New Dynamics: Chinese Women’s Poetry Enacted

Abstract

The article offers a preliminary investigation of the phenomenon of female-authored ‘poetry theater’ (shige juchang) in the People’s Republic of China. It discusses cross-genre explorations by a group of female poets, theater directors and artists who are all associated with the movement of ‘women’s poetry’ (nüxing shige) that emerged in the 1980s in China. The discussion focuses on two performances based on female-authored poems, “Riding a Roller Coaster Flying Toward the Future” (2011) and “Roaming the Fuchun Mountains with Huang Gongwang” (2016), which resulted from the joint efforts of four women: the poet Zhai Yongming, the poet-scholar Zhou Zan, and the theater directors Cao Kefei and Chen Si’an. Their avant-garde experiments with poetical theater document the different ways in which poetry is being translated into images, sounds, or bodily movements on stage. The paper argues that poetic exploration of writing and reciting practices has gained new momentum from emerging intermedial, visual-verbal experiments. Furthermore, it claims that interest in ‘poetry theater’ is also driven by the search for new forms of cross-genre stage performances that could be different from the previously politicized or commercialized ones.

Keywords

• chinese poetry
• women’s poetry
• intermediality
• avant-garde theatre
• performance art