|
|
Lai’s production of Pining ….—In Peach Blossom Land serves to bring together, for Tuan, many of the central elements and concerns in intercultural productions. First, the stage itself is divided into a realistic set and a Chinese-style painted backdrop. Similarly, the acting styles associated with those stages are used. A Chinese classic tale of longing for a utopic land, one that may also reveal the Taiwanese island culture and the mainland, is set alongside the internal, psychological journey of those who gather around a hospital bed. Yet, Lai adds a meta-level to his stage: the entire production is staged as a rehearsal by a troupe, whose interactions remain outside the narratives of the two sides of the stage. This example offers Tuan the kind of rich hybridity that lies at the heart of the Taiwanese experimental stage. She reads the structuring of the stylized memory of Chinese tradition in the painting, the acting style and even the blank space in the stage set. She reveals just how this hybrid stage spatializes processes of identification for the Taiwanese cultural practitioner.
Finally, Tuan uses Lai’s A Dream Like A Dream to initiate a discussion of reconciliation between Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China. Lai’s stage, fashioned on the form of a Mandala, literally includes or surrounds the audience, creating a space where the possibility of forgiveness can enfold. Reconciliation is a very loaded term in this time of heightened crisis between Taiwanese and the PRC. According to Tuan’s reading, the playt seems to address the problem of moral identification, when the memory of Tiananmen Square still haunts the stage. Filtered through a form of Buddhism originating in Tibet, even the ideological possibility of peace resounds with a memory of another contested territory. Yet forgiveness seems to make momentary appearances, a messenger of potential peace within both national memory and future.
Alternative Theater in Taiwan thus presents the reader with many varieties of alterity, from theater practice to theoretical strategies, from national futures to individual pasts.