Gao Xingjian's Post-Exile Plays

Transnationalism and Postdramatic Theatre

Mary Mazzilli

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781472591616
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Asian Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2000, Gao Xingjian is the first Chinese writer to be so lauded for his prose and plays. Since relocating to France in 1987, in a voluntary exile from China, he has assembled a body of dramatic work that has best been understood neither as expressly Chinese nor French, but as transnational. In this comprehensive study of his post-exile plays, Mary Mazzilli explores Gao's plays as examples of postdramatic transnationalism: a transnational artistic and theatrical trend that is fluid, flexible and encompasses a variety of styles and influences. As such, this innovative interdisciplinary investigation offers fresh insights into contemporary theatre. Whereas other publications have considered Gao's work as a cultural and artistic phenomenon, Gao Xingjian's Post-Exile Plays: Transnationalism and Postdramatic Theatre is the first study to relate his plays to postdramatic theatre and to provide close textual and dramatic analysis that will help readers to better understand his complex work, and also to see it in the context of the work of contemporary playwrights such as Martin Crimp, Peter Handke, and Elfriede Jelinek. Among the plays discussed are: The Other Shore, written just before he left China in 1987; Between Life and Death (1991) - compared in detail to Martin Crimp's Attempts on her life; Dialogue and Rebuttal (1992), and its relationship to Beckett's Happy Days; Nocturnal Wanderer (1993), Weekend Quartet (1995), and the latest plays Snow in August (1997), Death Collector (2000) and Ballade Nocturne (2010).

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Gao Xingjian and Postdramatic Theatre: The Other Shore – Between Lehmann and Fuchs

This chapter explains in further detail the terminologies used and the approach I have chosen to take in this book. I will start by looking at Gao’s 1986 play The Other Shore, which started a shift in Gao’s work towards a less ‘dramatic’ theatre. I then reconsider Lehmann and Fuchs’ positions in order to reconcile Gao’s shift within the context of postdramatic theatre.

The Other Shore – a shift in Gao Xingjian’s work

While earlier plays Bus Stop, Alarm Signal and Wild Man see Gao experimenting with modernist theatre and are still rooted in the dramatic, it is The Other Shore that signals a breakthrough in his dramatic work – and, also, in his personal life and career. Written in 1986, the play never reached the stage in China. The Deputy President of the Beijing People’s Art Theatre, Yu Shizhi, despite being the most open-minded ‘art leader’ of the time, stopped rehearsals, because of the allegedly political meaning of the play, denouncing the masses as an oppressive group against the individual. A year later, Gao moved to France and has not returned to China since. Artistically in this play, Gao moves towards a non-representational kind of theatre by developing abstraction through a disruptive structure.

In approaching The Other Shore, no assumptions can be made about the story and its plot. The play opens with a playful intermezzo of actors playing with a rope that structurally introduces the passage of the characters to the other shore, a passage that is both physical and emotional. Characters/actors are introduced in their new physical and emotional dimension, which are set in dreamlike situations, where characters/visions appear and disappear after interacting with one other.

There are two elements that help create the structure of the play: the stage directions in the text and the characters themselves. It is the sequences of exits and entrances that shape the development of the play, which, in turn, does not follow temporal or logical order. The pattern, as such, is created by the stage directions, the external non-speaking characters (for example, Card Player, Zen Master, Plaster Seller) entering the stage, the dialogues between two or more characters and the disappearance of either one of the characters or all of them from the stage. These sequences of scene units add a rhythm of sorts to the development of the play, one that picks up speed towards the end. The speed is indicated by the use of more dialogues in the first unit of scenes, fewer dialogues in the following units, and monologues and a lack of extensive dialogue towards the end. Moreover, the role of Crowd and its behaviour is another point of reference in the change of rhythm: Crowd’s behaviour is more dynamic at the beginning of the play and towards the end, whereas in the middle it is restricted to the background. The more pressing role of Crowd towards the end, and the diminished length of scene units, create a certain climax, which can be seen as a resolution of the dialogic rhythm of the play and, to some extent, it signals the gradual end of the characters’ actions on stage. The penultimate scene sees Man and uncontrollable mannequins and is the high point of the action; there is an almost total absence of dialogue in the scene as Man is left dealing with almost neurotic mannequins. In the last scene, the actors cease to be characters, look back at their play and reveal themselves in their function as actors.

I see the two aspects – the ‘diegetic location’ and the ‘characters’ – as being important elements of the play. The diegetic location is signified by the play’s title, The Other Shore (Bi’ an in Chinese, meaning the ‘other shore’ or the ‘other side’; L’Autre rive, also meaning the ‘other shore’ in French), which represents the overall theme of the play, the essential drive of the characters’ search. The ‘other shore’ is the place the characters are striving to reach at the beginning of the play and also is the place where the characters find themselves, as well as the object of their search. It is the drive behind their journey. It is interesting to note that in Zen Buddhism prajñā pāramitā means literally ‘the wisdom that leads to the other shore’, also referred to as wisdom (Kapleau 1980: 374). The characters are faced with the impossibility of defining what the other shore is and this constant motif to the play is suggested by the surreal ambience that surrounds the characters, the stage directions that Gao uses to describe the location of the play and the actors’ actions themselves. Especially in reference to the latter, spatial references and spatial embodiments can be read by Gao’s idea of jiadingxing. The term jiadingxing refers, here, to a type of acting where the actor returns to storytelling and, from that point of view, he/she enters the role of the character he/she is performing; by doing so, he/she works through his/her own acting self and the role of the character but maintains some kind of neutrality in performing it. Actors’ actions shape the location through appealing to the audience’s imagination and not through the physicality of objects. Liu Zaifu interprets the play as representing the struggle of individuals to overcome loneliness under the pressure of society (Liu 2004: 86), hence adding a philosophical meaning to the play. Sy Ren Quah, instead, explains the ambience of the play by referring to Gao’s conception that the starting point of acting is in the use of theatrical space through actions and words (Quah 2002: 165). The focus is on the use of space, strictly relating to the actors’ actions on stage, which exemplifies the idea of jiadingxing.¹

In theatrical terms, Gao’s notion of jiadingxing is based on the idea that the stage representation of a play does not benefit from bearing a resemblance to reality, yet it still implies that what is offered on stage could be true. Quah uses the term ‘suppositionality’, suggesting that every element in the theatre is ‘artistically represented, subjectively imagined and thus, fundamentally unreal’ but still has some connection with reality (Quah 2004: 169). Zhao, instead, uses the term ‘hypotheticality’, stressing a degree of resemblance to reality by stimulating the audience’s imagination. Thus, we can call Gao’s theatre as a form of ‘hypothetical or suppositional theatre’.

Going back to the role of characters/actors, Gao’s notion of acting does not totally obliterate the character’s psychological entity, but splits it. The lack of personal connotations and psychological depth makes them a functional part of the system of the performance, creating the rhythm of the performance. The only way to distinguish their role in the play is through the antagonism and the internal conflict between counterparts, gradually coming out from the unfolding of events and situations presented on stage. However, to some extent it is possible to draw a distinction between the main characters, such as Man and Crowd, from the sort of characters presented as a vision, such as Mother, Woman, Young Girl and the inhabitants of this strange place, such as Card Player, Zen Master and Stable Keeper. In particular, Man seems to show the traits of a more complete and fuller personality through the story he tells of himself, but again the emphasis is on the performability of the words that are spoken, and the theatrical effects of behaviour. As the denomination Man indicates, he is not referred to as a specific person with a name and identity. In this case, generality depersonalizes Man as a character, who comes to represent a man sui generis. The best example of the depersonalisation of characters is Crowd, who is referred to in most of the text as an indefinite group having one voice that speaks for all. The use of these characters can be explained as a consequence of Gao’s original intention to use the play for actor training. In this case, Crowd would represent a group of actors trying to conform with one another. Within this context, the actors, who make use of their fullest potential by creating their role together with their acting partners, would use the second and third person alternatively when referring to themselves.

According to Quah, Gao develops the principle of jiadingxing to deal with the direct connection between physical space on stage and the psychological impact of actors’ actions using this space in relation to the audience (Quah 2002: 166): he refers to Gao’s idea of ‘psychological field’ (xinli chang) (Gao 1996: 225), which through the exploration of actions and words, creates the suppositional setting of the play. In this sense, Quah stresses Gao’s interest in subjectivity, a feature which is intrinsic to Gao’s post-exile plays and will be one of the main areas analysed in this book.

The theatrical implication of the use of jiadingxing principle and the exploration of subjectivity is the application of what Zhao calls ‘a theory of “Triplication”’:

He first called it the triplication of the actor (yanyuan sanchongxing), but later triplication of the theatre (juchang sanchongxing) […] His main idea is that while realism stresses the performed, and theatricism stresses the performance, triplication tries to separate both of them from the actor leaving him a neutral ‘self’ in between. The subjectivity, isolated and extracted in this manner, stands at the distance to the performance. The actor is now able to examine both his own person and his role but rising above both the presented and the presenting (2000: 119).

In practical terms, tripartition (sanchongxing) is conveyed by the actors’ use of split-person lines, which Gao argues derives from the use of asides and self-addressing in Chinese opera. Gao explains that the three persons correspond to ‘his/her own person’, ‘an actor, a neutral medium that does not bear a relationship to his/her own particular experiences’, and ‘the character he/she creates’ (Gao 1988: 211). Another related term used to define Gao’s approach to character and acting is that of the neutral actor which will be looked at in more detail later, in the analysis of other plays. As we will see, some of the theatrical elements introduced by this play find a resonance in both Lehmann and Fuchs’ theoretical conceptions of postdramatic theatrical practices.

Lehmann’s postmodern theatre

The term ‘postdramatic’ implies more than a simple rejection of the theatrical: postdramatic theatre has surpassed or transcended the dramatic by leaving narratives, plots and especially actions behind, and is focused instead on the ‘states’ or ‘aesthetic figurations of the theatre’, thus ‘showing rather a formation rather than a story, even though living actors play in it’ (2006: 68). In order to understand Lehmann’s definition, one should look at the journey of the ‘dramatic’ towards the privileging of the ‘theatrical’. Lehmann’s definition of the dramatic cites Aristotle’s Poetics as ‘an artificially constructed and composed course of actions’ (ibid.) based on the idea of mimesis:

Aristotle’s Poetics couples imitation and action in the famous formula that tragedy is an imitation of human action, ‘mimesis praxeos’. The word ‘drama’ derives from the Greek δραν = to do. If one thinks of theatre as drama and as imitation, then action presents itself automatically as the actual object and kernel of this imitation (Lehmann 2006: 36).

A narrative, a plot with beginning, middle and end, is what Lehmann calls Aristotle’s need to give ‘a logical (namely dramatic) order to the confusing chaos and plenitude of Being’ (ibid.: 40). Szondi, instead, considers the ‘Drama’ – with a capital ‘D’ – of modernity (or neoclassical drama) that stems from the Renaissance but also corresponds to ‘the traditional conception of the Drama’ (1983: 197). It is an absolute concept of drama as being ‘always primary’ and whose internal time is ‘always the present’. He argues that ‘time unfolds as an absolute, linear sequence in the present’ (ibid.: 196), dominated by dialogue, and intended as ‘interpersonal communication’, thus making Drama only the reproduction of ‘interpersonal relations’ and making the actor–role relationship invisible (Szondi and Hays 1983: 195).

The nineteen-twentieth century ‘crisis of Drama’ that Szondi describes, citing writers such as Henrik Ibsen, Anton Chekhov, August Strindberg, Maurice Maeterlinck and Gerhart Hauptmann, is in the emergence of narrative practices in which the dramatic present is subjugated to the past and past events motivate the present (1983: 202).² These writers created a ‘middle-class salon Drama’ that replaced neoclassical drama and transformed this into the epic,³ – in their view, to patch up the contradictions between content and form (Szondi and Hays 1983: 218).

Lehmann clearly criticizes Szondi for turning ‘the epic theatre into a kind of universal key for understanding the recent developments’ (2006: 29), predominantly because he feels that this has made Brecht, with his idea of epic theatre, the rightful successor to the ‘dramatic’ (ibid). In Lehmann’s opinion, Brecht’s conception of theatre was still anchored to the element of fable (story) (2006: 33).

Lehmann’s critical opposition to Brecht – he refers to postdramatic theatre as ‘post-Brechtian theatre’ (ibid.) – does not translate to a total rejection of the Brechtian theory of theatre. When he states that postdramatic theatre ‘situates itself in a space opened up by the Brechtian inquiries into the presence and consciousness of the process of representation’, we understand that he acknowledges Brecht’s influence on postdramatic practices. In this regard, I agree with John Freeman when he argues that the spectator’s self-awareness of the artificiality of theatre is implied in Lehmann’s rejection of dramatic illusions in their representational mimetic function (2013: 226). However, Lehmann gives much importance to theatre practitioners like Artaud and Grotowski: Artaud’s Total Theatre, where spectacle is a primary element in the sequence of elements, and Grotowski’s focus on the actor as breaking through the unconscious.

Besides the question of influences and roots of the postdramatic, what is important is the fact that Lehmann depicts the journey of dramatic to what he sees as its redundancy and this gives way to new theatrical practices rejecting the idea of theatre ‘as a representation of a fictive cosmos’ (2006: 31):

When it is obviously no longer simply a matter of broken dramatic illusion or epicizing distance; when obviously neither plots, nor plastically shaped dramatis personae are needed; when neither dramatic dialectical collision of values nor even identifiable figures are necessary to produce ‘theatre’ (and all of this is sufficiently demonstrated by the new theatre), then the concept of drama – however differentiated, all-embracing and watered down it may become – retains so little substance that it loses its cognitive value. It no longer serves the purpose of theoretical concepts to sharpen perception but instead obstructs the cognition of theatre, as well as the theatre text (Lehmann 2006: 34).

The concept of the dramatic, as synonymous of unity and mimesis of reality, thus becomes inadequate and we need to talk, instead, about the ‘theatrical’ and about theatrical texts where unity and mimesis disappear. The postdramatic in the journey Lehmann describes – from pre-dramatic Greek Tragedies, dramatic Racine and postdramatic post-1970s theatre, such as ‘Robert Wilson’s visual dramaturgy’ (ibid.) – points to a kind of theatre that is anti-representational and breaks the invisible actor–role relation, as defined by Szondi. Lehmann uses the analogy of a painting and its relation to the viewer to explain the changes in the new kind of dramaturgy:

The seemingly ‘static’ painting, too, is in reality merely the now ‘definite’ state of the congealed pictorial work, in which the eye of the viewer wanting to access the picture has to become aware of and reconstructs its dynamic and process (2006: 68).

The dynamic he refers to is not a ‘dramatic’ but rather a ‘scenic’ process. The painting analogy is telling in that it represents two aspects of postdramatic theatre: the self-referential nature of postdramatic theatre, namely the theatre that brings attention to its own construct – the viewer’s awareness of the painting creative process ­–­ and the active participation...

Table of contents

• FC
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Toc
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Gao Xingjian and Postdramatic Theatre: The Other Shore – Between Lehmann and Fuchs
• 2. Gao and Postdramatic Theatre: A Comparison with British Playwright Martin Crimp
• 3. Dialogue and Rebuttal: The Death of Love in Postdramatic Transnationalism
• 4. Individualism and Freedom in Nocturnal Wanderer
• 5. Transnational Postdramatic Realism in Weekend Quartet
• 6. Latest Postdramatic Attempts at Transnationalism
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• About the Author
• Index
• Copyright Page