Mark Driscoll
This is a figure ubiquitous in contemporary Shanghai. He enters a simply-lit stage, carrying two soiled leather sacks full of the emblematic commodity of ecocidal, hypercapitalist China—empty plastic water bottles—the detritus he collects to survive. Despite readily available recycling bins, the bottles are now an integral part of the Shanghai cityscape, marrying the class polarities of bottle-collector and financial analyst as the only two expanding jobs in urban China.1 Echoing Walter Benjamin’s ragpicker from the Passagenwerk, the bottle recycler applies himself assiduously to his work, deftly salvaging the empties that will pay him the equivalent of one cent for ten bottles and ignoring those lacking any value. The obvious skill at identifying value where others see only trash is registered smugly on the face of the collector, who after a few minutes of focused salvaging, stuffs his bags to the limit and proceeds to break the fourth wall by smiling directly at the audience. Closing up (shoulong) the bags to prevent any losses, he breaks into a communist song popular in the 1950s.
Our future lies in working the fields
The smoke drifts from the kitchen chimneys of the brand-new farmhouses
Life takes on a whole new form when we are working
The elderly raise a glass to toast, and the children laugh loudly
We work the fields for the honor and glory of our epoch.
As the bottle collector concludes the song and withdraws to the back of the stage, the character of “play director” walks to the center of the stage and directly addresses the audience: “Welcome all of you who’ve come tonight to see the play Little Society (Xiaoshehui). We welcome any input big and small you want to bring from the outside world, as our theater group is intimately connected to your lives.” Then, on a blank white sheet a simple rear projection displays Little Society, Part I.
While the bottle collector falls onto a chair for a well-deserved snooze, a second figure enters the stage dressed in a raggedy old overcoat, and sits down on a chair in the middle of the stage peering out into the audience:
“I see pedestrians with cheap casts protecting broken legs hobbling along Nanjing Road/I see the Oriental Pearl Tower wearing an old, ragged straw hat/I see the gangrened legs of cats at the entrance to Longhua Martyrs cemetery.” Described as a middle-aged beggar (qigai), this woman concludes her schizoid scan with: “Ireallydon’t want to see you all, but you are all I can see from here in the city; you are my non-revolving anchoring point” (rao buguo qu de dibiao).
As the woman beggar leaves the stage, we are left with a camera obscura inversion of Shanghai’s most iconic sights—the consumer district of Nanjing Road; the futuristic Oriental Pearl Tower on the Bund; and Longhua Martyrs cemetery, a popular Chinese tourist attraction and former site of the infamous Guomindang prison where Communist Party members were tortured and killed. Jacques Rancière’s class specific “sensible” of what I will call the lumpenprecariat here sabotages the pristine consumerism of Nanjing Road, corrodes the corporate confidence of the futuristic Oriental Pearl Tower in Pudong, and disfigures the Chinese government’s official version of communist history (Rancière 2006: 21–23). The perceptual vengeance of the beggar is an open invitation to the Shanghai audience to put under erasure the nationalist and consumerist everyday. The defamiliarizing device is accented by the sudden release of plastic bottles from the recycler’s overstuffed sacks, cascading onto the floor.
This prompts the bottle collector to move onto the center of the stage where he takes a small red scarf out of one of his huge bags and starts to caress it. The scarf is the kind worn by Chinese kids in the Youth Pioneers League, and the physical touch sets him off singing the anthem of the group.2 Apparently a former member of this political group, the act of singing impels a bleedthrough to encounters with friends in the group. Hailing these friends, he leaps off the chair he had just a moment ago sat down on, only to slump back into it when their virtual presence can’t be actualized.3
At this point the presence of three or four people surrounding him on the chair (referred to in the script as the “masses” [zhongren]) becomes apparent. They constantly hover around these characters, but both the beggar and the bottle collector go about their lives oblivious to their presence, reminding us of Michel Foucault’s state of“darkness and blindness” experienced by atomized subjects in capitalism (Foucault 2008: 279). When the bottle collector starts singing a traditional Chinese wedding song, the masses move in tandem with him in welcoming the phantom presence of his “bride” (xinniang). Next, the masses shuffle off stage leaving the collector and virtual bride in romantic isolation, exposing the fact that the collector is hallucinating the presence of his former love. Suddenly, the terrified collector feels himself being pushed to the ground and we see him there filled with fear. The virtual wife pulls him off the floor back onto his chair and he sits there yelling and bickering with her until she leaves. Even after her seeming departure, the collector continues to argue with her, until the virtual presence of the collector’s young comrades from the Youth Pioneers League bleeds through again, only to fade out quickly, leaving the collector looking sad and despairing on the ground. He manages to sing several stanzas from the Youth Pioneers’ anthem, which centers him enough to enable a return to his chair.
A third Shanghai precariat appears at this point; an attractive woman around 20 named Lulu. Carrying a roll of toilet paper, she makes her way to the center of the stage, climbing up on a stool. Looking furtively at the audience, she pulls a virtual condom out of her wallet and rolls it on to the penis of a phantom john. Suddenly, she lies back prostrate while balancing on the stool, as an act of penetrative sex bleeds through to the here and now: “Master, are you comfy?”
She abruptly steps off the stool and, in a relaxed, playful manner, walks round and round in a circle, reverting to a child-like demeanor. Like the bottle collector and beggar before her, she enters some kind of dream space (mengjing), albeit continuing to pantomime putting condoms on the penises of virtual johns:
I had a dream I was back home surfing the net.
I had a dream Mom’s illness was completely cured.
I had a dream I was earning lots of money.
I had a dream I was a guy. (She giggles to herself.)
I had a dream I was a rich guy, but I still kept doing sex work.
Returning to her stool while smiling confidently, this time she puts a condom on her own virtual penis, “as if she were a man.” Her next transgendered act has her ordering a sex worker to “Take your clothes off!” and after her facial expression alternates between a “sweet subservience” and a masculine “brutality” (hendu) Lulu, in obvious distress, returns to her previous state of subservience and intones, “Master, are you comfy?” She then falls onto the floor and lies straight out on her back while experiencing imagined penetrative sex and, after stopping, gratefully blurts out “Thank you! Thank you!” to a virtual john throwing money at her. Overcome by more psychic distress, with one hand she strikes herself on the face, while with the other picks up the money. Then she repeatedly exclaims, “I want to be punished!” before moving to the front of the stage to declare “I’m a whore.” This is immediately followed by “I’m not a whore,” after which a series of rationales follow: “I have to earn money”; “the money I’ve worked hard for is rightfully mine”; etc.
At this point the masses return to the center of the stage and gather right behind her, staring at her intently. They start speaking her lines in unison:
All money is clean.
There’s no such thing as clean money.
Some customers are generous.
Some customers are scary and pervy (bientai).
Some customers send me gifts after sex.
Some customers are so rough that I ache afterwards.
I feel lonely.
When I’m in this city I feel free.
I want to make friends.
What use are friends?
I want my own house.
What can a house do for me?
I am playing the role of this girl named Lulu; she’s 18 years old.
How could she ever be my friend?
She has encounters with lots of people.
But she’s an individual.
Do you have any friends like me?
There’s no such thing as a good man.
Is there even one exception to this rule?
I’m here playing the role of a woman who sells herself.
Does this mean I’m playing a woman worker?
Someone wants to help me.
What can you do to help me?
You don’t really want to help me.
I don’t really want you to help me.
I want to go out of the city.
I don’t want to go out of the city.
I want to leave Shanghai.
I don’t want to leave Shanghai.
I want to go back to my family in the country.
I can’t go back to the country.
This goes on for another few minutes, until the masses slink off the stage, leaving the sex worker Lulu alone. She continues:
There aren’t any sincere people.
There’s no one I can trust.
How do you deal with the distance separating you from me?
What can we do about this distance?
What can I do about this distance?
Lulu ceases abruptly when she accidentally spills a bag of dried melon-seed shells onto the floor. Having a kind of panic attack, she gathers the seeds up and darts crazily around the stage, finally collapsing on the floor lying on her back again. Softly, she sings a popular song from the 1990s called “A story of springtime.” The first, and most important, half of Little Society concludes with the appearance of a character called “the soliloquizer” (dubaizhe).
For fifteen minutes or so, this soliloquizer declaims an exhaustive list of all the social actants in both communist (1949–78) and reform period (1979–present) China.
I’m standing here and, you know what I call you?
I call you comrade!
I call you comrade!
I call you teacher!
I call you Miss!
I call you comrade!
I call you work-unit leader!
I call you collectivist!
I call you party leader!
I call you upper-class!
I call you superficial club-kid!
I call you proletariat!
I call you oppressed!
I call you public-bond market!
I call you hedge fund!
I call you red-light district!
I call you New Left!
I call you public security cop!
Little Society is the most recent play from the most important avant-garde theater troupe in Shanghai—Grass Stage/Cao Taliban (Tao 2013). Founded in early 2005, the director Zhao Chuan decided to make Grass Stage an amateur-only group. Although a few of the original members had studied dance or art, only one had any background in theater. Therefore, the great majority of Grass Stage’s 200 or so members have lacked any experience in the arts before joining the troupe. The only requirement for joining is to attend the long, all-day rehearsals and collective writing sessions held on Saturdays, and to pay the 5 RMB dues—about 85 US cents.
In Zhao Chuan’s own words, he wanted to completely invert the politics and aesthetics of the Shanghai theater world, which he condemns as solely concerned with “using beautiful actors and actresses to make as much money as possible.” A site for disseminating official communist ideology in the 1950s and 1960s, with a few notable exceptions, the contemporary Chinese theater scene has been transformed—in Zhao’s eyes—into a place for the wealthy to display the fashionable trophies emblematic of victories in the capitalist world; in other words an elite “white collar theater” (bailingxi).
Drawing on a long tradition in China of performers going to the countryside to bring art directly to working people (their name refers to medieval travelling performers who constructed humble stages in rural grasslands), Grass Stage was formed to bring theater to Shanghai’s 99 percent—not the rich businessmen and 20-something club-kids who often serve as Shanghai’s synecdoche in the Chinese national and global media, appearing most recently in the blockbuster films about crass materialism in Shanghai Tiny Times (Xiao shidai). The first twentieth-century version of populist performing arts emerged during the May 4 (1919) republican movement, followed by Mao’s 1942 Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art (Zai Yanan wenyi zaotanhui shang de jianghua) which established that all art would serve and “learn from the masses” (xuejun xuenong). Learning from and serving the masses meant, during this period of communist war against both Japanese imperialist invaders and the Guomindang, art for and from soldiers and the peasants who sustained them—configuring the masses as the sine qua non of an independent Chinese nation-state itself. This all changed dramatically in the post-Mao era when avant-garde (xianfeng) theater first emerged in Beijing (Chen 2004; Yin 1999).
Although the interventions of the Euro-American avant-garde since Dadaism have normally featured a combination of formal experimentation, an attack on previous aesthetic standards, and a political refusal of the ideology of bourgeois possessive individualism, the specificity of China’s history and geopolitics calls for a provincializing of this European logic. While avantgarde pioneers in China in the late 1970s and early 1980s rejected the official aesthetic regimes of socialist realism and naturalism, their political refusal focused on the notion of the masses and the one-party state in Chinese communist orthodoxy. The critique of the masses naturally led to an exploratory celebration of individualism and personal expression in China, almost directly opposite to the tendencies of the avant-garde in the West. As Liu Kang has written about cutting-edge Chinese literature of this same period, “the targets of assault and deconstruction in China were different from those of the European precursors: not bourgeois values and norms but the revolutionary ideologies and discourses that dominated Mao’s China” (Liu 2002: 98). In particular, the emphasis on individualism and private expression in the early performing arts avant-garde is crucial to keep in mind when thinking about Grass Stage.
We also need to foreground the different set of conditions determining the relation between art and the state in East Asia. Like in Japan in the 1950s and 1960s, the overwhelming majority of performing artists in China are connected to state institutions, and almost all have worked for state-owned theaters after graduating from state universities or art schools. This means that a performing artist’s outright opposition to the state was inconceivable in China until the early 1980s, after the capitalist reform period took off in 1979 and made available spaces for independent art and theater.
Almost immediately, young dramatists like Gao Xingjian and Wang Peigong attacked the hegemony of naturalism by trying their hands at Dadaist and modernist non-realism. This resulted in new theatrical techniques emphasizing the de-familiarization techniques of Brecht and the general absurdity of Ionesco. But after the promising successes of productions like Bus Stop (Chezhan), Savage (Yeren), and Rubik Cube (Mofang) the proliferation of local film and television companies began to offer urban consumers unprecedented entertainment choices, making it difficult for the new avant-garde to survive at the box office. This was compounded by occasional government attacks on these fringe dramatists for their “bourgeois liberalism” imported from the West.
So as experimental dramatists started fleeing the theater, several brave performing artists started the first self-funded, non-governmental theater troupes committed to working and performing completely outside the state-run arts institutions. The most influential of these—and an important precedent for Grass Stage—was the Frog Experimental Drama Club (Wa shiyan jutuan) led by Mou Sen and Meng Jinghui. Mou and Sen established the group in 1987 and put on three influential productions before the Tiananmen Square crackdown of June 4, 1989, which forced Mou and others to deal with the consequences of personal expression and avantgarde aesthetics in a newly repressive China. Despite this, a novel political culture of opposition to the government in the performing and media arts would emerge a few years later.
Mou Sen’s new group, Garage Theater, put on a production called A Chinese Grammatical Discussion of the “The Other Shore” (Guanyu “Bian” de yihui hanyu cixing taolun) in 1992, which was the first play to confront life in China after the Tiananmen Square incident. It was a reworking of a 1986 play called Other Shore by Gao Xingjian that was banned by the government. Using standard avant-garde techniques like inner-monologue and the breaking of the fourth wall by directly addressing the audience, it depicted a group of individuals who had lost all sense of purpose, or a shore to orient one’s future towards.
Mou found it difficult to put on plays after his 1994 critique of the Orwellian character of the Chinese state, Zero File (Ling dangan), because he was prevented by the government from showing at a theater festival in Brussels in 1994. He subsequently relocated to Europe. It was left to his old friend Meng Jinghui’s new Beijing group to try to advance the agenda of politicized avant-garde theater. Meng’s group started out putting on loose adaptations of Euro-American avant-garde standards by Beckett and Ionesco using the techniques of collective reading and collective performance where all the group members democratically worked out parts and interpretations. This practice led to the breakthrough 1995 work I Love XXX, based on a script by Meng. It emphasized physical movement over verbal expression and when dialogue did happen, it was often absurdist. As Rosella Ferrari writes:
It is thus no accident that the new generation of Chinese theatre-makers, who had witnessed the hysteria of the Cultural Revolution as children and the June Fourth bloodshed as adults, did regard grotesque aesthetics and the fragmented structures of the Theater of the Absurd as privileged allegorical grounds in which to materialize the post-utopian mood of China after Tiananmen Square.
(Ferrari 2012: 121)
According to the critic Tao Qingmei, the additional emergence of consumer society in the intensified capitalist reform period after Deng Xiaoping’s southern tour in 1992 impelled political performing artists like Meng to address the issue in their work, along with the issue of government repression (Tao 2011). Meng’s projects from the mid-1990s featured stinging critiques of the new “consumer individualism” (xiaofei gerenzhuyi) that, for him, wasn’t an individualism at all, but actually a new authoritarianism of the commodity lurking behind the shiny surface of consumer society. The concomitant sense of beauty consolidated by consumer society was, in Meng’s well-known abjection, the “aesthetics of dog shit” (goushi de meixue) (Chen 2004: 117). It was obvious, though, that several independent dramatists were willing to put clothespins on their noses to block the stench, as the intensification of capitalist reform after 1992 led to a temporary relaxation of government control over the performing and media arts. This produced a small wave of completely independent theater troupes who were allowed to promote their own performances and sell tickets. In 1992, three new groups appeared—the most famous of which was the Wild Swan Creative Collective in Beijing— and in 1993 several more, including the Fire Fox Drama Society (Huohuli jushe) and the Saturday Theater Workshop.
The appearance in the 2000s of a new “people’s theater” (minzhong xiju) movement emerged from these earlier independent groups. As the acuteness of Tiananmen faded and capitalist consumerism intensified, they deepened the critique of commodified desire even as they negotiated the dialectic of singular individual and mass Chinese nationalism emerging in the reform period. Along with Cotton Flower in Guangzhou, Grass Stage’s productions (Lu Xun 2008; Squat; Madman’s Story) expand on Meng’s critique of commodity aesthetics in Chinese society as they move into thinking and feeling new notions of collectivity.
Zhao Chuan’s intention only to include “ugly or average-looking” people in Grass Stage was just the beginning of the group’s critique. The next level of critique has to do with a fuller inversion of the logic of commodity aesthetics in the form of valorizing refuse, detritus, and the lumpen. This valorization involves not only giving “voice” to socially marginalized subjects in Little Society, but also extends to their choice of venues for performances: buildings ordered to be demolished to give way to expensive high-rises; abandoned warehouses on the outskirts of the city; and regular schools and empty bookstores—the “grass stages” of urban, hypercapitalist China. The final level of critique is the refusal to turn their art into a detached commodity, as Grass Stage doesn’t charge admission and always holds an open discussion with the audience after each of their shows, building in a space for the input and criticism Zhao invites from the public as Little Society begins.
Grass Stage limits membership to people without formal training in the performing arts. Zhao Chuan sees this restriction as maintaining a revolving door with the Shanghai demos, where anyone with the time and desire can be involved. Open membership comes with the responsibility of collective creation in all of Grass Stage’s production. Although Zhao Chuan normally presents the larger idea for any particular play, the process of creating dialogue and mise-en-scene is collective and democratic. Members are urged to bring their intensities, affects, and percepts to the characters and issues of any particular play. New members are encouraged by the veterans not to “possess” the roles of the dramatis personae, but to use the characters as interfaces between their singular bodies and the outside social world—recreating both in the process.
This generative praxis of Grass Stage has resulted in several independent productions by members, one which was banned by the Shanghai authorities. However, it is the completely independent and collectivist nature of their creative process that potentially poses the biggest threat. Jacques Rancière identified a socialist tradition in working-class theater in nineteenth-century France he called a “theatocracy,” which established a grounding for real democracy and thus a defining framework of “self-representation” through which the people “could view their own actions” (Rancière 2012: 12). Grass Stage is similarly carving out a mode of collective praxis in its theater productions (and through its eliciting of critique by their audiences which allows them to “view their own actions”) that contains the potential to seed some undefined democratic future.
After graduating from college, Zhao went to live in Australia for 13 years, before returning to Shanghai in 2000; he then spent a year in Taiwan working with the innovative director Wang Molin. Wang’s “action theater” was influenced primarily by contemporary Japanese theater and dance, especially butoh. Zhao has similarly come to prefer to work within the parameters of contemporary East Asian performing arts, and this sets Grass Stage off from much of the Beijing experimental theater of the 1980s and 1990s. Wang’s description of the impulses for his theatrical work—“current events write our scripts, the people are our actors and society our stage”—could very well double as Grass Stage’s motto as well (Tao 2013).
At one level, Grass Stage works to liberate repressed personal expression in China, which is evident in their emphasis on “individual voice” (geren de biaoda). Zhao understands Grass Stage’s eliciting of regular people’s voices to be explicitly political in a society that restricts expression to consumer acts and reactive nationalism. But he also has a more encompassing sense of politics in deliberately refusing the Chinese government’s restrictions for theater, which state “no vulgarity and no politics.” As Zhao ironically claimed in an interview I did with him in May 2012, “for me, it’s vulgar not to be political.”
This feedback and feedforward between the world of socio-politics and personal embodied expression impels a different configuration of the “art and politics” binary. Félix Guattari’s recommendation for a “new aesthetic paradigm” offers an ideal transcode for Grass Stage’s mode of political art. For Guattari, art is an existential interface that multiplies one’s capacity to feel, which for him means the Spinozist capacity to affect and be affected. Establishing art as an interface sets up a “double process” that transforms and multiples the individual subject as it creates a new world. (Guattari 1995: 106–7). This aesthetic paradigm is thoroughly fleshed out in Grass Stage’s theatocracy
The affecting/affected subject and world need to be seen as enveloped in Little Society by a specific affective and perceptual matrix consisting of nostalgia and alienated fear—nostalgia for a communist past invoked by the lumpenprecariat subjects as pristine belonging, and an acute fear of psycho-somatic disintegration faced with the capitalist present. These affective-perceptual polarities are shown to work directly on the bottle collector, sex worker, and beggar, resulting in schizoid movement and dialogue. (I want to make friends. What use are friends?) Although the precedent for these avant-garde techniques is the Chinese experimental theater of the late 1980s and 1990s, in the hands of an explicitly anti-capitalist group like Grass Stage, the schizoid mode is more the result of an artistic confrontation with the actual violence of the Chinese capitalist present as it works to extricate itself from the communist past. But as that past maintains a sensate hold on mainland Chinese—reproduced both by revolutionary communist history itself and the ways in which the ruling Chinese Communist Party needs to constantly invoke that history as legitimating device—Grass Stage’s performing art as existential interface intensifies the capacity of its members to affect and be affected in the present. The simultaneous creation of new selves and a new world in Little Society unleashes intensities with the potential power to dissolve the alienation of the lumpenprecariat. When the members of Grass Stage create precarious characters like the sex-worker, bottle collector, and beggar (loosely based on their own experiences and those of their friends), this allows them to “view their own actions” theatocratically and thus to feedback into the creation of transformed singular selves and feedforward into the production of democratically communist worlds.
Chen, Jide (2004) Zhongguo dangdai xianfeng xiju 1979-2000, Beijing: Zhongguo xiju.
Ferrari, R. (2012) Pop Goes the Avant-Garde: Experimental Theater in Contemporary China, London: Seagull Books.
Foucault, M. (2008) The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collége de France 1978-1979, trans. Graham Burchell, New York: Palgrave-MacMillan.
Guattari, F. (1995) Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, trans. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis, Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press.
Liu, K. (2002) “The Short-Lived Avant-garde: The Transformation of Yu Hua,” Modern Language Quarterly 63, no. 1.
Massumi, B. (2002) Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, Durham: Duke University Press.
Rancière, J. (2006) The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill, London: Continuum.
——(2012) The Intellectual and His People: Staging the People Volume 2, trans. David Fernbach, London: Verso.
Tao, Q. (2013) “Ba xianfeng xiju ‘caotaiban’ hua,” in Tao Qingmei de boke. http://blog.voc.com.cn/taoqingmei, downloaded on August 21, 2013.
——(2011) “The Paradox of the Individual and the Collective,” in Jorg Huber ed. A New Thoughtfulness in Contemporary China: Critical Voices in Art and Aesthetics, Zurich: Transcript-Verlag.
Yin Guojun (1999) Xianfeng shiyan: Bajiushi niandai de Zhongguo xianfeng wenhua, Beijing: Dongfang.2012
I want to thank Zhuang Jiayun and Diane Nelson for comments and suggestions. I also want to thank Chris Connery for being the Enabler par excellence.
1 New Chinese Premier Li Keqiang has promised significant deleveraging as the pillar of China’s economy going forward. While designed to avoid the systemic presence of finance-driven bubbles characteristic of Euro-American capitalism of the last three decades, this axiom of Li-kenomics will also inevitably lead to the contraction of the erstwhile booming construction and housing markets when easy financing disappears, downsizing what has served as a safety net of sorts for rural migrants forced off farms and into the city in desperate search for work. Although promising to maintain growth rates of 7 percent annually, Li is also vowing to cut support for state-owned enterprises, which have continued to serve as job-producing engines in medium and heavy industry. It’s unlikely Li’s call for more individual “entrepreneurship” (gongshangqiyejia) can make up for impending job losses in these sectors.
2 The Youth Pioneers League (shaonianfengdui) is an organization for youth leaders inside the Communist Party and membership is often a requirement for advancement in the party hierarchy. It was officially formed in November 1949 after the Chinese Communist Party’s victory over the Goumindang.
3 Post-Deleuzian cultural theory deploys the pair virtual/actual to depict equally real entities; see Massumi (2002). Here I use virtual to signify that entities aren’t actually present, but who nevertheless have a very real hold on the characters.