The Image Of The Home: On The Theatre And Artistic Space In Globalized Shanghai

We should confront and respond the question about the life ontology and existing significance when our social life is saturated with the mass mediatized culture in the age of consumption. The huge transformation of the urban space and the human cognitive paradigm caused by the spectacles is the social and theoretical background of the research on the subjective agency in this dissertation.Taking three theatres in different type and institution as cases, the dissertation juxtaposes them as the social texts to analyze the cultural production and representation in the theatrical space, to explore the interaction between the live performance and the social space, and how the human being exert the subjective agency under the circumstance of the society of spectacles.The structure of the dissertation can be divided into five chapters.The first chapter is the introduction, which focuses on the literature review and the significance of the research. The concept" the stranger in the society of the spectacles" is put forward in this chapter, and the feasibility of the research on the human being's agency in the theatres is demonstrated.In the second chapter, the Subei Huaiju Opera Troupe and its theatre in Shanghai are taken for the instances to explore the production of the theatrical space. The theatre is re-conceptualized as the production of space, in which the spectators and performers build their subjective agency through home-making practice.In the third chapter, the dissertation focuses the social individuals' performance in Mecooon Space which is operated in an anti-commercial mode, in which a new relationship between the performers and the spectators is built to make the theatre as the potential public space.The fourth chapter analyzes the theatrical aesthetics of Shanghai Dramatic Arts Center (SDAC), the post-national theatre's commerciality and globalization. The human identity and the subjective construction of Shanghai/China are explored in three cross-national performance cases.The last chapter is the theoretical summary of the above analysis, pointing out that the theatre has formed the heterotopias in the globalized city by constructing and representing the home image in them. It draws a conclusion that the theatre is not to represent the reality but to reveal the illusion of the reality. The dissertation's exploration of the "live performance" or in other words, the "body practice" in the three different theatres, is to initialize the aesthetic research on the human agency in these artistic spaces, which could answer the question "what is the ontology and the social function of the theatre under the new social and historical circumstances".