Chinese Theater
From the world’s first actors to the Theater of the Absurd to Italian Theater
to American Theater and David Henry Hwang
China had first
professional actors
• 600’s BCE (ahead of Greek Thespians in 500’s BCE
• “Actors performed at ceremonies in Buddhist temples”
– Chinese New Year’s/ Spring Festival
• Tang emperor Ming Huang – had an actors training
school in Xian: “storytelling, musical performance,
dance, gestures, acrobatics, and martial arts” (712-755)
= children of the Pear Garden
• Yuan Dynasty 1280-1368 Golden Age of Drama
Golden Age Drama
• Poetry (lines) more important than character or plot
• Used popular music
• Plots: love stories, religious & supernatural, historical sagas,
domestic dramas, crime (esp. murder), bandits and heroes
(like Robin Hood)
Like Commedia, it has roles that one
actor plays repeatedly
• Face make-up is one key to the characters
• “The white-faced image symbolizes wickedness and
viciousness, while black-faced image stands for equity
and selflessness.” (Cultural-China)
Some more meanings:
• Redder: Courage, loyalty and straight forwardness
Blacker: Impulsiveness
Bluer: Cruelty
Whiter: Wickedness
White Nose: Joviality
Peking/ Beijing Opera
• Military plays, based on legend & history
• Love stories set amid daily social problems
• Four principle roles:
•
•
•
•
Female (tan or dan)
Painted-face (jing)
Clown / acrobatic (ch’ou)
Male (sheng)
Sheng can be
Dan
Mei Lan-fang
• One of modern China’s foremost actors
Jing
Ch’ou
By 1900 theater
changed
• First to political theater
• Then to realist theater
• Then to classical theater in support of the revolution
• Then to Theater of the Absurd
• However, it is still “symbolic, stylized theater with a system
of gestures, poses, stage properties, costumes, and music”
• Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism can be seen without
our sense of tragedy. Justice must prevail. Melodramas
with poetic justice.
Long White Silk
sleeves
• “Long white sleeves are used in performances of classical Chinese
operas and dances. They are 0.5 metre long but the longest of
them can reach more than one metre. When being swung on
stage, the long white silk sleeves look like ripples in a river. It goes
without saying that our ancients were wearing loose-fitting sleeves
which had no pieces of white silk attached. The long white silk
sleeves are a means of exaggeration to enhance the aesthetic
effects on stage. The movement of swinging such sleeves helps
making up for the shortage of language, giving expression to the
identity, personality and feelings of the character portrayed, and
enhancing the appeals of the dancing movements. Tossing the
sleeves outward means that the character is in anger; shaking
them incessantly means that the character is shivering with fear;
failing them skyward indicates that certain disaster or injustice has
just befallen on the character; and waving the sleeves to tidy up
one's costume means that the character is about to see an elderly
whom he or she holds in high esteem.” (Cultural-China_
Dancing with sleeves
Hsu Tao-Ching
writes
• The whole Chinese stage is unreal. The characters never
look like the audience; they are dressed in clothes which
belong to the theater only and are very different from what
the audience wear. They use a stylish language. They do
not talk but declaim and sing and they do not walk but strut
and stalk and amble and glide. . . They do not fight, they
clash their weapons, parade across the stage, spin on one
leg, turn and jump and walk off the stage. They do not
weep, they put their sleeve to the eye and start an aria in
lento. They do not faint, they fall back into a chair, wipe
their eyes with both hands one on each side and start
another aria in adagio. They do not get angry, they stamp
their feet and toss their long beards right and left . . . A
different race of human beings.
Gao Xingjian
His sets
The other shore
• Click
• Nobel Prize winner Gao Xingjian’s greatest work for the stage,
The Other Shore explores the desperate human struggle to reach a
state of nirvana by crossing the river of life to the other shore.
According to Buddhist belief, humans experience an actual visible
life full of suffering, but by living according to the virtues of
‘‘paramita’’—morality, patience, meditation and wisdom—they
can cross the ‘‘river of life’’ to the other shore and experience
enlightenment. The Crowd, Man, Woman, The Card Player, and
others engage in a symbolic struggle over the conflict between the
individual and collective will. Using a dazzling array of styles,
unconventional staging and lively characters Xingjian’s staggering
work shadows the individual human experiences of solitary
struggle for meaning and enlightenment.
more
• Stylistically Xingjian is considered avant-garde; his works seldom
follow conventional narrative modes, and The Other Shore is no
exception. The play comprises a series of seemingly disconnected
scenes with no discernible plot or character development. The play
clearly shows the influences of Jerzy Grotowski, the Polish dramatist
who devised the concept of "poor theatre," in which the "non
essentials" of theater such as costumes, sound effects, makeup, sets,
and lighting are eliminated as a way to emphasize and redefine
relationships between actors and the audience. In The Other Shore, the
actors take on multiple roles and must quickly change personas
several times in the course of the play. In conventional theory of
acting, best represented by Constantin Stanislavski's theory of "total
immersion," an actor fully takes on the persona of the fictional
character. In The Other Shore, the actors never fully leave their role as
actors. The purpose of the play is not to reproduce life realistically,
but rather to provide a hypothetical world that allows the actors to
continually reinterpret their roles.
images
Ropes
Meanwhile, in 1904
• Madama Butterfly by Puccini
Love duet from
Madame B.
Love Duet
(David Henry Hwang)
David Henry Hwang on race
scene from M. Butterfly
Great interview with David Henry Hwang
M. Butterfly, the entire film
M. Butterfly vs. Madama
Butterfly
• One good day, we will see
Arising a strand of smoke
Over the far horizon on the sea
And then the ship appears
And then the ship is white
It enters into the port, it rumbles its salute. Do you see it? He is
coming!
I don't go down to meet him, not I.
I stay upon the edge of the hill
And I wait a long time
but I do not grow weary of the long wait.
• And leaving from the crowded city,
A man, a little speck
Climbing the hill.
Who is it? Who is it?
And as he arrives
What will he say? What will he say?
M. butterfly
• He will call Butterfly from the distance
I without answering
Stay hidden
A little to tease him,
A little as to not die.
At the first meeting,
And then a little troubled
He will call, he will call
"Little one, dear wife
Blossom of orange"
The names he called me at his last coming.
All this will happen,
I promise you this
Hold back your fears I with secure faith wait for him.