A Study Guide for Gao Xingjian's "The Other Shore," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Drama For Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Drama For Students for all of your research needs.
Gao Xingjian is the leading Chinese dramatist of our time. He is also one of the most moving and literary writers for the contemporary stage. His plays have been performed all around the world, including China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Australia, the Ivory Coast, the United States, France, Germany and other European countries. Born and educated in China, Gao studied French literature at the Beijing Foreign Languages Institute between 1957-1962. After the Cultural Revolution, he became a resident playwright at the Beijing People's Art Theatre. His works, including Bus Stop, Absolute Signal, and Wilderness Man, were trend-setting and have created many controversies and a wave of experimental drama in China. In 1987 he settled in Paris, France and continued to write in Chinese and in French. He was awarded the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government in 1992. The present collection contains five of Gao Xingjian's most recent works: The Other Shore (1986), Between Life and Death (1991), Dialogue and Rebuttal (1992), Nocturnal Wanderer (1993), and Weekend Quartet (1995). One finds poetry, comedy as well as tragedy in the plays, which are graced by beautiful language and original imagery. Combining Zen philosophy and a modern worldview, they serve to illuminate the gritty realities of life, death, sex, loneliness, and exile, all essential concerns in Gao's understanding of the existence of modern man. The plays are also manifestations of the dramatist's idea of the tripartite actor, a process by which the actor neutralizes himself and achieves a disinterested observation of his self in performance.
In Dionysus on the Other Shore, Letizia Fusini argues that throughout his early exile years (late 1980s-1990s), Gao Xingjian gradually moved away from Absurdist Drama to develop a dramaturgical system with tragic characteristics. Drawing on a range of contemporary theories of tragedy, this book reconfigures some of the key tropes of Gao’s post-1987 theater as varied articulations of the Dionysian sparagmos mechanism. They are the dismemberment of the dramatic self, the usage of constricted spaces, the divisive nature of gender relations, and the agony of verbal language. Through a text-based analysis of seven plays, the author ultimately aims to show that in Gao’s theater, tragedy is an ongoing and mostly subtextual dynamism generated by an interplay of psychic forces concurrently cohesive and divisive.
the worldwide bestselling novel by the winner of the 2000 Nobel Prize for Literature.Soul Mountain is a picaresque novel of immense wisdom and sparse beauty, bursting with knowledge and experience and portraying a culture as vast and fascinating as the history of humankind itself.In China in the early eighties, the book's central character embarks on a cross-country journey in search of the mysterious 'Mountain'. Along the way he collects stories, lovers, spiritual wisdom and undergoes myriad experiences that are sometimes violent, sometimes frightening, sometimes funny, but always enriching. He researches the origins of humankind and Chinese culture, and explores philosophical issues such as truth, knowledge and how oneᱠchildhood affects later life. At the end of the book, he realises that all along what was important was not finding the elusive Soul Mountain, but rather the journey itself. Part love story, part fable, part philosophical treatise and part travel journal, this is one of the most challenging, rewarding and inventive works of fiction since Ulysses.
This book argues that Gao Xingjian's Idea of Theatre can only be explained by his broad knowledge and use of various Chinese and Western theatrical, literary, artistic and philosophical traditions. The author aims to show how Gao's theories of the theatre of anti-illusion, theatre of conscious convention, of the "poor theatre" and total theatre, of the neutral actor and the actor - jester - storyteller are derived from the Far Eastern tradition, and to what extent they have been inspired by 20th century Euro-American reformers of theatre such as Antonin Artaud, Bertolt Brecht, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Jerzy Grotowski and Tadeusz Kantor. Although Gao' s plays and theatre form the major subject, this volume also pays ample attention to his painting and passion for music as sources of his dramaturgical strategies.
A collection of six unforgettable stories from Nobel laureate Gao Xingjian. Dealing with Gao's trademark themes of relationships, family, the political scene in China and exploration of the self, these stories are by turns moving, beautiful and thought-provoking. With the exception of 'In an Instant', all the stories were written in China in the early 1980s and published in Chinese in a collection called Gei wo laoye mai yugan (Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather) by Lianhe Press in taipei 1989. 'In an Instant' was written in Paris in October 1990 but not published until 1996 in the collection Zhoumo sichongzhou, after Soul Mountain had been published in early 1990. this is the perfect first taste of the work of Gao Xingjian - short, sweet and highly accessible - something for those who have heard about the author but are unsure where to start.
Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2000, Gao Xingjian is the first Chinese writer to be so lauded for his prose and plays. Since relocating to France in 1987, in a voluntary exile from China, he has assembled a body of dramatic work that has best been understood neither as expressly Chinese nor French, but as transnational. In this comprehensive study of his post-exile plays, Mary Mazzilli explores Gao's plays as examples of postdramatic transnationalism: a transnational artistic and theatrical trend that is fluid, flexible and encompasses a variety of styles and influences. As such, this innovative interdisciplinary investigation offers fresh insights into contemporary theatre. Whereas other publications have considered Gao's work as a cultural and artistic phenomenon, Gao Xingjian's Post-Exile Plays: Transnationalism and Postdramatic Theatre is the first study to relate his plays to postdramatic theatre and to provide close textual and dramatic analysis that will help readers to better understand his complex work, and also to see it in the context of the work of contemporary playwrights such as Martin Crimp, Peter Handke, and Elfriede Jelinek. Among the plays discussed are: The Other Shore, written just before he left China in 1987; Between Life and Death (1991) - compared in detail to Martin Crimp's Attempts on her life; Dialogue and Rebuttal (1992), and its relationship to Beckett's Happy Days; Nocturnal Wanderer (1993), Weekend Quartet (1995), and the latest plays Snow in August (1997), Death Collector (2000) and Ballade Nocturne (2010).
Born Red is an artistically wrought personal account, written very much from inside the experience, of the years 1966-1969, when the author was a young teenager at middle school. It was in the middle schools that much of the fury of the Cultural Revolution and Red Guard movement was spent, and Gao was caught up in very dramatic events, which he recounts as he understood them at the time. Gao's father was a county political official who was in and out of trouble during those years, and the intense interplay between father and son and the differing perceptions and impact of the Cultural Revolution for the two generations provide both an unusual perspective and some extraordinary moving moments. He also makes deft use of traditional mythology and proverbial wisdom to link, sometimes ironically, past and present. Gao relates in vivid fashion how students-turned-Red Guards held mass rallies against 'capitalist roader' teachers and administrators, marching them through the streets to the accompaniment of chants and jeers and driving some of them to suicide. Eventually the students divided into two factions, and school and town became armed camps. Gao tells of the exhilaration that he and his comrades experienced at their initial victories, of their deepening disillusionment as they utter defeat as the tumultuous first phase of the Cultural Revolution came to a close. The portraits of the persons to whom Gao introduces us - classmates, teachers, family members - gain weight and density as the story unfolds, so that in the end we see how they all became victims of the dynamics of a mass movement out of control.
Diversity, Inclusion, and Representation in Contemporary Dramaturgy offers fresh perspectives on how dramaturgs can support a production beyond rigid disciplinary expectations about what information and ideas are useful and how they should be shared. The sixteen contributors to this volume offer personal windows into dramaturgy practice, encouraging theater practitioners, students, and general theater-lovers to imagine themselves as dramaturgs newly inspired by the encounters and enquiries that are the juice of contemporary theater. Each case study is written by a dramaturg whose body of work explores important issues of race, cultural equity, and culturally-specific practices within a wide range of conventions, venues, and communities. The contributors demonstrate the unique capacity of their craft to straddle the ravine between stage and stalls, intention and impact. By unpacking, in the most up-to-date ways, the central question of “Why this play, at this time, for this audience?,” this collection provides valuable insights and dramaturgy tools for scholars and students of Dramaturgy, Directing, and Theater Studies.
