People tend to believe that the difference between performance art and theater lies in the fact that performance art is a genuine physical expression, while theater is acting. Performance artist Marina Abramović has also expressed this view. She believes that the bleeding and injuries in performance art are real, whereas in theater they are fake.
So I started to wonder: What would it be like to bring the reality of performance art into theater? And if we take theater out of the stage and let it happen in exhibition spaces or everyday spaces, how do we then distinguish between performance art and theater?
Moreover, as far as I know, theater has completely broken through the limitations of traditional story texts and spatial constraints. Many experimental theaters are more like a concept of Gesamtkunstwerk, a synthesis of various artistic media.
I have always maintained a vigilance towards the boundaries between disciplines and professions and have tried to break them. The boundary between performance art and theater is also one that I have always hoped to transcend.
Furthermore, performance art, which has continued from the last century to the present, has not undergone major changes. In terms of bodily boundaries and even moral boundaries, many performances have been pushed to the extreme, especially in the 1960s, when performance art made all kinds of extreme explorations that are still insurmountable today.
So how to add new elements to performance art or even create completely different forms of expression is a question that needs to be considered.
In 2017, I curated a workshop and performance of performance art and postmodern theater at UCCA, inviting Chinese-German director Cao Kefei to work together to combine performance art and theater. In 2021, I started FRACTION Performance Theater to try a kind of performance art that combines performance and theater.
There is a lack of theory in performance art, but there are many theories in theater. I have always been fascinated by Sarah Kane's scripts and Artaud's "Theatre of Cruelty" theory, and I hope to bring these into performance art.
Sarah Kane (1971-1999), a famous contemporary British playwright, was the most important representative of the "In-Yer-Face theatre" movement in the West and was hailed as "the greatest British playwright since Shakespeare and Pinter." She left behind only five works in her 28 years of life, but each one is a classic. Her works include Blasted, Phaedra's Love, Cleansed, Crave, and 4.48 Psychosis. These works all reach the extreme of cruelty, but they are the most appropriate metaphors and symbols of this world. 4.48 Psychosis gave me a deeper understanding of mental illness.
Artaud was a French theater theorist, actor, and poet, and the founder of the French anti-theater theory. In The Theater and Its Double, he expounded his concept of the Theatre of Cruelty: "He advocated the mystery and ritualization of performance, such as moaning, screaming, pulsating lighting effects, unusual stage puppets and props, etc., to shock the audience."
In Artaud's view, theater is like a plague. The role of theater is similar to that of a plague, "both expel pus from the body and have the function of spiritual purification. The plague ends in death or extreme purification in crisis, while theater brings the spirit into delirium and thus stimulates its own energy. Therefore, theater, like the plague, is a powerful call to a certain spiritual force and has a fanatical destructiveness. Artaud's plague metaphor has no center or focus and is in an uncontrollable state of disorder. The plague is caused neither by human nor natural forces; it originates from evil and mysterious forces, and its characteristics are arbitrary and unpredictable unnatural behaviors."
Artaud gained some insights from the cosmology of Hinduism, "believing that the universe itself is cruel, that nature and human society are full of violence, and that there are cruel factors hidden in human nature. Cruelty is an all-encompassing existence; it is everywhere and unavoidable. Specifically, he compares cruelty to a life whirlwind that engulfs darkness and mystery, referring to the pain beyond ruthless necessity."
Artaud created a unique theatrical language based on space. He emphasized the ritual nature of the performance and wanted to quickly and directly achieve the desired state of mind and spirit through effective means and intensive actions. Traditional literary language would give way to stage language and symbolic language, and more signs and symbols were used on the stage, with the actors acting like living hieroglyphs. This is a kind of theater that expands beyond words and develops into space, and the performance uses movements, lights, colors, and sounds to fill the three-dimensional space. This "total theater" transcends the usual boundaries of art and discourse and uses a variety of techniques to complete a holistic creation.
I try to combine the theory of the Theatre of Cruelty in performance art to reveal the reality of this world - violence - in a symbolic and metaphorical way.
Sexual violence is one of the most typical forms of violence that exists in human history and culture. Accompanying it is the experience of trauma, a state of fragmentation after mental damage.
Trauma as a personal experience cannot be perceived by others; it is invisible, indescribable, and cannot be expressed in language. It is an abyss hidden in every life, and the traumatized person repeatedly experiences the process of falling into it.
The experience of trauma is rejected and alienated by the so-called healthy society; it is either concealed or symbolized.
Only in art can trauma find its place and be accepted. People express those unspeakable traumatic experiences through art. Distortion, deformation, dislocation, inversion, melancholy, darkness, death, pain, screaming, struggling, everything can be presented through art, uncovering the pus.
German philosopher Han Byung-chul discusses the aesthetics of trauma in The Salvation of the Beautiful. He regards trauma as a negative existence, especially in a transparent society, where the opacity of trauma becomes a negative force.
"Without trauma, people cannot see in a different way. The premise of seeing is vulnerability. It can be said that trauma is the moment when the truth can be seen. Without trauma, there is no truth, and there will be no perception of the truth. There is no truth in a hell composed of the same things."
"The negativity of being shocked and seized, that is, the negativity of trauma, is a necessary component of experience. ... No poem does not describe the unexpected, no poem does not open itself up like a wound, and no poem is not hurtful. Without trauma, there would be no poetics and art. Even thought is stimulated by the negativity of trauma. Without pain and trauma, the same, familiar, and habitual things will continue to appear over and over again: experience ... is essentially pain. In this pain, the opposition between the otherness of the existent and the habitual is revealed."
FRACTION Performance Theater
Is the borderland between performance and theater
Exploring spiritual space
The boundaries of the body
Dreams and reality
Virtual and truth
Intertwined
Fractured
Converging
Dissipating
Fading
Departing
The past
Writing visual poetry
Sculpting for sound
Passing through the palace of memory
Passing through blurred mirrors
Passing through you and me
It is accidental
It is instantaneous
It is uncertainty
It is the inner space and time
It is the entrance