Pure Love and Beyond: Suzuki Tadashi’s Use of Taiwanese Popular Music in La Dame aux Camélias (2011)

Abstract

La Dame aux Camélias is Suzuki Tadashi’s first collaboration with Taiwan’s National Theatre. Interlacing the well-known love story with Taiwanese popular music, Suzuki’s Camélias should be read with his previous works as well as Taiwan’s social and political context in which the production took place. This article examines the complexity brought by extratextual narrative in Suzuki’s selection of popular songs and discusses how Suzuki turned the love story into an allegory of Taiwan’s contested postcoloniality.