10/26/21- Asteria Liu- ” “Love, Betrayal, and Death:Reading East-West Crossings in Men’s Cross-dressing Performances of Tragic Heroines”

Please join the Theater and Performance Studies Workshop for:

Asteria Liu

MAPH Student | University of Chicago

Who will Present:

Love, Betrayal, and Death:Reading East-West Crossings in Men’s Cross-dressing Performances of Tragic Heroines

Respondent: Yiwen Wu, Ph.D. Student in East Asian Languages and Civilizations/TAPS, University of Chicago

Tuesday, October 26,

4:30 – 6:00 PM CT

Logan Center Room 028

Please register HERE for the workshop. Asteria will read her paper at the workshop.

We are committed to making our workshop fully accessible to persons with disabilities. Please direct any questions or concerns to the workshop coordinators, Michael Stablein (mstableinjr@uchicago.edu) and Catrin Dowd (catrindowd@uchicago.edu).

ABSTRACT: What is the relationship between art and life? Two contemporary works, David Henry Hwang’s play M. Butterfly and Chen Kaige’s film Farewell My Concubine, raise this question with men’s cross-dressing performances of tragic heroines that complicate different theatrical aesthetics and intertwine theater with reality. By presenting twists of characters’ real-life relationships entwined with Western and Eastern operatic fantasies, Hwang and Chen complicate the 19th-century European romantic opera cliché of “tragic women dying for love” and classical Chinese theatrical aesthetics of presentational performances. The intertwining of art and life, in theatrical performances contextualized in the 20th-century history, reveals situations of irony in the lives of minor characters caught in grand historical movements. The cultural figures of tragic heroines allegorized by histories channel East and West in characters’ suspected betrayals and deaths, offering cultural translation and historical allegories. This thesis examines how male characters perform tragic female roles to mediate their relationships to others and to given realities. Whereas previous discussions focus on general gender politics, my approach to the East-West tension through comparing aesthetic traditions evolved in performances will offer the subtlety previously neglected. Reading through the lens of various crossings redefines the dichotomous East-West tension as a relationship of mutual inclusion and reveals the West’s underestimation of the East. The undervalued theatrical power to replace reality at the end of both works enables us to read individuals’ operatic suicides as self-salvation and Hwang’s character Song’s survival, ironically, as a tragedy.

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