Introduction: Postsocialist Realities and Realisms

The scene is a police station. Three policemen who have just killed a suspect during an interrogation summon a convicted artiste, known as the Madman, to help them produce a realistic story to cover up the murder. The Madman asks whether the iron hoop that the Police Chief is holding in his hand should be used as a prop for their theatrical reconstruction of the event and, if so, how: As a noose? An enclosure? An instrument of torture? The Chief replies: “Don’t always think of yourself as a convict; now you are a theater director. This hoop represents a window.” A window? The Madman retorts, with contempt: “So, you want to do experimental theater? I never liked those avant-gardists; they throw a bunch of TVs and broken boxes on the stage, as if it were a junk dealer or a dumping ground, and now they have even built a pool. The truth is that they are not good enough for realist theater.” The Chief explains that whether the scene should be approached realistically or symbolically depends on the Madman’s artistic inclinations. “I see what you are saying. But this is someone who jumps from a building to his death. Whether you do it a bit more avant-garde and jump through this hoop or a bit more realistic and jump through that window over there, that’s entirely up to you.”1

In this scene from the 1998 Chinese production of Dario Fo’s Accidental Death of an Anarchist (Yi ge wuzhengfuzhuyizhe de yiwai siwang), Page 101 →adapted by Huang Jisu and directed by Meng Jinghui, the latter references episodes from his career to launch a mordant attack on the orthodoxy of dramatic realism that prevailed in China at the time.2 Despite the Madman’s mock-critique of experimental theater, this character is, in fact, constructed self-reflexively as a histrionic saboteur who attempts repeatedly to hijack the policemen’s realist dramaturgy with his penchant for absurdism. Meng, who is today one of China’s most influential theater personalities, belongs to the generation of experimentalists who were born in the mid-1960s and came onto the scene in the early 1990s, just as the socioeconomic reforms that have since shaped China’s postsocialist condition were gaining momentum.3

For the purposes of this study, postsocialism denotes the defining cultural order and structure of feeling in China since the end of the Mao era (post-1976), and particularly since the 1990s. After years of ideological radicalism and social disruption during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), the market-oriented reforms launched by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the late 1970s inaugurated a new phase of modernization and socioeconomic transformation under Deng Xiaoping’s leadership. The reform era ushered in unprecedented economic development, urbanization, and internal migration, which dramatically altered the structure of Chinese society. The rapid transition from a planned economy to a form of state capitalism, or socialist market economy, has generated prosperity and opportunities but also considerable wealth inequality, a widening rural-urban divide, the marketization of the cultural sphere, and rampant commoditization of every aspect of life. Furthermore, the violent suppression of the democracy movement at Tiananmen Square in June 1989 elicited feelings of disillusionment and dystopia. Yet more than three decades later, the CCP’s one-party rule is still firmly in place.

In 1989, Arif Dirlik described postsocialism as “a response to the experience of capitalism” in contexts where “socialism has lost its coherence as a metatheory of politics.”Page 102 →since 1992, as catalysts for the emergence of a new phase of “postsocialist [post]modernity”6 and of postsocialism as the underlying affective regime of Chinese society.

Sheldon Lu describes postsocialism as a distinctive “cultural logic” arising in the post-1989 era from the interpenetration of divergent ideological formations, social structures, and economic systems. Lu highlights the coexistence of “capitalist modes and relations of production” in a “nominally socialist” nation-state and the turning point of China’s 2001 accession to “the global capitalist regime of the World Trade Organization (WTO)” alongside the CCP’s continued commitment to socialist values. Thus, the postsocialist zeitgeist is marked by disjunctions, ambiguities, and contradictions, as artists, cultural producers, and common citizens attempt to negotiate the philosophical paradoxes and practical incongruities of an enduring state of transition.7

The turn to postsocialism has generated a fragmented social landscape cohabited by conflicting regimes of reality. Artistically, this state of fragmentation translates into performances of a fragmented reality. These regimes interact at various levels—socioeconomic, political, ideological, and affective—as synchronous dimensions of the real. Accordingly, the modalities of theatrical engagement with the question of the real examined in this chapter, which I categorize collectively as a theater of postsocialist realism, renounce the representational totality and totalizing metanarratives that are characteristic of Chinese modernity to produce multiple renditions of reality as fragmented and conflictual.

Postsocialism is widely discussed in academic discourse on Chinese culture and society, but its implications for the study of China’s performance cultures have yet to be appraised. Likewise, scholars of Chinese cinema have coined the phrase “postsocialist realism” to examine the destabilization of the tenets of Mao-era socialist realism in post-1980s filmmaking practices.Page 103 → deconstruction, and performativity at the turn of the twenty-first century. Furthermore, the postsocialist critique of realism as constitutive of modern Chinese drama entails a broader theoretical reconsideration of notions of “drama” and “theater,” along with a shift from the dramatic to the postdramatic in the realm of practice.

Film scholar Jason McGrath notes that, since the early twentieth century, the term xianshizhuyi has designated a mimetic conception of realism that manifests (xian) the real (shi).xianshizhuyi differs from “xieshi (a traditional term for realism) or zhenshi (the real)”—as Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar further indicate—for these notions “relate to aesthetic practices and are subordinate to xianshizhuyi as ideology.”10 Notably, literary reformist and huaju pioneer Hu Shi (1891–1962) chose xieshi to define the essence of Ibsenism as a dramaturgical mode that describes (xie; literally, writes or inscribes) the real (shi). Hu adopted this term in an eponymous essay (“Ibsenism”) published in the New Culture Movement’s flagship magazine New Youth (Xin qingnian) in 1918, which triggered a veritable Ibsen fever in modern China. The founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949 consolidated the ascendancy of realism as literary and artistic orthodoxy. Under the CCP, modern notions of realism were remolded into what McGrath terms the “prescriptive realism” of the socialist era.11 In the early 1950s, Soviet socialist realism (shehuizhuyi xianshizhuyi) was institutionalized as the official mode of literary and artistic creation, while a dogmatic exegesis of Stanislavskian psychological realism—emphasizing emotional and ideological identification—was endorsed as the sanctioned training and performance method in the nation’s state-run theater companies and academies.

As the self-appointed standard-bearer of Chinese avant-garde theater, director Meng Jinghui took particular aim at the most revered of these institutions, Beijing People’s Art Theatre (Beijing renmin yishu juyuan; BPAT), at the outset of his career in the early 1990s. BPAT is generally regarded as the depository of the twentieth-century huaju traditionPage 105 → of Chinese-style realism that developed from the dramas of Cao Yu (1910–1996), Lao She (1899–1976), Tian Han (1898–1968), and Guo Moruo (1892–1978), among others. After 1949, these playwrights took up key positions in leading theatrical organizations such as the Central Academy of Drama in Beijing and BPAT itself. Still today, their classic works are part of the BPAT repertoire. Moreover, since the 1950s, BPAT played a key role in the consolidation and creative development of the Stanislavsky system in China, thanks to the efforts of director Jiao Juyin (1905–1975) and his successors.

BPAT is also the institution where, in the first half of the 1980s, experimentalists such as director Lin Zhaohua and dramatist Gao Xingjian (winner of the 2000 Nobel Prize for Literature) took the first steps toward dismantling the entrenched monopoly of realism; the “Brechtian” director Huang Zuolin (1906–1994) at Shanghai People’s Art Theatre (Shanghai renmin yishu juyuan) had pursued the same goal since the 1950s. But it was the more radical post-1989 avant-gardes that gave full shape to the critique against the institutionalization and progressive ossification of the realist norm. The praxis of directors such as Meng and Mou Sen and of new independent ensembles that emerged in the last decade of the twentieth century revealed a paradigm-shifting disconnection with the representational mode of theater-making grounded in the illusion of reality. As Gao writes of his early-1980s collaboration with Lin at BPAT, “Lin Zhaohua and I planned to break away from the established Stanislavsky patterns of realist theatre—in terms of both actor performance and the form of the production—but we kept this to ourselves and did not publicize it.”huaju tradition and the prescriptive mode of realism imposed on the arts during the Mao era.

On January 28, 1989, Frog Experimental Drama Troupe (Wa shiyan jutuan) issued an address to the audience, written by Mou Sen, on the premiere of Eugene O’Neill’s The Great God Brown in Beijing. In this manifesto-like statement, printed in the program notes to the production, Frog portray themselves as “a new theater group” that “belongs to the new century” and whose iconoclastic actions echo their resolve to alter the course of theater in China: “We are well aware that we are making history.”Page 106 →1949. Its members included emergent 1960s-born artists, such as Mou and Meng, who would soon become leading figures in the experimental theater scene of the next decade. Frog’s address proclaimed the inevitability of a generational and aesthetic rejuvenation at the turn of the millennium by introducing their O’Neill production as the herald of an epochal change, which was signaled by a departure from the canon of twentieth-century realism. While the premiere of The Great God Brown was taking place, “the old artists of BPAT” were completing a run of performances of Lao She’s realist classic, Teahouse (Chaguan, 1957): “Just as Teahouse buried an old era, The Great God Brown breeds a great dream”—one of spiritual regeneration and artistic renewal.14 As it turned out, Frog did not survive long. But Mou, Meng, and other members moved on to found new collectives and experiment with nonrealistic forms of dramaturgy that rejected accepted norms of playwriting, directing, acting, and stage design.

Meng explored the European theater of the absurd extensively in the early 1990s. His 1993 production of Jean Genet’s The Balcony (Yangtai) embraced “stylization” and “formalism” as antidotes against the “superficial ostentation” and “artificial affectation” of the “rusty traditions” that sustain “the exquisite illusions of naturalism,” as stated in his director’s notes.15 Inspired by Vsevolod Meyerhold, Peter Brook, and the Dadaists, Meng and his associates reacted against the realist convention represented by BPAT and other state-run establishments that “always use the same old formulae, old methods, old jokes, and old effects.”16 In a clear nod to Brook, in several mid- to late-1990s writings Meng dismisses China’s mainstream theater as “brainless,” “deadly theater,” and repeatedly associates realism with formal obsolescence, psychological shallowness, and affective insincerity.17

In a series of columns appearing in Theater and Film News (Xiju dianying bao) in 1996–1997, Meng elaborates on the equation “realist theater = brainless theater.” He maintains that the theater that truly is close to life does not attempt to merely “imitate life” (mofang shenghuo), “fabricate feelings” (zhizao qinggan), or “replicate reality” (chongxian xianshi).wei xianshizhuyi) that has been institutionalized as the sole conceivable mode of theater-making in China. Chinese mainstream realism has betrayed what he views as Stanislavsky’s original spirit of experiment and has become stifling, regressive, and mediocre.19 The hyperbolic rhetoric and hostility toward dramatic orthodoxy that transpires Page 107 →from the above statements reveals the premillennial experimentalists’ deeply nihilistic position of almost-ontological antagonism toward the canon and conventions of realism.

The avant-garde’s attack on realism culminates at the turn of the century with its own self-dramatization in the caustic satire of Academy-style training and the BPAT realist tradition featured in Meng’s adaptation of Fo’s Anarchist. The protagonist introduces himself as an alumnus of the (Central) Academy of Drama, where he has been trained in accordance to the tenets of Ibsenian drama, socialist realism, and Stanislavskian acting. The Madman asserts the superiority of realism and maintains that nonrealistic methods only serve to camouflage the experimentalists’ incompetence. The passage quoted in the opening of this chapter hints self-reflexively at criticism Meng received at the start of his career and alludes to the nonrealistic design of pioneering 1990s experimental productions by Lin Zhaohua, Mou Sen, and Meng himself.20 Elsewhere in the performance, the cast delivers a riotous parody of a scene from Teahouse, a canonical text of Chinese realism and a classic of the BPAT repertoire.21

Furthermore, the 1990s witnessed a nascent propensity for the postdramatic—namely, a growing commitment to “the emancipation of the performance from the literary text” and mimetic representation.hou huaju), to differentiate the twentieth-century convention of script-centered realist drama from the post-1990s director- and performer-centered avant-garde theater, which values process and embodiment over textual detail and representational accuracy. The 1990s work of Mou Sen’s Garage Theatre (Xiju chejian), Wen Hui and Wu Wenguang’s Living Dance Studio (Shenghuo wudao gongzuoshi), and Tian Gebing’s Paper Tiger Theatre Studio (Zhi laohu xiju gongzuoshi) signaled a further move away from the representational mode of text-based huaju in favor of performativity. As a general tendency, however, the withdrawal from the realist norm was articulated predominantly in terms of “anti-” (fan; e.g., antitheater, antiplot, antitext, antidrama) rather than “post-” (hou) in late-twentieth-century Page 108 →discourse; that is, in terms of a clean break with the past, rather than a temporal progression from it. In other words, the premillennial innovators positioned themselves in stark opposition to the institution of realism, hence embodying the paradigmatic “spirit of the anti” that typifies the discourse of the avant-garde as one of ontological antagonism and radical rupture with tradition.24

Redefining Realism

A new wave of experimental theater-makers has come onto the scene in the twenty-first century, and with them come new perceptions of the concept and legacy of realism. The postmillennial cohort, a majority of whom are independent practitioners who work primarily “outside the (state) system” (tizhi wai), has on the one hand taken the redefinition of the realist paradigm a step further, by embracing new aesthetics and vocabularies (such as juchang, detailed below) to describe their creative practice. On the other hand, however, and in contrast to their predecessors, they have also recuperated the modern canon of realist drama by means of postmodernist and postdramatic modes.

The approach of director Wang Chong with Théâtre du Rêve Expérimental (Xinchuan shiyan jutuan, est. 2008) illustrates the transition from the late-twentieth-century radical dismissal of the realist norm to its early-twenty-first-century recuperative deconstruction. Wang’s trademark 2.0 series of multimedia stage productions reimagines and updates the realist canon for the digital age by recasting foundational texts of European realism, modern Chinese huaju, and Mao-era revolutionary realism within a postdramatic transmedia framework. The series includes Ghosts 2.0 (Qungui 2.0, 2014), based on Ibsen; Thunderstorm 2.0 (Leiyu 2.0, 2012), after Cao Yu’s 1934 play; The Warfare of Landmine 2.0 (Dilei zhan 2.0, 2013), after the eponymous 1962 socialist film classic; and Revolutionary Model Play 2.0 (Yangbanxi 2.0, 2015) on the theater of the Cultural Revolution, among other works. In 2017, moreover, Wang devised Teahouse 2.0, based on Lao She’s classic, with a cast of Beijing high school students. While actively engaging the realist dramatic canon, this body of work concomitantly departs from realist production conventions through procedures of remediation, mediatization, and versioning of reality. Wang’s recourse to the language of software versioning in the 2.0 series articulates a mode of mediated realism that functions at different levels: in the dramaturgical process of editing and adaptation of realist texts; in the implementation and display of an array of media and mediatingPage 109 → technologies to the production and performance of these texts; and, at the semantic level, in the self-referential reproduction of the simulated and mediatized screen-based realities of our contemporary world.

In Wang’s “stage cinema” (wutai dianying), as he has described his style,25 the deployment of video recording devices, CCTV cameras, loudspeakers, live filming, real-time editing, and live-feed projections disrupts the illusion of dramatic unity and the logical coherence of conventional realism. The theatrical mediation of reality by such devices generates an effect of “doubling” and discontinuity that mirrors “a simultaneous and multi-perspectival form of perceiving” China’s postsocialist reality.26 Mediated realism in the postdramatic mode—as practiced by Wang, Sun Xiaoxing,27 and other postmillennial independents who have worked in transmedia and digital theater—engenders a new disjointed sensitivity toward the real that supersedes both “the linear-successive” pattern of realist-naturalist modernity and the teleological determinism of Mao-era socialist realism.28

In an essay on the creative process of Thunderstorm 2.0, published in 2013, Wang references Thunderstorm and Teahouse as aesthetic and political high points in the national tradition of realist drama, whose production conventions, set by BPAT during the socialist era, are deconstructed in the 2.0 mediated mode.29 Wang’s postdramatic versions subvert the canonical BPAT productions at the level of both text and performance. Thunderstorm 2.0 retains only a fraction of Cao Yu’s text. In its highly fragmented, yet internally coherent script, disparate lines from the play are recombined and reassigned to only three roles from the original large cast. Formally, it rejects the realist dramaturgy, melodramatic acting, and naturalistic design of BPAT’s classic staging to expose the constructed and mediated quality of the production process through the introduction of body doubles, live camera operators, and on-the-spot shooting, cutting, and screening of the filmed material. The theater stage becomes a dynamic and multi-sited cinematic set where changes in location, costume, or makeup are made entirely visible to the audience during the live performance. The spectating process and perceptual experience of the viewer are thereby also fragmented, multifaceted, and ultimately irreproducible.30 

Similarly, Teahouse 2.0 overthrows Lao She’s meticulous reproduction of the momentous transformations of a Beijing teahouse in the first half of the twentieth century and sets the action on a twenty-first-century Chinese campus. Performances took place in a real high-school classroom in Beijing and the majority of the cast were actual pupils from the Page 110 →school. In a “reversal of the theater as propaganda machine,”31 forty-four actors played to only eleven spectators at each performance. The 2.0 version retained Lao She’s script, yet shifted its original focus on Beijing life and history to current educational issues in order to critique the reality and challenges of high-school life in postsocialist China.

Additionally, Wang’s “New Wave Theatre Manifesto,” issued in 2012, announced that the innovations surging from the Théâtre du Rêve Expérimental’s performance mediascapes will “wash out the dust and dirt of the old theater.”Page 111 → and overlapping socio-ideological formations that characterize postsocialist China’s conflicting regimes of reality, discussed previously.

Other twenty-first-century theater-makers have addressed the socio-affective ecologies of Chinese postsocialism through modes of embodied and documentary realism. Works in these categories tend to reveal conditions of existential uncertainty, spiritual dispossession, and economic precarity. They resonate with a definition of theater that, in the words of Carol Martin, “claim[s] specific relationships with events in the real world” and “enacts social and personal actualities by recycling reality for the stage”—namely, a theater of the real.34

Evidence of such performative recycling is the practice of the Shanghai-based collective Grass Stage (Caotaiban), which typifies the trend I designate as embodied, or physical, realism. The theater of Grass Stage foregrounds reality as constituted and brought to life by the movement of the untrained and unrestrained “real” bodies of “real” people, as opposed to the theatrical bodies of professionally trained performers. Since the group’s inaugural production of 38th Parallel Still Play (Sanbaxian youxi) in 2005, Grass Stage founder Zhao Chuan has deliberately shunned professional actors, whose bodies he perceives as either too conditioned by the institutionalized education administered in the state-run academies or too compromised by the profit-making mindset of the performing arts industries. By engaging professional actors, Zhao feared that the realities their performance sought to convey would “come off as unauthentic,”xianshixing).37 This embodied pursuit of the real wants to question reality, rather than represent or recreate it. It is contingent on actual incidents in life, history, and society rather than on a theatricalized or aestheticized sense of the real. Grass Stage devised 38th Parallel Still Play and the follow-on project 38th Parallel in Taipei (Taibei 38 duxian, 2005) with partners from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and South Korea to address the effects of the Cold War on the contemporary realities of the Korean Peninsula and China-Taiwan relations. The productions incorporated biographical anecdotes and self-reflexive accounts of incidents that occurred during the rehearsal process alongside reflections on historical events.

Grass Stage has since developed a distinctive training method and performance style centered on corporeal expression, which highlights the signifying power of the collective social body of the ensemble—still today comprised mostly of nonprofessionals. Grass Stage defies script-centricPage 112 → dramaturgy and theatrical role-playing; their performances resist both the formalized kinesthetics of conventional naturalistic acting and “the commoditisation of the human body” that pervades Chinese commercial theater and postsocialist society at large.Xiao shehui, 2009–2011) and World Factory (Shijie gongchang, 2014) illustrate the group’s distinctive brand of social praxis that confronts the crude and uncomfortable aspects of reality. Beggars, rag pickers, sex workers, and other precarious subjects take center stage in Little Society to uncover the ugly face of postsocialist modernization and provide an outlet for the minor life stories of those who have been excluded from the race for prosperity of China’s capitalist transition. Scholar Li Yinan suggests that Grass Stage’s “true-to-life” portrayal of real, laboring bodies engenders an “overwhelming sense” of realism that genuinely captures the essence of “Realistic Drama.”39

Such an approach to presenting reality resonates equally with the mode I designate as documentary realism. The creative ethos of twenty-first-century performance documentarians such as Li Ning, Wang Mengfan, and Li Jianjun is committed to recording the social conditions of present-day China and bearing witness to the “nameless mankind” (wuming de ren), as Li Jianjun describes the aesthetic pursuit of the real beyond reproducible theatricality.40 Dramaturgical material is extracted from private chronicles, intimate accounts, mundane anecdotes, and the often-overlooked histories of ordinary citizens caught in the whirlwind of urbanization, and adrift in the transition between a socialist and a semicapitalist social order. Many works in this growing corpus of postsocialist performances of the real cast into relief the self-narratives of nonprofessional actors/participants who share personal memories and real-life stories. Others draw attention to conditions of subalternity, urban alienation, and geopathic displacement. They strive to give voice to the experiences of economic precarity and systemic discrimination of the large communities of rural migrants who toil on the margins of China’s swelling metropolises, in stark contrast to the romanticized portrayals of the laboring masses in socialist-era theater.

A fundamental trait of the postmillennial redefinition of realism is that the twentieth-century assertion of ideological authenticity and the Page 113 →quest for an objective and totalizing recreation of reality are superseded by the intention “to complicate notions of authenticity with a more nuanced and challenging evocation of the ‘real,’” as Alison Forsyth and Chris Megson write of the global genre of documentary theater.41 In the Chinese context, McGrath identifies a comparable renunciation of claims to “an ideological truth that underlies apparent reality” in postsocialist realist cinema, which strives instead “to reveal a raw, underlying reality by stripping away the ideological representations that distort it.”42 Intent on capturing reality uncut, with all its disjunctures and contradictions, and, frequently, by direct testimony, the reconfigured realist mode of China’s new independent theater may be viewed as a performative recasting of the contemporary discourse of postsocialist realism—or, in other words, a postsocialist theater of the real.

Redefining Theater

In addition to historical shifts in the concept and critical vocabulary of realism, as outlined above, the contemporary redefinition of realism from the modern tradition of realist drama to the postsocialist theater of the real has entailed reassessing the concept and vocabulary of theater itself. Evidence of this critique is the terminological and theoretical transition,Page 114 → between the twentieth and the twenty-first century, from huaju to xiju to juchang. In the late twentieth century, xiju was used to differentiate the new avant-garde forms from the spoken-drama convention of huaju. In contrast, the postmillennial discourse is characterized by an additional reconsideration of the meaning of xiju and increased critical circulation of the term juchang to denote forms of theater—or, better still, a distinct attitude toward theater-making—that foreground place, process, interaction, multi-perspectival perception, and “the spatial and social aspect[s]” of performance.43

The principal theorist of the contemporary juchang turn is Li Yinan. Li describes juchang as a participative modality that values the interplay of actors and audiences as equal partakers in an event occurring in a specific place or location (chang), which may or may not be a conventional performance space. As such, juchang is both an artistic practice and a “social event.”juchang not only to “‘realist’ huaju”—with its emphasis on text, plot, narrative, and lifelike characterization—but also to xiju.45 This distinction stems from her translation of Hans-Thies Lehmann’s Postdramatic Theatre (Postdramatisches Theater, 1999), wherein she renders “drama” as xiju (or xiju juchang) and “theater” as juchang, hence “postdramatic theater” as houxiju juchang.46

The disparities in form and function that Li Yinan perceives between xiju and juchang reflect divergent perceptions of the relationship between theater and the real. While Li defines xiju as “the written text by a single author,”juchang implies a dynamic and multi-angled observation of reality from the perspective of both the author and the participants (performers, spectators). Li’s conceptual differentiation echoes Carlson’s view that—notwithstanding the conventional demarcation between “drama” as the literary script and “theater” as its enactment on the stage—the latter remains “primarily a visual realization of a pre-existing written text.”48

The reality that juchang strives to capture is neither static nor unbroken but contingent on the unique circumstances of the performance event—and often unscripted. Juchang denotes creative praxes that emphasize “performativity,” “presence,” “locality,” and “a non-referential use of the body.”xijuxing) based on “reproduction” (zaixian)—to quote director Li Jianjun—and a methodological turn toward juchang.50 As Li Yinan has repeatedly emphasized, juchang and postdramatic theater are distinct concepts. Nonetheless, in terms of their relationship to the Page 115 →real, one can identify a shared intention to destabilize “the traditional concept of mimesis” and a notion “of the theatre world as a fictional construct distinctly separated from everyday life and its surroundings.”51

Many independent theater-makers have expressed their predilection for juchang as an accurate descriptor of their practice. Among others, Li Yinan brings the examples of Li Ning’s site-specific performances in found spaces, such as derelict buildings and car cemeteries, and Wang Mengfan’s dance theater with nonprofessionals. Li Ning is a theater and dance artist, filmmaker, curator, and founder of the independent ensemble J-Town Physical Guerrillas (Lingyunyan jiti youjidui) in Jinan, Shandong. Li Ning has named his method of channeling reality through the body as “physical sketching” (jiti xiesheng): “I use the term ‘sketching,’ in the sense that you are looking at the world around you from your own point of view. ‘Sketching’ involves study: it’s inseparable from nature and life and not something that can be copied.”52

An increased focus on corporeal presence rather than a predetermined script is equally evident in Wang’s practice, whose work to date has consistently foregrounded the ordinary beauty of real, moving bodies—irrespective of age and ability. The Beijing-based director-choreographer has explored the expressive potential of the untrained bodies of young children in The Divine Sewing Machine (Shensheng fengrenji, 2017) and of the mature bodies of aging dance professionals in When My Cue Comes, Call Me, and I Will Answer (Gai wo shangchang de shihou, jiao wo, wo hui huida, 2019), in which she cast two retired ballet dancers aged fifty-eight and eighty-one. In 50/60—Dance Theater with Dama (50/60—Ayimen de wudao juchang, 2015), Wang worked with six women in their fifties and sixties who were ardent practitioners of square dancing (guangchang wu), a wildly popular form of amateur dance carried out in public spaces. The choreography featured a repertoire of corporeal expressions ranging from different forms of dance to the performance of daily routines that, together, embodied the lived experience of a generation of Chinese women.

The connection between postsocialist realism and juchang is further evinced by the prominence of the notion of chang in the theorization of both concepts. As mentioned, chang means location, (gathering) place, or field. It brings to the fore the site of the performance event, and the event itself occurring in the “here and now” of that site. It is thus premised on an interactive relationship between space, action, and the bodies that witness an action in a given space. For example, in 25.3 km Fairy Tale (25.3 km tonghua), directed by Li Jianjun, semi-structured Page 116 →interactions between performers and passengers on a rented public bus shaped the reality of the event as it unfolded within the dynamic chang constituted by the Beijing cityscape and the bus traveling through it on the night of 31 December 2013.

In addition to valorizing observational or documentary realism over representational or text-based realism, a characteristic of these performances is that they draw attention to liveness, contingency, and immediacy as phenomenological components of the dramaturgical process unfolding within chang. China’s postsocialist theater of the real foregrounds the material (physical) and immaterial (affective, psychological, energetic, auratic) qualities of chang as the locus of a processual reality in a state of becoming, which arises contingently from the execution and exchange of actions in a shared time-space.

Zhao Chuan has written of the role of chang in Grass Stage’s juchang praxis. The purpose of the group’s creative method is to interrogate, rather than imitate, reality, and to intervene in social praxis; or, better still, to become social praxis by establishing a direct connection between the theater and the experiential realities of the public sphere.53

Experimentalists of the premillennial cohort such as Wen Hui, Zhang Xian, and Tian Gebing have also designated their practice as juchang. Meng Jinghui, albeit working predominantly within the category of xiju, has emphasized the role of xianchang gan (a sense of presence while being “on the scene”) in avant-garde theater,xianchang” in the postsocialist realist cinema of his contemporaries.55

Xianchang has been discussed widely as a defining feature of post-1990s Chinese independent cinema and in connection with the style of documentary realism known as jishizhuyi (on-the-spot realism). Conceptualized by documentary filmmaker Wu Wenguang as “being present on the scene,” xianchang “constitutes a particular social and epistemic space in which orality, performativity, and an irreducible specificity of personal and social experience are acknowledged, recorded, and given aesthetic expression.”xianchang as “an intervention in the real,” tracing its origins to 1990s avant-garde performance.57 In fact, the latter was closely linked to the independent film scene, as evidenced by numerous collaborations between Mou Sen, Wen Hui, and documentarians Jiang Yue and Wu Wenguang. Elements of performativity in Wu’s documentary practice have also been acknowledged.58 Despite such manifest connections, the nexus between juchang, xianchang, and the documentary impulse of postmillennial independent Page 117 →theater has hitherto been overlooked. Nonetheless, the principle of bearing witness to reality in the present continuous is central to China’s postsocialist theater of the real.

Performing the Real

The practice of Li Jianjun with the New Youth Group (Xin qingnian jutuan; NYG hereafter) is an emblematic case. The group’s name summons the primal scene of Chinese realism, namely, the early-twentieth-century literary magazine New Youth. The script (by Zhuang Jiayun) of their inaugural production of A Madman’s Diary (Kuangren riji, 2011) was based on the eponymous novella by Lu Xun published in New Youth in 1918. However, the NYG’s creative process unsettles the premises of the modern realist convention of “reproducible theater”59 with a Deleuzian interpretation of the real as an unceasing process of becoming. Becoming real, rather than being real, indicates a condition that can neither be reproduced or fixed in a script nor represented reflexively. The distinction between being and becoming real is central to the shift from realist drama to postsocialist theater of the real because it sets a static relationship to reality rooted in mimetic representation against a reality that one “creates” and “perceives” agentively in its specific and unique circumstances, and that continually renews itself.60 If postsocialism marks the coming into being of a fragmented reality cohabited by disparate socio-affective regimes, then the postsocialist theater of the real frames this reality not as immanence but as process—as a draft that ceaselessly rewrites itself into multiple fragmented versions, none of which can ever be regarded as final.

Another defining trait that the theater of the real shares with postsocialist art and film is the aestheticization of the ruin—of the material remains of wrecked environments and discarded spaces—as “a metaphor for the real world.”Page 118 →Jia Zhangke.63 The perception of reality as a ruin conveys the ontological disjunction and heterochronicity of postsocialism, for the crumbling “remnants of time”64 excavated from the vestiges of postsocialist China’s swiftly morphing urbanscapes resurface and reconstitute themselves in the present as both mnemonic residues of the past and dormant future possibilities. Consistent with Li Jianjun’s view of reality as becoming—proceeding continually from the here and now of (xian)chang—the ruin is an intrinsically postsocialist “dimension of time.”65

The postsocialist realist accent on immediacy and contingency corresponds to a thematic emphasis on mundanity in lieu of the typicality of classic realism, and on subalternity in place of the sublimity of socialist realism. The focus turns to common citizens, nonprofessional actors, and the prosaic minutiae of the quotidian. Again, this aspect resonates with the twenty-first-century transition “from public to private” and investment in “the ordinary, and more often, the socially and geographically marginalised subjects” that have been noted in independent documentary filmmaking.fanren juchang),67 spotlights amateur participants who enact their own self-narratives in pursuit of a relatable “feeling of the real” (zhenshi gan).68 The NYG’s postsocialist poetics of ordinariness documents not only the minor histories of ordinary people but also the mundane theatricality of ordinary spaces, material objects, and daily-life scenes in an attempt to capture a polyphonic testimony of what constitutes the real in contemporary China.

The headphone theater production of One Fine Day (Meihao de yitian) can be regarded as the initiator and, arguably, most emblematic illustration of the NYG’s documentary practice of theater of the ordinary. Between 2013, when it premiered in Beijing, and 2022, One Fine Day was staged several times in various cities (Hangzhou, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Hong Kong) with different nonprofessional casts recruited locally through workshops and interviews. In each performance, an ensemble of nineteen individuals sits in a line facing the audience for almost the entire duration of the stage proceedings, each relating personal life episodes in nineteen distinct monologues. Participants have included homemakers, professionals, businessmen, manual laborers, and army veterans, and ages range from sixteen to ninety-one. On the one hand, the public presentation of private experience by a cross-section of Chinese society seeks to give voice and presence to common urban citizens who have been engulfed in the ebb and flow of postsocialist ruination and reconstruction of the past few decades. On the other hand, these oral Page 119 →histories strive to capture the fleeting sights of the fast-evolving psychophysical scenery of the twenty-first-century Chinese city.

Compositional principles of chance, choice, “repetition,” and “overlaying”Page 120 →in their entirety within a single performance event implies an ontological renouncement of representational totality, and a recognition of the inevitable incompleteness of whatever one might regard as authentic or true. There are only fragments of truth, and the revelation of each truth conceals the possibility of another: “The repetition makes it impossible to see an end point; there is only steady becoming.”71

Conclusion: Limits of the Real

China’s postsocialist realism undermines the distinction between artistic representation and lived experience and unsettles notions of objectivity, authenticity, and truth on a phenomenological and ontological level. It does so by foregrounding the presence of disparate and contingent renditions of reality that are mediated, embodied, and documented through performance in a state of continuous becoming. Notwithstanding the potential for diversity and social inclusion of this approach, there are limits to the postsocialist realist theater’s engagement with the real. The scope of this chapter does not permit an exhaustive assessment of the limits of the theatrical real vis-à-vis the actual sociopolitical realities of postsocialist China. Nonetheless, by way of conclusion, it is worth noting how factors specific to the Chinese regime of governmentality may add an extra dimension to the theoretical and ethical complexities that have been observed regarding the theater of the real as a mode of performance-making. Critical points in the scholarly debate have concerned boundaries between authenticity and artifice in reality-based artistic practice, skepticism about its transformative capacity and actual social efficacy, and ethical considerations surrounding the voyeuristic commodification of potentially vulnerable subjects and the public disclosure of sensitive material.

In China, the limits of the real can be an ontological or methodological question, as the contrasting approaches to realism and reality-based performance surveyed above demonstrate. But in a society where regimes of truth are sanctioned, regulated, and carefully monitored by the political superstructure, they can also be a question of articulatory boundaries. At the most basic level, noncompliance with institutional protocols and ideological restrictions can seriously jeopardize access to funding, venues, and licensing for public performance, among other matters. In such circumstances, the limits of the real are found not only in the interstices between the performed real and the “really real,”Page 121 →those aspects of the “really real” that can or cannot be brought into the public sphere accompanied by a veritable claim to truth. On the one hand, the turn to juchang may be remedial to a theatrical system that still tends to primarily censor scripts. On the other hand, since the onset of the Xi Jinping era in 2013, demands on the arts have been rising to conform to harmonized reality narratives and “self-disciplining measures” dictated by the state.73

The multiple regulatory regimes embedded in China’s ideological, social, and cultural governance and the resulting regulation of reality narratives and performances of the real in the public sphere open up a number of questions: How does the production of reality-based performance under conditions of reality regimentation affect the articulation of the real? To what extent does governmental scrutiny, and, especially, the awareness of such scrutiny, defy the theoretical premises of reality-based performance? Does it encourage self-regulatory behavior (of artists, actors, and audiences) that may itself be framed as a performative response to the real? Does the method of selective listening to individualized fragments of truth noted in the account of the NYG’s headphone theater also imply practices of selective speaking—that is, of deliberate silencing and excluding certain aspects of reality from public discourse?

This kind of question should be asked to avoid drawing overly triumphant conclusions regarding the capacity for independent expression and the potential for democratic participation in China’s theater of the real. However, the impact of institutional monitoring and individual self-regulation will require closer inspection in future research to apprehend the complex workings of the conflicting regimes of reality that distinguish the Chinese postsocialist condition. As postsocialist realism defies the conventions of realist drama, it also pushes the boundaries of the real, for it demarcates multiple dimensions of “performing reality” that both enhance and complicate the definition of theater of the real in contemporary China.