| This dissertation explores the meanings and functions of images that represent theatrical performances formulated within mortuary contexts in mid-imperial China. Focusing on the relationship between these representations and theatrical experiences of the contemporary living, I examine the ways in which a specific self-reflexivity generated through the images of performances in theatrical terms reveal contemporary views and attitudes towards death and the netherworld. This period of time, ranging roughly from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries, witnesses a vibrant emergence and development of representations of theatrical performance situated in tomb space. In media as diverse as brick reliefs, clay figurines, engraving on the surfaces of sarcophagi and paintings, such images came increasingly to occupy tomb space over these three centuries. Although the emergence of these dynamic expressions of theatrical performance does correspond to the development of drama during this time, I argue that the meanings of these representations go considerably beyond simple reflections of actual performance culture.;Each chapter showcases one or two images of theatrical performances in various media, and discusses how their particular materiality and visual effects are in dialogue with the space which contained them. The diversity in media and visual effects revealed in each example speaks not only to increasingly deeper connotations of theatrical images in mortuary contexts, which signals their divorce from traditional depictions of entertaining performances, but further helps us locate a particular visual logic shared by the images. By grasping the complex nature of actual theatrical performances in the realm of the living and contemporaries' theatrical experience as the prototypical imageries of their representations, I extract a particular self-reflexivity conveyed by the performance images. Rather than simply illustrating a performance tableau, these images function as a site in which the notions of life and death are contested through the theatrical vision. I argue that the theatrical vision, by staging worlds for both the living and the dead, served for the contemporaries to configure themselves as audience members of the symbolic performance of death and life, as well as to socialize death as an enactment of their various and varied lives. |
