obviously harmful to his masculinity and thus becomes problematic. From here, in the next scene, his body has already collapsed, and this is quickly followed by his death. In this light, the performer/characters’ body becomes a site of multiple, conflicting references through which the audience can interpret the instability of history, memory, gender, sexuality, and so on. The realistic body, then, carries an excess of references.

Death and the Imagined Reunion

The last scene. Stage right. Blue lighting gradually illuminates the dark stage. We see an empty chair, a bed on which Old Qi is lying. General Liu, in a gray suit, sits at the side of the bed, looking at Old Qi. On the upper-right stage, at the other side of the bed, Madam Liu, wearing a red coat, stands with her back to the audience. It seems to General Liu, Madam Liu, and the

32 Source: qtd. in Huang Zhi-Kai (Ed.) 163. 153 audience that Old Qi is going to die on this near-empty stage. A piece of stage scenery, a construction of three windows that covers roughly one-third of the stage length, demarcates the interior space of the hospital. Then, surprisingly, Mi Mi enters and begins to sing.

In that moment, listening to Mi Mi singing the tune “Wang Zhao-Jun,” Old Qi takes his last breath. In these very final minutes, the performance transforms from a realistic representation to a magical realism style. The background scenery is moved away. At the same time, the stage of the Xi Yang Guan cabaret, a platform with neon lights, gradually moves on to the left-hand part of the stage. Mi Mi leaves (larger) stage; Yang Hui-Min enters, wearing a traditional Chinese wedding dress, and steps on to the cabaret stage. The ghost of Old Qi rises from the bed and walks toward the bedside chair. Yang Hui-Min, now on the stage, continues singing Wang Zhao Jun. Listening to her singing, Old Qi waves and claps his hands while he beats time to the music. The stage turns into a quasi-dream space. As Yang Hui-Min finishes the song, Old Qi walks toward the cabaret stage and gives her a pile of white envelopes, the symbol of death in Han culture. The background sound effects of machine guns and bombs fade in.

Moving to center stage, Old Qi salutes Yang Hui-Min. The curtain falls.

Most theatre scholars agree that Xiqu emerged from rituals, and that in its nascent form consisted of rituals for revering gods and ghosts.33 The concept of the ghost, in other words, is not an exterior device of Xiqu but part of its core mentality. To be sure, the ghost in the context of Xiqu and the modern theatre in Taiwan are not identical, but the deployment of the ghost in the modern play has cultural overtones that connect it to classical practices from Xiqu with which the audience will be familiar.34 For now, the focal question is this: What does it mean in Far Away from Home to incorporate the element of the ghost at the very end of the performance? From the

33 For an account of ghosts and Xiqu, see Yang Qiu-Hong, 26–32. 34 For a description of the discourse on ghosts in Taiwanese arts, see Gong Jow-Jiun et al. (Ed.), The Return of Ghosts. 154 performance of the ghostly reunion of Old Qi with Yang Hui-Min, one may reasonably surmise that this setting echoes the meaning of ghosts in Xiqu.

The use of ghosts, despite the obvious connotation of redemption in an afterlife, is the final resolution of the body as a cage that is entangled with materiality, sociopolitical influences, historical memory and trauma, and a nostalgia for home. Yet, with the exception of the ending, the play is performed in a realistic sense. The incorporation of ghosts at this final moment of the performance sacrifices dramatic probability from the perspective of the realistic theatre, but bridges the gap between China and Taiwan by relying on the cultural linkages between classical

Chinese and modern Taiwanese theatre. By suddenly shifting to a theatrical mode that evokes the classical Chinese dramatic convention of the ghost, Lee foregrounds the tensions between contemporary Taiwanese life and the uncanny afterlife of China within it, here figured as the persistent desire to return to China on the part of a specific group, the mainlander soldiers.

Reshaping the Self

The overall effect of Lee’s performance is close to that of epic theatre, in which the circumstances and problems are protracted and the play comes to a close without providing concrete answers. Lee’s claim that, “Space does not exist; Time is meaningless” is paradoxical, and might be read in response to Halbwachs’s intriguing analogy in which he compares history and memory to a play:

History divides the sequence of centuries into periods, just as the content of a

tragedy is divided into several acts. But in a play the same plot is carried from one

act to another and the same characters remain true to form to the end, their

feelings and emotions developing in an unbroken movement. (80) 155

Whereas Halbwachs does not elaborate on this metaphor of theatre, Lee complicates the interplay between theatre and history via the body. The conceptualization of the body is, in fact, subject to time and space. Lee’s emphasis on the ways characters are haunted by the past, or by personal or collective memory, comes exactly from such a desire to transgress the limitations of time and space in which the body is situated. The body in performance is, in Lee’s case, not a simple reflection of society in the superficial sense. The body is incapable, on its own, of effecting the reconstruction of history or memory, which are both fragmented and suspicious.

The further complication of the meaning of the body, in fact, is the audience’s task.

As I mentioned at the outset, the theoretical notion of critical realism cannot be ignored in any effort to adequately evaluate Lee’s work. Among the essential ideas of critical realism, the first and foremost is that social structure and theatrics are mutually constructed. Yet, the relationship between the two is not a reflective one. Theatre, as a system of signs, produces knowledge that might lead the audience to re-examine their perceptions of the real world.

Theatre enables one to investigate the complexity of social structures. With the idea of critical realism, Lee’s play functions as a complex meditation on the biological and discursive aspects of the body, in which he further problematizes the interplay between history and memory. In foregrounding the embeddedness of the body in society, Lee proposes the body as a site for refracting social formations, identities, and the history of Taiwan in the late 1980s—a period during which Taiwan was saturated by both its perplexing relationship with China and the pressures of rapid modernization.

As the preceding discussion shows, what is being revealed in the final scene is rather a gesture that articulates confusion, rather than offering a specific stance or answer to the problems encountered in the play. By introducing the final ghost scene, Lee offers only a non-answer in 156 response to these complications. Memory, history, and reality are all unpredictable, and the reconciliation can only be achieved in an afterlife. In real life, we as spectators can only witness the effects of historical remnants, formulating our own memories of an intractable past. In other words, the solution, as the scene visually hints, can only be imagined in the context of an afterlife.

The issues of reconfiguring the self and the afterlife also underpin another play, Stan Lai’s A

Dream like a Dream, the next case in my analysis. In the play and performance of A Dream like a

Dream, the presentation of the duality of the body, its embeddedness and its liberation, also occupies a central position.

Stan Lai and the Reconfiguration of the Body

A member of the second generation of the Chinese diaspora in Taiwan, Stan Lai is probably the only Taiwanese theatre director who is famous internationally. Lai was born in the

US and has a Ph.D. in theatre from the University of California at Berkeley. He founded the

Performance Workshop in 1984, a group that has remained one of the most successful theatre companies in Taiwan. His grounding in a diasporic Chinese identity, his Western education, and his identification with his Taiwanese homeland mean Lai can draw on abundant cultural resources. On this basis, he has created works that reflect Western theatrical techniques, a nostalgia for Taiwan’s Chinese origins, and parodies of the Taiwanese cultural milieu, such as

The Night We Became Crosstalk Comedian (那一夜，我們說相聲, Nayiye, Women Shuo

Xiangsheng 1985), Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land (1986), and Strange Tales of Taiwan (台

灣怪譚, Taiwan Guaitan 1991), all of which deal with the complexity of Taiwanese society and its entanglement with China. 157

Unlike Lee’s pessimistic constructions of a soldierly body trapped in a nowhere land of ambiguous national sentiments, Lai’s reconfigurations of the body concentrate on the possibility of transgressing reality, as we will see through a close reading of Lai’s 2000 play A Dream like a

Dream. In the following sections, I will analyze how Lai deploys the technique of narrating stories, which forms the major dramatic action in this play, to problematize realistic performance.

My primary concern pertains to how narrating one’s story as a theatrical device is tied to the issue of a theatricality of realism and more deeply to the construction of the subjectivity of both the characters and the audience. In other words, I explore three intertwined questions: What happens to the sense of self when it is narrated on the stage, performed as theatre rather than constructed as a written text? Moreover, what happens to the “narrative sense of self” when the self being performed is deeply informed (or disturbed) by the introduction of Buddhist traditions?

Finally, how does this process of searching for and narrating one’s story become a reactionary action that embodies the postcolonial conditions of Taiwanese society?

A Dream like a Dream, which premiered in 2000, is a genuine epic, requiring almost eight hours for an entire performance. According to Lai, he was inspired by the story of a young doctor’s first day working at a hospital, which he read about in The Tibetan Book of Living and

Dying, a story that became the starting point for composing a synopsis of A Dream like a Dream

(2001 12–17). Dramaturgically, Lai’s epic play features three structural shifts in narrative voice.

First, as the play opens, our narrator is the Doctor. Speaking to the audience, she tells us the story of Patient Number 5 (No. 5). Then, in the next segment of the play, No. 5 takes over the main narratological role, telling the Doctor a series of stories, first about his wife, then about a woman named Jiang Hong whom he had met on a journey in France, and finally about a woman named

Koo Xiang-Lan whom he met in China. Finally, Koo Xiang-Lan takes up the story-telling baton, 158 becoming the main narrator. She tells No. 5 about her past life and the various men—primarily

Mr. Wang and Count Duchamp—with the latter she had a miserable marriage. In her long monologue, Koo Xiang-Lan seems to fuse her ex-husband (Count Duchamp, named Henry) and her interlocutor (No. 5). We learn that Koo and her ex-husband tortured one another. Having established this almost impossibly interconnected tangle of a plot, Lai resorts to a classical tragic motif. In short, he kills off his characters: first the Count, then Koo, and finally No. 5. And, thus, with most of its narrators dead, the play draws to a close. Simply put, A Dream like a Dream is a play with multiple narrative frames. As Lai says, “In a story, someone had a dream; in the dream, someone told a story” (2001 9). As critics have pointed out, the structure works like a set of nested Chinese boxes, in that a story contains another story with more stories inside.35

In the version of the play performed in 2000, which is the video archive this chapter analyzes, provided by Performance Workshop, the play takes place on an arena stage in a rectangular formation. That is, some of the audience members (the VIP seats) sit at the center, and the performance actions happen on the sidewalks surrounding the audience. The rest of the viewers witness the live performance with the VIP spectators embedded within the action, seated in the open center of the stage. In short, the stage setting, like the plot, constructs a space that integrates the performers with the audience in a series of concentric circles.

Seen in this light, what is intriguing about A Dream like a Dream is the tension embedded in the contrasts between the use of a realistic performing body framed by non-realistic constructions. That is, although the performers mainly enact the characters using a life-like style, the illusion of the fourth wall does not exist. In performance, Lai deploys multiple actors to perform one character at the same time on the stage. The characters in performance are, therefore, not simply like a real human being. As Lin He-Yi suggests, the setup whereby multiple

35 See Chang Wen-Cheng 44. 159 performers enact the same character functions as “a mirror” that reveals the inner life of the character (139). Like Lee, who complicates the idea of realism in Far Away from Home, in A

Dream like a Dream, Lai further demonstrates the limitations of realistic performance and the reconfiguration of identity in the Taiwanese context.

Biosocial Schema

Just as Lee’s work, examined in the first half of this chapter, captures the social mentality and atmosphere of the late 1980s, Lai’s A Dream like a Dream addresses a similar biosocial approach. Lai’s directorial choices, which favor a decontextualized and embodied mental state, may be better understood as an intervention into another phase of the sociopolitical milieu of

Taiwanese society after the turn of the 21st century. In A Dream like a Dream, from the audience’s perspective, we know very little about No. 5 and the Wife. Nor do we know anything about the Doctor and Koo other than their occupations. Jiang might be the character with the most complete background in the play, but even that is sketchy, and the representation of her trauma is like a floating signifier. In other words, the shaping of characters does not follow the

Western tradition of psychological realism, in which the depiction of a character presumes a genuine human being with a rich stock of life information. The lack of social background among the characters and the visualization of emotion can be better contextualized as a refraction of the exterior context of Taiwanese society.

Taiwan at the beginning of the new millennium welcomed another radical reconfiguration in regard to its political mentality. In 2000, Chen Shui-Bian of the DPP was elected as the tenth president of Taiwan. Chen’s election was phenomenal, as he ended the authority of the KMT government that had launched the 228 Incident and the ensuing political oppression. For some, 160

Chen’s success constituted the first genuine fulfillment of democratization in Taiwanese society.

For others, the power shift from the KMT to the DPP was just a starting point for grasping

Taiwan’s uncertain future as an independent nation. Seen against this general backdrop, what is at stake in the new millennium is a transfiguration in the structure of feelings, which cannot be overestimated. Such a change, unlike the one after the late 1980s, was more mentally oriented than materially conditioned.

Another example that supports my viewpoint is the so-called “1992 Consensus.”36 In

2000, concerning international relations, the KMT and the PRC suggested this debated term as a way to talk about the principle of “one China interpreted separately” and as a mutual agreement between the two governments, a specter which still haunts Taiwanese politics and society in the present day. The 1992 Consensus, in essence, articulates a political stance in favor of maintaining the status quo between Taiwan and China. Again, the tension between changed and unchanged has more to do with social mentality, a discourse that is not materialized. The feeling of unknown and ineffable anxiety constitutes the dominant tone of Taiwanese society. In the year 2000, the

Taiwanese people, no matter which position any given person took, could hardly avoid feeling this kind of mental struggle.

In short, determining the actual exterior context of society is not the goal of the play.

Rather, it is the effect of the influence of society that Lai attempts to construct in A Dream like a

Dream. The deep connection between the environment and the shaping of the self as well as the decontextualized embodiment of trauma echoes the phenomenon of a changing mentality in

Taiwanese society in the year 2000.

The paradox in this schema is that this alienation between theatre and social specificities is itself culturally and sociopolitically sensitive as well as conditioned. Originally, Jiang is a

36 For the details of 1992 Consensus. Wu Jieh-Min. 161 member of the Chinese diaspora in France who has gone into exile because of the Tiananmen

Incident.37 In the 2012 version of A Dream like a Dream, a new version enacted by a troupe composed principally of Chinese actors with a few Taiwanese actors, made a great tour from

China to Taiwan. However, in this version, Jiang no longer talks about Tiananmen.38 Her trauma and sadness remain the same, but the reference to Tiananmen is replaced with a reference to the issue of illegal immigrants. We cannot be sure of the exact reason for this change. However, as it is well known that the June Fourth incident is a political taboo in China, nothing proves the sociopolitical sensitivity of Lai’s theatre better than this case does. This provocative example brings us back to Nellhaus’s critical realism in the sense that society and theatre are reciprocally constructed not in terms of plot, but via dramaturgy and theatrics.39 Still, though we can detect from the style of performance how theatre refracts social communication and mentality, the way in which a practitioner envisions and positions himself or herself in theatre in actively responding to society remains a challenge. Understanding the relationship between Lai’s experiment of interweaving Buddhism and storytelling with the issue of reconfiguring the self is my goal in the following sections.

Buddhist Implications and the Shaping of the Self

As scholars have pointed out, the main characters in A Dream like a Dream are all associated, to varying degrees, with Buddhism.40 No. 5 first meets the woman who is to become his Wife in front of a theatre, where having been dumped by her lover (on the phone) she invites

37 The Tiananmen Square Incident, also known as the June Fourth Incident, was a student–popular social protest in opposition to the authoritarian regime in China in 1989. This demonstration ended with military action that resulted in numerous deaths. The event marked a failed attempt on the part of some of the Chinese people to bring democracy to China. Even today, this incident is still a political taboo and remains a censored in China. 38 Lai, A Dream like a Dream. 2013. 122–24. 39 Nellhaus 194–98. 40 See Yeh Ken-Chuan 12–14. 162

No. 5 to dinner, during which she tells No. 5 about her dream. The Wife dreamt that she was being tortured by a man whom she did not know. With this encounter as a starting point, No. 5 and the Wife start their relationship and soon get married. A few years later, their child is born with an incurable disease and passes away. The couple’s relationship falls apart. One day, the

Wife disappears, and No. 5 searches for her until he contracts, but does not die of, a fever of unknown origin. Through the progress of the plot, the audience is led toward a possible explanation, in the form of karma, for the mysterious encounter and the ultimate separation of

No. 5 and the Wife.

Another couple, Koo and the Count, are the main characters in the second part of the play.

The Count is a diplomat in the Shanghai French Concession where he meets Koo, who is working as a prostitute, a prima donna. The instant the Count sees Koo, he falls in love with her.

Later, the Count proposes to Koo, who, in fact, has no feeling toward him but is willing to accept the proposal in exchange for freedom. Then, the Count and Koo return to France. Gradually, the

Count sees that Koo has become a socialite who engages in sexual relationships with multiple men. At the same time, Koo becomes increasingly aware that the Count only wants her to behave as a traditional Oriental wife would. Ultimately, it appears that the Count has died in a traffic accident, and Koo is left to survive in France alone. A few years later, however, Koo finds out that the Count is, in fact, alive and that he has returned to France from Africa as a successful businessman. However, he has cancer and is close to the end of his life. In the Count’s last minutes, Koo comes to the hospital and curses the Count for the torture he has imposed upon her.

Again, the Count and Koo are revealed as karmic echoes, ghosts of the past; they are each other’s enemy, such that each has experienced suffering. More years pass, and Koo is dying in Shanghai where No. 5 finally finds her based on a portrait of the Count and Koo together, painted by Koo 163 in France. Koo tells No. 5 the story of her life including her relationship with the Count. At the end, shortly before her death, Koo calls No. 5, Henry (the Count's given name), thus revealing to the audience implicitly that No. 5 is the reincarnation of the Count, and his unknown, incurable disease is the result of Koo’s curse, the karma from his previous life.

Generally, then, A Dream like a Dream emphasizes the sense of continuity presented by the connections between dreams, memory, reincarnation, and karma. A singular self has been denied, an aspect we can clearly connect to the Buddhist references. What Lai illustrates in the play, on the surface, are personal inquiries into the meaning of the suffering of the present, an ordeal that carries the accumulation of previous lives, a typical Buddhist perspective on life. In

Buddhist teachings, the essence of life is suffering, and the suffering of human beings arises from desire, which causes rebirth.41 Karma, then, suggests that “the circumstances of future rebirths are determined by the moral deeds a person performs in this life.”42 It is this moral burden that

Buddhist practitioners seek to transgress. Also the structure of the play, a story within another story, might refer to the symbol of a mandala.43 These Buddhist references mean A Dream like a

Dream is close to a religious play. Should we thus identify the concept of the self in accord with

Buddhist philosophy? My answer would be: Not really.

Buddhist philosophy, regardless of its labyrinthine genealogy, does not favor a permanent picture of subjectivity. In fact, neither the self nor the soul is recognized in Buddhism.44

However, in A Dream like a Dream, Lai complicates the status of subjectivity through deploying the body to experiment with the reconfiguration of the self in the Taiwanese context. In practice,

Lai deploys multiple actors to enact the same characters. For example, at the textual level, there

41 Keown 32–48. 42 Ibid., 29. 43 See Chang Wen-Cheng 28–33. 44 Keown 51. 164 are three “Koo Xiang-Lans”: one young, one middle-aged, and one old in the play. At the performative level, the current presence of one character is usually haunted and disturbed by the presence of others. Via the proliferation of the same character, the more a character tries to recollect and reason through the past, the more dreams come in and are intertwined with the presence, and both dream and reality are demonstrated simultaneously via the characters’ multiple presences.

Through the double (or even multi-layered) presence of the same actor, Lai grants the old theatrical technique—one character performed by more than one actor, usually aiming at creating a comical effect—another profound meaning. Using multiple actors to perform one character does not just serve as a functional device for articulating complicated narratives, but also becomes a juxtaposition of a set of binaries: old and young, past and present, dream and reality.

These binaries overlap, and the question regarding the “presence” of theatrical time is usually immersed in “temporal thickness” or in the conflation of time.45

There is no pure presentism in theatre. The actors’ bodies carry the present time of performance as well as the memory of the character’s past, an embodied practice of the conflation of time witnessed by the audience. In other words, there is no single self, but rather multiple selves. The self in A Dream like a Dream is never a stable existence. For the audience, to distinguish which is the real and which is the fictional self is not the task, as everything happens at the same time, theatrically speaking. In Lai’s words, “whether a story is a story, a dream is a dream, it is real” (41). The term “real” does not refer to material plausibility, but to the effects of emotions, an echoing theatrical knowledge that is, I will argue, valued by critical realism. The real has the effect of complicating and proliferating the cognizance of the self in

45 Wanger 2–18. 165 theatre. Lai does not completely comply with the Buddhist doctrine of the “no-self.”46 The past, rather than karma, of the self always intersects with the selves of other people, and thus the self is organized closer to a network in which no one is isolated, or one is always haunted by others.

Storytelling, then, is a practice through which the self can be reconfigured and through which memory and reality can be communicated.47

Storytelling and the Traumatic Self

Lai’s play uses multiple techniques of repetition. Drawing from case studies such as the

Holocaust and the Vietnam War, in her study of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), Cathy

Caruth suggests the nature of trauma: “The pathology consists, rather, solely in the structure of its experience or reception: the event is not assimilated or experienced at the time, but only belatedly, in its repeated process of the one who experiences it” (4–5). Trauma is part of the experience that comes back after the seeming passing of the event. Therefore, trauma is decontextualized, and one who has been traumatized might not necessarily be aware of the influence of this condition, and is trapped in the event. When trauma returns, it becomes a fragmented understanding of history. The problem is that the misrecognition of history, in the eyes of the traumatized victims, replaces the potential for a more comprehensive picture of history and blocks the possibility of further communication over the past.48 In dealing with trauma, Caruth, therefore, suggests that “the history of trauma, in its inherent belatedness, can only take place through the listening of another” (11). Storytelling, practicing the sharing of

46 The idea of the self in Buddhist philosophy, in brief, is that the self is an interplay between the inner perception of mental propensities and an exterior empirical awareness of the world. See Coseru http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2012/entries/mind-indian-buddhism/. 47 Memory in this sense is close to “plastic power” suggested by Nietzsche as “the capacity to develop out of oneself in one’s own way, to transform and incorporate into oneself what is past and foreign, to heal wounds, to replace what has been lost, to create broken moulds” (62). 48 Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory 3–11. 166 one’s understanding of the past, is considered a crucial way of recollecting the self as well as a crucial method of reconfiguring subjectivity in various fields, including trauma studies, postcolonial studies, and theatre studies. The power of storytelling in theatre, as succinctly summarized by Hugo Bowles, is that “Storytelling is a form of talk which invites participation”

(201). In other words, storytelling provides the listener with an opportunity to participate in the inner world of the narrator.

Lai proposes his view of storytelling via the Doctor’s Cousin:

One’s condition in the last stage of life is unique. If he is allowed to have a chance

to tell his own story, and then you listen to him quietly; the action means to offer

him an opportunity to organize his life unintentionally, and he might acquire

wisdom beyond his imagination. (67)

In A Dream like a Dream, Lai draws on the healing and communicative functions of storytelling between the characters and the spectators.49 How can storytelling reveal its potential for recollecting the self on stage, not just from the perspective of the characters but also and especially from that of the audience? My concern is with how Lai enacts his vision of realizing the self through both narrative and performance. Let me turn to the Jiang Hong’s dream to illustrate my point.

As the performance of this scene demonstrates, it is about Jiang’s monologue, her story.

Yet, there are seven actors enacting “Jiangs” on the stage. Located in various spaces on the stage, each performs the same dream that Jiang at the center narrates. The images of the actors and the repetition of the contents of the dream are represented via lighted spaces framed as a storyboard, creating a strong sense of the continuity of the dream without an outlet, a standard perception of trauma as represented, for instance, in Caruth’s work.

49 See also Fischer-Lichte on “the transformative power of performance” 11–23. 167

Jiang Hong is a member of the Chinese diaspora whom No. 5 meets during his search for the cause of his disease in France. No. 5 encounters Jiang at the restaurant where the latter is working as a waitress and pretending not to know Mandarin. Later, in a small coin laundry store,

No. 5 finds out that Jiang is actually a Chinese woman, whom he discovers listening to Chinese pop songs and reading a Chinese novel. Then, they go to dinner, and their romance starts. Jiang becomes No. 5’s guardian and companion during his journey in France. They visit the castle previously owned by the Count and Koo, now a luxury hotel, and determine the next stop for No.

5: China. During the final moment of separation, Jiang also faces her own puzzles.

In the performance, the time is near for Jiang and No. 5 to separate. On a dark stage, after a failed attempt to persuade No. 5 to stay with her in Paris, the actress playing Jiang is featured in a bright spotlight. She begins to address the audience about a little ritual she performs in which she locates herself in the morning via the position of the window: the left, Paris; the right,

Beijing. Behind Jiang’s current position, on the upper stage, the second floor of the up center stage reveals a rectangular framework, lighted, formulating another space in which another Jiang is sitting and stretching. Then, Jiang under the spotlight talks about how she makes breakfast, a process that is performed by Jiang in the framework: “that day, as usual, I took an egg from the refrigerator, preheated the pan, and poured oil. Then, I broke the eggs with light and clear sounds”

(199). Jiang in the framework performs this procedure in the style of a mime. She “opens” the refrigerator with her left hand, and “takes” an egg with her right hand. “Holding” the pan in her right hand, Jiang uses her left hand to “pour” out oil. Then, she “shakes” her left hand horizontally in from of her belly, symbolizing the action of preheating the pan. Next, her right hand, raised near her head, she “hits” the air three times with three short sounds, and her fingers converge in front of her chest and split, representing the action of breaking the egg. Yet, in the 168 next second, alongside the sound of the egg falling into the pan, the space of the framework on the up center stage is darkened. On the up right stage, a third Jiang’s face appears from the darkness, now looking perplexed, and she is about to break the egg (again). However, as soon as we hear the sound of the egg falling into the pan, the framework on the center darkens again, and the other two frameworks and a Jiang appears on either side. Accompanying Jiang’s narrative, the process of Jiang waking up in the morning and then frying an egg repeats.

At this moment, the Jiang in the spotlight begins to wonder whether she is entrapped by this recurring process of frying an egg and tries another time. The result is the same. With the sound of the eggs cooking, two Jiangs disappear, and the other two Jiangs show up, creating an uncanny spectacle like a flickering of flashbulbs. This process continues until the seventh time when Jiang, still standing in the middle, is joined by the other four Jiangs on the second story of the stage.50 Jiang’s nightmare ends, but the process of frying eggs proceeds. Her morning ritual continues but beyond the vision of the audience.

Jiang Hong’s frying eggs scene symbolically articulates her fear of being entrapped by life and also her desire to escape from “reality,” which is a combination of memory, the past, the present, and emotions. According to Jiang, the center-stage narrator, two principal factors affect her sense of being herself. On the one hand, she locates herself via the position of the window and the direction of sunlight, in tune with the environment. On the other, as she suggests,

Sometimes, to make sure I am in Paris, I like to make the breakfast of the western

people. Opening the refrigerator, seeing butter, orange juice, and cheese, I am sure

that it is correct that I am in Paris. (199)

50 Chang Wen-Cheng suggests that the number seven refers to the “karma” of Buddhism and also to the “circulation of nightmare” (41). Although I do not negate this possible connection, how accurate it is to refer to the play as connecting to Buddhism is an open question. Instead, I focus on the issue of transcending the traumatic state, a process represented by Jiang. 169

The present for Jiang is, thus, an accumulation of a series of transitions both passively, with the environment, and actively, in the form of daily chores. The sense of being a self located somewhere is a reciprocal choice, a shaping of the self via the interaction with the environment, which is essential if Jiang is to reconfigure her subjectivity.

Thus, strictly speaking, in the frying egg scene, the multiple presences of Jiang indirectly signal the ineffable and decontextualized trauma. The stage is empty of any scenery or furnishings. There is only the bodily movement of the multiple Jiangs. The pantomime and the proliferation of Jiang’s images draw our attention to the existence of the body in which the body, like the environment, becomes an empty reference. In this scene, the movement of Jiang’s body does not refer to any progress or change. In brief, the dream of frying eggs, from the narrative and the conditioned environment, does not directly refer to any specific sociopolitical factors. It might be that it relates to the Tiananmen Incident if we consider this story of a dream as the return of trauma. But Jiang does not inform the audience of any concrete reference or even hint at this moment. And, as we have seen in the alteration of the 2010 play for the purposes of a

2012 performance, the Tiananmen Incident can be substituted out for other, more contextually appropriate (or legally permissible) traumatic events.

The difficulty of Jiang’s life lies in how to dissociate from her past and reconstruct the present. The frying egg scene addresses Jiang’s fear of living with reality. The sudden ending of this scene, nonetheless, implies the intriguing possibility of a solution, an answer that emerges through Jiang’s encounter with No. 5. Later on, at the end of A Dream like a Dream, in Jiang’s letter for No. 5, we know that, in fact, Jiang’s relationship with No. 5 causes her to become seriously depressed, which overlaps with her past trauma in China. However, according to Jiang, 170

One day … after Tiananmen. That’s how things should be. That day, I found the

depression is all I wanted. My life relies on that [….]. I decided to change. I think,

rather than expanding that fleeing time into enduring memory, living fully in that

particular moment is better. That’s all. (385)

The message is self-referential, addressing the point that Jiang’s trauma is only hers, and she is fully aware of that. Jiang’s trauma in this condition becomes cultural, environmental, and corporeal, as an indispensable part of the shaping of the self. It is no more merely about

Tiananmen, but becomes a combination of memory, affect, and interpersonal relationships.

Here, we need to go back to Caruth and trauma studies for a moment in order to problematize the issue of trauma. The problem with the classical trauma studies is that with the

Holocaust and war featured as paradigmatic examples, trauma becomes a universal term for describing universal suffering, whereas, in fact, pain that is on a case by case basis and is, thus, culturally conditioned, as we can see from Jiang’s scene.51 Lai also seems aware of this status.

Via Jiang’s dream, Lai intriguingly presents trauma in a dream-like form that is decontextualized.

As a result, this decontextualized scene focusing on the uncanny aspect of everyday life shows almost no signs pointing to the Tiananmen Incident. The stimulus and the context of the pain do not appear to be the main concern in this scene. Through positioning the body in the incessant repetition in the empty environment, Lai zooms in on the constructedness of the body and the reconfiguration of the self vis-à-vis memory. This non-realistic representation rejects the

Tiananmen Incident as a simple, universal fact. Instead, it presents and embodies the effect of ineffable suffering of the individual witness and problematizes the question of how one can go on in life. By telling her story, Jiang understands that the haunted past constitutes one facet of herself. In Jiang’s story, there is no concrete demarcation of the past and the present. Reality is

51 For a study of pain, see Scarry 3–23. 171 always manifold, a milieu in which one must constantly adjust oneself. The body becomes the embodiment of feelings and the site for adjusting the self in reality, a perspective that reminds us of Lee and Far Away from Home. The difference between the two works is that in Far Away from

Home, Old Qi fails to relocate himself in the present, whereas in A Dream like a Dream, Jiang succeeds.

However, we return to the issue of biosocial schema. Lai is elusive in the sense that he does not intend to present a specific picture of what reality would become after the reintegration of the past. Jiang simply disappears from the story. Concerning the social reality of performance, in the 2012 version, Jiang’s background was changed from that of a political dissident to that of an illegal immigrant. As a global theatre artist and a member of the second generation of the

Chinese diaspora in Taiwan whose theatre troupe tours China often, Lai must struggle with his self-censorship in terms of political intervention into China–Taiwan relations, if only in the aesthetic terms of the theatre. Although Lee seeks to reconcile the emotional and cultural tensions between China and Taiwan, he nonetheless avoids taking a political stance, thereby placing the burden on the audience, as I will elaborate in a subsequent section.

Performing Death, Enabling the Audience

As noted in the previous sections on Lee, death is a theatrical choice that is infused with cultural references and marks the limits of realism. In Lai’s theatrics, death also plays a central role. If Jiang’s story shows a reconciliation between multiple selves through the presentations of the main characters’ deaths, Lai attempts to bridge the gap among characters, performers, and spectators. 172

Lai wraps up the epic A Dream like a Dream through the juxtaposition of a series of deaths: Act 11, scene 5, the death of the Count; Act 11, scene 6, the death of Koo; Act 12, scene 3, the death of No. 5. In live performance, the sense of continuity between these deaths is perceivable, as the three patients enact the last moments of their lives in a similar spatial rendering, a small square space demarcated by stage lighting. The three squares remind us of the sense of continuity and repetition in Jiang’s frying eggs scene. No.5, Koo, and the Count are like the doubles of Jiang in her dream, in which the ending of each dream/story comes abruptly.

Through this spatial imagery, the extent to which one individual human existence differs from another is shown to decrease. Impending death becomes a site for communicating the pain of the self to others. From the three characters, we can find a pattern that reveals both the distinctiveness and fragility of human beings.

Despite differences in ideology, gender, class, and feelings, all human beings die. Death demarcates the limits of our flesh, but at the same time, it becomes the threshold that promises commonality and communicability among distinct individuals. Death as an ultimately shared goal for dissimilar lives consequently triggers a signal that transcends the invisible line between the characters and spectators, as both are human beings and subject to the limitations imposed by death. In A Dream like a Dream, death constitutes a universal avenue that connects people. It consequently entails the possibility of reconciliation with others.

As the Doctor states, “every patient has a story” (Lai, Dream 393). In the face of death, storytelling engenders a reflexive moment of encountering death for the characters. For the audience, it triggers a sympathetic imagination of death as a universal experience. This process refers to the “self–other exchange” in which the Doctor participates with No. 5, who also listens to Koo’s life story during her last moments. 173

As he draws close to death, No. 5 starts murmuring, partly to the Doctor:

Then I came back to Taiwan. My illness worsened, and I came to stay in this

hospital.

Then in came a doctor. She insisted that I tell my story.

Then I talked about my story.

There were many people in the story. You all there … you all there … Now the

story ends. Thank you, I can leave.

[…]

When Koo was leaving, I held her hand. She told me everything. It felt

transparent. Now, I know that feeling. Even touching your hands reminds me of

the feeling.

[…]

My story is finished, and I understand it now. This world, our bodies are built by

us with bricks and tiles. We are the architects of our own.

This time, the building does not work. Hope next time it could be better.

[…]

I got it. Now everything is transparent. I saw it. You want to inhale my pain,

giving me your happiness?

It is I who am leaving. This thing should be done by me. Let me take away what

you do not want! (390–91)

Finally, No. 5 dies.

The messages embedded in No. 5’s final words are abundant. Echoing Koo’s expression,

No. 5 also refers to the state of being transparent, which is complicated imagery. It implies an 174 afterlife, or say, a ghost, and thus indicates the impending moment of death. It also connotes redemption in which the character discloses the secret of his/her life and seeks reconciliation. It further implies the revealing of the invisible essence of life in which people usually do not perceive in their normal daily existence. Such an essence is embodied via the images of theatre and architecture. Theatre and architecture are not new analogies. In Shakespeare, all the world is a stage. Here, the body is a theatre, and life is a play. A comparison of the body as architecture with the experience of life as playwriting suggests the idea of agency, in which the self is enacted, relational, and evolutionary.

In addition to the idea of an afterlife, Lai suggests that the analogy between body, theatre, and life is not just an ending, but also a starting point for both the characters and the audience.

Death eliminates the biosocial and cultural difference of those characters and communities their affects. The recollection of the self is fulfilled along with the interaction with other people, the impending death, and the foreseeable existence of an afterlife. For the spectators, witnessing the enactment of those characters’ stories and deaths, the sense of empathy makes this theatrical space a place for the self–other exchange, which can only be granted by imagination, which exceeds the limitation of the corporeal body and of material reality, as No. 5 eventually exemplifies. In other words, the enactment of death and storytelling are quasi-rites of passage, to borrow Arnold van Gennep’s term, happening in theatre, making it a special place for recollecting the self.52 This rendering is not to lead the characters to Nirvana, transcending life and death, or to create the effect of catharsis as in Japanese Noh, but to invite emotional engagement and enable individual judgment in the theatre.

As a result, after No. 5’s death, what the spectators perceive is an ending, which is close to a ritual. When the Doctor narrates her reaction to No. 5’s death, the other No. 5 appears on the

52 Gennep 146–65. 175 stage, contextually the ghost, and the Nurse brings a pile of candles to the stage and lights them.

All the actors (not the characters) gradually enter the stage and cross the center pathway of the spectators, who are at the center of the reversed arena stage around which the performance has taken place. No realistic, life-like presentations any more. The march goes along as the ghost of

No. 5 is singing. Ultimately, the actors enclose the audience, and the stage falls into darkness.

The flickering candlelight creates a circle, which is soon blown out with the sound of a hand bell.

The performance ends.

For the audience in A Dream like a Dream, this is the end of the characters’ journey. Their pain and deaths remind one of the finitude of human life. This ending with a quasi-ritual is significant in the sense that it is more than the collective pain that has been emphasized. What has been interpolated is the sense of community. Characters, performers, and spectators are a unity in theatre.

At the same time, the deployment of candles in this ritual, in fact, challenges the risk of totalizing all the participants. Characters in A Dream like a Dream light a candle while telling a story. Originally, lighting a candle, as described in the play, is a practice to signal the night on which a woman first works as a prostitute. The Count asks to light a candle during his first night with Koo, for whom, of course, this event is not the first time. Lighting a candle is, thus, more like fabricating a scene and a romantic story the Count has in mind. The candlestick the Count takes with him back to France is later stolen by Koo, who gives it to No. 5. In the performance, requesting listeners to light a candle becomes an action shared by Koo and No. 5 while telling a story. Thus, when the lighting of a candle means revealing one’s story, the existence of candles also points to the interconnectivity of the narrator and the listener. The candle, therefore, also delimits the self and the other. The action of lighting a candle constitutes an “affordance,” or a 176 mental image of the body that indexes ways in which people interact with others and with the environment,53 reminding us of our ability of tell our own stories.

In other words, a prop in the theatre is not a simple object. It is “a discrete, material inanimate object that is visibly manipulated by an actor in the course of performance.”54

Deploying a candle at the end of the performance, in a ritual-like ending, then, functions as a gestural reminder that everyone can light a candle, calling for spectators to listen to others’ stories and leaving with own stories. By witnessing the condition in which one is always embodied in someone else’s story in the space of theatre where time is accumulated, the spectators become part of the network in which they, just like the performers, can be a character in the other’s life. The cognition of the self in this sense is an “extended” one that is always in the process of reconfiguration resulting from the interaction of our bodies, the others, and the environment.55

This very last moment reminds us of the ending of Tian’s White Water in which the line between performers and characters becomes blurred. But unlike Tian’s seeking to reconstruct the national identity via the hybrid combination of multiple cultural references, in the context of A

Dream like a Dream, the connotation of blurring this invisible line can potentially refer to the recollection of the self on a personal level. This moment also has resonance with Lee’s Far Away from Home in which an imaginary reconciliation of the protagonist’s suffering is fulfilled in the performance. For Lee, a solution to the pain of his characters seems to be highly unlikely. Lai’s version can be said to be both more drastic and milder at the same time: he kills the major characters and places confidence in his audience to interpret the drama. Hence, unlike the ending of Lee’s Far Away from Home, which is still profoundly subject to exterior history, memory, and

53 McConachie 73–4. 54 Sofer 11. 55 Menary 1–26. 177 society, we can reasonably surmise that Lai puts more confidence in the function of theatre as a site for reorganizing the self for both the characters and the spectators. As a place where the audience can witness an enacted death and listen to the stories of others, theatre in this condition constitutes a laboratory for engendering the reconfiguration of the self.

Theatre and Society from the Viewpoint of Critical Realism

One fundamental belief inherent in Stanislavski’s system is that theatre should be a reflection of genuine life, and even now, Stanislavski remains one of the most influential figures in psychological realism in world theatre.56 For later theatre practitioners, the ways to connect theatre and life, or say, the world, are much more challenging, which has also resulted in the flourishing of aesthetic experiments.57 The most well-known examples are Brecht and the epic theatre as well as Augusto Boal and his theatre of the oppressed. Scholars such as Jill Dolan argue that performance and its correspondent emotional engagement can formulate a space of utopia.58 The connection between performance and society, of course, is too complicated to be articulated in any single book and naturally exceeds the horizon of my analysis. The connection between literature, arts, and society is culturally conditioned, a fundamental insight of which postcolonial studies reminds us.59

Then, the question I have proposed and explored in this dissertation is precisely the connection between the bodily practices of the modern Taiwanese theatre and the sociopolitical specificities of Taiwan. In this chapter, from the nuances of the respective productions of Lee and

Lai, I have suggested that the distinct renderings of each transcribe social mentality into patterns

56 Zarrilli 13– 21. See also Lan Chieng-Hung, 489–95. 57 For the genealogy of aesthetic experiments in Western theatre, see Lehmann 29–45. 58 Dolan 95–97. 59 I am referring to the issue of Orientalism. See Said, Orientalism. Also, Mitchell 1–33. 178 of performance and explore the possibility of reconfiguring the self, which is fragmented due to the memory and trauma of historical conditions in the Taiwanese context. My major conceptualization borrows from the insights of critical realism.

In proposing the analysis of critical realism, Nellhaus argues that “Social actions do of course frequently repeat or invoke previous actions, and so accomplish similar acts that reproduce underlying social relations, but events are not (textual) citations” (160). In order to address the understudied connection between theatre and society, Nellhaus analyses theatre from the micro-aspect of communication. As he suggests, “critical realism charges theatre historians to recognize that casual links tying particular events and practices to underlying social structures and dynamics in order to explain the emergence, form, timing, and mode of existence of some aspect of theatre” (49). From the viewpoint of critical realism, theatre should be a special lens through which scholars evaluate the influence of social structure and formation, which reflexively influence theatrics. But, then, it seems to us that we encounter the chicken and egg question. The way Nellhaus attempts to avoid this dilemma, through elaborating on the theory of semiotics, is to suggest the idea of social ontology:

Social ontology is constituted by a sort of “double emergence.” On the one hand

are structures, agents, and discourses, which parallel the real, actual, and semiosic

[sic] ontological domains. On the other hand, social practices necessarily have

material, sociological, and meaningful aspects, which we may call the

phenomenological dimensions of social activity. (44)

In this three by three grid (structures, agents, and discourses intersected by material, sociological, and meaningful), Nellhaus proposed a macro lens to express the formation of society from its material specifics to discursive representations. Theatre practice, because of its 179 material embeddedness, human bodily orientation, and communication function, then, is positioned by Nellhaus as “a model of society” (16). In other words, what Nellhaus implies is that theatre is not part of society, but a parallel of society. This answer, nonetheless, sounds tautological. Consequently, limitation of Nellhaus’s argument is that by emphasizing the angle of society, he has sacrificed the aesthetics of theatre: “In this book I have paid considerable attention to agency, but only a little to matters of artistry” (189). In other words, Nellhaus, despite his insights on articulating the subtle reciprocal process of connecting theatre to society, falls short of conducting an aesthetic reading of enacted performance and its meanings. He reads theatre through society, but not the reverse. Therefore, what exactly theatre can contribute to society in its aesthetic renderings awaits further elaboration.

If we juxtapose the intimacy between theatre and society and the vision of critical realism, we find that the fundamental problem is rather that of how to better understand the perplexing interplay amid the elaborate aesthetics of theatre and its sociopolitical conditions without totalizing the concept of theatre? Put another way, how to read theatre in a conditioned context without universalizing its value and potential remains challenging. I am indebted to Nellhaus for his insight rendering the relationship between theatre and society more nuanced. Yet, my analysis in this chapter is not so much about proving his idea of theatre as a model of communication in parallel with social ontology. My elaboration focuses on “the capacities and physiology of the human body, or the mind’s complex and multilayered cognitive structures” (Nellhaus 50). In

Boal’s words, “Theatre is born when the human being discovers that it can observe itself” (13).

From the perspective of critical realism, therefore, my task is to uncover not just the interplay between theatre and society, but also the ways in which theatre can be an aesthetically innovative site of empowerment in which participants possibly develop agency. 180

In other words, the vision I share with Nellhaus is that theatre practice is reflective for one to take actions, an ultimate goal of many theatre practitioners. I suggest that theatre is more than a place for us to uncover how society functions. Instead, theatre gives us a place to explore the possibility of transgressing the limitations of specific social contexts, or “social schema,” in

Nellhaus’s words, as we can see from Far Away from Home and A Dream like a Dream. Through reading Lai’s and Lee’s plays and productions, I argue that the deployment of the body in theatre functions as a site that connects theatre performance to social structure. Aesthetics and society are inseparable.

Realistic Performance and Social Intervention of Lee and Lai

The deployment of a realistic style in Taiwan, because of its later association with anti-communist plays, narrowly, and as an enlightening project for the spectators, broadly, has been targeted as a conservative and outdated enemy of modern theatre practitioners since the

1960s. In fact, realistic performance, or more strictly, Stanislavski’s American version of Method

Acting, is one of the few dominant systematic training methods in theatre departments in Taiwan and plays an important role in productions in the commercial theatre market. However, concerning realistic performance, maybe because of its pervasive presence in modern Taiwanese theatre, the analysis and evaluation of its aesthetic innovations, as we can see in Lee’s and Lai’s works, are far from satisfactory.

Far Away from Home tells the life story including the death of Old Qi, and A Dream like a Dream, in a more circuitous way, tells more stories and portrays more death. My inquiry centers on the pattern formulated by the deployment of death and storytelling in a realistic performance style. Death is an inside-out approach, as no one can escape from the limitation of 181 mortality. Storytelling is an outside-in approach, as one must find a way to relate to the narrator’s story. Alternatively, the two can be reversed. Death is outside-in. By witnessing the other’s death, one contemplates one’s own. Storytelling is inside-out. One’s perceptions and cognitive experience identify with the enacted story, thereby creating meaning. I am not playing a language game. Instead, I am endeavoring to point out the complex interplay between performance and reception. This fluidity also connotes the nature of conceptual blending in the experience of watching a performance, a state oscillating among identities, characters, and actors. Whereas the outcomes of the characters are determined, the audience members, who behold the shared suffering of the Other, can continue on their own distinct journeys.

In my analysis, realistic performance conveys a complex relationship between theatre and the sociopolitical specifics through the bodies of the characters/performers. The body is the site of Lee’s and Lai’s experiments. By transcribing the sociopolitical specificities of Taiwanese society through realistic performance, Lai and Lee initiate a form of emotional engagement that empowers the audience. Chinese influences, universal sentiments, and the limits of corporeality add up to an affective point of intervention for the Taiwanese audience to contemplate the intricacies of the mutual construction of the self and society. Due to the actual social scenario of

Taiwan, replicating reality then means very little. As a result, realistic performance is elusive in

Lee’s and Lai’s works. This is also the reason why the representations of characters might invite little identification. Instead, the spectators must find their own stories. Thus, Lee and Lai aim to trigger feelings and produce knowledge via theatrics and the bodies of the performers for the audience to return to and reevaluate the exterior world outside theatre. Watching a performance and taking social action in this sense are not two separate things but are two poles of the same spectrum. The tension between emotional detachment and engagement embedded in one’s body 182 becomes the potential avenue for the change that the audience can carry with them in everyday life.

It is, thus, understandable that in Lee’s case, the quasi-magic realistic rendering reunion conveys both his compassion for marginal characters and the pessimism of a possible solution whereby the self can be reintegrated with reality. It also becomes apparent that the way Lai ends

A Dream like a Dream with a semi-ritual spectacle results from the reconstruction of the self not as the task of the performers on stage, but of the audience in the theatre. The spectacle reminds the audience of the ends of dreams and thus the necessity of returning to reality. The spectacle also entails the sentiment that brings the spectators back to the original function of theatre in creating a communal sense of identity. In these matters, thematically, Lee’s and Lai’s realistic performance is not meant to superimpose political messages. However, my focus on the body has shown that in theatre, the practitioner’s craft enacts the shared oppression of Taiwanese society.

From this point, the characters’ stories have ended, whereas the audience members’ stories have just begun.

Ultimately, this is the potentiality of realistic performance, through the directorial renderings of the shared biosocial affects and actions of human beings in particular conditions, theatre functions as a site for both practitioners and spectators to engage with and question the aesthetic, cultural, and sociopolitical constructedness of that society per se, and more importantly, to experiment with possible directions for repositioning oneself in that society. A realistic performance in this light has to be contextualized not as a style, but as a vessel for negotiating commonalities among characters, performers, and audience in a temporal, spatial specific place. 183

Chapter Three

Transgressing Taiwan:

Suzuki Tadashi, Robert Wilson, and Intercultural Theatre

In 2009, the first Taiwan International Festival of Arts (TIFA), initiated by the National

Theater and Concert Hall (NTCH), invited Robert Wilson to collaborate on a local production of

Orlando, his famous and idiosyncratic monodrama based on Virginia Woolf’s book of the same title. Wilson agreed to come on board, and the NTCH used the term “flagship (旗艦, qijian) production” to publicize his involvement in an effort represent the production as one of unparalleled grandeur and scope. Wilson cast Wei Hai-Min (魏海敏, 1957– ), a well-known and distinguished Taiwanese Jingju actress, and the subsequent collaboration between the Western avant-garde director and the traditional performer created a production that became the theatre event of the year. Two years later, in 2011, in responding to an invitation from the NTCH, the

Japanese modern theatre director Suzuki Tadashi visited Taiwan and produced La Dame aux

Camélias in the form of what is referred to as a “Taiwanese musical.” Performed mainly by local

Taiwanese performers, the production combined an interpretation of Alexandre Dumas fils’ eponymous novel with a set of Taiwanese pop songs. The text of this production was written by

Suzuki first and later translated by Taiwanese theatre professionals into Chinese and Taiwanese.

Both of these flagship productions benefited from extensive promotion and drew large audiences. The SPOT-Taipei Film House, a cinema dedicated to non-commercial films, and the

NTCH played promotional videos, which were also available on the TIFA’s website. At any bookstore, a person could easily find the monthly PAR (Performing Arts Reviews)—a trendy magazine focused on the performing arts in Taiwan—and could read special introductory articles 184 and interviews with the directors and local practitioners. In addition, newspapers ran a number of articles on the productions. During the performance run of each play, audience members could attend an opening talk guided by theatre critics, during which the critics would enthusiastically instruct the audience regarding how to better appreciate these masterpieces. The NTCH even published books to introduce the directors and produced DVDs to document the preparations and performances. We cannot be sure of the exact expense of the whole process of producing a flagship production, but it is quite evident that these activities cost an enormous amount of money, and even large Taiwanese theatre companies such as Lai’s Performance Workshop and

Lee’s Ping-Fong Acting Troupe, the subjects of Chapter Two of this study, have yet to use as many marketing strategies just for one performance. In other words, without state support, the flagship performances would have been impossible.

In this chapter, I offer three interventions in regard to the idea of intercultural theatre, which is the essential framework of this dissertation. First, I discuss intercultural theatre not as a stable intellectual product, but as a practice whose meaning unfolds continuously in the process of repeated intercultural encounters, including rehearsal, performance, and audience reception.

Second, I emphasize the role of the audience’s intercultural encounter in shaping the meaning of an intercultural performance. Third, I explore the subtle ways in which modern theatre reconfigures local identity and embodies postcolonial struggles in the current-day Taiwanese context. The fundamental problem of intercultural performance, as I will demonstrate in the case of La Dame aux Camélias, comes from the tendency to overlook the dynamic of the immediate audience reception and responses to the enacted performance, a factor that is history-laden and culture-ridden. This chapter is not an intervention in terms of the audience per se. After all, my study does not consist of a full description of the reception of the performance. Instead, I 185 consider the audience a code for a locality pertaining to the process of cultural translation and appreciation in an intercultural encounter. I use both texts and staged performances as the basis for the analysis in which the complexity of the body in performance, the problems of intercultural practice, and the specificities of Taiwanese society are all interrelated. My analysis is based on the experience of watching live performances, although I reconstruct the descriptions of theatrics through watching the video recordings.

“Flagship” Productions in Contemporary Taiwan

In English, the term “flagship” generally refers to the first production of a troupe. Indeed, flagship production is the term that has designated the most crucial (and certainly the most expensive) work at the TIFA since 2009. Yet, in the Taiwanese context, the two Chinese characters have other cultural connotations. One refers to Taiwanese geographical and historical contexts. Taiwan is an island surrounded by an ocean. In addition to the island’s indigenous groups, Taiwanese people were mainly immigrants, who had emigrated for various reasons, relocating to Taiwan from China since the Ming dynasty. The image of the sea, thus, plays a fundamental part in the self-perception of non-indigenous Taiwanese identity. Culturally speaking, among the most important historical incidents in the Ming dynasty were the great expeditions of Zheng He (1371–1433), in which he sailed seven times from China to the territories in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Sailing, therefore, connects to the idea of cultural exchange, and the flagship production activates a metaphor of exploration.

The other character ties in to an economic frame, in that Taiwanese people deploy the imagery of flagship because this kind of production is officially funded by the state and usually produced by internationally renowned directors. In this sense, flagship production—the most 186 heavily funded and sponsored events—serve as a sort of vanguard of later, or smaller, theatrical

“vessels,” which may follow behind the lead ship as part of a performative “fleet.” In this sense, the deployment of this term emphasizes the spirit of theatrical experiment, the goal of the TIFA.

These meanings are culturally and historically charged, showing that from the very beginning, the project is not free from ideology and power.

Indeed, Wilson’s groundbreaking style—its anti-literary, slow motions, its interplay between light and shadow, and its non-linear narratives—constitutes what many theatergoers and scholars understand when they think of Western postmodernism in modern world theatre.

Likewise, Suzuki is an icon of world theatre, famous for works that represent modern Japanese theatre with a unique training method, which incorporates techniques and aesthetics from the traditional Japanese theatre such as Noh. Under the guidance of these established directors, flagship productions commercially, culturally, and politically have become one of the most well-known instances of “intercultural” exchange happening in Taiwan, and they have served to connect the Taiwanese market to the global one.

The term “intercultural,” as part of the rhetoric of commercial marketing, foregrounds these special occasions, during which local Taiwanese practitioners have a chance to collaborate with foreign directors, and thus emphasizes the resolution of Taiwanese artists to, as Geng

Yi-Wei puts it, “walk the path between cultures of the Eastern and Western theatre.”1 This kind of official slogan, which illustrates a high level of confidence in the work, in fact, does not ease the debate over the quality of these locally intercultural exchanges. The central issues in the debate include (1) dehistoricization—the performance has nothing to do with the history of

Taiwan, (2) the expense of the productions—Taiwanese theatre cannot afford this kind of large-scale production, and (3) power imbalance—foreign directors do not communicate

1 The subtitle of the book that records the whole process of the production of Orlando. See Geng Yi-Wei, Orlando. 187 effectively with local practitioners.2 Despite the global fame of the directors and the enthusiastic promotion of media magnates, the audience members themselves responded polemically. Some liked the performance; others wanted a “refund” (Wang Yi-Ru 2011).

Audience Reception

As a member of the audience, at the February 10, 2011, performance of La Dame aux

Camélias, I have found that one moment has made a lasting impression on me: the scene in which Duval, the father of the protagonist, Armand, requests the heroine, Marguerite, a prostitute, to abandon Armand for the sake of the happiness of his entire family. In this scene, Duval enters the room, exchanging conversation with Marguerite, and finally reveals his true intention. Out of despair and love for Armand, Marguerite agrees to Duval’s petition. Then, gradually, the audience hears the opening bars of Strive for Victory (愛拼才會贏, Ai3 piaN3 chiah e7 iaN5), a well-known Taiwanese song. As soon as the prelude music began, a few members of the audience started to laugh. Once Duval began to sing, the laughter became quite loud, clear enough to be captured in the video archive, the main material of my performance analysis, despite its extremely poor quality.

I will present a more detailed analysis of the scene shortly. For now, the key question is this: Why did the audience laugh in response to what is, in terms of plot at least, a sad scene of separation? If this response is not just an embodiment of some idiosyncrasy of a given audience, or an intentionally jarring predetermined expectation controlled by the director (both of which seem unlikely), then we are left with two distinct possibilities: the laughter is an effect of identification, or it is a response to emotional alienation. In other words, assuming that there is a

2 See He Ding-Zhao. 188 reason for the laughter, what is the cultural context evoked by, and the directorial technique resulting in, this particular audience response?

Other than the label of flagship, the two performances I examine in this chapter also share this specific feature, namely, that the audience reception includes some notably extreme reactions.

Orlando caused an extended debate along the lines of an Orientalist critique. Yang Ze, writer and critic, asks, “What does globalization mean” in this kind of intercultural collaboration? Chang

Hsiao-Hung, scholar and critic, describes the performance as “an ahistorical, atemporal thing.”

Wang Mo-Lin wonders if maybe “Robert Wilson wanted to present the cultural phenomenon that the East is the East, the West is the West?”3 Even though these responses show, ambivalent attitudes toward the performance, at best, the wording is relatively mild. Two years later, however, concerning La Dame aux Camélias, a Taiwanese audience member, Yang Zhong Heng

(Mel Yang), also a famous director and producer of musicals, posted the following damning words to his Facebook page: “Suzuki Tadashi’s La Dame aux Camélias is the worst, visually and aurally, the most nonsensical ‘popular new musical.’” Lin Yu-Bin, a mediator and scholar working on Suzuki’s visit, responded on Facebook that “recontextualization” is the main purpose of Suzuki’s experiment in this Taiwanese musical: “This is his [Suzuki’s] aesthetics.”

The polarization in terms of audience response is nothing new. Instead, the experience of an expensive cultural endeavor undertaken with great seriousness, but resulting in bemused laughter, is fairly common in contemporary Taiwanese theatre. Yet, when the dialogue tends to focus on the issue of the gain and loss of Taiwanese identity, it is a case worth analyzing because it sheds light on the disjuncture between state-sponsored initiatives and the cultural appetites of theatre-goers, the often ironic gap between ‘the world’ and ‘Taiwan,’ and, most importantly, the

3 These quotes are from the symposium on 18 February 2009. See “Western Avant-Garde in the East—the Symposium on Orlando.” 189 ways in which the very notion of a flagship production is fundamentally at odds with the working principles of intercultural theatre, which stresses the cultural empowerment of participants, a two-way dialogue toward shaping an eventual theatrical experiment, and social engagement as well as the use of theatre as a tool of social redress. Ultimately the questions are these: What does it mean for local subjectivity when people express either their confidence in, or anxiety about, such an intercultural exchange? How does intercultural theatre intersect with the issue of building a national identity?

Just as the laughter from the audience provoked by La Dame aux Camélias proposes a challenge to understanding the complexity of a specific directorial choice in performance, the appeal of intercultural performance, too, requires a close contextualization of the locally mutual communication process, which articulates intercultural exchange as a two-way dialogue. Yet, the problem we can see from the local response to flagship productions is that the ground-level question of whether intercultural exchange actually happened in Taiwan is a genuine dialogue:

Are these productions not, instead, rather an embodiment of the “top down” power imbalances between the two cultures of Eastern and Western theatre? This distinct phenomenon invites the critical inquiry of this chapter, which tackles issues at the heart of intercultural theatre. To what degree can we label a performance as “intercultural”? What are the particular factors that constitute a sense of interculturalism? At what moments might we as spectators feel dissonance in regard to some intercultural practice? These questions, in fact, suggest two hermeneutic viewpoints: that of the practitioners, on the one hand, and that of the spectators, on the other. I will argue that critiquing intercultural practice requires a conceptualization of the ways in which directorial choices about gesture, posture, and bodily movement are unassimilable to, and 190 sometimes in direct conflict with, local bodily practices that are themselves infused with cultural memory. The imagination of subjectivity can scarcely be a smooth and stable process.

Intercultural Theatre and Its Displacements in Taiwan

As noted in the Introduction, intercultural theatre has long been an important issue of debate. It is a normative concept introduced by Richard Schechner in the early 1970s. At that time, Schechner used the term “interculturalism” to describe Western directors’ experimental work focused on integrating non-Western performance traditions into Western theatre. In this sense, interculturalism addresses a creative process initiated by practitioners and is concerned with their artistic agency. Yet, as Pavis theorized with his hourglass model, this process of intercultural exchange is not a free flow. The production of an intercultural theatrical work must go through a number of stages between “source culture” and “target culture” (184). Like any work of translation, which involves two or more cultures, this complicated paradigm cannot completely avoid constriction in dealing with the cultural flow, as it depicts a top-down pass-through between various stages in which interpretations necessarily clash. Pavis’s model implicitly connotes a linear flow of cultural exchange and, thus, paradoxically reveals a rooted power imbalance in the process of cultural collaboration.

Beginning with Pavis’s insightful yet problematic theorization of intercultural theatre, a number of theatre scholars remain interested in questions concerning how to conceptualize interculturalism. Lo and Gilbert’s toy model, which encourages a more dynamic analysis of intercultural exchange, is one of these further attempts. But the embedded dilemma, I argue, is that patterning interculturalism into a theoretical model is already a practice of intercultural choice. Pavis chose a relatively universal image to depict interculturalism; Lo and Gilbert, in 191 contrast, adopt a culturally specific analogy. Similarly, Bharucha’s anatomical approach—in which he further categorizes the complexities of cultural exchange into the frameworks of

“interculturalism,” “intraculturalism,” “multiculturalism,” and “secularism”—relies on patterns that he generalizes largely from particular intercultural practices in India. Although this explanatory narrative can hardly be disentangled from its ingrained Indianness, it does demonstrate a need for a more nuanced framework for the analysis of cultural exchange in world theatre.

In the Taiwanese context, the practice of modern theatre is already intercultural as it is a form that Taiwanese learned from Japan, China (indirectly), and the West. The problem is determining what intercultural means in this kind of flagship production. I am inclined to contextualize the adjective intercultural as constituting an analytical perspective on historicizing the embedded and superimposed cultural dynamics in modern theatre. The term indicates a fluid status that describes how theatre practices, whether textual or performative, are conditioned by the influence of other cultures. In other words, any work could include an intercultural aspect.

Thus, to various degrees, Tian, Lee, and Lai, the practitioners analyzed in the previous two chapters, embody their distinct intercultural characteristics in deploying the body in performance.

Yet, to be considered intercultural, at least in Schechner’s and Pavis’s articulations, a production requires the immediate presence of foreign practitioners and a constant collaboration and negotiation between various cultural factors during the rehearsal process and live performance. This process in the Taiwanese context often involves national funding in which the expectation of articulating a national identity is usually the norm. This immediacy of preparation 192 and perception between practitioners and audience, which I will elaborate shortly, is the key to unpacking the nature of intercultural performance in Taiwan.

To associate intercultural theatre with the concept of flagship production marks another tension between the canonical and the experimental. The simple reason for labeling La Dame aux

Camélias and Orlando as flagship productions stems from the fact that these foreign directors are well-established figures in world theatre, and to utilize this cultural capital to increase the visibility of Taiwan within the international community is the major reason for state support.

Aesthetically, however, the “canonical” styles refer to those directors’ “experiments” with non-canonical elements that are not necessarily geographically specific. In other words, the visits of these renowned directors to Taiwan and the collaborations with local practitioners offer no guarantee that Taiwan will play a major part in their experiments. If people’s expectations of intercultural theatre emphasize the potentiality of mutual and equal communication, the practicality of staging flagship productions relies primarily on the social capital of those foreign directors. In other words, what has generally been valued in flagship productions are the stereotypical characteristics of the participants. This gap between the layers of expectations yields a polemical audience receptions of one kind or another. My concern is, therefore, to locate an approach to intercultural theatre in flagship productions, which can incorporate audience reception while also elaborating on the particularities of the Taiwanese social and historical context.

La Dame aux Camélias

Let us return to La Dame aux Camélias and the laughter of the audience. Suzuki’s La

Dame aux Camélias includes just a few of the key scenes from the original novel, starting with a 193 confirmation of the love between Marguerite and Armand, the two main characters of both the novel and the play; Marguerite’s illness; the separation of the lovers at the insistence of Armand’s father, Duval; a reunion between the two lovers; and finally Marguerite’s death. Although the narrative of the novel is strictly realistic, Suzuki’s script and the performative rendering of it are distinctly stylistic. Suzuki places the original story within a new framework wherein Armand has been hospitalized for a mental disorder, possibly brought on by his breakup with Marguerite.

This means that the performance the audience sees is mainly the reenactment of Armand’s memory and illusion. In Suzuki’s version, the audience sees the story predominantly through a reenactment of Armand’s memory and delusions. The visualization of past illusions and the image of a mental hospital set up the main spectacle of the stage. Decorated with black rectangular frames on a completely black stage with actors wearing a futuristic, quasi-sci-fi style of costume, the stage presents a gloomy, depressing space that echoes the suffocating social hierarchy of contemporary society, according to Suzuki (Program 6). In Suzuki’s own words,

The story is told by a young lyricist/composer who reveals the reason why he has

been hospitalized for a mental disorder. […] In my adaptation, I keep the

character relationships to the minimum to avoid boredom. I also set the story

background in modern Taiwan. […] What the play aims to convey is how

destructive pure love can be to those involved. […] Pure love stories, which end

destructively, happened worldwide [sic]. […] For two people who come from [the]

two ends of the social ladder to testify to their love in the form of marriage, they

have to fight against their environment and break away from their world. […]

They may end up dying alone or living in a socially segregated way.4

4 Suzuki, La Dame Aux Camélias. Program, 6. This is the original English version of the text. 194

What is intriguing in Suzuki’s discourse here is that we can sense the triangular tension of intercultural theatre, a three-way pull between demonstrating the characteristics of a director, universalizing the theme of performance, and maintaining the particularity of the local context.

By “modern era,” Suzuki does not specifically refer to Taiwan but is more inclined to criticize modern society in general. In addition to his directorial renderings of the performance, Suzuki is interested in presenting the theme of love, which was also the theme of the TIFA of the year. Yet,

Suzuki’s concept of love is ambivalent. For one thing, the text does not address the issue of cultural translation from the French love story to the Taiwanese context. Making an implicit comparison between Romeo and Juliet and Armand and Marguerite, Suzuki seems to believe in love as a universal emotion. And, yet, he changes the setting of the story to modern Taiwan, with the apparent goal of acculturating the idea of love to Taiwanese perceptions.

Judging from the stage setting, as shown in the video archive of the 2011 performance, however, we can already perceive the fundamental problem with such an attempt. The spectacle of the stage is obviously detached from any particular location, much less Taiwan. The white sidewalk implies the demarcation of a fantasy world; the dark frames, as suggested by the assistant director Liu Shou-Yao (劉守曜, 1964– ), refer to the social melodramas and norms imposed on the common people.5 These generic “common people” are not necessarily

Taiwanese people. The references of the play are always in the form of a universalized abstraction. The aesthetic choice is based on Suzuki’s dedication to seeing the world as a mental hospital, a symbolic image strengthened by the presence of the Nurse,6 through whom Suzuki chiefly depicts the impasse of the universally pure love between the two primary characters.7 In other words, whereas Suzuki’s discourse focuses on the significance of pure love, his stage

5 Liu, Shou-Yao, “Q&A after the performance.” 6 Ibid. 7 Suzuki, La Dame Aux Camélias, Program, p. 6. 195 representation practically presents a shadowy mood of disease. Whether love or disease, the themes are not particularity localized. It is true that a symbolic stage setting can also be a way to localize a story, but in Suzuki’s case, very few references can connote Taiwan.

The sense of dislocation would not be an issue, to be fair, if the production did not specifically claim to offer a representation of Taiwan. Yet, as Suzuki simultaneously attempts to reproduce the locality of Taiwan and the universal presence of pure love on stage, we might want to ask how the supposed universality connects to Taiwanese society. Although Suzuki largely decontextualized the original story to foreground the theme of pure love, other stage factors, nonetheless, add a sense of alienation to the plot. For instance, the mental hospital, represented by the multiple wooden frameworks and the Nurse, strictly speaking, can hardly be understood, if an audience does not read the program in advance. The setting is at odds with both the modern architecture of mental hospitals and with any local Taiwanese forms of psychotherapy, which are associated with Buddhism and folk therapies. Even though pure love may be universal, its practice still requires re-contextualization. This process of re-contextualization precisely addresses the hidden problem of La Dame aux Camélias. In discourse, Taiwan is the target of reconfiguration. In practice, it is the “universality” of humanity and, in fact, the Suzuki Method of acting, both of which are communicated in this process of intercultural exchange.

The Suzuki Method of Acting and Taiwanese Bodies

As noted, in the performance of La Dame aux Camélias, the actors practiced the Suzuki

Method of acting, the goal of which is to learn the method as well as possible.8 Inspired by traditional Japanese performance (Noh and Kabuki), Suzuki invented his particular system of performance training with an emphasis on the connection between the lower part of the

8 Liu Shou-Yao, “Actors’ Energy Makes Theatre.” 196 performer’s body and the floor.9 What Suzuki has in mind is that, through this training, people would start to recuperate the “animal energy” emerging from the human body, which has lost its vigor due to the taming of modern life. With this purpose in mind, Suzuki’s theatre limits the use of modern technology prevalent in most modern theatre (outlawing the microphone, for instance), and requires actors to execute their roles solely with the body and voice, thus placing high-intensity demands on the performers’ physical ability in regard to endurance and projection.

Visually, this performance style emphasizes the lower part of the performer’s body and the floor. Actors are required to put all their strength in their feet to secure firm contact with the ground. Their center of gravity is on the lumbar, and they turn their bodies firstly from the lower back. Hence, in a performance with the style of the Suzuki Method, we can see that actors have to stand stiffly and minimize their body movements. In contrast to this restriction on motion, the actors’ facial expressions are intense with the effort of dedicating all their energy to delivering their lines.

The Suzuki Method is a both a system for training actors and a directorial/performing style. If we consider an acting method to be a formation of synthetic and syncretic physical postures, it might not be difficult for an actor in another cultural context to learn such a system.10

Not exactly. In La Dame Camélias, it is true that all the actors try to adopt the Suzuki Method on the stage such that they demonstrate a rigid posture. Still, for many audience members, as previously noted, the performance is far from satisfactory. To train an actor to become proficient in an acting method demands considerable investment. In the case of La Dame Camélias, the training given to the local actors took place over a relatively short period: roughly two months

9 See Lin Yu-Bin. 10 The most distinguished example may be Eugenio Barba and his International School of Theatre Anthropology. See The Paper Canoe. 197 for the two protagonists and less than one month for the rest of the Taiwanese performers.11 The training time was too truncated for them to digest an entirely new bodily language. Also, the

National Theatre is a huge place with more than fifteen hundred seats. The energy of actors who are inexperienced in the Suzuki style is accordingly easily diluted in this space. All these factors point to the fact that the laughter of the audience is more than a straightforward response to a theatrical conflict concerning the plot. The audience is active. Their response is not unilateral.

And, it addresses both interior and exterior elements of the performance. Without a power performance to “shock” the audience, accurately anticipating an audience’s response is close to impossible.

The further embedded problem is twofold. First, no acting method is ever invented ex nihilo. Any pre-existing physical movement, especially as part of cultural practice, is already culturally conditioned, and thus the re-utilization of bodily postures is a process of cultural translation. The Suzuki Method is intertwined with Suzuki’s aesthetic and his political perception of Japanese society since the 1960s.12 The rough idea of the aesthetic premise underlying the

Suzuki Method includes seeing the world as a mental hospital, reactivating animal energy in the human body, and rejuvenating traditional Japanese performance forms including by emphasizing the relationship between the body and the ground as in Noh.13 Politically, the conception of the

Suzuki Method is, thus, a form of criticism of consumer society and its development was intertwined with the Anpo protests in the 1960s.14

Anpo, or the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and

Japan, signed in 1960, marked the consent of the Japanese government (if not the Japanese

11 Liu, “Q&A After the Performance.” 12 Senda 40–69. 13 Suzuki, What is Drama 90–99. For the English translation of Suzuki’s collections of essays, See Ways of Acting. 14 Kazama 8. 198 people as a whole) to the domination of the United States in regard to political and military control. Culturally, Japan also underwent rapid modernization. Losing confidence in the political and cultural autonomy of the nation, younger Japanese intellectuals faced the confusion of an overwhelming Western modernity and started to explore alternative paradigms of practice in arts capable of expressing the particularity of the Japanese move beyond reality. Theatre, then, became one of the means of doing this.15 In this context, for Suzuki, the Japanese were trapped by the logic of a Western consumer society and lost their roots and traditions, the value of collectivity, and the physical energy of the agricultural era, for instance. Suzuki, therefore, sought to recuperate the characteristics of the Japanese body in his theatre.16

These historical factors are not immediately accessible to an uninformed amateurish audience even in Japan in the second decade of the 21st century, let alone to theater goers in modern-day Taiwan. Indeed, it might not be the audience’s responsibility to fully understand a practitioner’s aesthetics and ideological inspirations. Still, because theatre is a multi-layered system of signs, in the absence of even a basic picture of the embedded cultural codes, it is virtually impossible for an audience to understand, much less appreciate, a given production’s aims and aesthetics. This is the reason, for example, in the present day, why many theatre troupes of traditional genres of performance start educational workshops or lectures with the purpose of preparing and educating their audiences.17 This is also the reason why lectures and interviews were conducted during every visit Suzuki made to Taiwan in order to introduce amateur theater goers to the Suzuki Method.18 Intercultural exchange requires this kind of educational activity for the simplest reason: it involves two or more cultural contexts. A large percentage of the

15 Ibid., 10–14. 16 Suzuki, What is Drama? 136–49. 17 The relevant example is the GuoGuang Opera Company, which organizes Jingju camps annually for schoolchildren. 18 For example, Performing Arts Reviews 220 is a special issue that introduces Suzuki and La Dame aux Camélias. 199 spectators need this sort of guidance. “The audience is on the marginal side of the information imbalance,” as a general audience member wrote in his/her response to La Dame aux Camélias.19

Second, the paradox is that the Taiwanese bodies of those actors are transforming themselves in the Japanese method, which is supposedly dedicated to a cultural exchange in theatre that foregrounds the universality of humanity and the heterogeneity of distinct cultures, according to Suzuki.20 The question becomes, therefore, Where is “Taiwan” in this paradigm of collaboration? In other words, Taiwanese actors perform in Western sci-fi costumes, on a stage that is an unlocated (and unlocatable) mad house, using Japanese body movements, delivering lines from a nineteenth-century French novel, and singing contemporary pop songs in Taiwan.

This is the intercultural picture a spectator might easily perceive from the stage performance. As the only factor immediately familiar to a general audience, the pop songs bear an extra interpretive burden. How can these music and songs (as the sole indicator of “Taiwaneseness”) in such a chaotic intercultural context manage to construct any notion of “Taiwan”? What kind of

Taiwan is fabricated and recontextualized on the stage via this performance? These are my focal questions in the following sections.

Local Taiwanese Musical and the Impression of Taiwan

The enacted association between La Dame aux Camélias and its Taiwaneseness relies on music and songs. In this new adaptation of the novel, billed as a “local Taiwanese musical,”21 the music consists of a small part of Giuseppe Verdi’s opera with most of the score consisting of pop songs well-known in Taiwan, including in Taiwanese and Mandarin, as we can see from the list of songs in the program (Figure 9).

19 Jimmy Blanca. 20 Suzuki, What is Drama? 151–60. 21 Suzuki, La Dame Aux Camélias, Program, p. 6. 200

Figure 9. The list of songs. Suzuki, La Dame Aux Camélias, Program 40-41.

In other words, despite its title, the production has nothing to do with Verdi’s opera. As the list of songs clearly shows, reproducing a sense of opera can hardly be Suzuki’s goal for the performance. The use of Taiwanese pop songs contributes to the local color of the production, in terms of the melodies and the lyrics of the tunes. Yet, the way actors sing the pop songs, with all their physical energy emphasizing the dissemination of sounds in theatre, renders the physical and acoustic performance closer to that of opera than to the conventions of musicals. In other words, throughout Suzuki’s adaptation, there is an uncomfortable disjuncture between the two 201 musical styles, in which the operatic vocal style clashes with the innovative use of Taiwanese pop songs, embodied by the Taiwanese actors’ bodies as influenced by the Suzuki method.

Strictly speaking, the picture this list of songs depicts is itself close to cultural hybridity.

The only reference to the original work and Verdi’s opera and the only tune to bring European color to the production, is the no. 10 Prelude of La Dame aux Camélias. Some of the songs have transcultural references. No. 1 and no. 12 When Will You Return is a song that has been widely disseminated in both Japan and Sinophone regions, especially in the version performed by the renowned singer Teresa Teng.22 No. 8 River of Fortune was translated and remade by Teresa

Teng in 1987 from the Japanese original. No. 3 Say Good-bye to the Past with a Toast, though not specified in the program, also originated in Japanese, and is a song generally used in wedding ceremonies and commencements. It was covered by Korean-Chinese artist Jiang Yu-Heng in

1988.

Songs that actually originated geographically in Taiwan are linguistically in either

Taiwanese or Mandarin. No. 2 Love by Express Mail, is a Taiwanese pop song introduced in

1995 by Wu Bai; No. 4 Drunken Revelation of My Heart, 1992, is the representative work of

Jody Chiang; No. 5 The One I Adore, 1958, is by Hong Ang It; No. 6 Strive for Victory, 1988, is the work of Ye Chi-Tian. These Taiwanese pop songs, to some extent, are golden oldies and are still popular in the present day. In regard to Mandarin songs, No. 7 The Last Night, is Tsai Chin’s early work, also the theme song of The Last Night of Madam Chin, a film adapted from novelist

Pai Hsien-yung’s short story of the same title. No. 9 You Have Nothing to Do, and I Am in Full

Bloom, is a contemporary song from 2002, by the composer, Sakurai Koji, who was also the composer for La Dame aux Camélias. No. 11 The Spirit of My Life is lyricist and singer Lee

22 When Will You Return is, thus, a famous case study for the translational flows of a popular song in Asia. See Wu Jian, 127–32. 202

Tsung Sheng’s hit song from his first album in 1986; No. 12 Am I the One You Love the Most? is

Michelle Pan’s hit song from 1989. No. 14 Green Island Serenade was composed in 1954; however, it is not clear who the original artist was.

I have offered basic information about these songs in order to point out the complicated patterns embedded in this list. Some songs, When Will You Return?, for instance, are imbued with multiple cultural references that reflect the fact that Taiwan is a land haunted by various foreign forces with which it remains intimately connected, i.e., China and Japan. In regard to the local Taiwanese context, most of the pop songs included in the production chosen were composed in the 1980s and 1990s. The exception is one from the 1950s, yet to some extent they are not out of date and remain in most of Taiwanese people’s memory, a point of some importance to which I shall return in later sections of this chapter.

We do not know if the period was a conscious decision or not. But either way, the lack of relatively “contemporary” songs means that there is a time gap in the list, depicting a “selective” picture of Taiwan with a temporal gap. The missing periods, the late 1960s and 1970s, were times of anti-communist policy, intense censorship, and the most oppressive period of martial law. In other words, this list of songs is innately political, insofar as it refracts the repression of the political realities of Taiwanese history, a phenomenon that sharply reveals the close interaction between theatre and social structures. This list, then, applies pressure to Suzuki’s experiment in regard to shaping Taiwan in this production. The tension comes from Suzuki and

Sakurai’s construction of the local Taiwanese musical as an aesthetic innovation and their choices in conformity with the preexisting structures of Taiwanese society.

Yet, does this matter for the audience, if spectators, as I noted, do not necessarily possess the cultural knowledge needed to closely analyze a performance? The real problem of 203 intercultural performance, I argue, is the dichotomy between the immediacy of spectatorship in theatre and the accumulation of historical experiences. For the audience, an act of seeing a performance only happens once in theatre. Things one sees presently determine one’s feelings toward and evaluation of a given performance. At the same time, a spectator also draws on his/her own cultural frameworks. Put another way, watching a performance is itself already a cultural exchange, an interplay between the pre-loaded cultural concepts an audience possesses and the intercultural aesthetics a production embodies. The failure of recontextualizing Suzuki’s aesthetics in Taiwan largely results in an audience response based on members’ own cultural experience. This condition yields a tension that lies at the foundation of intercultural performance.

In the following section, through a close reading of the particular scene that triggers the laughter of the audience, I argue that intercultural exchange is inevitably a process of conflicts and “displacements,” to borrow Min Tian’s term. Cultural memory embedded in the elements of performance and in the actors’ bodies is the primary factor resulting in the disharmony of the intercultural encounter.

Strive for Victory

The ghost of Duval asks Marguerite to leave his son and then slowly moves to center stage, where the beams of the spotlight demarcate a rectangular area of roughly 1.5 square meters. At the same time, the music of Strive for Victory fades in, and Duval, who is standing in the center of the lighted area now, starts to sing the song with the apparent motive of providing encouragement to Marguerite: “There is no need to complain about failure; there is no need to be discouraged by downfalls.” At this exact moment, the audience breaks out in laughter, which 204 clearly disturbs the expected atmosphere of this scene, with its modulations of depression and encouragement. During the rest of the song, Duval slowly raises his right hand with his fist clenched, which he holds in front of his chest as he continues to sing: “You cannot lose hope, being drunk every day. Having a body without a soul is like a straw man.” Gradually, he lifts his fist again, and stretches it to the sky, as he sings the following lines: “Life is like waves on the sea. Sometimes it rises; sometimes it falls.” Then the actor waves his fist back to the original position and waves his other hand: “Good luck, bad luck, have their own order.” Finally, the actor waves his fist to the sky again, and sings the final lines: “Thirty percent of life is determined by heaven; seventy percent is worked out by human efforts. Strive for victory.”23

During Duval’s song, the audience can see Marguerite drinking in her room at stage left.

Why does the audience laugh?

Aesthetically speaking, the audience’s laughter may result from the “misappropriation” of a song that brings to mind a completely different context, the situation of Strive of Victory being performed on stage. The song becomes a sort of comic relief—which is a technique that experienced audience members might expect to find in Suzuki’s productions. According to the composer Sakurai, this is the “director’s special technique of collage […]. [H]e [Suzuki] chose not to let the audience be touched and shed tears for the scene but to use different means to present the pain of love” (71). But, then, what would be the reason for laughing? The common idea of comic relief points to a neutralization of audience response: the audience laughs at the moment at which dramatic tension meets relaxation: We laugh, so that we can continue watch.

We laugh so that we do not look away. Is it necessary to complicate the audience reception in this way? In my view, it is essential to do so, as laughter in any context is never strictly neutral.

23 My description is based on the video recording. See Suzuki, La Dame aux Camélias. 205

Theatre is a form of art infused with cultural codes. To borrow Marvin Carlson’s words, the theatre stage is always “haunted” by exterior social factors.24 The bodily performance in the theatre then is a phenomenon that constitutes a “repertoire” of culture, an embodiment of an invisible and transient social memory. The participants bear social memory with their bodies in entering the field of performance.25 The spectators’ own bodies, which are by no means excluded from this dynamic, also carry preexisting cultural memories. Hence, the space of theatre is never “empty,” a prevailing concept proposed by famous British theatre director, Peter

Brook, who is also a pioneer of intercultural theatre.26 Theatre is not a passive place simply waiting for practitioners to superimpose their visions. With the presence of practitioners, crews, and audience, even an empty space is culture- and memory-ridden. In other words, everyone in the theatre has his/her own cultural framework that is in conversation with those of others, and in this light, the audience's response—laughter, fear, alienation, and so on—requires an aesthetic reading as well as a cultural analysis. As a result, seemingly superficial or natural feelings might, in fact, connect with or reveal a set of complicated cultural references. What, then, are the potential cultural implications associated with the laughter of the audience as the first bars of

Strive for Victory are played?

A search on YouTube for Strive for Victory turns up more than 60,000 entries. Released in

1988, it is one of top recording artist Yeh Chi-Tian’s best-loved songs and is among the most well-known Taiwanese pop songs overall. The lyrics paint a portrait of a fisherman who is impoverished and possibly also an alcoholic, and it thereby offers an image of the ebb and flow of the tides as an analogy for a turn of fortune that sees him rise above his downtrodden state.

Taiwan is an island with a thriving fishing industry. Thus, the symbol of the sea can easily be

24 Carlson 1–15. 25 Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire 20–26. 26 Brook 9. 206 associated with a fisherman, an image in Taiwan usually connected with alcoholics. No matter who the unknown person is, a sense of masculinity becomes the emphasis of Yeh, who waves his fist as a signature movement when performing this song. Originally, Strive for Victory depicted the tension between individual will and predetermined fortune, and the song emphasizes the importance of hard-working people. Combined with the iconic bodily gestures that characterize

Yeh’s performance of this song, Strive for Victory, however, has become a cheer and a rallying cry for political campaigns. It has, therefore, occupied a unique position in the cultural experience and memory of the Taiwanese people since the late 1980s.

Taiwan underwent a period of profound political reform at the end of the 1980s. The

Order of Martial Law was lifted in 1987, but the political position of Taiwan vis-à-vis the international community has never been clear since then and, as a result, general Taiwanese perceptions of national identity remain characterized by the figure of the nation, and its people, as the “orphans of Asia.”27 Political liberation in the late 1980s brought democracy to the

Taiwanese people and catalyzed political protests with the pursuit of a local identity while rapid economic growth and international trade shaped a consumer society in the image of its Western counterparts. As the writer Yang Zhao recalls, “the context of the 1980s is the process of a constant search of self-identification and self-identity with anxiety and frustration” (10). In this context, Strive for Victory, symbolically foregrounding the will of the self, captures the zeitgeist of the confusion that prevailed in 1980s Taiwan. It is, therefore, an anthem for many Taiwanese people, who tend to see, in the figure of the downtrodden fisherman, a symbol of Taiwan’s troubled history and, in his redemption, a harbinger of a future for the island as a proud and independent state. Such a mentality might explain in part the tendency to incorporate this song in political elections.

27 See Wu Zhuo–Liu. 207

It is essential to remember again that the memory of Strive for Victory is not simply intangible and abstract, as it is associated with the singer’s bodily performance and capitalized on by anonymous politicians. Instead, the way people remember the song is also imbricated with specific embodied gestures and expressions. Thus, when the actor playing Duval attempts to perform the distorted love of the father, whose only concern is the happiness of his family, and

Strive for Victory plays at the same time, his performance produces dissonance. According to assistant director Liu Shou-Yao, during the rehearsal, the actor performing the role of Duval mentioned that it was very difficult to separate the song from his memories of it in other contexts

(Q&A). Referencing the song’s association with Taiwan’s elections, Liu put the matter clearly enough, stating that “Strive for Victory has too many meanings for us” (Q&A). The bodily performance of the actor playing the role, therefore, becomes a problem of some significance.

The actor is haunted by the embedded cultural memory of the performance of the song. Thus, his bodily language greatly resembles the performance given by the original singer.

The performance of Strive for Victory, therefore, turns out to be a weird (and new, undeniably) hybrid of the original bodily posture associated with the song combined with the

Suzuki style. The movement of the waving fist disturbs the performer’s attempt to achieve a sense of gravitas by centering himself from his lumbar region, a situation that probably resulted from the insufficient bodily training accorded to him. From my observations, the actor at least partly lost his energy. This unsteadiness of the body adds a bit to the comical effect of the performance. Such a posture also causes the audience to remember the original cultural context of the song. The local cultural memory of the song in a highly political context is in opposition to the scene, i.e., the imminent sad separation of lovers, and in opposition to the theme of pure and universal love that Suzuki wishes to foreground. This moment of performance represents a local 208 memory that cannot be eliminated by the imposition of the Suzuki Method. The performativity of the body exceeds the predetermined performing style.

Struggle with Memory

If we return to Pavis’s model of intercultural performance, we may find it to be practitioner- and production-oriented. Audience perception is relegated to a relatively passive position in his estimation. The problem here is that, to some degree, every participant in the production is also part of the audience. In intercultural theatre, practitioners also have to encounter and perceive unfamiliar cultural codes. Sakurai Koji, the composer, suggests that in adapting those local songs, it is particularly challenging for him to preserve concrete and distinct cultural memories of the songs in the production:

Every tune can trigger a different feeling for everyone. I can’t change this part. So,

currently the way is to “give up.” (70)

In other words, Sakurai is aware that the songs already have a life that is closely associated with ideas and experiences in local memory.

According to Liu’s recollection of the process of selecting the music, Suzuki listened to more than five hundred songs and read translations of lyrics in order to choose the “right” songs to express the solitude of human beings in love (O&A). We do not know what Suzuki meant by

“right.” Maybe, the way Suzuki proceeded was simply by relying on his artistic intuition, which is usual for artists. Yet, the meaning of a song is not limited by its lyrics, but also depends on attendant bodily images and the cultural context attached to the sound. As noted in the preceding section, during the rehearsal, the actor playing the role of Duval commented on how difficult he found it to separate his performance of Strive for Victory from his memories of it. In facing this 209 problem, according to Liu, Suzuki asked the actor to connect his image to a candidate on the political campaign trail and to associate the feeling of winning the election with the effort to persuade Marguerite (Q&A). No matter what Suzuki’s logic in choosing the songs, given the local cultural context in which the song is disseminated, the conflict between the world of the play and the audience’s perceptions can hardly be avoided. Put another way, the audience and the performers all have their own memory of cultural codes, and thus the response is not unilateral.

In the Strive for Victory scene, at the narrative level, it may be that the action is read as comical because it attempts to conjure hyper-masculinity in a bid to encourage the heroine to rally. The sense of comedy may also arise from the essential absurdity of the situation portrayed:

A Taiwanese song widely used at political events seems out of place in a scene of sad separation.

No matter what the audience pictures, some spectators laugh. What I want to argue is that this kind of emotional response arises from cultural codes in the intercultural production. If the ideal of intercultural performance is to enhance intersubjective communication, then the reaction of the audience to La Dame aux Camélias demonstrates an important impasse that awaits analysis.

In this sense, a top-down interpretation and evaluation of the cultural contexts imposed by practitioners on a performance cannot sufficiently codify the interpretive framework of local subjects.

The intersection of the body and culture and likewise the intersection of the translation between source culture and target culture complicate the constructedness of the performance of subjectivity (主體性, zhuti xing). This term, despite its convoluted meanings in cultural studies, is widely used by Taiwanese intellectuals and artists in creative discourse and points vaguely to the idea of autonomy, of not being subject to some external control. Whose cultural subjectivity is being performed here? In the context of modern Taiwanese theatre, Suzuki occupies a unique 210 position as an ideal model for local theatrical development. Historically speaking, modern

Japanese theatre was one of the sources from which the Taiwanese people learned about the concepts and practices of modern Western theatre in the 1960s and 1970s. In this same period, the student movement flourished and theatrical performance was used as a tool for political demonstrations. Modern Japanese theatre has, therefore, been regarded by Taiwanese practitioners since the post–martial law period of the late 1980s as an ideal of artistic power and a model for developing local cultural subjectivity. As the assistant director Liu suggests, his expectation was that this collaboration with Suzuki on a “transnational production” would help the Taiwanese people create an “environment of their own for building an established performance system” (“Actors’ Energy” 79). Japan, represented by Suzuki and his method, turns out to be a nurturing “other” for the development of Taiwanese cultural identities. Taiwanese practitioners are motivated by the idea that learning the Suzuki Method can pave the way to the construction of an ideal Taiwanese theatre. In this context, despite some harsh criticism from the audience perspective, involved practitioners generally do not demonstrate any profound reflections on this collaboration. A real dialogue does not appear.

Before the definitive moment of the audience’s inevitable laughter, the flow of culture and the force of directorial movement are almost entirely one way. At the moment of laughter, however, an element of discord is introduced.

Overall, through this analysis of La Dame aux Camélias, I suggest that the opportunity of cultural negotiation, which intercultural practice created in the local context, is the dissonant moment of bodily performance intertwined with entrenched cultural memory. Based on this perspective, the issue of identity construction and imagination should be complicated and deconstructed not just from the perspective of discourse, but also through a close reading of 211 performance. In short, via the intercultural encounter, local people might experience a moment in which the audience’s memory of sociopolitical specificities is interpolated. Thus, the spectators might reflect on the issue of identity construction—the questions of who we are and also how we are seen. Still, what does that mean to a reflection on the self? I will tackle this question through my case study of Orlando, a performance and collaboration more engaged with the clash of cultures, the body, and the imagining of a local subjectivity.

Orlando

The drastic response to Suzuki’s La Dame aux Camélias probably arose from accumulated feelings of a power imbalance embedded in the flagship intercultural production, as first represented by Wilson and his Orlando. My analysis of La Dame aux Camélias focused on the issue of cultural memory embedded in the audience reception of the performance. Yet, as hinted at in the example of Strive for Victory and the actor’s problem associated with delivering this song in a new context, we can see, to a certain extent, that an actor is also an audience member, is, in fact, the first audience member, as he/she observes him/herself. The line between practitioner and spectator is fluid and inconsistent. In the following sections, I take Orlando as the second example of my investigation of the complexities of interculturalism. I chose Orlando because, as noted, Wilson is famous internationally, and the performer Wei Hai-Min and the playwright Wang An-Qi (王安祈, 1955– ), with whom he collaborated come from the distinct cultural background of Jingju. The obvious difficulty of this collaboration makes it, in fact, subtle terrain in which to explore the unmarked power struggles in intercultural performance.

Wilson spent the period of 21 February to 1 March 2009 in Taiwan directing Orlando, his famous adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s novel of the same name. Hailed by the local press as “the 212 maestro of theatre,” Wilson assigned Wei to perform Orlando in Chinese.28 Orlando had already been performed in Western contexts a couple of times.29 However, this was the first time it had been performed in a Sinophone theatre with the collaboration of local practitioners, who included

Wei Hai-Min and the entire theatrical ensemble of the Guoguang Opera Company.

General audience responses to Orlando were generally much more favorable and less vitriolic than those to La Dame aux Camélias. Typical audience reactions, as expressed in personal blogs, included celebrating Wei’s mastery of performance and the magnificent spectacle of the stage settings. In this production, instead of seeing Wei in her customary attire of traditional costumes for Jingju, audiences would see her wearing all black, elegant and noble, for the first half of the performance, and then in a golden dress, beautiful and majestic, for the second half. Through a performance in which she transforms herself from male to female through soliloquies and songs, Wei delivered Wilson’s idiosyncratic Orlando on a vast stage. In short, the spectators see Wei as an Orientalized Western Orlando.

Then, from the point of view the audience, what exactly is one to make of this extravagance? As explained at the beginning of this chapter, the blind spot of intercultural theatre is that this lens underestimates the audience’s immediate perceptions. The analysis I will offer next is based on both the published working documents and the DVD of the production as staged in 2009. I use these materials to perform a phenomenological reading of audience reception, contemplating how the practitioners in this intercultural performative experiment may or may not transcend the limited framework of the foreign directors and reconfigure a cultural identity of some kind.

28 See Lin Cai-Yun. 29 See Wilson’s official website Robert Wilson: http://www.robertwilson.com/shop/orlando-by-virginia-woolf-directed-by-robert-wilson-dvd. 213

Acculturation of the Text

This kind of tension is first manifested at the level of textual adaptation. Wilson adapted

Orlando from Woolf’s original novel, which, written in the stream of consciousness style, tells the story of Orlando’s epic journey. In adapting Woolf’s text to his own idiosyncratic style,

Wilson deconstructed the entire novel, reducing its complex human relationships and time flows to a single character on a stage. Wilson’s Orlando is a cluster of words that foreground Orlando’s memory of life accompanied by multiple images of death and solitude. Thus, Wilson’s Orlando is enacted by a single actress, who performs for more than two hours, a challenge of some magnitude for even the most experienced performers.

This foreign text was translated into Chinese Xiqu version by playwright Wang An-Qi, the artistic director of and leading playwright with GuoGuang, the major national troupe of

Jingju in Taiwan. With a Ph.D. in Chinese literature, Wang has devoted her professional life to preserving, promoting, and renewing Jingju. As one of the most influential Jingju playwrights in

Sinophone regions, Wang is well-known for her beautiful classical Chinese prose and poetry and her exploration of the emotions of female characters. Wang and GuoGuang have done extensive experiments focused on innovating with Jingju and continue to be important in Jingju theatre. It is fair to say that without Wang and GuoGuang, the development of Jingju in Taiwan would be a totally different picture. Given this background, it is not difficult to imagine, that for Wang, as an inheritor and shaper of the beauty and elegance of Chinese literature and performance, Wilson’s distinctive style did not accord with her aesthetic framework. Still, Wang struggled to translate the script, despite the constraints of directorial preferences, with the style of Jingju.

It is, thus, palpable that for Wang, this intercultural encounter was anything but an agreeable collaboration, as she commented, 214

[Wilson] clearly hoped the stage and lighting designs should follow German and

French versions. So, the structure of the play has been pre-framed, even the length

of some paragraphs has to comply with the cues of lighting in German and French

versions. (99)

As a distinguished Xiqu playwright, Wang either writes original plays or adapts plays from Xiqu classics. Working as a translator and the re-creator of the (post)modern Western play is definitely challenging.30 In Wang’s own words, “I often struggle in the gaps [between lighting and shadow] again and again” (99).

In creating an oriental Orlando, Wang divided Wilson’s script into two parts, narrative and songs, so that it would follow a clear Xiqu pattern. More specifically, Wang, added onto

Wilson’s framework by translating and revising the language and changing the setting of the play to ancient China, as indicated by the use in the script of two terms: xiyu (西域) or “the western regions”—the generic term in ancient China used to indicate the regions to the west of China, including central Asian and Indian subcontinent—and jiaofang (教坊) or “music institutions”—the musical institutions at court for training performers in a variety of arts, including Xiqu. On hearing these terms, an audience member with basic knowledge of Chinese culture would have immediately recognized the geographical references. The change of location is part of the larger project of acculturating Orlando with the conventions of Xiqu.

For Wang, as we can see from her muted critique of her experience working with Wilson, intercultural collaboration is by no means a painless task. In her working document, after briefly summarizing Wilson’s directorial aesthetics, Wang recorded her anxiety about working with

Wilson as follows:

30 In the past, in fact, Wang worked with Richard Schechner on staging the Greek tragedy, Oresteia. For Wang, at least, Schechner worked within the framework of Jingju. But Wilson was evidently ignorant of the aesthetics of Jingju. Personal Communication. 26 December 2015. 215

My main concern is to hope for [Wilson’s] better use of Wei’s “Jingju body”—or

[I] should say, “transformation.” Because [Wei’s body] is undoubtedly

deconstructed, and this is also something we look for […]. But I am also worried

that since the director does not know about Jingju, Kunqu, if he insists on having

our Jingju Queen follow German and French performers’ posture, then what is the

culture that has been “interculturalized”? (qtd. in Geng, Orlando 99)

Wang wrote this short article recording her thoughts before and after the collaboration. From this passage of “before the performance,” it is easy to see that Wang’s attitude toward this production is ambivalent. She clearly knows Wilson’s directorial style and is also keenly aware of Wilson’s ignorance of Xiqu performance. More importantly, she already foresees that the main conflict will arise from the disparate bodily schemas Wei will be asked to enact.

After the performance, Wang’s reflection does not change much, although the way she articulates it is more moderate than might have been expected:

This is an exciting seesaw battle. This is my Eastern way of encountering the

West. If you want to ask me whether the performance is good or not, I think it is

hard to say. Yet, the experience will be part of my life. (qtd. in Geng, Orlando

101)

Concerning the real process of production, the perception of intercultural collaboration might change through time for the practitioners. The experience of this intercultural exchange for practitioners can be something intellectual whereby the practitioners learn something about aesthetic differences, for instance. In Orlando, Wang literally competes with Wilson in regard to shaping the outcome of the work. Yet, as I have noted, a practitioner is also an audience member.

Intercultural exchange can be an accumulative practice that evolves and alters over time. 216

Wilson returned to Taiwan a year after Orlando was staged and produced 1433—The

Grand Voyage (2010). This time, the performance received a much better response from the audience, including from Wang. In this second intercultural exchange, Wang was simply an audience member, and her reflection of 1433—The Grand Voyage is worthy of our attention. In

1433—The Grand Voyage, Wang saw a more fully realized version of Wilson’s unfinished experiment in Orlando. Simply put, 1433—The Grand Voyage, for Wang, was a good performance. Thus, Wang suggested that the value of intercultural theatre is associated with understanding the Other: “to let Wilson understand us, and let us understand him better.”31

Wang’s double identity as a practitioner and an audience member indicates two competing attitudes. In Wang’s case, watching 1433—The Grand Voyage provided her with an opportunity to reevaluate Wilson at a distance and thus to revisit her experience of collaborating with him.

Then, this experience became the inspiration for her own next production.32 Both kinds of experience, intellectually and aesthetically, are accumulative and readily subject to change.

This is the value of intercultural theatre for practitioners as participants or as members of an audience. In Wang’s case, she recontextualizes herself based on her experience of the two performances. However, for an ordinary normal theater goer, these insider perspectives are hardly attainable. In most cases, the only evaluative ground for the audience is the immediate experience of watching the performance in a spatially and temporally specific place: the theatre itself. This difference in the logic of reception between practitioner and audience is in reality a spatial and temporal gap, which is very unlikely to be bridged. In other words, the audience does not have the practitioner’s opportunity to sense the work outside theatrical space and time or to

31 Qtd. in Hsieh Hsiao-Mei, 157. 32 Ibid., 157. 217 renew the experience. Further, the practitioner’s feelings toward and investment in any given theatrical intercultural practice cannot trigger the sympathy of the audience.

I do not intend to undermine the significance of the practitioner’s experience, nor do I attempt to deny the contribution of an analysis that explores the potential of intercultural theatre.

The problem in this gap of reception is that the audience’s responses, especially the negative ones, in intercultural practice tend to be flattened as simple issues of knowledge and taste, thus obscuring the real problems attending cultural interpretation. To some degree, the cumulative perspective that practitioners and cultural brokers deploy in order to foreground the most positive aspects of intercultural exchange is based on the linear progress of time in which, ultimately, the practitioner’s efforts will be rewarded. But on what ground this linear evolution can be realized remains elusive in most scholarly studies. An account of audience reception is mostly absent in the practitioner’s reflective framework.33 The mutual communication between practitioners and general spectators is largely inaccessible.

Through Wang’s example, we can better uncover one major problem in Pavis’s model, which has been criticized for making a clear demarcation between each stage of intercultural production, thus the linear temporality. The challenge is not just about adding dynamics to the model, as Lo and Gilbert attempted. The predicament, in reality, is that every factor of an intercultural production has its own history and each factor intersects with others. In Wang’s case, her creation of a Xiqu version was predetermined by the stage factors of other, previous productions, which temporally are in the past tense, not the present. Wang’s case also reminds us of Strife for Victory in La Dame aux Camélias. Both instances reveal the ways in which the negotiation in intercultural theatre starts long before the live performance. Such tension comes

33 Interestingly, as noted previously, a debate over intercultural productions took place in regard to most of the cases, on Facebook, for example, a phenomenon that foregrounds the immediacy of audience response. 218 not simply from a clash of styles but also from cultural memory as instantiated in embodied echoes.

Disharmony in Performance

Orlando is undoubtedly a remarkable piece in respect to its directorial aesthetics. In the opening scene, Wei stands behind an immense translucent screen with a pattern of a landscape in the style of an ink wash painting. Then, a sharp, cracking sound repeats four times while the lighting of the National Theatre gradually darkens from ground level to the chandeliers. The audience can only see the silhouette of Wei behind the screen. The stage is darkened and lightened again, the screen is raised, and the performance begins. In these opening few minutes of theatrics, the audience can clearly sense the juxtaposition of two kinds of aesthetics: a traditional Chinese visuality and Wilson’s atonal acoustics.

However, this encounter between East and West is far from smooth. Wilson, known for his directorial style, is one of the iconic figures of contemporary Western theatre. His aesthetics consists in highly precise, uncanny, and abstract stage elements and the extreme control of every movement and effect on stage, whether in regard to the actors’ bodies, the lighting and sound effects, or the blocking. Wilson, thus, creates a dreamlike spectacle of floating signs that is unmanageable from the perspective of realism. Finding a consistent and meaningful narrative in

Wilson’s productions is also an impossibility. This style of anti-theatrical illusion, fragmented, de-centered narratives, collage stage elements, and extreme control over the performers’ movements makes Wilson an iconic figure in the context of Western theatre.34 Also, as mentioned in the Introduction, the term “postmodernism” (despite its convoluted meanings) was enthusiastically introduced by Taiwanese scholar Chung Ming-Der in the early 1990s, whereby

34 Lehmann 77–81. 219

Chung recognized Wilson’s work as among the most exciting spectacles of modern Western theatre even up to the present day.35 Still, for Taiwanese practitioners, respecting Wilson is one thing, collaborating with him is another. Reconciling Wilson to the aesthetics of Xiqu is not an easy task.

Xiqu, as noted in my chapter on Tian, is, to some degree, a symbolic theatre, whose aesthetic logic is embedded in the realistic world. Without at least general knowledge of the society in which Xiqu developed, it is unquestionably hard to appreciate the nuanced transformation from the realistic to the stylistic on the Xiqu stage.36 Components such as stories and emotions, depreciated by Wilson, are treasured by a Xiqu performer. In other words, the essence of Xiqu is its condensation of human feelings.37 The poetic atmosphere is not created by piles of signs as these are on the surface, but primarily by means of the performer’s acting, singing, and dancing, actions that amplify emotion. A good Xiqu performer, therefore, must utilize stories, characters and performing conventions to accentuate human emotions. As a result, on the Xiqu stage, actors/characters are even more human than in reality, and this aesthetic of

Xiqu is in direct contrast to Wilson’s directorial stance.38

In this light, on the stage of Orlando, the audience sees two distinct kinds of bodily schemas intersecting with the script: one is Wilson’s cold and mechanical bodily movement expressing disruption and conflict; the other is a tradition of physical conventions rooted in Wei’s background training in Xiqu. The opening spectacle is itself a good example of this hybrid tension. In Xiqu, the first glance of an actor is the critical moment in which the actor demonstrates his/her ability to enact a character. This technique of Liangxiang, or making a

35 See Chung Ming-Der, From Realism to Postmodernism. 36 This is also a problem that Taiwanese practitioners encounter in attempting to localize Jingju with local materials. How to combine modern stories, themes, and objects with traditional aesthetics of Xiqu remains a significant challenge. See Wang An-Qi, Contemporary Xiqu 73–94. 37 Tian, Min 22–44. 38 Wang An-Qi, qtd. in Geng, Orlando 100. 220 debut on stage, is twisted in the way that Wei is hidden behind the screen. Her body is concealed, and the character she presents is unknown at least at this moment.

Concerning the plot and language of Orlando, Wilson does not intend to reproduce

Woolf’s novel in regard to every detail. In Wilson’s Orlando, the original text is deconstructed, reorganized, and revised into clusters of words that foreground Orlando’s memory of life and a variety of images of death and solitude. Accompanying the script, the audience can see Wei moving principally in slow motion, which is typical of Wilson’s theatre. Also, she interacts with unusual objects, such as a crystal skull, a desk with legs carved to resemble the silhouettes of seahorses, a platform of stairs, a marionette, a fish: in short, things that suggest the psychoanalytic unconsciousness that Wilson typically emphasizes in his practice. The stage environment—constituted by attributes such as checked pattern lighting, the huge screen, and atonal music—reflects Wilson’s idiosyncratic renderings on stage likewise.

Spectators undoubtedly perceived those perspicuous marks of Wilson’s directorial style.

Yet, this stage is not totalized. Other elements sneak in from Wei’s practice and from the Xiqu repertoire. On stage, the tones of the percussion instruments remind the audience immediately of the convention of Jingju. In regard to the performer, spectators would perceive Wei’s bodily postures with specific rhythms and tempos as the stylized movements of Xiqu. In short, from every aspect of the staging, the traces of Xiqu and the presence of Wei and her “Jingju body” already prescribe the audience perception of Jingju in performance. The advertisement for

Orlando, therefore, focused primarily on the encounter between Wilson and Jingju.39

Accordingly, most commentators have concentrated on the gains and losses between

Jingju and Wilson’s aesthetics. The critics either criticize Wilson’s ignorance of and lack of respect for Jingju or offer suggestions regarding how Wilson’s unique directorial style can

39 See Lin Cai-Yun. 221 benefit conventional Jingju performance.40 For, example, Chang Hsiao-Hung asks, “The

Western avant-garde is in the East […] then where is the Eastern avant-garde?”41 Daphne Lei, who participated in the production as scholar and also as the translator proposed the term “HIT”

(hegemonic intercultural theatre) to describe her experiences and observations with Robert

Wilson in the intercultural productions in Taiwan.42 Hsieh Hsiao-Mei, on the contrary, echoes

Wang’s later reflections on 1433—the Grand Voyage to suggest that “intercultural exchange is a process,” arguing that it could still benefit practitioners, as in Wei’s and Wang’s cases.43

I do not intend to dismiss the importance of those opinions. However, in these discourses, we can sense a petrified process of signification that identifies Wilson with the West, the avant-garde, and the intercultural at one pole, and Wei with the East, the past, and the traditional

(Jingju), at the other. In this schema, both Wilson and Wei are dismissed as an abstraction of ideas. In contrast, I return to the real moments of performance and response. Through a close reading of the performance of Orlando, we will find that the term intercultural itself is already a signifier and that the corresponding signified moves beyond the geographical dichotomy between the East and the West as well as Jingju and postmodern theatre. We will also find that the dichotomy between East and West is also a reification of ideology.

Displacements in the Process of Intercultural Theatre

This disharmony is not just about aesthetics. It also relates to actual practice. As the rehearsal notes indicate, Wilson once became furious during a rehearsal because he needs to collaborate with the composer, who on this occasion was absent from the theatre, in a continual

40 Yang Ze (Ed.). 41 Chang Hsiao-Hung, qtd. in Yang Ze (Ed.). 42 Lei, Alternative Chinese Opera 571–86. 43 Hsieh 157. 222 way: “The composer must be here. If not, I am not directing anything.”44 The process of rehearsing is connected to the personal style of aesthetic creation, as Wilson’s insistence on the presence of the composer suggests. This request is understandable in the sense that Wilson calculates the movements of performers second by second and adds music or sounds according to the speed at which they move. However, the problem here is that Wilson is not simply working with his own crew but with people trained in and dedicated to other performance traditions.

For any traditional practitioner of Xiqu, however, Wilson’s demands and, more importantly, his underlying assumptions about where and how music fits into the building of a performance, would be just as inexplicable and perhaps also equally infuriating. The way Xiqu practitioners work is that before a composer works with any piece of modern music, another traditional composer works on an “aria arrangement,” or bianquian (編腔) first. Nor is a composer required to be present at rehearsals, as Wei explains to Wilson.45 The working document does not offer us details of their conversation. After depicting this conflict, the commentator noted that

Basically, Bob [Robert Wilson] respects Wei very much. Every time he wants Wei

to perform some actions, his tone is mild with “please” and “Could you,” things

like these. So when Wei expressed other options, Bob controlled his tempered.

But ultimately, he emphasized, “My things are working at the same time.”46

This incident took place on August 25, 2008, in the rehearsal room of the National Theatre, and is noted a book that records anecdotes pertaining to rehearsals, interviews, and Wang’s play script. This conflict shows that in this kind of intercultural collaboration, a better understanding

44 Qtd. in Geng, Orlando 50. 45 Ibid., 50. 46 Ibid., 51. 223 between cultures does not necessarily arise—or, at least, not without growing pains. Instead, each side insists on his/her aesthetics requirements and conventions. The conflict is about the right to express opinions and to persuade others, and the ideas embedded in the exchange of opinions are, in reality, personal preferences as well as performance traditions. This incident is of interest because it provides us with a lens through which to reflect on the pressure of intercultural encounters, in which the presence and absence of an individual has implications not only for distinct aesthetic conventions but also for the territory on which a power struggle takes place.

The question comes down to the matter of who has the right to complain, who must be present, and who has adequately conceived complicated “tactics” of negotiation, to borrow

Michel de Certeau’s term, in the ephemeral life of artistic preparation and creation. To be sure, there is no concrete causal relationship between quarrels and the quality of performance. Some scholars might see this kind of tension as resulting from a paucity of cultural knowledge.47

However, my concern is that these exterior actions before the live performance point to a range of factors that hinder a complete kind of communication in intercultural theatre more broadly.

Sometimes, the purpose of communication is not to further understand and appreciate another culture, but to negotiate or even control “cultural shock” in order to maintain a superficial harmony of cultural communication. In this anecdote, there is no genuine recontextualization for

Wilson, and vice versa. Given a flagship production, foreign directors possess ultimate power

(granted by government officials) in regard to determining the aesthetic style of the intercultural performance. Local practitioners would hardly prevail against this power imbalance, as a major goal of the flagship production is to learn the canonical approaches of the directors.

Through my discussion of the aspects of text, performance, and rehearsal, I return to the idea of displacement suggested by Min Tian. Tian sees the process of displacement in

47 Lei, Alternative Chinese Opera 571–86. 224 intercultural theatre as resulting from ignorance of “the social, historical, cultural, political, and ideological factors” (2). I agree with Min Tian’s general claim. Yet, I would like to elaborate on his insights by suggesting that the fundamental factor of generating displacements and replacements is the complicated negotiations of the whole interaction—the entire cycle of performance, as suggested in Pavis’s hourglass. Displacement and replacement, I argue, become unavoidable when the allotted time for performance is insufficient. Intercultural productions, with their exorbitant costs, may be doomed to this sort of cultural and cognitive failure long before the curtain rises.

To be critical of intercultural theatre is not just to be able to identify what has been displaced but to see performance as the sediment of cultural aesthetics and the specifics of everyday life practice. Based on what assumptions are local practitioners to admire a certain director, and vice versa? What are the possible causes of partial communication between them?

How can we read the complexities of communication revealed in these moments of live performance? More importantly, if the positive effects of intercultural theatre are evaluated accumulatively, I argue that the accumulation of practices in either everyday life or rehearsals must also be taken into consideration. To read an intercultural production is to analyze its temporality. The live performance is an end of intercultural production as well as a starting point for identifying the power struggles embedded within, as I will show in my account of Wei’s personal creation in the next section.

In the case of Orlando, the tension and resistance fall mainly on Wei, who is alone on the stage, “collaborating,” in a sense, with the unseen demands and restrictions placed on her, negotiating and transgressing the invisible framework of Wilson. In my analysis of the performance, I have chosen not to become trapped by an attempt to unravel Wilson’s postmodern 225 flow of signs, an endeavor that would contribute little to our inquiry into intercultural theatre.

Instead, I will concentrate on a specific moment, during which Wei’s effort to enunciate her voice and confrontation with the intercultural experiment becomes self-evident. The analysis in the following sections is based on a DVD of the 2009 production.

Voices on the Intercultural Stage

Near the end of the performance, in the scene after Orlando has transformed from a man into a woman, on the down stage, Wei slowly takes off her golden coat to show a golden dress with a V-neck and short sleeves underneath. Then, she walks to center stage while a headless marionette gradually moves from the upper left stage to the upper center stage simultaneously putting on a dress similar to that worn by Wei. In this double image between human and marionette, Wei starts to move and deliver lines that seem to align her more with her own identity as the actress Wei than with the character Orlando.

The disharmony between Wei’s performance in this scene and the general aesthetics of

Orlando is noticeable. At first glance, an attentive audience, even if unfamiliar with the aesthetics of Xiqu, will perceive that the style of the soliloquies plainly differs from the poetic language of the rest of the play:

The next generation took over.

Food, clothes, styles, transportation … everything was different now,

even people’s taste had changed.

This world had changed completely. (lights flickering)

(sing) What had happened to it?

(sing) What had happened to it? 226

(sing) Why was it no longer the world I knew?

(sing) The grace had turned into the queer,

(sing) The reserved had turned into the bald;

(sing) Oolong tea was changed with coffee and wine;

(sing) Traditional rolls and fried bread sticks/Were replaced with cheese cakes

[sic].

(sing) Life lacked meditation and accumulation;

(sing) Life was no longer about waiting and expecting.

(sing) Life was only about speed, while I wanted to slow down.

What exactly had happened to the world?

What exactly had happened to the world?

Could I find my true self and finally settle down here?48

In this short scene, Wei relies heavily on a soliloquy with a few lines of singing, which shows her questioning of a changing world. These lines were written independently by Wei in an effort to articulate the ways in which the world was changing, as the projection of the subtitles in live performance clearly shows: “Lyrics by Wei Hai-Min.”49 Wei, standing at center stage, complains, “The next generation took over. / Food, clothes, styles, transportation … everything was different now, / even people’s taste had changed.” Accompanied by the flickering light in the rectangular lighted areas of the ceiling curtain, and monotone, quick, short string music, Wei strolls and spins on stage, an action like searching or escaping, while she sings, “What had happened to it?” Later, during the enchanting “What exactly had happened to the world? / Could

48 I transcribed the English script from the DVD of Orlando released in 2009. 49 My observation in theatre in 2009. Also confirmed by Wang An-Qi. Personal Communication. 26 December 2015. 227

I find my true self and finally settle down here?” she moves to center stage and turns swiftly just as the percussion instruments in Jingju fade in. Finally, she stills her body and suddenly collapses. The marionette on the upper stage also falls. The scene ends.

The language of this scene written by Wei deviates from both Wilson’s and Wang’s respective frames. Wang’s task, as she herself suggests, is to figure out a central narrative for the plot, which was originally highly fragmented. Wang, after reading Woolf’s original novel, decides that the key theme is the evolution of a writer’s consciousness in Orlando. This journey of self-enlightenment is gradually completed in the process of the protagonist’s transformation between genders. This transformation makes Orlando understand the complexity of being a human, according to Wang. These sentiments of fulfilling the self with the awareness of the limitations and possibilities of human life constitute the major focus that Wang attempts to weave into the plot and to shape in the style of Xiqu.50

Wilson’s text, on the other hand, does not express much in the way of humanitarian concerns. In fact, in most of Wilson’s theatre, the text doesn’t necessarily convey communicable meaning, his main concern being in general with visual and audio effects.51 Also, concerning this performance, the encounter between East and West is his major emphasis. Wilson uses Yin and Yang as the metaphor to describe the collaboration between his theatre and Wei’s Jingju performance. Yet, although he emphasizes a harmonious picture as the goal of this intercultural production, how this picture can be realized remains a problem.

Wei’s performance in this scene expresses not so much the above concerns but her own conceptualization of Orlando. With the aspect of the contents, the lines (or lyrics), as expanded upon and delivered by Wei express anxiety about a rapidly changing world. What is interesting is

50 Qtd. in Geng, Orlando 98. 51 At least, this is how Taiwanese critics have introduced Wilson. See the special issue of Performing Arts Reviews on Wilson and Orlando: Performing Arts Reviews 193. 48–67. 228 that this echoes the original narrative of Woolf’s novel, the relevant passage from which reads

“In the eighteenth century, we knew how everything was done; but here I rise through the air; I listen to voices in America; I see men flying—but how it’s done, I can’t even begin to wonder”

(300). At the same time, however, the style of these lines, as delivered by Wei, is not congruent with the aesthetics of the traditional Chinese literariness that Wang is struggling to preserve in the script. Simply put, even from the English translation, we can see that the wording is close to modern colloquial language and approximates neither the classical Chinese vernacular nor the classical poetry with which Wang is concerned. In other words, Wang’s play clearly demarcates two segments, the vernacular of speech and the poetry of songs. In Wei’s language, we cannot find the rhythm, syntax, or iambic meter of classical Chinese. It is simply a modern colloquial composition without any specific pattern. Also, the material references—coffee and traditional rolls, for instance, suggest modern temporality, a condition that makes this segment of performance an excess of information, which moves beyond the director’s framework.

In Wei’s solo performance, the term “modern” is used in a very limited way. It refers exclusively to contemporary Taiwan. “Oolong tea” (凍頂烏龍, dongding wulong) is a famous kind of traditional tea in Taiwan; “traditional rolls” (燒餅, shaobing) and “fried bread sticks” (油

條, youtiao) commonly make up a Taiwanese breakfast. Although these foods are also popular in

China, it is likely that most members of the Taiwanese audience read this food as denoting what it means to live in Taiwan, to be Taiwanese. The consuming of food is usually social, connecting the individual with the community, as suggested by Certeau (91). The temporality evoked by

Wei’s performance in this scene does not relate to universally available memories, but specifically connects to the particular cultural and social context of contemporary Taiwan as 229 experienced by the audience at this specific point in time. That is, Wei’s soliloquy is in the present tense, and as such directly addresses Taiwan as it was in 2009.

Furthermore, Wei not only shifts the geographical location to modern Taiwan, she also comments on the introduction of trendy foreign food, such as “wine” and “cheesecake,” as an instantiation of a modern society. Associated with Western culture, wine and cheesecake are popular in Taiwan, but the cultural signification to the local is weak. To some degree, they are fashionable because of their foreignness. By interpolating these foods, Wei’s framing of a changing Taiwanese society manifests a sense of dislocation. If there is a metonymic relationship between food and Taiwan, then this picture of Taiwan, at least in part, arises from its intersection with foreign influence.

Here, I do not plan to explore further the very broad issue of modernity in conversation with theatrical practice. I am more specifically concerned with what Wei seeks to enunciate.

What is Wei achieving or trying to achieve in these moments of performance? What is her relationship to the performance? Do we see the character of Orlando shaped by Wilson, the director? Is Wei breaking through the framework of the “Jingju body” in response to the modern theatre as represented by Wilson? Or, is Wei merely a performer using her body to represent some universal humanity? Perhaps, the answer is yes to all the above. Wilson cannot dominate the performance at every turn. Just as Wei demonstrates multiple identities in this performance, the intercultural relationships are fluid.

Wei’s performance is aesthetically ambivalent. At some moments, her acting is representational. For instance, when she expresses her confusion in regard to changes in the word, she waves her hands dramatically or moves them close to her cheeks. Also, when she mentions

“cheesecakes,” Wei uses her hands roughly demonstrating the size, a quite ordinary way to 230 indicate an object that is not actually present. These movements partially connote realistic representations. Then, Wei’s performance becomes problematic in Wilson’s framework, which is exactly non-representational. If we see Wei’s performance from the aesthetics of Wilson’s style, it is safe to claim that this direction does not match with Wilson’s intentions.

At other moments, while she talks about things that are changing in everyday life, Wei touches her thumbs to her forefingers thereby creating a circle, which she moves in front of her chest. The meaning of this bodily posture is unclear, as it does not appear to refer to anything tangible. Instead, Wei’s bodily posture seems to exceed the level of representation and enters the expressive level of the abstract. Her circle conveys the sense of an exclamation, expressing a yearning for interconnectivity in opposition to the description of life as no longer about waiting and expecting.” Wei’s gesture in relation to her words is paradoxical such that the gesture might function as a performative commentary on the text. Likewise, in performing the rest of the line,

“Life was only about speed,” Wei enacts running in slow motion. It is also worth noting at this point that at this point, Wei’s “singing” is rendered in a high dissonant pitch, reinforcing the inconsistency between linguistic articulation and bodily movements. This acoustic dissonance, in fact, also returns Wei to Wilson’s aesthetics of “separating the visuality and auditory.”52

In short, if the shift in temporality pays tribute to the original novel in terms of time travel,53 then the alteration in location—from the West to ancient China and to modern

Taiwan—can be understood as Wei’s subjective enunciation of her own pursuit of artistic creation coupled with her humanistic concern over societal change. While this short scene is almost always ignored by scholarly and critical accounts, I want to point out that it, in fact, conspicuously embodies the tension between linguistic text, directorial rendition, and

52 Geng, “Awake” 56–59. 53 I must thank my colleague Huang Zi-Jie for reminding me of this point. 231 performative expression. What can we draw from this battle of multiple factors? Before I proceed with a more theoretical analysis, through the example of this scene, my tentative answer is two-fold: On the one hand, it is true that Wilson is still in a dominant position in this artistic production. This scene is the moment Wei clearly demonstrates her creativity about and concern for modern Taiwan. Yet, this is not to say that Wei acts freely on stage. The director’s control is always present. The constant change in regard to lighting and music indicates that the atmosphere and time flow are all within Wilson’s schema. The golden dress Wei wears, in fact, conceals her body, making her body shape almost invisible, changing her such that she appears very like the marionette on stage. Hence, even though Wei’s soliloquy seems to disconnect her from the world of the play, her performance still operates within the framework set up by Wilson.

The performance still confirms Wilson’s idea of what should constitute theatre: all its elements are fragmented and mutually penetrated.54 The essential logic of the director’s orientation in the modern Western theatre is not drastically challenged this context. As a result, while Wei is attempting to intervene in the context of Taiwan via her performance, her body is still manipulated by the invisible power of the director. The last line of this scene is “to find myself,” an articulation that cues Wei’s collapse and that of the marionette. This ending, then, indicates symbolically that the search for the self can never be smooth and uninterrupted.

Performance is porous and the meaning of performance cannot be controlled entirely by the director. Ric Knowles offers a succinct description of the generation of meaning in theatre as follows:

Meaning, then, is best understood as a process, something that is provisionally

produced by communities, technologies, and cultures engaged in various kinds of

social, economic, technological, and pedagogical relationships with one

54 Laera 9–10. 232

another—including relationships between theatre artists, between audience

members, and between the audience and the stage. (2–3)

The production of meaning in theatre is always fluctuating and plastic, under the influence of multiple factors; the director is just one such factor. In the example of intercultural encounter, the complication of meaning exactly comes from cultural clashes, which are intersected with aesthetic traditions, communication problems, individual creations. In other words, I want to argue that part of the nature of intercultural theatre is “polyphonic,” to borrow Mikhail Bakhtin’s terminology.55 Could this status possibly result from Wilson’s intention not to intermingle East and West, as suggested by the critics?56 The answer is clearly no, as Wilson invokes the knowledge of the dichotomy and harmony between Yin and Yang in describing this collaboration.57 At least, Wilson demonstrates an ambition to communicate the two repertoires of performance. This polyphonic performance, because of cultural clashes, can hardly be his original intention. This returns us to my previous argument of the incomplete communication in an intercultural encounter. Without considering multiple contextual connotations embedded in accounts other than the director’s intentionality, the reading of intercultural exchange will result in reifying cultural differences.

Wei’s scene, the one described above, is the singularity of this intercultural performance, in which a variety of times, perspectives, and performances are mismatched. In this convoluted cultural network, the enunciation of both a local identity and Wei’s identity occupies the discourse. In their discussions of Orlando, some critics note that Wei is also offering resistance

55 I must thank the commentator, Alan Ying-Nan Lin, for reminding me of this term in discussing the conference paper version of this section. 56 Wang Mo-Lin, qtd. in Yang Ze (Ed.). 57 Gang, Orlando 67–74. 233 and creation in this performance via her own body, which is deeply rooted in Jingju.58 At the same time, others, including Wei herself, argue that in Orlando, Wei works her way out of traditional Jingju to create a new kind of performance. As Wei states, “the family name of Jingju is not necessarily Jing.”59 How do we understand these two seemingly antagonistic observations: the indestructible Jingju body vis-à-vis the revolution? What exactly does is meant by the

“Jingju body” with which the audience becomes preoccupied? In answering these questions, an effort to judge gains and losses in this kind of collaboration between East and West would make little sense. Instead, I think it is worth taking a step back to explore what the body means and how it creates meaning on the stage of intercultural performance in Taiwan.

Time, Intercultural Bodies, and the Reconfiguration of Identity

As we can see, Wei’s performance is closely related to the search for identity in the modern world, which also demonstrates her insistence on maintaining her identity as a theatre performer. In considering the audience response, though mainly derived from the professional spectators, and their contemplation of the Jingju body, we must ask the questions of how to conceptualize the body and what kinds of subjectivity have been imagined. If theatre constitutes a place for Wei to articulate her identity, we also as how this is case. These questions require some ontological understandings of the body, of the generation of meaning, and of theatre itself.

In the conclusion to this chapter, I explore these questions principally through a cognitive approach in theatre studies, and its modification of phenomenology, relevant to theatre performance and propose my approach of complicating the body in intercultural theatre in

Taiwan.

58 Chang Hsiao-Hung, qtd. in Yang Ze (Ed.). 59 Wei Hai-Min “The Family Name of Jingju.” 234

Phenomenology as a field of philosophy, especially under the direction of Merleau-Ponty and his Phenomenology of Perception, to some degree, stands as a theoretical ally of theatre practice. Concerning René Descartes’s idea of Cogito, separating the mind from and prioritizing it over the body, Merleau-Ponty turns our attention to the body as a converging point of the self that processes the exterior world.60 Despite the convoluted expositions articulated by

Merleau-Ponty on the subject of the living body generating meaning, I would like to suggest that this idea echoes and is realized in theatre as an artistic practice with an ontological status that relies on the “liveness” of the participants on the spot.61 The issue of temporality becomes one of the essential and shared focuses for both Merleau-Ponty and theatre studies.

For Merleau-Ponty, the human subject is intertwined with time. The basic logic is that of a present filled with the transformed layers of the past and the future in which subjectivity is the ability of the body to capture, detect, organize, and complete a variety of frameworks of time.62

In his words, “we are entirely active and entirely passive because we are the sudden upsurge of time” (425). In theatre studies, for instance, as Julia Walker argues, theatre “is an art form devoted to just this kind of oscillation, offering us a glimpse of the world as it can be imagined from an objective analytical viewpoint and an experience of the world as registered within our body’s viscera in the form of an affective engagement that is very much in the moment and real”

(38–39). Even though Merleau-Ponty fascinatingly contributes to the reevaluation of the necessity of physical existence for human beings, the insufficient narrative of phenomenology, in general, is, as suggested by McConachie, that it still maintains some division between subject and object in perceiving the world.63 These basic assumptions of phenomenology are later tested

60 For theory on how the body generates meaning, see Merleau-Ponty 75–91. 61 Carroll 119. For a discussion of liveness in performance, see Auslander 10–72 and Phelan 146–66. 62 For a discussion of subjectivity, see Merleau-Ponty 444–46. 63 McConachie 79–80. 235 and supported, as well as modified by cognitive science, especially in the sense of how human beings can acquire consciousness and what the role of the body is in generating meaning.

Without unpacking all of the phenomena, we can see that these few specifics already suggest the complexity of the body and its significance to theatre studies. Undoubtedly, there are a lot of questions to be answered. One fundamental lack I would like to point out as shared by phenomenology and a cognitive approach in theatre is that the discussion pertaining to the sociopolitical embeddedness of the body, or how the body is conceptualized and contextualized in society and on stage, is insufficient in both directions. This problem returns us to Butler’s insights on sexuality and the constructedness of the body.

Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological perspective, Butler combines phenomenology with feminism, starting from a critical angle of gender to argue that the association between time and body might not be limited to an internal sensation.64 As noted in my previous chapters, the body, for Butler, is the materialization and accumulation of social norms, and thus is a form of “historical situation” (521). Butler invokes this ambiguous term in articulating the idea of that our conception of the body and sex is a repetitive performance of social norms imposed upon us. Yet, what captures my attention is Butler’s quasi-behavioral, constructing view of the body. She adds a sociopolitical dimension in the way the body intersects with some exterior reality. The temporality of becoming the subject is hardly neutral.

What has this to do with theatre analysis? As McConachie, citing Jeremy Lopez’s studies of the theatre audience, has noted, “Playwrights and actors aim to turn disparate social groups at the theatre into a temporary unity so that they may respond as one” (174). The enactment of performance is partly a manipulation of temporality. The practitioners have their imagined audience coexisting, while, in fact, each spectator carries his or her own cultural memory. Rather,

64 Butler, “Performative Acts” 521. 236 if seen from Butler’s idea, from the very beginning, the presence of an individual is already an accumulation of social norms. A consensus in regard to audience response is, at best, a utopian target.

The practice of intercultural theatre in Taiwan, because of its mass scale, multiple references, cultural memory, audience reception, and performers’ creation, serves to sharpen conflicts between temporal configurations. In contemplating intercultural theatre, what must be considered, I argue, is not maintaining a linear, evolutionary argument of the ultimate understanding or unification of distinct cultures will arrive. Instead, we have to face the practical conflicts among participating cultures and think about what benefits and/or opportunities does this pattern of work initiate?

Ontologically, the key is still the body in performance. Theatre is precisely a place for complicating perceptions of the body, as performance relies largely on the artistry of the body.

An actor must use the body to perform, a process through which the constructedness of the body is revealed. A performer deploys his/her body as a tool for shaping the world and as a physical space for seeking encounters with others. The immediate communication of live performance, thus, magnifies the spectacles of the body and creates an opportunity to examine how subjectivity is envisioned and constructed. Therefore, any dissonance in performance has the potential to transgress the demarcation of abstract time and historical accumulation. In this sense, the bodily performance becomes a further alienation of the body in everyday life and the intercultural exchange furthers such logic.

Here, let me shift my focus to Jean-Luc Nancy’s expositions on the body to elaborate on the possibility and problem of the body. For Nancy, it is not just the body as a site for the subject 237 to contact the world. The body is an actual existence that occupies the space and the world.65

The corporeality of the body marks the irremovable occupation of residing in space and thus designates the status of existing in the world, as perceived through tactile communication.66 At the same time, nevertheless, the body is susceptible to the world in abstract, realistic, and organic senses. By citing his own experience of a heart transplant, Jean-Luc Nancy asks the following question: If he receives a heart transplant, is the new heart part of him? Or does the heart become

‘a stranger’? (“L’Intrus” 4). We cannot be sure about it. “Theseus’ paradox,” or the question over whether all the parts of an object are replacements (Is it the same object?)—seems to inform

Nancy’s underlying question about the body, which is an open space consisting of the possibility of being touched, intruded upon by others. In short, from Nancy’s point of view, the body demarcates both the subject’s absolute existence and alienation at the same time. Just as Nancy questions the body as the ultimate other based on his experience of the heart transplant, the body must be examined in multilayered cultural and temporal contexts in order to unpack its internal others if we want to better understand the complexity of the subject formation.

In regard to La Dame aux Camélias and Orlando, it is evident that the yearning for a new subjectivity invades these globally modern intercultural performances enacted by Taiwanese practitioners. Taiwan haunts the performances. In La Dame aux Camélias, the dislocation of cultural memory embedded in Taiwanese pop songs brings the historical sentiment of political vigorousness back to the stage. The audience’s coincident laughter, then, disturbs the performance of universal love and also reflects the condition in which the performing body is a history-ridden site. In other words, the presence of the performers is the performance on stage, which is a love story embodied by the Suzuki method, whereas the present of the audience is the

65 Nancy, Corpus 16–17. 66 Ibid., 33–34. 238 return of the cultural memory embedded in the protesting hand. The audience’s laughter becomes a criticism of the practitioner’s assumption of the universal communicability of the body.

Similarly, in the performance of Orlando, even though Wei attempts to seek a break with the cultural tradition embedded in her body for the sake of better accommodating Wilson’s aesthetics, the local cultural context, mainly Jingju, is not among the director’s concerns. Yet, the cultural elements invited by Wei through her soliloquies are at least partly incompatible with the rest of the structure of the performance. Thus, the problem is that the identity Wei tries to embody and the understanding of local specificities are inseparable. The imagination of subjectivity Wei interpolates in the performance is, therefore, an excess of signs, which is too many for the targeted aesthetics of performance and too few for the local audience to contextualize Taiwan. As Chang Hsiao-Hung asks, how could Taiwan be simply represented by a comparison between “cheesecakes,” “traditional rolls,” and “fried bread sticks”?67 In brief, if the body is the material locus of history, as suggested by Butler, then the contribution of intercultural collaboration is via such an enforced encounter such that participants can uncover and criticize the process of identification and the constructedness of local identity. Thus, the existence of the body on stage can mark the limits of intercultural exchange and unmark the opacity of historical, cultural embeddedness.

It is also in the condition of intercultural theatre that the interplay between the body and the reconfiguration of subject identities becomes noticeable. While touching on the issue of identity formation, local practitioners are, to some degree, accomplices, assuming the identity of

Taiwan as a pre-existing fact that can be represented, transformed, and transcended on stage. A

Taiwanese identity is metonymized as a local cultural code—pop songs, food, or even

Jingju—and evoked and represented by actors’ bodies. Practitioners, through utilizing cultural

67 Qtd. in Yang Ze (Ed.). 239 knowledge, flatten the complexities of Taiwan and change the depth of the localities into the present bodily performance, which is for articulating and enacting his/her subjectivity as an artist for the audience to perceive. In other words, Taiwan is temporalized as something present in order to be transmuted into the past, the existence of which is thus neutralized, or at least visibly weakened and rendered secondary, in the intercultural exchange. The stage of intercultural performance becomes in this way a space of demonstration—a preconditioned confusion of subjectivity and identity.

The Taiwanese body in intercultural performance shows a preconditioned national identity that is ultimately relevant to the cultural, political, and economic problems of Taiwanese society. Because of past colonial experience and the ongoing denial of Taiwan imposed by China, the anxiety over national identity has been clearly in evidence since the 1980s after the lifting of martial law. Yet, at the same time, politically, the actual sovereignty, independence of Taiwan, cannot be achieved. In other words, historically speaking, Taiwan is politically “a nation without sovereignty” and exists based on the logic of negation, as suggested by Jon Solomon from the angle of biopolitics.68 Taiwan is not a nation, but it is not not a nation, say, part of the PRC. This is an enforced order imposed by the United States under the post–cold war condition, which still undergirds the Taiwanese sociopolitical mindset. In this condition, rapid economic growth and a proliferation of cultural events substitute for political independence, and intercultural theatre in the 21st century constitutes a site for local practitioners and the Taiwanese government to demonstrate the soft power of Taiwan. Indeed, without governmental support, such huge productions as Orlando and La Dame aux Camélias are highly unlikely to be realized.

On the stage of intercultural performance, the point is thus how foreign directors can benefit Taiwan. As Liu Shou-Yao suggests, his expectation is that by learning the Suzuki Method,

68 For a further analysis of the relationship between Taiwan and “the state of exception,” see Solomon. 240 local practitioners can build their own system.69 In other words, Liu means that Taiwan already has autonomy, but the problem is how to communicate it with foreign culture. However, the paradox lies in the disharmony between a political impasse and a cultural, economic autonomy.

In the process of intercultural exchange, what has to be negotiated does not include national identity. Instead, the abstract discourse of universality that can connect Taiwan to the world becomes the foremost expression that practitioners adopt.

As Wei explains,

All theatres deal with human emotions—happiness and anger as well as sorrow

and joy. Humanity is the quintessence of theatre. Differences in nations and races

are just superficial. […] Bob sees my potential. It is exactly because he is a

foreign director, he sees me and is impressed by my qualities, and this

appreciation touches me.70

Wei’s performance has occasioned serious debates in regard to the issue of local subjectivity. At one pole, some local practitioners, working as cultural brokers in introducing Western masters, support Wei’s stance.71 At the other pole, the critic Yeh Ken-Chuan argues that “if such a chance allows a dominant artist of Jingju to reflect on the unlimited and immeasurable possibilities of performance, this advantage is private and individual; it has nothing to do with the flag of

‘globalization’ and ‘intercultural’” (22). Again, Taiwan is not being articulated explicitly in performance, but persistently comes back, disturbing the audience. Yeh’s comment is exactly the logic of such an individualized bodily performance shaping Taiwan as a pre-existing fact that haunts the stage. Taiwan is once here, but from the perspective of practitioners, “we” want

69 “Actors’ Energy Makes Theatre” 79. 70 Geng Yi-Wei, Orlando 93. 71 Ibid., 13. 241 something that transcends this national boundary, and thus the negotiation of the process of identity formation is avoided.

It is this twisted logic of negation that ensures Taiwan functions as an empty sign that can remain active on the discourse level to be interpolated. Seen in this light, intercultural theatre in

Taiwan and its universal agenda turn out to be a paradoxical method for claiming Taiwanese identity via the demonstration of the performers’ subjectivity in artistic creation. Put another way, the practice of intercultural performance, which is highly political and economically oriented, can be construed by local practitioners as a site of embodying invisible local identity. However, the ability of practitioners to take action is constrained by Taiwan’s geographical reality as a nation in constant denial of its own sovereignty, as suggested by Jon Solomon, such that a new kind of Taiwan can only be realized through the logic of transcending local specificities. Taiwan becomes a self-evident existence in intercultural performance.

Through analyzing key scenes from La Dame aux Camélias and Orlando, I would like to point out that the fundamental problem of an intercultural encounter is that it assumes the communication of two existing models of identity formation. This process, as practitioners have conceptualized it, is a journey of pain and joy that leads to mutual understanding. However, by paying attention to the Taiwanese audience of intercultural practice, I re-orient this process as incomplete, asymmetrical, and unbalanced. In the first model, both Suzuki and Wilson are globalized, prominent figures of modern theatre, processing the power of transgressing national boundaries. For Taiwanese practitioners, the second model, in the project of flagship productions, these practitioners are sponsored by official funding and communicate with foreign directors with a (voluntary or involuntary) goal of expressing national identity, which remains vague because of its political lack of sovereignty. The substitution of national identity for artistic 242 subjectivity, proving the ability to capture the universal premise embodied by Suzuki and Wilson becomes one tactic through which local performers construct their ideas of Taiwan. Taiwan, thus, is included in their practice through the logic of negation. This attempt to transgress Taiwan, however, undermines the immediacy of audience reception that challenges the efficacy of communication in the practice of intercultural theatre. The audience still questions the content and meaning of intercultural theatre. For foreign directors, the chief objective of intercultural theatre is to create something new and universal in “Taiwan.” For local practitioners, it is to learn something new and to universalize “Taiwan” in their accumulative experiences. In the eyes of the spectators, “Taiwan” is what they see on the stage. These three faces of Taiwan differ significantly and are often at odds with one another.

The assumption of the inception of a new subjectivity in intercultural theatre, as we have seen in the two case studies, involves multiple factors, demarcating the limits of intercultural performance. In Taiwan’s case, the process of claiming national sovereignty is never finished, so the identities of local people are convoluted and even ineffable. The spectators have their own expectations and memories of the land. They generally cannot comply with the practitioner’s logic. Hence, the enunciation of both subjectivity and identity can never be symmetrical, due to the nature of intercultural theatre as it is reinforced by the unique sociohistorical as well as economic and political conditions of Taiwanese society. A close reading of the bodily postures in performance demonstrates and complicates this paradoxical phenomenon in that the depth of histories, memories, and realities are embedded in the constructedness and the irreducibility of the body at present. As a result, intercultural practice in Taiwan is about more than the cultural negotiation between East and West. Ultimately, it reveals the violence of presentism and uncovers the internal tensions of identity struggles rooted in past and present Taiwanese society. 243

Conclusion

At 4 am on March 19, 2014, a group of students and protesters intruded into and occupied the Legislative Yuan in Taipei, Taiwan. Outside the Legislative Yuan, people from different walks of life congregated and demonstrated their support for those dissidents. Riot police were everywhere. This protest originated as a response to the exceptional activities of KMT legislators, who earlier that day had attempted to rush the introduction and passing of, i.e., in the space of 30 seconds, the innocently titled but ominously dictatorial Service Trade Agreement with China.

The occupation of the Legislative Yuan, thus, became the ultimate method for Taiwanese citizens to demonstrate their anger and anxiety about this kind of “black box operation,” or inter-party agreement between Taiwan and China. This protest was dubbed the Sunflower Movement, an image meant to evoke the Taiwanese people as engaged in an unyielding pursuit of democracy and constant resistance to Chinese influence over Taiwanese society. The Sunflower Movement constituted the largest national sociopolitical demonstration of the new millennium and drew international media attention. The occupation of the Legislative Yuan lasted until April 10.

A week after the eruption of the Sunflower Movement, a production of The Rose Colored

Country (玫瑰色的國, Meigui Se De Guo)—which premiered in 2013 in a version by the

Cyclops Troupe (讀演劇人, Duyan Juren), a newly formed theatre ensemble consisting of a group of former theatre majors from National Taiwan University—was restaged in Keelung City.

In this post-protest production, the Sunflower Movement appeared, inserted into the script as a topic of conversation among the characters on stage. This kind of quick response to the political 244 events of the day, though not completely absent in Taiwan, is a comparatively rare phenomenon in modern Taiwanese theatre,1 which came of age in the period of martial law.

During that period, plays were necessarily political insofar as they were produced in a time, and circumscribed by a logic, of intense and overt state control. That control consisted of, among other things, censorship, self-censorship, and a state-mandated aesthetic program that defined itself in contrast to, and in defiance of, the socialist ideologies of the PRC. One might expect that, with the lifting of martial law in 1987, theatre practitioners would produce work that was equally engaged with social and political issues, but this time in either a more patently celebratory (of partial democratization) or more critical (of past state control) mode. This case, however, did not last long. Instead, we see theatre practitioners’ engagement of overtly political, socially sensitive material giving way to a more subtle and less obvious treatment of socio-economic, cultural, and political conditions. Why? Exploring and explaining that conundrum is one of the main goals of this dissertation.

In essence, this conundrum can be explained by unpacking the deployment of the body in performance. I argue that in response to the previous political oppression, theatre practitioners discarded direct political enunciation and translated their concerns in regard to sociopolitical specifics into disparate aesthetic innovations of the body in performance. In this context, The

Rose Colored Country is an intriguing example, as it did not just incorporate the term “the

Sunflower Movement” into the production. Instead, this work is itself consciously political. In fact, its concerns and style overlaps extensively with the issues discussed herein. Although an

1 Take the 228 Incident, the national massacre in 1947, as an example. In modern Taiwanese theatre, Fragrance of Banana (xiang jiao xiang) performed in 1947 was the only production to deal directly with the 228 Incident until the end of martial law. Its premiere caused a conflict between mainlanders and islanders such that the theatre group was forced to cancel additional planned performances by the government. “Thus, we can see that the 228 Incident has become a kind of taboo, and it earmarks an untouchable scar that Taiwanese do not dare to see …” (Jiao 53). 245 in-depth explication of The Rose Colored Country is not my project here,2 I will offer a brief discussion of that production in order to situate the main ideas explored in the preceding chapters.

The Rose Colored Country

The plot begins by presenting a group of friends who used to belong to a drama club at their university (in the year 2014) and are now reunited in middle age (in 2034) during a

“futuristic” time in which Taiwan has, itself, “reunited” with China. In this future Taiwan, the characters are wrestling with various difficulties in their daily lives and personal relationships.

Perhaps invoking the solace the good old days, they start to recall their student days, and in particular, they reminisce about the play they rehearsed as members of the drama club in 2014.

Like an ever-regressing set of timeframes within timeframes, the 2014 play consisted, in turn, of recollections of social movements from previous eras.

In 2034, Min-Yao, a social activist, meets Min-Chun, a documentary director, at a social protest. They had joined the dramatic club as undergraduate students in 2014 and had lost contact after graduation. Witnessing the profound social conflicts and terrible human disasters of 2034

Taiwan, Min-Chun recalls the drama club members’ friendship and the play they had rehearsed then, and she notes that the play and the Taiwan of 2034 have much in common. Min-Yao, touched by Min-Chun’s observation and the archives she has made, decides to host a launch event for the publication of Min-Chun’s book and the accompanying documentary on Taiwanese social movements. At that event, the members of the drama club are all reunited. In the course of conversation, they all catch up on the paths their lives have taken, a reenactment the audience

2 I collaborated with Cheng Fan-Ting and published the article “Protesting Self-Reflexive Theatricality: The Cyclops Troupe’s Rose Colored Country.” 246 witnesses in performance. Zheng Yun is married to Wen-Fu, a technician of the Fourth Nuclear

Plant who had become ill due to overexposure of radiation in a nuclear disaster. Liu Yi,

Min-Yao’s boyfriend during her student days, serves as the Magistrate of Taitung County and is now Min-Yao’s major opponent in a civil battle over development of Taitung. Da-Qi and

Ruo-Xuan married and then divorced; the former now works in China and the latter teaches

Vietnamese to immigrants in Taiwan. The play ends their reunion with the general statement that

“our journey continues.”

At the level of dramaturgy, there are in fact three timeframes in play: there is the dramatic time of the play (which changes with each performance, whether the debut of the play in 2013 or a later reprise), the 2014 of the students’ past, and the 2034 of the present reunion. Hence, this play demonstrates the memories and representations of the characters’ youth and the struggles of their lives as intertwined with the realities of Taiwanese society, based on which, a future picture of Taiwan is imagined. In short, when the play debuted in 2013, it imagined a Taiwanese “past” set in real time and a Taiwanese “future” set in 2034.

The significance of the Rose Colored Country, then, can be articulated from the following three aspects. First, it explores nonlinear historical narratives that question the formation of

Taiwan’s national identity. Second, it takes the individual human body as a method for expressing local identity struggles. Finally, it shapes a “postmemory” of Taiwanese society. I will explain each of these ideas in turn.

Frames of Time

As discussed, the plot is about the fragments of the lives and memories of a group of friends who belonged to the same dramatic club at university. The story is not very complicated. 247

However, its presentation is convoluted. Three timelines (actually, three strands of timelines) intersect in this production, all of which are referred to by the same title: The Rose Colored

Country.

First, The Rose Colored Country is the title of the work the drama club rehearsed in 2014, when the characters were undergraduate students. The play itself was fragmented, but we can tell from the pieces of rehearsal that it was a retrospective of various social movements in Taiwan, including the 228 Incident—the massacre of Taiwanese people executed by the KMT government in 1948—and the Wild Lily Movement—the phenomenal student protest for the democratization of Taiwan in 1990. Why did these students rehearse a play with this content?

The fragmented play, which can be accessed only through remembered portions of rehearsal segments, does not convey a clear rationale or motive.

Second, The Rose Colored Country designates a documentary and a book produced by

Min-Chun. Just like the fragmented rehearsals, the exact contents of the documentary are unknown. But the character informs the audience that it was about the group’s student life. Also, during the performance, the audience can see Min-Chun taking a camera on stage during the enactment of social protest movements. It can thus be inferred that the dramatic device of the camera records social conflicts as well as the characters’ personal lives, and the parts of the rehearsed play, in turn, must be understood to constitute the images of the documentary.

Third, The Rose Colored Country accounts for an allegorical future of Taiwanese society.

In that picture of 2034, Taiwan has reunited with China and faces various social disasters, such as an outbreak of avian flu and the aftermath of nuclear leakage. In this context, the characters encountered many intractable problems concerning how best to survive in their ever-changing society. Where do I want to live, Taiwan or China? What kind of work should I take? With whom 248 should I stay? These questions disturb the characters’ present and trigger memories of their youth.

The three intertwined frames suggest the idea that temporality in this production is both actual and fictional at the same time. The actual memories of political oppression are embodied in the enactment of past social demonstrations that are only partially fictionalized as re-constructions in theatre. Also, the current social struggles in reality (that is, the consensual reality of theatre goers)—namely, the specter of China–Taiwan relations, the burgeoning anti-nuclear movement, and the debates over same-sex marriage, for instance—are transcribed into this imagined future of Taiwanese society. Past, present, and future versions of Taiwanese society are interconnected in an inherently non-linear fashion: the past does not lead to the present and on to the future; rather past-present-future are fused into a giant mash-up of temporal and causal frames. The characters’ confusion over identity alone, not to mention their collision with happenings arising from social turmoil, are incessant. As a result, the identity of any character, and the status of Taiwan is never clear. Massive contingency reigns.

Bodily Performance and the Cultural Repertoire

How does one tie these diversified issues into one production? Even for theatre goers accustomed to modernist productions and meta-theatrical gestures, the various threads of time and their relationship to one another threaten to render the play itself fragmentary and aesthetically un-unified. At one level, the transitions from time to time and from one matter to another rely on the common strategy of speaking to the audience in a dramatic monologue or aside, as we usually see in the style of epic theatre. A character is also the narrator, the actor, and the witness of non-linear temporal flows. The audience, then, does not follow the storyline but is 249 invited by the characters to participate in witnessing the documentary of their lives and of the social changes represented. This technique provides one sort of cohesion to the dramatic action.

At another level, the deployment of the body in performance silently presents the ineffable suffering of the characters. This is another sort of cohesion: the recognition of pain as registered visibly and viscerally in the body of another human being. The characters’ bodily movements can be classified into roughly three types. The first is a kind of modern dance that embodies emotions. For instance, Min-Yao and Liu Yi’s pas de deux—which primarily consists of patterns of one surrounding the other and physical contact that reveals their lingering emotions in regard to their history as a gay couple long ago (Figure 10). Their physical intimacy with one another, though strained and painful, is still markedly apparent in their movements as one reaches out to the other. The second embodied gestural type in the play is the representation of familiar physical activities, which connects to Taiwanese collective memories such as the kinds of aerobic exercise young students take at school and, more simply, typical forms of bodily comportment in a classroom atmosphere such as raising a hand to answer a question (Figure 11).

The third category of movement is more imaginative, depicting specific settings such as a political riot or the reunification of Taiwan and China through iconic gestures of protest (Figure

12). The extended hand of a former lover, reaching for unwanted contact. The raised hand of a student in the classroom, who is disciplined to remain at the desk. The raised fist of the protester, distorted into an open palm as he fights to maintain his physical balance as the riot police apprehend him. These are all bodily codes, gestures immediately familiar from lived experience and easily available to the audience’s tactile and proprioceptive sense. 250

Figure 10. Min-Yao and Liu Yi’s pas de deux.

Figure 11. Imitation of a hand raised to answer a question. 251

Figure 12. A gesture of protest. With permission from the Cyclops Troupe to publish the above three photographs. Credit: Peng Jing-Wen.

These gestures, movements, and physical comportments are deeply familiar. From these deployments, it can be inferred that the meaning of bodily performance in this play is close to

Taylor’s notion of “repertoire,” which is a fundamental concept in this dissertation. For Taylor, the repertoire “enacts embodied memory” (20). That is, the body forms a site for people to preserve and recall cultural memories. The body moves beyond text and language. On the stage of modern theatre in Taiwan, the body records and presents local memories and channels the emotional affect of how individuals are disciplined in both everyday life and in extreme cases such as martial law. The body is the tool through which, and the site in which, local people enact their various miseries of being immersed in an ongoing social conflict stemming from rapid modernization and the severe political oppression of twentieth-century Taiwanese reality. The 252 corresponding sentiments are not easily translated into words in a limited length of time; they are demonstrated via bodily expression.

Constructing Postmemory

From the multilayered narratives of the plot and a variety of the functions of the bodily performance, the tension between history and memory becomes noticeable. The structure of The

Rose Colored Country is like a matryoshka, in which diverse sets of history are incorporated into the performance, each nested inside the next. The key is that there is no totality of history in the narratives. Instead, narrative challenges history. There only survive piecemeal references to past social movements, which are scarcely mentioned in textbooks and rarely come up for comment in the educational system. In other words, many Taiwanese people have neither direct memory, nor even secondhand knowledge, of those past events. The fragmented narratives in the play, thus, function as markers that indicate to spectators the neglected and unremembered history of

Taiwan. Those historical terms presented on stage, then, do not just signify an attempted remembrance of fact, but also draw attention to the amnesia of history.

Incorporating the terms of social movements, The Rose Colored Country demonstrates further a gesture that calls for constructing the postmemory of this social past. According

Marianne Hirsch in her research on war and the Holocaust, postmemory “describes the relationship that the generation after those who witnessed cultural or collective trauma bears to the experience of those who came before, experiences that they ‘remember’ only by means of the stories, images, and behaviors among which they grew up” (106). In other words, postmemory is constructed as something the descendants of victims did not actually witness but which is acquired via archives and repertoires, such as storytelling through film, photography, and oral 253 traditions, and, I argue, through performance. Building on this generalized ignorance of local history, The Rose Colored Country articulates the ambivalence of Taiwan’s national identity resulting from its colonial past and its aftermath.

But what kind of contribution does this work make? The Rose Colored Country seems to directly reconnect the relationship between the theatre and political engagement, a stance that many Taiwanese practitioners have avoided taking since the late 1990s. In past contexts, the major linkage between the theatre and politics lay in the deployment of the theatre as a site for representing imposed national identities. After the late 1990s, apparently due to some kind of political apathy, at best, practitioners decorated performance with a piecemeal parody of current political issues whereby, for example, a politician who has said something particularly ridiculous is quoted in a scene. That is the general level and limit of political engagement. The Rose

Colored Country, however, demystifies the predetermined picture of national identity. Its multiple frameworks of plot bring together past, present, and future Taiwan. What this text illustrates is not a consistent understanding of the local but an unsteady place of identity confusion. The body is used to concretize this identity confusion via the characters’ lives. And, the characters’ agonies and struggles refract Taiwan’s convoluted histories and specificities, and their search for some kind of meaningful goal becomes an allegory of Taiwan’s pursuit of national sovereignty.

It is worth noting at this point that Taiwanese society saw its civil awakening after the millennium—an awakening that reached its peak during the Sunflower Movement. Because of the thorny interaction between Taiwan and China, the problem of identity and sovereignty configuration remains unresolvable given the current social reality. At least, in present Taiwanese society, thanks to the social media, recovering and disseminating information about historical 254 details has become a relatively easy such that young intellectuals in particular are becoming more well-versed in the many histories of Taiwan. Now, we can see that modern theatre practice is participating in this trend.

This connection between theatre and politics is not new. From the complexities of identity formation and the specific political relationship between China and Taiwan, to the constructedness of history and memory, these issues as presented in The Rose Colored Country are also problems that other practitioners have examined on stage, each in his/her own distinctive ways. The Rose Colored Country plainly demonstrates the continual experiment of engagement in political intervention in modern Taiwanese theatre. Whether this case is an isolated one or a road sign to the returning of a conscious construction of a political theatre remains uncertain.

Paying attention to this emerging direction is a significant task for any analysis of modern

Taiwanese theatre, and it is a task that I engage in head-on in this dissertation.

The Politics of the Taiwanese Stage

This dissertation examines the performances of modern Taiwanese theatre after the lifting of martial law in 1987 and analyzes various ways in which theatre and politics intersect. Strictly speaking, theatre and politics are always interconnected. Including during the era of martial law, the practice of modern theatre in Taiwan has largely remained a tool for political propaganda, either for promoting authoritative ideologies promulgated by the government or for advancing political criticism.3 After the end of martial law, when political oppression began to loosen, modern theatrical spaces provided participants with opportunities to engage in social movements

3 Yet, this is not to say that the ideological stance of a work is stable. Even in anti-communist plays, we can find disharmony. See Chi Wei Jan. 255 and protests, as we can find in the case of Wang Mo-Lin, who continues to be both a theatre practitioner and a critic, who concentrates on presenting sociopolitical criticism via the theatre.

However, Wang is a rare case, and since the latter half of the 1990s, at least, direct political engagement in modern Taiwanese theatre was a strictly marginal affair. Politics has constituted only a very little part, usually confined to the realm of parody. The reason for this alienation from politics is self-evident. In the past, because of its marginality and its potential, theatre was favored by practitioners as a tool for articulating sociopolitical criticism. Entering the

1990s, as the censorship superimposed by martial law was no longer in place, however, the

Taiwanese people had many more avenues, mass media as well as the Internet, through which to express radical ideas. Theatre, as a result, became less appealing.

Put another way, if Wang’s vision of modern Taiwanese theatre demonstrates a conspicuous and typical model of the direct political intervention of theatre especially in the late

1980s, there must be other relationships and forms between theatre and society. On this point, in this dissertation, I investigate alternative patterns between theatre and sociopolitical intervention and explore how the relationship between theatre and politics changed after the lifting of martial law. The goal, however, is not to build a new theoretical model but to suggest an alternative understanding pertaining to how and why modern theatre in Taiwan has remained and can continue to remain political.

From the case studies included in this dissertation, it can be concluded that in addition to thematizing a particular social issue (homosexuality in White Water, for instance) the logic of

“indirect reference” is noticeable. By indirect reference, I mean to suggest that modern Taiwanese practitioners’ aesthetic efforts after the late 1990s gesturally and physically capture and reproduce the social formation and mentality of Taiwanese society in its distinct contexts through 256 the deployment of the body. It is the physical status, rather than ideological issues, that is tied closely to the depiction of social changes.

This kind of indirect signification is a symptom of political oppressions. During the martial law era, radical political criticism was scarcely a safe course of action for practitioners.

After the lifting of martial law, with the realization of the freedom of speech and the blooming of a mass media, less significance was ascribed to staging politics in the theatre. In this condition, the connection between theatre and the political climate of Taiwan transformed from the obvious to the subtle. Theatre could afford to be clever, so to speak.

The Intercultural Characteristics of Modern Taiwanese Theatre

The case of The Rose Colored Country indicates that the most important issues this dissertation conveys are still deeply rooted in modern Taiwanese theatre. To summarize, I will start with the idea that the evolution of modern Taiwanese theatre is intercultural. Here, I intend the term “intercultural” not in the limited sense of the Shechnerian model from the 1970s, which signified cultural exchanges of “non-official groupings” that do “not obey national boundaries”

(42). Instead, at one level, “intercultural” in this study covers the origins of modern theatre in

Taiwan disseminated from and mediated by Chinese and Japanese practices of modern theatre. In other words, from the very beginning, the Taiwanese did not learn the forms of modern theatre from its Western origins, so there was hardly a concrete definition of modern theatre per se as to the diversified incorporation of aesthetic styles.

In this context, the evolution of modern theatre in Taiwan has been elastic, and the practice in Taiwan always includes references to foreign cultural factors as well as internal cultural traditions. Taiwanese people in the Japanese colonial period tried to develop a 257 performative style close to modern life mediated by Japanese practice. Yet, the practice at that time was influenced by Xiqu such that many productions still used percussion instruments in performance, for instance. Hence, the style cannot be completely categorized as realism, which was still in the process of formation.

Later, in the aftermath of the Asia-Pacific War, the KMT took over Taiwan in 1945. The transition of the national language from Japanese to Mandarin forced many writers to re-learn another “mother” tongue, resulting in a deteriorating literary landscape. Also, the anti-communist policy and martial law strengthened censorship over literature and the arts. Realism in Taiwan became the norm because of its characteristic of depicting (mostly, ideal) social life and values.

Thus, ideologically, this form of practice did not aim at liberating the audience or theatrical practice, but to discipline and brainwash the citizenry. At the same time, starting from the 1960s, young intellectuals began to introduce styles other than realism, though these remained marginal, as we can see in the case of the magazine Theatre, which I discuss in the Introduction. Realism, modernism, and avant-garde forms practically coexisted and intersected in Taiwanese theatre.

This hybrid, non-linear picture underscores the evolution of the Taiwanese stage.

In Tian’s White Water, the subject of Chapter One, the audience would find elements of the theatre of cruelty, epic theatre, Xiqu, and Noh all mixed chock-a-block together. Tian’s theatre is a construction of these cultural sources, but Tian shows a minimal intention to reproduce any genuine form of other cultures. It is intercultural in the sense that Tian struggles with incorporating these performance traditions and experimenting with his own form of

Taiwanese theatre. Without the integration of these theatrical elements, White Water would not be the same. 258

In Lee’s and Lai’s works, the subjects of Chapter Two, the realistic styles constitute a dialectic site for synthesizing the performance with history as well as with trauma, the specific international tension between China and Taiwan, and non-Western cultural knowledge. Strictly speaking, their performances would be closer to intracultural as defined by Bharucha: that is, a performance that reveals the internal cultural diversities of a nation. In these works, we can see a strong sense of a converging performance with sociopolitical and cultural references, history and religion, factors that complicate the idea of Taiwan as a fixed concept. Both works scarcely reveal any desire to reproduce a genuine picture of Taiwan. Rather, through critically integrating the social mentality and structure of Taiwan, Lee and Lai complicate the process of subject formation through which the sentiment of national identity is subjected to change.

Without question, the two flagship productions, La Dame aux Camélias and Orlando, are intercultural in its strict sense. Still, ways to be intercultural are not limited merely to a mutual communication between two sets of national or international performance conventions. Due to

Taiwan’s distinct political and economic conditions, the power imbalance of cultural and political negotiations and locally cultural memories enhance the tension of this kind of cultural exchange. For foreign directors, the priority is by no means to exchange performative techniques with local. A more precise description is, instead: they came, they saw, they appropriated. Yet, this process is not without resistance. The practitioners’ efforts and the audience’s response all complicate the generation of the meaning and value of intercultural exchange. Interculturalism in

Taiwan, thus, must be carefully rehistoricized from both the levels of text and performance and contextualized from the perspective of Taiwanese cultural memories and postcolonial conditions.

The emphasis on the intercultural nature of modern Taiwanese theatre allows us to rethink the innate complexities of Taiwanese cultures and the concepts of Taiwan. The status of 259 being intercultural, at one level, signifies the hybrid formation of Taiwanese identity, and, at another, embodies the political ambiguity of Taiwan as a nation, the point of the next section.

The Influence of China

In Taiwan, Chinese factors influence locally cultural and political constructions. In Tian’s experiments, his conscious constructivism, an appropriation of various performance traditions, is undergirded by his desire to exclude the Greater Chinese ideology and to shape Taiwanese identity via an attempt to invent the Taiwanese body. In other words, Tian envisions a picture of

Taiwan that is autonomous at least in the sense of disentangling from China, no matter what that means. The idea of Taiwan is constantly in flux. In the context of the post–martial law period, this stance and feeling is not unusual, nor is it all there is.

In Lee’s Far Away from Home, China constitutes an aspect of the cultural identity of the

Taiwanese people (mainlanders, or the first and the second generations of the Chinese diaspora in Taiwan). The memory of China is an indispensable portion of Taiwan, and the inability to integrate China with Taiwan, the past and the present, results largely in the identity struggle of

Taiwanese society. Indeed, the conflict between mainlanders and islanders is still a political and emotional taboo in Taiwanese society. The idea that one belongs to Taiwan is by no means understood as either certain or natural.

In A Dream like a Dream, the reconfiguration of political references between the old and the new versions illustrates a picture wherein the performance of modern Taiwanese theatre is also influenced by China. In fact, practitioners cannot easily resist China, which is, however, something they do, at least, attempt to avoid. China is not simply a cultural reference. Given the self-censorship, the deletion of the June Fourth Incident, in the newest version of A Dream like a 260

Dream, the influence of China is a sociopolitical fact that haunts the production. China is the alienated other in the conception of Taiwan. For Lee and Lai, the inherent confusion of

Taiwanese identity is still mediated by China and embodied by the Taiwanese body. Seen in this light, Lee’s and Lai’s realistic performance styles, or critical realism, as I have argued, constitute a process of knowledge production in which the historical, economic, and political relations between China and Taiwan are overlooked or rejected.

The intercultural productions in Taiwan consist of these two directions, exclusive and inclusive, concerning Chinese factors. Like Tian’s perusal of Taiwaneseness, the Taiwanese practitioners in La Dame aux Camélias and Orlando embrace foreign directors’ aesthetics and techniques with the expectation of constructing Taiwanese aesthetics from a global scope. Put another way, routes other than China for constructing a Taiwanese identity are welcomed and cultivated. In La Dame aux Camélias, this process is disturbed by local memories of political and cultural specificities of Taiwan that cannot easily be eliminated from the performance and its audience’s response. In Orlando, the actress, Wei Hai-Min, is precisely a distinctive embodiment of the performative tradition in Taiwan. Immersed in the techniques of Jingju, Wei’s body is relatively resilient to the shaping of other performative styles. These two pictures of Taiwan are interwoven with the fact that Taiwan is a nation of uncertain status under Chinese influence.

Hence, the desire to be universal becomes an outlet and a detour for building a national identity.

In short, the development of Taiwanese society after the Japanese colonial period has been deeply connected to the complex relationship between Taiwan and China. Though practitioners may pursue a primary goal of reconfiguring the former, their practice and perceptions of Taiwan are mediated by the ways Taiwan–China relations are positioned both in text and performance. 261

The Constructedness of Identity

Due to the denial of the sovereignty of Taiwan as a nation, the sense of an empty identity underscores the productions analyzed in this dissertation. The practitioners discussed entertain an intercultural encounter to pursue the enigma of what Taiwan is, thus, foregrounding the fluid identities of Taiwan. In White Water, there is no clear sense of what Taiwan is. Put another way, that kind of chaotic cultural flow captures exactly Tian’s perception of Taiwan, which is ever-changing and awaits an order yet to be realized. Far Away from Home continues this narrative thread but contextualizes it via the failed identification of Chinese veterans in Taiwan with the present society. The imagined reunion of the protagonists then allegedly suggests the confusion pertaining to the forming of a nation in reality.

In A Dream like a Dream, Lai deploys China as part of a larger cultural and historical context, in which the protagonists constantly suffer from interpersonal relationships and search ceaselessly for causes that turn out to be beyond their control. The agenda of the play, simply put, is to return the responsibility of defining “who you are” back to the individual’s decision. This ideological stance, to some degree, is the suspension of political judgment. The religious reference of A Dream like a Dream and its emphasis on the significance of the search for the self, which relates to the previous existence, deliver a message that the subject’s formation cannot be completely fulfilled without a reconciliation with the other. But, what is there after reconciliation?

If we take this message seriously, then the question is not just how the reconciliation can be possible in real life. How would the self change after this reconciliation? The audience would not know what this proposed fulfilled life looks like, given that death stops life. Again, like the case of Far Away from Home, death explains very little in reality. The performances mainly depict the 262 suffering and pain of the body in an allegorical dramaturgical context and yield knowledge that stimulates the audience to reflect on the complexity of identity formation in Taiwan.

The ideological paradigm in intercultural theatre depicts a paradoxical narrative. Simply put, the practitioners suspend the process of signification of Taiwan in practice. Through embracing foreign aesthetics as universal tokens, local practitioners construct Taiwan as something yet to be invented. Both Western (Wilson) and Japanese (Suzuki) factors function as stimuli to enable the transformation of Taiwan. However, this process is constantly haunted by the cultural memory of Taiwanese factors. On stage, Taiwan becomes a present theatrical existence of a combination of the yet to be realized future and the haunting past. Taiwan is empty in the present, but is full of references to the past and filled with possibilities in future.

In short, these case studies all reveal the desire to reflect on the shaping of Taiwanese identity, and they also articulate an ambiguous picture of Taiwan. Yet, on the one hand, performing Taiwan is imbued with historical, cultural factors; on the other, the actualization of its references is not readily available. The practice of modern theatre, then, enacts these questions of who the Taiwanese people are and what the Taiwanese nation is. These confusions over and conflations of identity, subjectivity, and sovereignty undergird the deployment and conception of the body in performance.

Biopolitics, Body, and Theatre

Reading from the cases of modern Taiwanese theatre, it becomes clear that the deployment of the body reveals the interconnection of the issues of formulating a national identity, reconfiguring the self, and pursuing aesthetic innovations. White Water addresses the impurity of the body contextualized via the criticism of Confucian values. In Far Away from 263

Home and A Dream like a Dream, the deceased bodies convey messages showing an inability to deal with the past and to live in the present. Practitioners in La Dame aux Camélias and Orlando are eager to deconstruct and reshape their bodies with the ideas of reinventing new selves in and a new nation of Taiwan. These issues distinctively relate to the unique political conditions of

Taiwan. However, we can also see that the body provides a common field for expressing the struggles and sentiments embedded in these problems. The body in performance addresses an excess of information that is not necessarily distinguishable at the level of text. Seen in this light, I argue that the readings of the body on stage constitute an alternative narrative that helps us understand the ways practitioners represent the convoluted relationships between theatre and politics, an argument that leads us to the idea of biopolitics.

One of Foucault’s major narratives, biopolitics connotes how life has been politicized and subjected to the power structure in Western contexts since the eighteenth century, in particular with the emergence of capitalism and the progression of modern technology. In Foucault’s words, biopolitics connotes “the entry of phenomena peculiar to the life of the human species into the order of knowledge and power, into the sphere of political techniques” (141–42). In other words, for Foucault, biopolitics relates to the manipulation of the body and also to the reshaping of the structures of knowledge and power. It is about the dual nature of life—its material existence as well as its discursive effect. Biopolitics dominates an individual’s self-perception, at one level, and the total entity of population in a specific social context, a process that is not neutral but is managed by the intervention of political techniques.

To be more specific, as Foucault suggests, the power that shapes life can be understood from two exemplars. One pole is “the body as machine” (139), which has to be monitored and adjusted. This idea comes from Foucault’s studies of systems of discipline, such as modern 264 medicine and punishment. In certain places (such as hospitals and prisons), power is embodied by techniques that are executed to shape the subjects with the norms of discipline.4 This form of manipulation is, thus, grounded in the micro-configuration of the individual’s life. A second pole is the technologies of regulation (such as birth control and propagation) that evaluates life not so much from the individual human body as to the aggregation of a “species” (139). What matters is, thus, not the individual body but the totality of the subjects, “a biopolitics of the population”

(139). From Foucault’s perspective, the two poles separately work as a “biopower” the controls human bodies and illustrates the shifting regime of power.

In the classical period, the ultimate regulation is putting people the death, a power that marked the absoluteness of sovereignty In regard to a dominance over its subjects. Yet, with the modern progress of economics, technologies, and institutes as well as the rising awareness of individuality, life has become more and more valuable, and death has gradually lost its function of embodying sovereign power in modern society. The preservation, regulation, and distribution of life, or say, the power to preserve and generate life, which better represents functional governmentality, thus, replaced the power to let die. As Foucault explains, “power would no longer be dealing simply with legal subjects over whom the ultimate dominion was death, but with living beings, and the mastery it would be able to exercise over them would have to be applied at the level of life itself; it was the taking charge of life, more than the threat of death, that gave power its access even to the body” (Sexuality 142–43). In this exposition, Foucault lays out his conceptualization of the development and significance of biopolitics in a way that shows a disconnect between power and death, on the one hand, and to emphasize the linkage between power and the living body, on the other.

4 See Foucault’s elaboration in Discipline and Punish. 265

Reading through the lens of biopolitics, we can find that the paradigm of the body and the politics of modern Taiwanese theatre operates exactly within the realm of biopolitics in the historical conditions of colonialism and its aftermath. Why did theatre participants deploy the body as a site, whether intentionally or unintentionally, to demonstrate the conditions of the mentality relevant to sociopolitical specifics and ideologies? The simplest answer is this: many

Taiwanese people were oppressed throughout the historical development of Taiwan. As repeatedly noted in this project, in both the Japanese and the KMT period, extreme control over individuals was the norm, and theatre (along with other forms of art) was part of the various mechanisms of institutions that sought to regulate the citizens. Practitioners, whatever their social status, were all under the surveillance of the state. In this context, theatre practice was an indirect site that embodied the exertion of power over individuals. However, modern theatre, because of its connection with a Western modernity that stressed the constant progress of individuals and cultures, also created a place for some practitioners with a highly political sensitivity to reveal the constraints of power over individuals and to seek the possibilities of political resistance and social engagement. In short, performance in Taiwan consists of this conflict of a dual mentality of being the oppressed and of imagining possibilities for transfiguration.

The tensions and flows between life and power undergird Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, which as he later developed it became a field of power struggles intersected with neoliberalism, a linkage that continues to puzzle later scholars.5 Yet, in Taiwan’s context, the state and power have never functioned like that of Foucault’s paradigm in Western society.

Taiwan has been entrapped by the condition of colonialism and postcolonial violence. In other words, at least before the lifting of martial law, Taiwan was in “the state of exception,” in which

5 Lemm and Vatter 1–16. 266 the horror and actualization of death exceeded the necessity of the preservation of life, a unique status that brings us to Agamben’s conceptualization of biopolitics.

Foucault is concerned with the interplay between life and power relations in everyday life and undermines the significance of death as an integral part of the regime of power in the modern era. Agamben made a detour and investigated concentration camps from the conceptual angle of biopolitics. For Agamben, Foucault’s separation of sovereign power and biopower needs reevaluation if seen from the extreme cases of modern wars. What marks the fundamental power of the modern nation-state, according to Agamben’s observation, is the power to let people die as the “bare life” in a concentration camp is one in which some are denied rights by law. The power of the state (sovereignty) demonstrates its significance via this scenario of inaugurating “the state of exception” embodied in the camps as modern forms created through the combination of jurisdictional regulations and the amalgamation of modern technologies. In these sites, lives in custody are removed from the protection of national and civil rights—becoming a bare life with no meaning and no protection. In Agamben’s words, “the radical transformation of politics into the realm of bare life (that is, into a camp) legitimated and necessitated total domination” (71).

By turning the life into biological existence in the state of exception, the state makes these individuals reinforce the power of death in modern society. Via excluding the bare life, the state demonstrates its functionality in terms of protecting civil subjects, in which condition the power to let live paradoxically receives an ultimate affirmation. The exclusion of bare life, then, became a political maneuver in the sense that with the corporeal detainment of some lives, the scale of the civil subjects can remain determined. This insight offered by Agamben re-conceptualizes sovereign power with the significance of death, a stance that supplements Foucault’s emphasis on the management of power over life. 267

It is worth pointing out again that the state of exception, in fact, includes more kinds of models than the concentration camps. In Taiwan’s historical context, in colonial and totalitarian conditions, the state of exception and everyday life are interwoven. Death was an actual method for domination in daily life. The discipline of the body, the regulation of citizens, and the exclusion of life happened simultaneously. The lives of Taiwanese citizens can become “bare” at any moment: Taiwanese citizenship has been formulated on a basis of uncertainty.

In brief, in the discussion of biopolitics, the two key questions are as follows: First, what kinds of power are at stake in changing living subjects into political ones? And, second, Can either life or death be an effective means of ensuring the operation of power? It seems that

Foucault and Agamben described the operation of biopolitics as an indispensable logic of the modern nation, and, to a certain extent, conceptualized individuals as dominated by power relations with limited room to resist. During the year of Foucault’s death (1984), when he was interviewed about his attitude toward the realities of war, economic crises, and political conflicts, he replied plainly, “we must not accept [those issues],” but, as for the question of “what can be done,” Foucault was elusive without any concrete answer (Interviews 51). Under the paradigm of modern biopolitics with its distinct cultural and political conditions, how the process of subject formation can (or cannot) be disentangled from the domain of power remains an open question.

To avoid a possible misunderstanding, it should be made clear at this final point that this dissertation is not a work of theorizing the genealogy of biopolitics in theatre. The body is not just about manipulation and regulation but also about resilience and plasticity, as shown by the practitioners and theorists analyzed in this dissertation. I, therefore, focused on rehistoricizing the moments the body articulates the dissonance that is in opposition to the dominance of ideology and power. Following the dynamics of life, death, power, and politics, this project 268 reveals various ways in which the body in Taiwan’s distinct sociopolitical context generates affect and knowledge in modern theatre. In other words, the deployment of the body can help spectators better understand reality through producing and transforming feelings and knowledge of the complexities of sociopolitical specifics.

The body, via problematizing the definition of human beings (White Water), exploring subject formation under the influence of disease and traumatic memories (Far Away from Home and A Dream like a Dream), and demonstrating the inscription of the cultural, political references that affect the actualization of the self vis-à-vis the reconfiguration of the perception of Taiwan

(La Dame aux Camélias and Orlando), constitutes a site of inviting spectators’ participatory evaluation. The sentiments embedded in these issues are shared problems of most Taiwanese, if not people in general. Thus, the generation of corresponding feelings can be expected. Is it unusual in theatre? Not really. Yet, these frameworks—Tian’s conscious constructivism, Lee’s and Lai’s critical realism, and intercultural theatre—to varying degrees, provide the spectators with political and aesthetic knowledge pertinent to re-contextualizing their feelings and to generating resilient interpretations.

The intercultural nature of modern Taiwanese theatre complicates the perception and deployment of the body in performance, which formulates a creative negotiation with reality as a solid fact. The multiple cultures embedded in the body and incorporated in performance reveal the identity confusions of Taiwan but also challenge any predetermined, essential assumptions in the process of identification. The body demonstrates both the difficulties of transgressing reality and the possibilities of imagining the future. The community of theatre participants becomes a middle contact zone between the individuals and larger social structures for exploring the complexities of being in a nation that has lived and is continuing to live under the influence of 269 foreign cultures. Through revealing and re-inventing the constructedness of the body under the influence of the specificities of Taiwanese society, practitioners in the theatre deploy these aesthetic angles and situate themselves and their audiences in the condition of renewing the self and reimagining Taiwan.

270

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Jian, Zhi-Xin [簡志信]. “Thinking Modern Drama from the Performances of The Prophet and

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—. “Rethinking and Challenging ‘Postmodern Theatre’” [對「後現代主義劇場」的再思考與質

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常內心」的流行音樂再構：訪茶花女編曲者櫻井宏二, “‘Feichang neixin’ de liuxing 289

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Shao, Bing-Ru [邵冰如]. “Oriental Orlando: The Encounter between Modern Theatre and Jingju”

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論」談起, “Taipei diqu xiaojuchang zhi wenhua shengchan changyu fenxi (1986– 290

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Tsai, Chia-Ling [蔡佳陵], “Two Different Gazes: The Recognition Writing of GwoXiou Lee and

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Wang, An-Qi [王安祈]. “Solitude, Refulgence: Wei Hai Min gazes Orlando From a Distance”

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“Western Avant-Garde in the East—the Symposium on Orlando” [西方的前衛在東方—「歐蘭

朵」座談會, “Xifang de qianwei zai dongfang—Oulanduo zuotan hui”]. China Times,

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Not Necessarily ‘Jing;’ We Need to Take One Step Further” [京劇不一定要姓「京」，要 292

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1949 [何日君再來-流行歌曲滄桑史話 1927–1949, Heri jun zailai—Liuxing gequ

cangsang shihua 1927–1949]. Harbin: Beifang wenyi, 2010.

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造出來的？, “Jiuer gongshi daodi zenme bei suzao chulai de”]. The Journalist 26 Nov.

2015. Web. 15 Apr. 2016.

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Wu, Chen-Tse [吳承澤]. “On the Utopian Ideal and Its Practices in Taiwan’s Experimental

Theater” [論台灣實驗劇場中的烏托邦理念及其實踐, “Lun Taiwan shiyan juchang

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Yeh, Ken-Chuan [葉根泉]. Technology of the Body as Practice of Self-Cultivation: Askésis and

Body in Taiwanese Modern Theatre, 1960s to 1990s [身體技術作為工夫實踐：六○至九

○年代臺灣現代劇場的修「身」, Shenti jishu zuowei gongfu shijian: liuling zhi jiuling

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—. “Shopping Window and Dojo: Buddhist Presence and Not Presence in Stan Lai’s Theatre

Creations” [櫥窗與道場：賴聲川戲劇裡佛法的顯與不顯, “Chuchuang yu daochang:

Lai Sheng Chuan xiju li fofa de xian yu buxian”]. Theatre Journal 5 (2007): 7–24. Print.

Yu, Shan-Lu [于善祿]. “Contemporary Sinophone Theatre in Chinese Mainland, Taiwan and

Hong Kong” [幾岸幾地的當代華文劇場, “Jian jidi de dangdai huawen juchang”].

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Demonstrate Modern Arts” [布魯塞爾國際藝術節 台灣節目展現當代藝術, “Buluseer 294

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Zhou, Yi-Cheng [周翊誠]. The Rose Colored Country [玫瑰色的國, Meigui Se De Guo]. 2014.

Video Archive.

—. The Rose Colored Country [玫瑰色的國, Meigui Se De Guo]. 2014. Play.

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de”]. Theatre 2, Apr. 1965: 115. Print.

Japanese

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Chuokoron shinsha, 1992. Print.

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EDUCATION 2010 M.A., Drama and Theatre, National Taiwan University, Taipei

2006 B.A., Applied Foreign Languages, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Taipei

PUBLICATIONS Cheng, Fang-Ting and Wei-Chih Wang. “Shouzhu kangzheng zhuti de zifanxing xiju zhenglue: Duyan Juren Meigui Se De Guo” [Protesting self-reflexive theatricality: The Cyclops Troupe’s The Rose Colored Country]. Xiju Yanjiu [Journal of Theatre Studies]. 16 (2015): 217–251.

PRESENTATIONS “Intercultural Bodies: Politics of Performance in Modern Taiwanese Theatre.” Association for Asian Performance (AAP). Annual Conference, Chicago, USA. 2016.

“Kuawen hua zhuti zhanhyan zu zhenti zhenzhi: yi Oulandou yu Chahuanu zhi Taiwan liangting yuan qijian zhizuo weili” [Intercultural Performance and Bodily Politics: A Study of Taiwanese flagship productions of Orlando and La Dame aux Camélia]. Cultural Studies Organization of Taiwan. Annual conference. Taipei, Taiwan. 2015.

“Taiwan Silhouetted: Social Movement and its Theatrical Double.” Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE). Annual conference. Montreal, Canada. 2015.

“Incorporating the Tradition: Tian Chi Yuan and the Little Theatre Movement in Taiwan.” Performance Studies international (PSi) 20. Annual conference. Shanghai, China. 2014.

“Storytelling and Recollecting Self: Stan Lai’s A Dream like a Dream.” Mid-Atlantic Regional Association for Asian Studies (MARAAS). Annual conference. Delaware, USA. 2013.

“Cosmopolitan Body versus Local Body: Revisiting the History of Modern Taiwanese Theatre.” Performance Studies international (PSi) 19. Annual conference. Stanford, USA. 2013.

TEACHING EXPERIENCE Introduction to Asian Literatures (CMLIT/ASIA 004). Instructor of record. Fall 2014. Penn State. English language survey of the Asian literary tradition.

Contemporary Chinese Culture (CHNS 452). Instructor of record. Spring 2014. Penn State. Upper-level Chinese-language course, with readings focused on contemporary theatre and performance in East Asia.

What is Asia? (ASIA 100). Teaching Assistant. Fall 2013. Penn State. Survey of Asian civilization.