China's Theatre of Dissent: A Conversation with Mou Sen and Wu Wenguang

Abstract

Mou Sen, thirty-two, is the artistic director of the Beijing-based Xi Ju Che Jian (Garage Theatre). His production of File Zero, based on the documentary poem of the same title (Ling Dang An) by the thirty-nine-year-old avant-garde poet YuJian, has toured, since its premiere at the Kunsten Festival des Arts in Brussels in May 1994, to fifteen cities throughout Europe and Canada. Plans are under way for an extensive U.S. tour in 1996. Complicated negotiations are taking place to present File Zero in mainland China, as well, where its subtextual critique of dominant ideologies-in combination with its unique stylistic mixture of documentary realism and symbolic stage images-are guaranteed to make it controversial. In this interview, Denis Salter speaks both to Mou Sen and to the actor (and sometime documentary filmmaker) Wu Wenguang, who narrates one of four bureaucratic 'files or personal stories that make up the dramatic structure of File Zero. They discuss the difficult evolution of the project-although rehearsals began in Beijing, they had to continue in Brussels in preparation for the premiere there-and the problems they faced, along with two other actors, in figuring out how to transform a KaJkaesquestyle documentary poem-exploring the nightmarish postmodern world where people's identities are regulated by the classified files that governments compile on them secretly throughout their lifetimes-into a piece of effective theatre. They also discuss the difficulties-political andfinancial-they regularly encounter as dissident artists in a culture that of course remains dangerously repressive. Although Mou argues, near the end of the interview, that File Zero is not a subversive work, its concluding scene of mass destruction seems a direct comment on the suppression of the student revolt in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Indeed, it has broader implications: it functions as a visual parable for any incident, in China or elsewhere, in which people destroy-and are in turn destroyed by-technologies of oppression. Denis Salter teaches theatre at McGill University in Montreal. He has published widely on Canadian and Quebec theatre, postmodern and postcolonial performance theory, Victorian stage history, modern drama and theatre, and Shakespeare in performance in edited collections of essays and in many journals including Theatre Research in Canada, Canadian Theatre Review, Essays on Canadian Writing, andJeu. He is currently working on a research program that reexamines problematic keywords in (Canadian) theatre historiography.