Beijing. I am seated in the audience of the National Centre for the Performing Arts. On the stage below, an unmistakably deliberate narrative is laid out—birch forests, permafrost, feminine softness, and the order of the collective. The moment the first piece begins, I realize almost at once that these former “People’s Artists of the Soviet Union” are not performing dance as such. What is being activated again is an already completed national imagination. The feeling becomes even stronger during the intermission.
I walk up the theatre’s sunken steps and stand on Chang’an Avenue. Not far away rise the imposing silhouettes of Tiananmen and the Great Hall of the People. I want to say that patches of unmelted snow still lie scattered along the road, yet my memory seems unable to stop lying to me; in truth, I do not care much whether there was snow at all. I pace the street. In my head, a broadcast voice appears from nowhere: “The lights of Tiananmen are lit once again.” If I were still abroad, I would likely be overcome by sorrow. But my mind is not there. I am in my mother’s embrace, at the very center of the motherland.
Zhonghua cigarette is nearly hot enough to scorch my fingers. A line of the People’s Armed Police marching in perfect formation pulls me back into the intermission. I stub the cigarette out, moving swiftly from the order of their ranks back to the order of the girls onstage. Their movements are not complex, yet they are highly unified: the sway of skirts, the curve of arms, the rhythm of bodies—all of it falls with exactness into a kind of national temperament long familiar to us Chinese. It is a bodily language shaped through repeated rehearsal, through history and politics together. Facing this wordless narrative, I am not carried away by its emotion. When I learn that they have been performing here since the Khrushchev era, I remain fully conscious of one matter, that I am watching a performance that has been constructed.
This awareness does not diminish the dancers’ power in the slightest; it makes it clearer. Precisely because I do not sink into it, those elements that would otherwise pass as “natural”—land, gender, the collective, tradition—become legible as traces of form. The “Russian nation” onstage is not discovered; it is placed there, a result of constant reiteration. Inevitably, this mode of watching produces a distance: a theatrical distance, lucid even while participating.
In an early piece of writing, Brecht once alluded—quietly—to a view of theatre that would later influence his own work. That essay concerns “alienation” in traditional Chinese drama. Put simply, one difference between Peking opera and Western theatre is that the audience does not allow watching to slip into the unconscious; instead, it remains aware that everything onstage is constructed. In Brecht’s adaptation, this becomes what he called the “Verfremdungseffekt”—the distancing (alienation) effect. Essentially, he hoped his spectators would not unconsciously project themselves into a character and empathize, but would, in an almost cool manner, recognize that what they were watching was only theatre—so that they might perceive how the structure behind the play is built. Althusser praised Brecht precisely on this point: in one of his rare engagements with aesthetics, he connected this distancing effect to his own structuralist philosophy.
Once one leaves the theatrical context, this distance does not disappear. The reason I can so clearly discern the construction at work from the audience seat is not because I possess some special sensitivity to theatre, but because the same arranged, repeated, naturalized forms have already appeared too many times elsewhere.
In everyday life, we too are constantly watching, imitating, adjusting our position. Many actions are not the result of explicit choice; they happen quietly within an atmosphere of “this is simply how it should be.” In such moments, the individual finds it hardest to realize that they are onstage—not because the performance of a role is unreal, but because it is too practiced, too perfectly aligned with expectation, and therefore appears spontaneous.
When this practiced ease reaches a certain point, distance vanishes entirely. The stage is no longer recognized as a stage; the role no longer seems like a role. People begin to believe that the place they occupy is not the outcome of assignment, but the expression of an inner necessity.
Gender studies offers a particularly useful example. But before that, we must distinguish between gender identity (“genre”) and biological sex (“sexe”). The former does not concern biological difference; it concerns identity. Under ideological discipline, cisgender heterosexuality feels like the most natural way of living—and this “naturalness” is precisely how disciplinary structures operate.
For instance, a little boy is not born already convinced that he should wear short hair and suits. In the course of growing up, he is taught: you are a man, therefore you must embody certain masculine traits. Wearing a dress or keeping long hair plainly does not fit traditional descriptions of masculinity; he then “naturally” chooses suits and similarly coded forms of dress. But we must note: this “natural choice” is not freedom in any ontological sense. It is freedom constructed within an ideological framework. In this sense, one may say it is costume for a role being performed.
Gender is so stable precisely because we have long forgotten that this is theatre. We are too immersed, to the point that we forget its constructed nature. This is also what Brecht tried to remind us. In this sense, Brecht’s distancing effect is not merely a theatrical technique; it is an epistemological stance: it forces the spectator to recognize again that they are watching, and thus to see the operation of structure itself. If we bring this perspective into the question of gender, liberation may not first mean changing roles or claiming a new identity, but rather recovering this distance—recognizing that gender is not the essence of existence, but a form repeatedly performed. Once this distance is re-established, the stability of gender no longer appears unshakable, and the subject may once again, between “entering the play” and “stepping out of it,” reconsider the position they inhabit.
The performance, in the end, disperses. Those “Birch Tree” dancers—bearing an inheritance of the Soviet era—withdraw behind the National Centre’s heavy, dark-red curtain, together with the national narrative repeatedly summoned onto the stage. I leave slowly with the crowd. Night once again covers the square. The outline of Tiananmen appears in the distance, then is gradually sliced and swallowed by the moving silhouettes of passersby. I do not look back. My figure fades out of view, like any other spectator after the curtain call, disappearing into this space that is viewed again and again—and forgotten again and again.
孙锡瑞
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