EACS-2016. Book of Abstracts

Cinema, Theater, Performing Arts 21st Biennial Conference of the European Association for Chinese Studies 64 Falaschi Isabella (Lille 3 University) Woman as Suffering Body in Some Plays of the Yuan Theatre Key words: Woman, suffering body, Yuan theatre, Yuan society, gender In some plays of the Yuan theatre, as Dou E yuan 竇娥冤 (Injustice to Dou E), Huilan ji 灰闌記 (The Circle of Chalk) or Xiao Xiang yu 瀟湘雨 (Rain on the Xiao and the Xiang), we find the description of the suffering body of the female protagonist. The heroine is always presented as a wholly innocent victim, who is wildly tortured by men, depicted as brutal and depraved. Such an image of the constantly injured feminine body that often precede a sentence to death appears here as a paradigm of the radical evil. In our presentation, we would try to analyse the dramatic reasons of this fascination for female suffering on the scene, where women appear as the scapegoat, both as singular victims and political symbols of the “suf- fering body” of the entire society. Fusini Letizia (SOAS, University of London) Antagonists in a Community: Staging the Death and Rebirth of Tragedy in Gao Xingjian’s Play Escape (Taowang 1990) Key words: tragedy, Gao Xingjian, intercultural studies, modern Chinese drama, comparative literature Despite the high number of publications discussing Gao Xingjian’s theatre, his deliberate engagement with tragedy as a dramatic genre through his 1990 play Escape (Taowang) has not generated a substantial critical inquiry. Scholars dealing with this work have focused mostly on conceptualizing the meaning of “escape” in Gao’s personal view of the human condition rather than analyzing the connection (if any) between the latter as a major theme of the play and its intentionally “tragic” structure. The fact that not only was this play conceived as a modern tragedy, but Gao particularly chose the tragic form to address what he regards as modern man’s existential tragedy, justifies an in-depth examination of the play’s textual and subtextual structure, as well as its aesthetics and dramatic composition, in an attempt to dig out Gao’s own contribution to the issue of modern tragedy and to situate his individual work in the wider context of world tragic drama. This paper will investigate the relationship between Gao’s notion of “tragic modernity” and its concrete representation on stage, with the aim of bringing to light what Henry Zhao calls “the true message of this play” (2000, 94). This, I argue, coincides with enacting a dramaturgy of recuperation of certain fragments of an archetypal tragedy in order to use them as signifiers of the fragmentary nature of the present age. Specifically, by expanding on Gao’s remarks on tragedy and his stage directions for performing Escape, through twentieth-century reconceptualizations of tragedy as, respectively, a field of simultaneously cohe- sive and divisive forces (Storm 1999) and a religious, communitarian experience (Bataille 1937), this paper ultimately seeks to demonstrate, through close textual analysis, that Escape can be recategorized as a “meta-tragedy” in post-classical form. Hunter Gordon Kim (Royal Holloway, University of London) Choreographic Precision and the Changing Tradition in Contemporary Kunqu Key words: xiqu performance; xiqu tradition; kunqu; audience studies; xiqu innovation Kunqu is said to have developed since the Ming dynasty from a musical style and literary genre into a holistic performance art which combines dance, music and literary merit. One characteristic of its practice is that actors repeatedly perform the same single playlet, or zhezi. Performances are thus not only scripted and scored, but presumed also to have an inherited choreography, in some cases to an extremely high level of detail, with prescribed individual steps and even eye movements. The number of playlets that can actually be performed in this ‘traditional’ manner is significantly less than the number that can be sung, and currently stands at less than 200. These fixed choreographies are central to Kunqu’s promotion on the world stage as the ‘classical’ or highest expression of Chinese drama. There has been