Artists in exile or in transit have produced some of the most exciting works, which is why intercultural theatre thrives in the contact zones among different ethnic, cultural, and performance traditions. Snow in August (2002), a Buddhist-inflected play by Chinese French Nobel laureate Gao Xingjian, is a case in point. Why would a secular artist bring the religious rhetoric to bear on his philosophical investment in the idea of exile? The act of fleeing and constant search for a personal space through art carries important symbolic meanings for a playwright struggling with the contemporary tendency to politicize theatre works. Gao uses the hagiographic story of a Chan Buddhist master and semi-autobiographical narrative as platforms for asking probing questions about the nature of exile and the relationship between art and politics. Gao believes that art is strictly a personal affair rather than an institution of moral teaching or social engagement. Religious rhetoric has a special place in Gao's theatre, because the religious discourses are constructed as venues wherein heterogeneous values and performance styles are negotiated.
Written in 1997, Snow in August is part of Gao’s pursuit of a polyphonic total theatre that started with his earlier play entitled Wild Man. Both Wild Man and Snow in August feature performances and music that form a polyphony based on harmonies and disharmonies, and both plays are governed by an allegorical structure. In the former play, an ecologist and a reporter travel into the wilderness of modern China to look for the mythical “wild man,” while the latter features a Chan master’s endless fleeing from the wilderness that is the human world. The significance of Snow in August is thus twofold: stylistically, it inherited and expanded the vision of total theatre that Wild Man tentatively explored; and thematically, it is a meditation on freedom and Gao’s own ideological investment in the necessity of exile.
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Exile can take many different forms, ranging from moving across geopolitical borders to escape an oppressive government to intellectual distancing of oneself from undesirable ideologies. Some of the better-known examples include Bertold Brecht, Eugenio Barba, Ariane Mnouchkine, Suzuki Tadashi, Ong Keng Sen, and Gao Xingjian. As Patrice Pavis points out, an intercultural theatre focusing on training and ideas from “the others’ homeground” can become “a form of resistance against standardization” and initiate “a search for a new professional identity.” Works by playwrights in exile that traverse various “homegrounds” complicate the picture.
Snow in August, a Buddhist-inflected play by Chinese French Nobel laureate Gao Xingjian (1940– ), stands out in the recent explosion of innovative plays about the diasporic experience. It chronicles the life of Huineng (633–713), the illiterate Sixth Patriarch of Chinese Chan Buddhism. In both hagiographical and literary accounts, Huineng’s lifestory revolves around his self-exile from the establishment, both political and religious. The story is attractive to Gao, because fleeing is also a prominent theme in his creative writing. Being an outsider to the established order, Huineng lives in exile and becomes known for his anti-establishment stance. Defending the value of marginality, he is uncompromising in his refusal to serve politics—both within and beyond his religion.
Addressing an intellectual rather than mass audience, the play redirects the transnational cultural flows between East Asia and Western Europe by shifting the gravitational pull in intercultural theatre from a visual vernacular perceived to be universal, to forms of expression appropriated from traditional Chinese musical theatre. Gao uses the life story of a Chan Buddhist master and semi-autobiographical narrative as platforms for asking probing questions about the nature of exile and the relationship between art and politics.
Gao’s stage works examine the moral agency of the collective by implementing what he calls “apolitical” personal voices as an oppositional force to institutionalized national identity. He does not so much aspire to cross cultural boundaries in drama as he tries to create a “total theatre”—an eclectic mixture of performance genres, voices, images, and artistic forms, including ink painting. The central paradox in the case of Snow in August is Gao’s uses of the tropes of self-exile and Buddhism. His desire to be seen as an individual rather than a “Chinese” artist in the limiting ethnographic imaginations seems to be at odd with Gao’s other claims about the role his stage works can play in transforming Chinese theatre. Further, his claim of apolitical self-exile and how marginality can be conducive to the production of good artwork seems somewhat problematic in the context of the premiere of Snow in August in Taipei after Gao was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2000.
Art has become Gao's religion rather than the other way around, as evidenced not only by Snow in August, but by his earlier works like Soul Mountain and One Man's Bible. The act of fleeing and constant search for a personal space through art carries important symbolic meanings. While the Taipei production of Snow in August was met with fierce criticism by cultural and theatre critics in Taiwan, the playscript was very successful, and one of the production’s leading actors, Wu Hsing-kuo, was gratified by the experience. Wu spoke highly of the new paths charted by Snow in August for jingju actors, who possess flexible bodies and a full range of skills, such as singing, dancing, acrobatics, and movements, that can be adapted for works not in the jingju tradition. Religious rhetoric has a special place in Gao's theatre, because the religious discourses constructed by him are venues wherein heterogeneous values and performance styles are negotiated. To borrow Rustom Bharucha's characterization of theatrical interculturalism, religion in Gao's works "evokes a back-and-forth movement, suggesting the swing of a pendulum" not between cultures, but between individual freedom and responsibility. Snow in August invites theatre artists to further dialogues about a “modern theatre” that seeks to redefine a personal voice that can only be globally articulated.
Excerpted from
Alexander C. Y. Huang, "The Theatricality of Religious Rhetoric: Gao Xingjian and the Meaning of Exile." Theatre Journal 63.3 (2011): pp. 365-379.
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Author
Alexander Huang is Associate Professor of English at George Washington University where he is affiliated with the Sigur Center for Asian Studies and co-edits the Sigur Center Papers in Asian Humanities series, Vice President of the Association for Asian Performance, and Vice President of the Mid-Atlantic Region Association for Asian Studies.
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