Think of Yu – The Paint Bomb Spectacular
December 2011
I did not expect to see the face of Mao Zedong stare at me when I entered the hallway of the Alberta Theatre Projects offices after I climbed a flight of stairs from the back stage door on 9th Avenue in Calgary. His image is being used in wall-sized poster alongside one of a tank and another of three male figures with their faces blurred. They are the faces of three protestors Yu Dongyue, Lu Decheng and Yu Zhijian, who threw paint at the portrait of Mao Zedong in Tiananmen Square in Beijing during in 1989. Tiananmen Square is a vast, empty space with the old imperial residences, Forbidden City, to the north and two more recently built structures, the Monument of People’s Heroes and Mao’s mausoleum, lies at the south end. The portrait of Mao hangs on the wall of Tiananmen Gate that connects the square to the Forbidden City.
Sparked by students who gathered for the memorial service of the ousted former general secretary of the Communist Party Hu Yaobang, who had campaigned for political reforms and against corruption, the nationwide demonstrations ended on June 4th, 1989 when soldiers and tanks were ordered into Tiananmen Square.”
Yu Dongyue was a member of the cultural class, which began to re-emerge after Chinese authorities shifted towards a more open society and greater economic freedoms in the late 1970s. A former journalist and art editor for Liuyang Daily, Yu was sent to prison for 17 years after he splattered red paint on the portrait of Mao. He was the last of his friends to be sentenced and he served the longest sentence of the three (Yardley, 2009). Of all the millions of people involved in the Beijing Spring and nationwide protest, Canadian playwright Carole Frechette chose the story of Yu and his friends to tell, in a new play she began work on almost two years ago called, Thinking of Yu. It was the reason for the visit to Alberta Theatre Projects. I was there to meet Vicki Stroich, associate artistic director for the theatre company, that was set produce the play in February.
Originally written in French, the play centers around a teacher named Maggie. One day as she leafs through the newspaper, Maggie finds an article in one corner of a page about the three men. Frechette’s play, which is set to have simultaneous world debut in Berlin, Brussels and Calgary in February 2012, will be one of the a few plays in a long while to touch on politics in China from the decidedly outsider “Western” perspective that addresses the Tiananmen Square massacre. It intertwines one particular story of Yu Dongyue and his friends into a play in which the central character Maggie is on a quest to find meaning in her life with the freedoms and privileges she has in Montreal, and draws her neighbor Jerry and a young woman from China named Lin into her search for answers.
Six months ago in May of 2011, I shared a table near the back of the banquet hall at the Regency Palace Restaurant in Chinatown when someone from Alberta Theatre Projects announced it was set to debut the new play in February. It is late November 2011 as I write this and the Calgary-based theatre company Alberta Theatre Projects is about ready to begin rehearsals for the production.
As I waited in the hall for Vicki Stroich to meet me, I looked at the images on the wall with a strange mix of anxiety and fascination which has persisted throughout the weeks I have spent dwelling on a particular time in history when I was too young to know much about at the time. My parents had left China severalyears before the events of Tiananmen Square took place and have not returned. I was born and raised in Calgary, so I have no experience of life in China and can hardly fathom the stories from members of older generations of Chinese when they talk about the faith and idealism they had towards the Communist state alongside accounts of disillusionment and political repression.
The sight of a portrait of Mao in the hallway brought home at least one of the reasons for my sense of conflict; I grew up in Canada and should not feel any sense of obligation to visit through writing, events in a country my parents and grandparents had left behind. I could have chosen to leave the research and writing about the play Thinking of Yu to someone else to worry about, but I felt compelled to dig deeper into this matter. I needed to overcome the strange anxiety that often fills me when I venture to discuss the subject of Tiananmen Square massacre with words and speech. I don’t think I should feel this way; I was not there and did not see or experience the reported heavy-handed repression of student and citizen protesters by Chinese state authorities. This leaves me, at a loss, to explain the trepidation I have towards putting these words onto a page for others to see.
Back in the hallway of Alberta Theatre Projects, I knew I could only have waited for a few minutes for Vicki to see me, but as I lingered with couple of feet between myself and the wall poster, the time seemed to stretch longer than it needed to. When Vicki finally emerged from the back office, she led me to a meeting room that contained a long wooden conference table surrounded by a circle of black reclining chairs. I chose to a seat at the middle of the table and Vicki joined me after she shuts the doors on either side of the room.
She takes the seat next to me and we begin our conversation. Vicki tells me how Carole Frechette was inspired to write Thinking of Yu. Just as the main character read an article in a newspaper about Yu Dongyue and begins to look for ways to understand the situation better, Carole also read something in the paper that started her off to write the play. As part of her research, she also found a way to interview at least one of the protestors, Lu Ducheng, who arrived in Canada in 2006.
Partway through our conversation, Vicki tells me: “Carole has a beautiful way of writing about how we as North Americans react to things that happen in the world. I think what we were most attracted to in this piece was how the central character experiences a truly profound effect that an event in 1989 has on her.”
Frechette’s play will be the one of the few plays in a long while to touch of politics in China from the decidedly outsider “Western” perspective that addresses the Tiananmen Square massacre. It intertwines one particular story of Yu Dongyue and his friends into a play in which the central character Maggie is on a quest to find meaning in her life with the freedoms and privileges she has in Montreal, and draws her neighbor Jerry and a young woman from China named Lin into her search for answers.
“There is something beautiful and emotional and lyrical about Carole’s writing. The character of Maggie is sometimes talking to Yu Dongyue and his friends. She is trying to write him a letter explaining how she feels,” Vicki says. “There’s something beautiful in her struggle to find words to express it. That was also what we were attracted to. How do you express something that is un-expressible?”
Frechette was unavailable for an interview during the writing of this essay, but I was able to get a glimpse of her approach to plays through a comment by Stephanie Nutting that she wrote as part of the preface for a collection of Frechette’s plays in English called Three Plays. “Not only do her plays address people, but they seek out commitment from them. Responsibility has crept into the playhouse and we are free to take it up or squirm.”
At this point in this exploration, I find I cannot adequately assess Thinking of Yu in terms of where it lies amongst theatrical works to examine issues related to Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989. It is certainly one of the few outsider perspectives and the most recent to delve into the complicated subject matter of Chinese politics which confounds many, including those who are most directly affected.
With that said, at this point I turn to Xiaomei Chen, department chair for the East East Languages and Cultures at UC Davis and theatre scholar, “Non-Western cultures such as China has sometimes been used as a contrasting other to critique the mainstream experience in Western cultures,” which leads to questions of what, if any, impact or meaning would Thinking of Yu have for non-Western audiences.
In Maoist China, from 1949 to 1976, artists and scholars were recruited exclusively in service of political ideology and nationalism. This left little room for the exploration of concepts and aesthetics deemed impractical or unhealthy by a government that sought to bring China into the 20th century through its’ own hands, or those of the masses of peasants under whose name the People’s Republic of China had supposedly formed.
At the same time, traditional Chinese culture, which had began to come under attack well before 1911 when revolutionaries disposed the remnants of the Qing Dynasty, continued to be further suppressed under the Communist regime that formed in 1949. In the realm of performance theatre, the traditional Peking opera became a target for scholars who saw it as an empty and “dehumanized” form of theatre that was not relevant for the purposes of social and political reform. Under these conditions, western styles and forms of theatre became a source of inspiration for new spoken theatre. According to Xiaomei Chen, this pattern would be repeated in Post-Mao period, in the late-1970s and 1980s, by the many pockets of Chinese citizens who sought alternatives to culture that was controlled and dictated from above. They looked to developments in places nearby such as Hong Kong and Taiwan as well as to North America and Europe.
Consequently, the shift to more open borders and integration into the world economy in the late 1970s created greater possibilities for access and exposure to the music, art, film, literary journals and plays from beyond China’s borders. In a country that continued to feel the effects of the Cultural Revolution, a new attitude began to take shape among a population weary of the strangle hold politics had on daily life. They were ready for pursuits that did not necessarily gain approval from state authorities, which includes the world of political and experimental theatre.
One theatre artist is Gao Xianjian. A writer and drama artist, Gao Xianjian left China in 1987 as a political exile and now lives in France. He wrote the play Fugitives in 1989, in the wake of Tiananmen Square, to which the Chinese government responded by banning him and his works from China. Gao was born in 1940 in Jiangxi province in eastern China. His father was a banker and his mother, a performer in amateur regional opera theatre. He studied French when he was a student at the Beijing Institute for Foreign Languages and he also began to write and be a member of the college drama club. When Gao was sent to the re-education camps during the Cultural Revolution for educational background, he burnt a suitcase of his manuscripts and would not begin to write again until he was able to travel to France and Italy in 1979. Gao has since become a French citizen.
As a response to his bitter experience of the political campaigns and raids against intellectuals of the decade-long Cultural Revolution, between 1966 and 1976, Gao wrote a series of plays and other literary works that criticize the government, although he adamantly maintains a goal of artistic self-fulfillment for his works, rather than to serve any particular political agenda.
In 1989, Gao wrote the play Fugitives, also known as Exiles, about a young man and young woman as they flee from military crackdown of Tiananmen Square and come in contact with a middle-aged man. It was staged in Vancouver by the Western Theatre Conspiracy company in 2002.
According to the English language translation of his Nobel Prize laureate speech for literature in 2000, which he received for his novel Soul Mountain, he says: “What I want to say here is that literature can only be the voice of the individual and this has always been so. Once literature is contrived as the hymn of the nation, the flag of the race, the mouthpiece of a political party or the voice of a class or a group, it can be employed as a mighty and all-engulfing tool of propaganda.”
In the end, I left my surprise encounter with Mao in the hallway of Alberta Theatre Projects unsatisfied, and the assured promise and miracle of the curtain that will rise for Thinking of Yu.
Thinking of Yu is part of the Alberta Theatre Projects Enbridge playRites Festival from
February 1st to March 4th, 2012.The festival also includes new plays Drama by Karen Hines, AshRizin by
Michael P. Northey and Kyrios, and Good Fences by the Downstage Creation Ensemble.
