Abstract:

According to conventional wisdom, modern Chinese spoken theatre (huaju) was an artistic expression that was supposed to reflect the zeitgeist. Most of the dramatists, particularly those grouping under the rubric of enlightenment and national salvation, were always in the quest for formal realism (xieshi). However, this thesis aims to rethink the history of modern Chinese theatre from the vantage point of xieyi. As a manner of literati painting that falls into the traditional aesthetic category, xieyi was recurrently invoked in modern times. Whereas the practitioners of the National Theatre Movement in the 1920s felt impelled to adopt xieyi as a flare to pinpoint China on the world theatrical map, the Experimentalists in the 1980s and beyond took up xieyi as a lever to uproot the representational acting orthodoxy. Seen in this light, xieyi is a theatricality against the grain.

The scenic xieyi carries divergent connotations ranging from the stage conventions to scenic synecdoches and from the Chinese rendition of uslovnost’ to the manifestation of artistic vista (jingjie). In this regard, this thesis by no means seeks to provide a fixed definition of the scenic xieyi. Instead, I treat xieyi as a critical interface through which the repressed soundings about Chinese histrionic modernity can be heard in reverberation. For all its marginality to performance theory and historiography, xieyi is the one in the current repertoire best suited for grasping the alternative history of modern Chinese theatre. By examining xieyi, a contestable classical theatricality in modern times, I argue that such alternative history is constituted by a process of re-mediation, a succession of inventing and re-inventing tradition, and above all, the search for the most efficacious and affective theatricality to engage the aesthetic and political dynamics in twentieth century China.