The tapestry of time: Wang Chia-Ming’s postdramatic journeys with Richard III (2014-2018)

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper centres on three theatre productions related to Shakespeare’s Richard III, all directed by the Taiwanese director Wang Chia-Ming, whose work had been featured in Paris Autumn Festival in 2019. The first of these productions, Richard III and His Underground Parking Lot (2014), was his collaboration with the School of Theatre Arts of Taipei National University of Arts, while R3: The Life and Death of Richard III, taking inspiration from the first production, was commissioned by the National Theatre and Concert Hall for the 2015 Taiwan International Festival of Arts (TIFA 2015). Not being exhausted by possibilities of retelling the Richard III story, Wang created Blood and Rose Ensemble (2017) for National Theatre’s Experimental Theatre. For both Parking Lots and R3, Wang developed an acting device of ‘voice-body disassociation,’ in which actors mimed the movement of one character and dubbed the voice of another character. Breaking the integrity of characters in this way, Wang was able to reconstruct and question the politic of narration and paved his way to Blood and Rose Ensemble. This essay looks at how Wang’s narrative strategies in these postdramatic productions turned into an apparatus of history-making that is also relevant to his Taiwanese audience.