City of the Dead and Ballade Nocturne are two plays by Gao Xingjian, the Nobel laureate, which create new modes of theatrical presentation by experimenting with prose and poetry. In the City of the Dead, Gao employs traditional Chinese opera techniques that combine singing with dialogue, movement, and martial arts into a modern play. Ballade Nocturne, conceived as a poem play with dance, uses one female actor and two female dancers to represent the subjective self of the contemporary woman, divided in the “I” and the “she”. These two plays advance Gao's theatrical experiments in dramatic prose across linguistic and cultural boundaries.
