| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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Wei often breaks the boundary between drama and dance to express the themes of the productions through movement rather than through words. She also employs a varied mix of theatrical elements (such as action, diction, plot, movement, set, props, and costumes) to represent original scripts in her other works.
Within psychoanalytic theory, there are two contradictory aspects of the pleasurable structures of looking—the scopophilic and narcissistic. Mulvey elucidates the theoretical tenets of the gaze in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” to clarify these two aspects:
Therefore, Mulvey distinguishes the first as “a function of the sexual instincts” and the second as “of ego libido.” The differences between the two have to do with: (1) another as an object of stimulation, and (2) identification with one’s ego.
To activate the scopophilic drive, narrative cinema invites the male spectator to identify with the narrative’s hero as a kind of ego ideal, similar to when a boy projects his ego ideal in the mirror stage in psychoanalysis. The filmic hero becomes the spectator’s ego ideal. (48) Therefore, in Wei’s production When We Talked about Love, we can also identify the scopophilic drive of the viewers and the audience’s identification with the man who narrates the story, when they gaze at the female performer’s body in a special costume.
In Scene 4 of Scenes of Love Etude II, Wei demonstrates both the Camp and Queer identities in having the two actors exchange their underwear so that the audience gets a sense of their intimacy and gay comradeship. In Scene 5, two actresses face the audience and sing an old Chinese song “Forget You” as if they were singing Karaoke. Beneath the singing, there exists the two women’s silent lesbian complexes struggling to forget men.