Abstract
The chapter concentrates on the relationship between theater and the state and how this interaction influenced aesthetic innovations during the twentieth century. The chapter shows how the Chinese state used theater and performance to put forward specifically political goals and how playwrights in France steered theater toward politics. The rise of Absurdism in both countries is detailed. It is in this chapter that I discuss aesthetic influences on Gao like Samuel Beckett. Emphasis is placed on the freedom artists found in Absurdism to work within and beyond prescribed aesthetics. The chapter provides the reader with an understanding of the political consequences of playwriting in Gao’s career.
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Notes
Chen Xiaomei, Acting the Right Part (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2002), 33.
Haiping Yan, “Theater and Society,” in Theater and Society, edited by Haiping Yan (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1998), x.
Ma Sen, “The Theatre of the Absurd in China: Gao Xingjian’s The Bus Stop,” in Soul of Chaos, edited by Kwok-kan Tam (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2000, 78.
He Wen, “On Seeing the Play Bus Stop,” in Trees on the Mountain: An Anthology of New Chinese Writing, edited by Stephen C. Soong and John Minford (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1984), 388.
Ted Freeman, Theatres of War: French Committed Theatre from WWII to the Cold War (Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press, 1998), 6.
Martin Esslin, Theatre of the Absurd (New York: Vintage, 1961), 13.
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, translated by Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage, 1991), 17.
Sidney Homan, Beckett’s Theaters: Interpretations for Performance (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell Press, 1984), 9.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negiri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 14.
See Dudley Andrew and Steven Ungar, Popular Front Paris and the Poetics of Culture, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). This book offers an in-depth investigation of the emergence of politically engaged art—that is, film and literature—as it gained momentum in the interwar years of the 1930s.
Eugène Ionesco, “Toujours sur l’avant-garde,” Notes et contre-notes (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), 40.
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© 2014 Todd J. Coulter
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Coulter, T.J. (2014). Reactive Theater: State Theater and New Voices in China and France. In: Transcultural Aesthetics in the Plays of Gao Xingjian. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137440747_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137440747_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-49510-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-44074-7
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