까오싱지엔(高行健)희곡 연구 : 북경인민예술극원 시기 희곡을 중심으로 = A Study on the early plays of Gao Xing - jian

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Gao Xing-jian, a Chinese playwright and novelist who is in exile in France since 1988, received the Nobel prize of literature in the year of 2000. He wrote several sensational plays during 1981-1986, while he was working as a playwright of People's Arts Theatre of Beijing(Ren-Yi), experimenting new idea of theatre in China where the socialistic realism was the only doctrine.
The first play performed by Ren-Yi was "The warning signal", in which he experimented non-act play about a train robber, made a great success with more than 100 performances. He focused on the psychological description of three young men on a simple stage with sound of train and the darkness. The second play was "Bus stop", a theatre of the Absurd. Though it reminds us "Waiting for Godot" of Samuel Beckett, but it is close to a comedy of life. It produces a special effect like a vocal septette performed by 7 people of different background waiting for a bus at a suburban bus stop. The third one performed by Ren-Yi was "The wild man", an polyphonic epic of modern times. He used many different types of narration and various expressions derived from folk arts such as shaman rituals, mask dances, storytellings and puppet plays etc. It is an epic theatre, but very complicated, and near to a total theatre. There are other plays, such as "Selected scenes of modern times", "Monologue" and "The ocher shore" in which he experimented his idea on the new theatre, but had no chance to be performed in China.
Through these experiments, he pursued an "Asian modern theatre" in his own way. He tried to seek for a new idea from the Asian traditional theatre. Though he had learned various ideas of modern theatre from the western theories, he thought he could find more from his own tradition because he was greatly inspired by the shaman rituals and folk mask dances during the survey along the Yangze river in 1983 and 1984.
On the first, most of Asian traditional theatres are performed in an empty space assumed as a theatrical space, so we'd rather emphasize that we are not imitating a real life but performing a theatre. This theatricality of assumption is a basic concept in Chinese theatre and it causes specially stylized acting techniques. So he designed a simple and imaginative stage in his plays. This idea is very important for him to persuade the Chinese theatrical circles based on realism from the beginning of the history of modern Chinese theatre.
Secondly, he thought the narration is very useful to present a multiple stage of an epic of long history and different space. The narration is a basic method of Asian theatre in which we can arrange the time and the space without any limitation. So he successively created a polyphonic theatre by using many different methods of verbal or physical narrations in "the wild man".
Thirdly theatre is not merely a verbal, but a composite art including song and dance, mime, mask, puppets, magic, martial arts, and circus etc.. He could increase the ability of the expression of the stage to a great extent in "The wild man" by using various methods and ideas. But above all what he pursued in his works was the very energy of life that he encountered at the village rituals and performances during his survey along the Yangzi river. The primitive energy of life hidden in the folk arts is what Mr. Gao seeks for and what he was motivated by to build up a new idea of Chinese modern theatre. Those ideas on his "Asian modern theatre" has already enriched his stages very much, but he still seems to seek for his way of theatre.