| dc.description.abstract | Abstract
This thesis mainly deals with Wei Ying-chuan’s theatric works in terms of her use of body movements as her important dramaturgical method after 1995 and up till present. During this period of time,turning away from spoken language apparently is one of the most obvious characteristics in Wei Ying-chuan’s works. Without any help from spoken language, Wei appeals to lots of silent body movements to proclaim the distinction with preceding realistic performance and, most importantly, to announce her self-styled theatric esthetics as an instrument for the expression of the deeper levels of meanings. To make my idea clear, I borrow from Chou Huie-lilng’s description and try to term Wei’s works as a sort of “Non-narrative Body Performance.” Therefore, my task here is to re-represent this non-narrative body performance, putting my interpretation into words, transferring them from stage into page. In such doing, I also try to sort part of Wei Ying-chuan’s works and categorize them into three phases and then structure these three phases as three independent chapters in my thesis. These three phases are Gender Phase from 1995 to 1997, Choreography Phase from 1997 to 1999 and finally Literature Phase from 2000 up till now.
In addition to interpreting Wei Ying-chuan’s works in three phases, I also seek to contextualize Wei Ying-chuan’s use of body movements, or say, her self-styled aesthetics into Taiwan’s modern theatre history to see whether Wei Ying-chuan’s use of body movements, in fact, has reflected or even embodied any aesthetic or political radicalization or whether these body movements have anything to do with so-called Little Theatre Movements in the 1980s. Labeled as little theatre director, Wei Ying-chuan and her works are frequently mentioned and referred to the commonplace that Taiwan’s little theatre has to be avant-garde in aesthetics and also has to be radical in politics. However, what is the proper attitude or position an artist possesses when he or she is engaged in artistic creation? What if an artist comes to believe “art for art’s sake” and insists voicing his or her own personal sensibility? Some may feel that all experimental and avant-garde theatre has to be alternative and radical in politics or in aesthetics because it is different than – and therefore opposed to – the traditional and accepted. This thesis is not about the recovering of Wei’s aesthetics regarding movements, images, and directory methods, since they have long existed there in her works, but actually writing aesthetics in retrospect Wei’s career. To see her accumulation in aesthetics from 1995 up till now, this thesis also counts for giving her aesthetics some credit for her use of body movements as original collage or pastiche. Therefore, what I have done is not only writing aesthetics but also documenting history to see an artist develops her aesthetics through years’ accumulations. | en_US |