Redefining Borders in Contemporary Chinese Theater: Paper Tiger Theater Studio Performing Kafka’s “The Great Wall”

Abstract

For the past twenty years, director Tian Gebing and his Beijing-based independent artist collective, Paper Tiger Theater Studio, have pushed the boundaries of performance art and theater by probing, critiquing, and reconfiguring notions of the avant-garde. This article analyzes their recent production from 2017, 500 Meters: Kafka, the Great Wall, or Images from the Unreal World and Daily Heroism, highlighting the latent political and social ideologies of the Great Wall via parody and paradox within a decidedly postdramatic context in order to deconstruct Chinese political and social borders. I argue that 500 Meters moves the meaning of the immense border-demarcation line of the Great Wall from a discourse on political power to one of transcultural bonding. Consequently, the hybridity made possible through parody and paradox advances numerous possible alternative understandings of the Great Wall as variously a space of intercultural dialogue, a place of emotional connection with the other, and a surprisingly harmonious Babel where dominant dichotomies are subverted and even eliminated from the traditional, often coercive, and highly politicized understanding of borders.