| dc.description.abstract | This thesis aims to understand the Taiwanese Little Theater artists’ employment of body as an expressive means in their theater works from the late 1980s to the 1990s. To find out how “body” was then used and understood in the Little Theater, I first surveyed theater previews, reviews, and all kinds of academic papers that concern about the Little Theater’s body performances in various newspapers, magazines, and periodicals. Then, I study more than 200 visual records of the Little Theater performances at Electronic Theater Intermix in Taiwan (台灣現在戲劇暨表演影音資料庫, http://www.eti-tw.com/). With these written and visual records, I discover that the Little Theater artists’ use of body was either overstated or misunderstood in the existing discussions concerned about the Little Theater’s body performances.
In this thesis, I clarify these misinterpretations and misunderstandings by reexamining and reanalyzing Wang Mo-lin’s (王墨林) body discourse on the Little Theater performances in the late 1980s and early 1990s, then the commentaries on Tian Chi-yuan’s (田啟元) body-related works, and finally the solo plays of Liu Shou-yao (劉守曜). In Chapter One, I briefly introduce the existing discussions of the Little Theater’s body performances, and meanwhile, explain my research methods and the subjects of this thesis. In Chapter Two, I recognize Wang Mo-lin’s attempt to theorize the sociopolitical signification and aesthetic value of the Little Theater’s body performances in the late 1980s, as well as point out his misuse of the experiences of Japanese Little Theater performances of the 1960s and the Butoh dance of the 1950s to evaluate the overall performance of the Taiwanese Little Theater body performances. In Chapter Three, I reexamine Tian Chi-yuan’s use of body in his theater works. I, on the one hand, explore how his works were over-interpreted as have resembled Antonin Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty, and on the other, point out that his appropriation of “found bodies” to challenge the conventional beauty concept was the most significant achievement of his use of body in his theater works. In Chapter Four, I conclude my thesis with the discussion of Liu Shou-yao’s extraordinary androgynous body performance as an exemplification of the true accomplishment of one decade experimentation on body explored by Taiwanese theater artists since the late 1980s till 1990s. | en_US |