Word: gao
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...after two years trapped in the Nobel's gilded cage, Gao is back at work on an ambitious production of his latest drama, Snow in August, which opens at Taipei's National Theatre on Dec. 19. Of course, the Nobel Prize does have its advantages. Thanks to Gao's literary celebrity, the production budget is unusually generous, allowing him 60 actors, a choir and a 70-member orchestra. All that manpower has created an unclassifiable theatrical experience. "It's not a drama, or a Peking opera, or modern dance, or Western opera," says Gao. It's all of the above...
Slouching behind his desk, director, playwright and Nobel laureate Gao Xingjian watches the rehearsal in dismay. The actors are tentative and uncertain, as if they don't quite know where they are going. The problem, in Gao's mind, is that they are complicating what should be simple. "Speak as you speak, listen as you listen," he orders. "Give me your true voice...
...writer who has endured China's spasms of oppression, it's a lesson Gao has learned through bitter experience. When Chinese authorities tried to squelch his voice in the early 1980s, he fled his home in Beijing, first into the rural wilds of China, later to exile in France, penning a sprawling novel, Soul Mountain, partially about his flight. In 2000, it helped him win an utterly unexpected Nobel Prize in Literature, the first by a Chinese author. To many writers, the Nobel has proved a curse, triggering furious envy from rivals, and intensifying crippling perfor-mance anxiety. And some...
...With its complex blend of genres, the play is risky. But Gao's equanimity runs deep. Friends speak of his Zen-like detachment, what his French translator Noel Dutrait calls his "unshakable faith" in himself. "He can be in the center, yet not of the center," observes one of his English translators, Prof. Gilbert Fong. "This is what he tries to capture in his writing." For Gao, detachment is just another word for freedom, the freedom to live and to write what he described in his Nobel acceptance speech as "cold literature," art that "refuses to be strangled by society...
...dated girls, but a lot of them would report to the higher-ranking officials and tell them exactly what I was thinking," he recalls. "And I had funny thoughts." Later, during the Cultural Revolution, he was even denounced as a counterrevolutionary by his first wife. As a young man, Gao wrote down his funny thoughts in fistfuls of plays and novels, but with the Red Guards attacking the least twitch of non-conformity, he burned all of his early writing as a precaution. This sacrifice didn't save him from being exiled to the countryside for "reeducation." Despite the hardship...