A Strafed, Tactical, Pugnacious Island: Political Performances in Taiwan from 2000 to 2013

Open Access

Abstract

This dissertation examines contemporary political performances inside and outside of Taiwan as a political gesture capable of reacting and responding to the changing milieu. I investigate the process through which performers and activists reinforced or troubled the political dominance between the years 2000 and 2013, an unusual period in which colossal demonstrations against governments ensued. I consider the cultural and economic scenarios in which performance practitioners participate in the discussion of identification and examine the diverse performing methods mediated through transnational and regional discourses. I argue that live performance has become a tactical and playful form of political critique that fights within and against the official norms of identity from which it is constructed. The main focus of this dissertation is the process through which Taiwanese performances negotiate and oscillate in-between various identificatory (de)constructions resulting from its layered colonization and sensitive relationship to the international. The various artistic approaches signify what I model as the dialectic between the national melancholia and the campy island disidentification of Taiwan. The practices not only contribute to the enactment of a more just and egalitarian Taiwan but also mobilize necessary dialogues across states and borders that partake in performative and political issues abroad. I ground this argument in the combination of psychoanalysis, transnational discourses, body politics, and the analysis of specific performance examples. The examples include Dreamers (2011), Mazu's Bodyguards (2009), Pirates and Formosa (2011), A Soldiers' Pay (2004), Antigone (2013), The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (2009), Occupy Wall Street (2011-), and White Shirt Movement (2013-). I treat "performance" not as an end product but as an ongoing political project probing into the interrelation between political/economic apparatus and media/technology spectacle. I suggest not only that the historical particularities dominate the local cultural productions but also that practitioners transform and reimagine the sense of nation and of island by fashioning divergent theatrical aesthetics in response to the political dynamisms. This dissertation ends by querying how performative articulations of Taiwanese identification function as a means of survival that triggers further discussion regarding the interplay between postcolonial politics and multicultural aesthetics on this island.