Kwok-kan Tam

Ibsen, power and the self : postsocialist Chinese experimentations in stage performance and film Kwok-kan Tam

This is a study of how theatre and film artists in China, including Hong Kong, explore new visions of Ibsen that go beyond the socialist paradigm of treating Ibsen's characters, particularly Nora, Dr. Stockmann and Peer Gynt, as personifications of political discourse and class theory, with the self being reduced to ideological abstractions. Since China's opening up in 1978, new theatre styles and new concepts of femininity have entered China and have given theatre artists new frameworks for revisioning the self in psychoanalytic dimensions and in relation to power and subjection. Ibsen has become a site of experi.mentation with traditional Chinese theatre aesthetics and stage design, as well as a testing ground for political and cultural representations of the female body in dance and opera. A visionary figure, Ibsen signifies the experi.mental and the non-traditional in China today. Other than critical analyses, the book contains rare materials from the author's private collection, such as photographs and archival records of Ibsen performances on the Chinese stage, that are made available to the public for the first time.