The study makes a hermeneutical investigation into China’s contemporary avant-garde theatre discourses and techniques of experimenting with multi-layered socio-historic realities, from the year 2000 to the present. After the performance of Rhinoceros in love in 1999, the Chinese stage breaks with its elitist performance vision and takes a sudden turn to a neorealist theatrical perspective. I argue that Chinese avant-garde theatre’s new modes of exploring different, competing versions of realities are the result of a complicated web of historical contingencies that have as ultimate purpose a new reconfiguration of China’s ethical lost traditional values. The revival of Neoconfucianism as moral strategy to cure the social harm caused by the coexistence of a hard-core capitalist modernity and a traumatic, restrictive political regime is the key to understanding contemporary Chinese theatre’s latest subliminal allusion to a moral re-guiding of society.

A full-length study is available here.