Performing Identity in the Plays of Gao Xingjian

Performing Identity in the Plays of Gao Xingjian PDF Author: Todd J. Coulter
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780773444911
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Get Book

Book Description
Offers a fresh look at a theater scholar and Nobel Peace Prize laureate viewed from a cultural studies lens. This exploration of transcultural theater is useful to both the general and initiated reader. It embraces the social and aesthetic influences of traditional Chinese theater and the intellectual, cultural influences of French theater.

Performing Identity in the Plays of Gao Xingjian

Performing Identity in the Plays of Gao Xingjian PDF Author: Todd J. Coulter
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780773444911
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Get Book

Book Description
Offers a fresh look at a theater scholar and Nobel Peace Prize laureate viewed from a cultural studies lens. This exploration of transcultural theater is useful to both the general and initiated reader. It embraces the social and aesthetic influences of traditional Chinese theater and the intellectual, cultural influences of French theater.

City of the Dead and Song of the Night

City of the Dead and Song of the Night PDF Author: Gao Xingjian
Publisher: The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press
ISBN: 9629966506
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 112

Get Book

Book Description
Presented in English for the first time in this book are two plays by Gao Xingjian originally written in Chinese: City of the Dead and Song of the Night. City of the Dead is the first of Gao Xingjian's plays to focus fully on the malefemale relationship. In this work, he transforms a wellknown ancient morality tale, "Zhuangzi Tests His Wife", which had been used to caution women against being unfaithful to their husbands, into a modern play that is in keeping with his own sympathetic stance towards women in malefemale relationships. In a certain sense, City of the Dead may be regarded as defining Gao's fundamental view that men possess a flippant and cavalier attitude to their female sexual partner or partners, and that women who become involved in sexual relationships with men are therefore doomed to suffer. Among Gao Xingjian's theatrical portrayals of the female psyche, Song of the Night is his most ambitious and most detailed one. Gao's articulation of the female psyche is embedded in a solid substratumbedrock of his autobiographical impulses. It is through female actors, and his range of ingenious theatrical innovations that Gao succeeds in convincingly portraying his personal view of the power dynamics generated in malefemale sexual relationships, and how these are played out. Together, these two plays advance Gao Xingjian's innovative theatrical experiments in dramatic prose across linguistic and cultural boundaries. The English translations of City of the Dead and Song of the Night in the present volume will lead to significant Englishlanguage productions of these plays, and concomitantly a greater understanding of Gao's plays.

Polyphony Embodied - Freedom and Fate in Gao Xingjian’s Writings

Polyphony Embodied - Freedom and Fate in Gao Xingjian’s Writings PDF Author: Michael Lackner
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110351870
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 271

Get Book

Book Description
Like artists, important writers defy unequivocal interpretations. Gao Xingjian, winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, is a cosmopolitan writer, deeply rooted in the Chinese past while influenced by paragons of Western Modernity. The present volume is less interested in a general discussion on the multitude of aspects in Gao's works and even less in controversies concerning their aesthetic value than in obtaining a response to the crucial issues of freedom and fate from a clearly defined angle. The very nature of the answer to the question of freedom and fate within Gao Xingjian's works can be called a polyphonic one: thereare affirmative as well as skeptical voices. But polyphony, as embodied by Gao, is an even more multifaceted phenomenon. Most important for our contention is the fact that Gao Xingjian's aesthetic experience embodies prose, theater, painting, and film. Taken together, they form a Gesamtkunstwerk whose diversity of voices characterizes every single one of them.

Gao Xingjian and Transcultural Chinese Theater

Gao Xingjian and Transcultural Chinese Theater PDF Author: Sy Ren Quah
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 9780824826291
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 252

Get Book

Book Description
A reclusive painter living in exile in Paris, Gao Xingjian found himself instantly famous when he became the first Chinese language writer to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature (2000). The author of the novel Soul Mountain, Gao is best known in his native country not as a visual artist or novelist, but as a playwright and theater director. This important yet rarely studied figure is the focus of Sy Ren Quah’s rich account appraising his contributions to contemporary Chinese and World Theater over the past two decades. A playwright himself, Quah provides an in-depth analysis of the literary, dramatic, intellectual, and technical aspects of Gao’s plays and theatrical concepts, treating Gao’s theater not only as an art form but, with Gao himself, as a significant cultural phenomenon. The Bus Stop, Wild Man, and other early works are examined in the context of 1980s China. Influenced by Stanislavsky, Brecht, and Beckett, as well as traditional Chinese theater arts and philosophies, Gao refused to conform to the dominant realist conventions of the time and made a conscious effort to renovate Chinese theater. The young playwright sought to create a "Modern Eastern Theater" that was neither a vague generalization nor a nationalistic declaration, but a challenge to orthodox ideologies. After fleeing China, Gao was free to experiment openly with theatrical forms. Quah examines his post-exile plays in a context of performance theory and philosophical concerns, such as the real versus the unreal, and the Self versus the Other. The image conveyed of Gao is not of an activist but of an intellectual committed to maintaining his artistic independence who continues to voice his opinion on political matters.

Transcultural Aesthetics in the Plays of Gao Xingjian

Transcultural Aesthetics in the Plays of Gao Xingjian PDF Author: T. Coulter
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137440740
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 135

Get Book

Book Description
Gao Xingjian has been lauded for his inventive use of Chinese culture in his paintings, plays, and cinema, however he denies that his current work participates in any notion of Chinese. This book traces the development of these forms and how the relate and interact in the French language plays of the Nobel Laureate.

Dionysus on the Other Shore

Dionysus on the Other Shore PDF Author: Letizia Fusini
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004423389
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 253

Get Book

Book Description
In Dionysus on the Other Shore, Letizia Fusini re-examines Gao Xingjian’s post-1987 theatre as a form of tragedy.

Gao Xingjian’s Post-Exile Plays

Gao Xingjian’s Post-Exile Plays PDF Author: Mary Mazzilli
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472591623
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Get Book

Book Description
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 full of variety of styles and influences. As such this innovative interdisciplinary investigation offers fresh insights on 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).

The Other Shore

The Other Shore PDF Author: Gao Xingjian
Publisher: The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press
ISBN: 9882378838
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 312

Get Book

Book Description
Gao Xingjian is the leading Chinese dramatist of our time. He is also one of the most moving and literary writers for the contemporary stage. His plays have been performed all around the world, including China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Australia, the Ivory Coast, the United States, France, Germany and other European countries. Born and educated in China, Gao studied French literature at the Beijing Foreign Languages Institute between 1957-1962. After the Cultural Revolution, he became a resident playwright at the Beijing People's Art Theatre. His works, including Bus Stop, Absolute Signal, and Wilderness Man, were trend-setting and have created many controversies and a wave of experimental drama in China. In 1987 he settled in Paris, France and continued to write in Chinese and in French. He was awarded the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government in 1992. The present collection contains five of Gao Xingjian's most recent works: The Other Shore (1986), Between Life and Death (1991), Dialogue and Rebuttal (1992), Nocturnal Wanderer (1993), and Weekend Quartet (1995). One finds poetry, comedy as well as tragedy in the plays, which are graced by beautiful language and original imagery. Combining Zen philosophy and a modern worldview, they serve to illuminate the gritty realities of life, death, sex, loneliness, and exile, all essential concerns in Gao's understanding of the existence of modern man. The plays are also manifestations of the dramatist's idea of the tripartite actor, a process by which the actor neutralizes himself and achieves a disinterested observation of his self in performance.

Handbook of Contemporary China

Handbook of Contemporary China PDF Author: William S. Tay
Publisher: World Scientific
ISBN: 9814350087
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 466

Get Book

Book Description
A handy reference in one single volume of the key institutions and profound changes over the last three decades that transformed China into a global power.

Performing China on the London Stage

Performing China on the London Stage PDF Author: Ashley Thorpe
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137597860
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 263

Get Book

Book Description
This book details the history of Chinese theatre, and British representations of Chinese theatre, on the London stage over a 250-year period. A wide range of performance case studies – from exhibitions and British Chinese opera inspired theatre, to translations of Chinese plays and visiting troupes – highlight the evolving nature of Sino-British trade, fashion, migration, the formation of diaspora, and international relations. Collectively, they outline the complex relationship between Britain and China – the rise and fall of the British Empire, and the fall and rise of China – as it was played out on the stages of London across three centuries. Drawing extensively upon archival materials and fieldwork research, the book offers new insights for intercultural British theatre in the 21st century – ‘the Asian century’.