The Other Shore: Plays by Gao Xingjian

Gao Xingjian

Jun 1999 · The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press

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Gao Xingjian is the leading Chinese dramatist of our time. He is also one of the most moving and literary writers for the contemporary stage. His plays have been performed all around the world, including China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Australia, the Ivory Coast, the United States, France, Germany and other European countries. Born and educated in China, Gao studied French literature at the Beijing Foreign Languages Institute between 1957-1962. After the Cultural Revolution, he became a resident playwright at the Beijing People's Art Theatre. His works, including Bus Stop, Absolute Signal, and Wilderness Man, were trend-setting and have created many controversies and a wave of experimental drama in China. In 1987 he settled in Paris, France and continued to write in Chinese and in French. He was awarded the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government in 1992. The present collection contains five of Gao Xingjian's most recent works: The Other Shore (1986), Between Life and Death (1991), Dialogue and Rebuttal (1992), Nocturnal Wanderer (1993), and Weekend Quartet (1995). One finds poetry, comedy as well as tragedy in the plays, which are graced by beautiful language and original imagery. Combining Zen philosophy and a modern worldview, they serve to illuminate the gritty realities of life, death, sex, loneliness, and exile, all essential concerns in Gao's understanding of the existence of modern man. The plays are also manifestations of the dramatist's idea of the tripartite actor, a process by which the actor neutralizes himself and achieves a disinterested observation of his self in performance.

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GAO XINGJIAN is the winner of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Literature, the first Chinese to receive the award. Best-known for his novels and plays, he is a multitalented artist who also excels as stage director, painter, poet, photographer and literary theorist. In 2007, he completed his movie Silhouette/Shadow, in which he was the writer, director and actor. Born in Jiangxi, China, he has settled in Paris, France since 1987. GILBERT C.F. FONG is a professor at the Department of Translation, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is the translator of The Other Shore: Plays by Gao Xingjian, (also by The Chinese University Press, 1999) and also editor of Hong Kong Drama Review, Journal of Translation Studies and several books on Chinese and Hong Kong Drama.