Alternative Theater in Taiwan: Feminist and Intercultural Approaches
Powered By Xquantum

Alternative Theater in Taiwan: Feminist and Intercultural Approac ...

Chapter 1:  Introduction
Read
image Next

(115) In Wei’s production When We Talked about Love, she protests the idea of viewing a woman’s body as an object of fetish; furthermore, in Wei’s Le Testament de Montmartre, she protests the social construction of compulsory heterosexuality. Wei’s production Le Testament de Montmartre is a theatrical revision based upon the lesbian Chiu Miao-Jin’s will before she committed suicide in Montmartre in France. At the beginning of the performance, several pieces of paper are thrown on the stage floor, with three actresses on each side of the stage lying prone on the floor as they try to reach the pieces. The six actresses, clothed in white, turn towards the audience, reciting the lines from the pieces of paper. The scattered paper symbolizes the lesbian’s will and letters.

Wei’s method of getting the performers to narrate the story as if they were outsiders is akin to Bertolt Brecht’s theory of the Epic Theater. According to John Willett in “The Street Scene” in Brecht on Theater: The Development of an Aesthetic, Brecht’s theory of the Alienation Effect is exemplified by a street demonstrator:

We now come to one of those elements that are peculiar to the epic theater, the so-called A-effect (alienation effect). What is involved here is, briefly, a technique of taking the human social incidents to be portrayed and labeling them as something striking, something that calls for explanation, is not to be taken for granted, not just natural. The object of this “effect” is to allow the spectator to criticize constructively from a social point of view. Can we show that this A-effect is significant for our street demonstrator? (47)14

Therefore, as Brecht believes, the Epic Theater provides the audience with an “alienated” view of the world so that the audience can keep a distance to view things as extraordinary.