Introduction -- Chapter One Chinese Avant-Garde: New Trends in Chinese Exploratory and Experimental Theatre -- Terminology -- New Aesthetic Awareness -- Dominance of the Stage Director -- Theatrical Space -- Word, Text and Theatre -- Chapter Two Actor in the Space of Illusion and Anti-Illusion -- Anti-realistic Turn -- Theatricality Regained -- Towards the Audience -- Self-observation and the Neutral Actor -- Actor and Metadrama -- Chapter Three New Narrative Strategies -- Early Attempts: From Didactic Drama to the Theatre of Imagination -- Further Exploration -- Inspirations by Music, Film and Painting -- Collage Technique -- Expanding the Boundaries of Language and Literature -- The Author-Audience Relationship -- Chapter Four From Realism to Sur-Realism: Poetics of the Absurd and the Grotesque -- Chapter Five Between Life and Death, Reality and Dream: Towards an Oneiric Imagination -- The Other Shore of Cognition -- Scattered Identity -- On the Boundary between Night and Day -- Democratization of the Tragic -- Chapter Six In Search of the Total Theatre -- Return to Origins -- Tracing the Wild Man -- Towards the Total Theatre -- Theatre of Words-Theatre of Images -- The Intercultural Total Theatre -- Bibliography -- Index.