Aesthetic Representations of Hieroglyphs in Chinese Post-dramatic Theatre
Aesthetic Representations of Hieroglyphs in Chinese Post-dramatic Theatre

Summary/Abstract: This research is a hermeneutical investigation into the theoretical and practical ways in which the concept of reading dramatic text in the era of post-dramatic theatre is being analyzed globally by performance studies theorists. In the light of avant-garde discourses regarding the dramatic relevance of the theatrical text, my study will point out how letters and their coagulated meanings turn into physical, palpable concepts. Theatrical texts and their carnal texture are raw cultural symbols, metaphorical acting bodies, loaded with socio-political meaning. Moving on to the Chinese aesthetics modes of representing the written word within the theatrical performance, I argue that contemporary Chinese avant-garde theatre embraces a similar take on the role of the scripted text as organic body, within the process of theatre staging. But unlike their Western counterparts’ representation of Chinese calligraphy as regiving the much needed meaning to a senseless modern world, the Chinese contemporary directors turn hieroglyphs into senseless, chaotic signs, suggestive of China’s equally senseless and chaotic social background. I further argue that the perfect equivalence between the text and physical body, specific to the Western dramatic post-dramatic theatre, as well as the equivalence between the text and societal realities, specific to the contemporary Chinese way, go back in time into the Chinese Confucian tradition: a tradition which “rectifies names” in accordance with the truth of reality so as to give meaning to an ideal society governed by aesthetic and moral beauty.

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