Not yet farewell: Postsocialist performance and visual art in urban China.

摘要

This dissertation explores, in detail, a variety of postsocialist theater, performance, and visual art works that re-signify the country's revolutionary and socialist history. Taking a deep look at the somatic and semiotic practices of performative resignification, this dissertation examines the pieces that invent new ways to represent how prior socio-political and ideological codes continue to inform the culture of the postsocialist present. Overflowing with historically and ideologically-laden gestural and visual signs, these performative practices challenge the previously state-sanctioned ideologies in a cross-historical dialogue.;Chapter 1, as the introduction of this study, lays out the conceptual framework for the dissertation, probing the theoretical and historical ramifications of the postsocialist performance and visual art in the PRC, as well as engaging recent scholarship on the subject. Chapter 2 focuses on two independent theater groups in urban China as well as their major performance productions: (1) the dance-theater group Shenghuo wudao gongzuoshi (The Living Dance Studio); (2) the dance-theater group Zuhe niao (The Niao Collective). This chapter explores the ways in which the dance-theater groups deliberately rework the normalized physical and linguistic signifiers in the socialist representation system, in order to detach their practices of zhiti xiju (physical theater) from huaju (spoken drama---the particular form of modern, western-style theater that first made its appearance at the turn of the 20th century). Chapter 3 explores the new citadel of contemporary Chinese art---Factory 798 in Beijing, also called 798 Art District and Dashangzi Art District nowadays. This chapter, by examining a number of performance pieces enacted in Factory 798 in detail, tackles the question of post-socialist nostalgia, since a particular socialist history has been repeatedly compressed and resignified within this specific factory space. Chapter 4 focuses on a large-scale collective art and social project launched in 2002, entitled the Long March, A Walking Visual Display, which echoed and responded to the historical Long March of the Communist-led Red Army in the mid-1930s. In this chapter, I examine a number of performance pieces enacted at the particular site along the journey: while some resignified the revolutionary signs that have been central to the Chinese revolutionary narratives or the model work of socialist realism, others performed certain bodily phenomenon, such as repetition compulsion, to "act out" the failure of remembering the past occurrences or the resistance of entering into the ideologically-reconstructed past.