Exploring Interculturalism, Taoism, and Chinese Theatre

First up for this seminar series will be Chaomei Chen speaking on Rethinking the Postrevolutionary vis-à-vis the Postcolonial Conditions in Chinese Theatre through Intercultural Dramaturgy in Meng Jinghui’s Teahouse (2018-2019).

Written by Lao She (1899-1966), one of the most prominent authors in the early PRC period, Teahouse is probably the most iconic and classic production of Beijing People’s Art Theatre (BPAT) (premiering in 1958) in the history of modern Chinese drama (huaju). For this reason, BPAT’s Teahouse has never deviated dramatically from the original production style over the last six decades. Unsurprisingly, director Meng Jinghui’s (1964-) radical adaptation of the play in 2018 received polarized receptions among the public, critics, and academics. The production was later invited to the Avignon Theatre Festival in 2019 as the first Chinese production in the “IN” festival. It is also the first time Meng’s Theatre Studio collaborates with a dramaturg, Sebastian Kaiser (1977-), from Germany (born in East Berlin) and with an intention to do so.

Both intercultural and intracultural, Meng and Kaiser assimilate various Chinese, German, Russian, and French texts and references into Lao She’s script, including his own play The Three Qin Brothers (Qinshi San Xiongdi, 1957) and short story Vision (Wei Shen,1933), Bertolt Brecht’s play Baal (1919) and poems, Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s short story The Dream of a Ridiculous Man (Сон смешно́го челове́ка, 1877), Heiner Müller’s The Hamletmachine (Die Hamletmaschine, 1977), and Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Preface” to Franz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth (Les damnés de la terre, 1961).

A number of critics have noticed the important influence of dramaturg Kaiser on this production (Gao Ziwen 2019; Conceison 2019; Du Yi 2023; Leonesi 2023). However, they failed to delve deeper into the subtleties of this intercultural collaboration, given that dramaturgy is not a common practice in the Chinese theatre scene. By reevaluating Lao She’s own cosmopolitanism, Meng’s and Kaiser’s shared theatrical aesthetics and political meditations, I will argue that this intercultural collaboration in a postdramatic manner reconnects the pasts and presents of revolution and socialism in China, Germany (esp. former GDR), and Russia through world literature and theatre. Through postrevolutionary and postcolonial lenses, the intercultural dramaturgy of post-Lao She and post-Teahouse further contributes to reassess modern Chinese revolution through the perspective of postcolonialism and to reconfigure the Euro-American centered tendency in postcolonial studies through an integration of China’s revolutionary and postrevolutionary histories.

Bio
Chaomei Chen is a PhD candidate in Drama at Trinity College Dublin. She is funded by Trinity College Dublin-China Scholarship Council Joint Scholarship. She also did a research visit at the East Asian Studies Institute at the University of Vienna (October 2023-January 2024), funded by TCD’s A. J. Leventhal Scholarship, and was an Early Career Researcher at the Trinity Long Room Hub (2021-2022). Her research interests lie in experimental and political theatre in China, aesthetic ideology, interculturalism, traditional Chinese theatre (xiqu), and contemporary Irish theatre. She is the winner of the New Scholar’s Prize for the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR) 2023. She was also an editor for the journal Ying Ming Theatre (2021-2023) and a postgraduate representative of the Irish Society for Theatre Research (2021-2023). Her recent publications include Still Resisting Left Melancholy? Chinese New Leftist Theatre’s Inheritance and Resistance in Che Guevara (2000-2001), Performance Research (2023, forthcoming this April) and other writings in Theatre Journal, Theatre Research International, Platform, etc.

The second speaker is Chengyun Zhao speaking on the essay Inner Peace, Reversal, and Indeterminable Tao: Lin Zhaohua’s Assimilation of Taoism.

This essay interprets how Taoism influences Lin Zhaohua’s attitude towards political and cultural hegemony, xiqu’s aesthetics, and directing aesthetics with regard to his allusions to the specific texts of Laozi and Zhuangzi. Through detailed analyses, he uncovers how Lin holds the Taoist “inner peace” to prevent the disruptions of political and academic authorities, how the Taoist tenet, “Reversal is the action of Tao”, helps Lin theorize his methods of Sinicizing huaju with xiqu’s aesthetics, and how the indeterminable Tao frees Lin from the restraints of fixed theatrical school. The essay thus argues that Lin’s application of Taoist tenets in his directing life parallels the way of pursuing Taoist freedom and enables him to stand at the forefront of the field of Chinese theatre. 

Taoism is one of the oldest indigenous Chinese philosophies initiated by Laozi and Zhuangzi during the Spring and Autumn Period and Warring States Period (770BC – 221BC). As a philosophy focusing on individuals instead of collective groups, Taoism encourages human beings to pursue a free life by detaching themselves psychologically from the external society. Taoist philosophers praise nonexistence as they believe the existent world comes from nonexistence, thus, nonexistence embodies infinite possibilities to develop. Since things keep developing from nonexistence to existence, and further, from existence to nonexistence, Taoist philosophers take reversal as a tenet to describe the action of the world. These tenets will be further utilized to discuss Lin’s directing experiences.
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Bio
Chengyun Zhao is a 3rd year PhD candidate studying intercultural performance and Taoist philosophy at Trinity College, Dublin. He has already published 3 academic essays: On the Role of Translation in the Chinese Drama ‘Going Out’ Strategy in New Perspectives in Translation Studies [yi yuan xin tan] (2019), Victims of Post-industrial Era—A Review of Sweat, the 2017 Pulitzer Prize Winning Drama in New Perspectives on World Literature [wai guo wen xue dong tai yan jiu] (2021), and Directing Dramas is Returning Hometown: Reading Lin Zhaohua’s The Cherry Orchard from the Perspective of the Taoist Freedom, Xiaoyao in Theatre Academy. He gave 4 papers respectively at Global View and Local Practice of Comparative Literary Studies: Youth Forum on Comparative Literature (Shenzhen, 2019), IAMCR (online, 2022), The International Federation for Theatre Research (Reykjavik, 2022; Ghana, 2023). 

This is the last event in the School of Creative Arts Research Forum seminar series for this term. The aim of the Forum is to provide a space for School researchers, both staff and postgraduate students, to share their ideas in an informal and supportive environment. It is also an opportunity for the School to hear about the research of colleagues both from within TCD and from outside the university who share our research interests. In line with the research agenda of the School, talks encompass traditional research and practice-based research.

Please indicate if you have any access requirements, such as ISL/English interpreting, so that we can facilitate you in attending this event. Contact: weiyi@tcd.ie