Last week, we pushed Li Yinan's "Making Useful Drama", which made a macroscopic presentation for understanding the "drama construction", "applied drama" and "documentary theater" in German-speaking countries. Prior to the second screening of "Urban Action and Documentary Theatre" in cooperation with the German Cultural Center Goethe-Institut (China), we continued to quote Professor Li Yinan's article "Dramatic Composition Facing the Present Society"[1], to gain an in-depth understanding of conceptual theatrical composition based on German-language theatrical works that have been exhibited in China, and to see how "cities" and "records" are social and contemporary in different works.
Face the dramatic composition of the present
Text/Li Yinan
Professor of the Department of Drama and Literature of the Central Academy of Drama, doctoral supervisor, director of the Department of Drama Planning and Application
In the past two years, more and more theater works from German-speaking countries have been staged in China, and while Chinese audiences have gradually learned about the "German characteristics" of the director's theater (Regietheater) creation method, they have also made the unfamiliar term "drama composition" well known to the theater industry. Dramaturg/-In is a permanent position in German theatres. On an international tour of the repertoire. Most of the people who come to China with the actors and other crew members are not directors, but theatrical constructors of a play. The theatrical constructors spoke to the media and audience on behalf of the entire crew. They gave guided lectures to the audience on the background of the creation, and hosted post-performance talks and related media publicity activities. These events have made Chinese audiences familiar with the term and have tied it closely to German theatre. Due to the lack of understanding of the peculiarities of the history and current situation of the drama in German-speaking countries, some people mistranslate the profession of theatrical constructor as "theatrical consultant", confusing it with the "dramaturg" in the repertoire of English-speaking countries. In fact, there is a fundamental difference between the theatrical architect in German-speaking countries and the literary consultant profession in the British and American theatre systems. In German-speaking countries, theatrical composition is not only an indispensable task in the rehearsal and theater management of the play, but also represents a special idea and creative method of theatrical rehearsal in German-speaking countries.
The Theatrical Compositions of german-speaking Countries reflect on the meaning of the text from the point of view of deconstructivist theory. The theatrical construction method does not regard stage performance as a means of interpreting the meaning of a given text, but as if the original meaning of the text does not actually exist. The literary theorist Christeva argues that all texts are intertextual. Any author borrows symbols from the written tradition and mixes them into their own texts. Elliott also said: "No poet, no artist, can enjoy full semantics alone." For theatrical performance, the textual meaning is "produced" through the audience's perceived participation in the live communication process of the performance. German theatrical architect Marion Tideck once said: "The unique feature of the German theater is that it breaks the supremacy of the text, and when we deal with the script, the task is no longer to show what the text itself is meant to show." We need to show our understanding during the performance. The supreme authority of the performances of previous generations no longer exists. The theatrical composition gives a new interpretation and presentation of the classic works, and also emphasizes the unique style of the actors when performing. ”[2]
Therefore, the theatrical compositions of german-speaking countries attach great importance to the present and social nature of theatrical performances, emphasizing that the performance takes place "in the here and now" (hier und jetzt); both the actors on stage and the audience under the stage are people of the present society. They coexist in the field of a current society. Performance is a real-time communication between the stage and the audience, not just a medium that connects the audience with the existing text. The task of the theatrical constructor is to select texts that are closely related to the current reality of the theater performance according to this current characteristic of the theater performance, establish the theme of the rehearsal, find the appropriate style, and constantly dialogue with the director during the rehearsal and performance to ensure that the theme of the rehearsal is implemented. In fact, in each specific performance project, the drama composition work is often not only performed by the theatrical architect, but according to the different rehearsal forms and personal work habits, it can be completed by the director, actors, stage designers, composers and other crew members.
From the works performed by Chinese in recent years, we can see the creative characteristics of the theatrical composition of German-speaking countries that emphasizes the present. From the perspective of thematic content, the repertoire of German-speaking countries is to face the current society, and it is by no means to reflect the eternal "eternal meaning" of classic literary works. The present is not only reflected in the newly created premiere repertoire of the contemporary era, but also in the reinterpretation of the classic script. In contemporary new creations, documentary theater (also known as documentary theater) is a typical way of theatrical construction that confronts the present. Coming to China in June 2016, Common Ground is a documentary play created by several former Yugoslav actors from the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, led by Israeli director Yael Ronen and dramatist Irina Szodruch,[3] where the actors tell their true life stories to the audience on stage and the crew's experiences of researching together in the former Yugoslavia. These personal narrative fragments, collaged with headlines from the Western world of the 1990s and reports of the Balkan wars, constitute the stage text. Ron maneuvers through the eyes of the victim, the abuser, and the bystander, and skillfully combines these materials into vivid, sentimental, and wonderful pictures. "Stumbling Blocks of the National Theatre", which came to Beijing in July 2017 to perform, is also a documentary drama. The work was co-created by Hans-Werner Kroesinger, a representative of the third trend of German documentary drama, together with his longtime collaborator Regine Dura, at the Baden State Theatre in Karlsruhe. The work explores the history of the National Theatre itself. 82 years ago, when the Nazis came to power, the theater's employees found that some of their colleagues had disappeared: actors, musicians, teleprompters, deans, conductors... These Jewish colleagues were dismissed from their contracts. Some went into exile, were arrested, and eventually died in concentration camps.
2015 marks the 300th anniversary of the founding of the city of Karlsruhe. Krosinger argues that while celebrating, the city should also reflect on itself. Theaters are important urban institutions with the nature of public spaces. Four actors from the Baden National Theatre participated in krosinger and Durra's research at the City Archives. The four actors on stage reconstruct what happened in 1933. The process of the killing of theater colleagues is carried out step by step and methodically, and hannah Arendt's "banal evil" of ordinary people can be seen everywhere. During the performance, the audience and four actors sit together at a large table. The text, images, films, and actors' narration on the big screen are cross-referenced. The composer constructs the sound space with the sound of stone. In this carefully constructed document "field", the audience cannot put themselves outside to watch, but can only explore their own position in the surrounding of the literature with the performers, to put themselves in the shoes of thinking, constantly change perspectives, and achieve the purpose of deep reflection.
Common Ground
Tripping Stones National Theatre
"Terrorist Attack", staged at the National Centre for the Performing Arts in June 2017, is an educational drama that directly discusses current political topics. Written by The German playwright Ferdinand Von Chirac, the play has become one of the most performed new plays in recent years at the German-speaking National Theatre since its premiere in the fall of 2015. Chirac, a lawyer by origin, erected a moral paradox through fictional case plots: In order to save the lives of 70,000 spectators at Munich's Allianz Stadium, Air Force Captain Koch decisively shot down a civilian airliner with 164 passengers hijacked by terrorists. Is Koch a hero or a murderer? The play asked the live audience and the court members on stage played by actors to rule on whether Koch was guilty. In the rehearsal version of the Nuremberg State Theatre, which came to Beijing this time, director Frank Benk made the stage a minimalist abstraction. Behind the actor are six giant letters: "terror" ("horror" – the German title of the show). Displaying words on stage and using slogans and slogans are common techniques of Brecht-style educational dramas. Benk was originally a theatrical composition for the National Theatre, his stage presentation is not a fancy form, but a direct point, hoping that the audience will focus on the text content; the advancement setting of the plot is also step by step closely around the theme, with a gripping statement to draw the audience in, so that the audience can hear the different parties' positions on the legal and moral aspects of the case, and gradually understand the complexity of all aspects of the incident, so as to finally use their own reason to make independent judgments.
Terror Attack
These new German-speaking repertoires created in recent years have adopted texts and stage formats that are most convenient for the purpose of discussing social topics. Common Ground uses a collage centered on topics (the Balkan Wars), The National Theatre Stumbles turns the theatre into a venue for discussing the history of the Third Reich, and Terror Attack becomes an audience-attended court debate confronting the refugee and humanitarian crises of contemporary Germany. This form of polemical political theater has a long history in German-speaking countries, with Piscato and Brecht being the most famous. The documentary drama directly places the material in front of the audience, without forming a fictional story and character, thus avoiding the limitations of the creation of the reproduction method and helping to show it from multiple perspectives at the same time. Through Brecht's detached performance method, the educational drama allows the audience to actively participate in the viewing process and think rationally, so as to achieve the purpose of promoting people to reflect on social issues.
In those director's theater works that take the classic text as the starting point, the theme of rehearsal that is oriented to the present and pays attention to reality is also clearly reflected through the way of theatrical composition. "John Gabriel Bockman", which came to Beijing in 2016, is one such typical work. Carin Heinkel, a female director at the Deutsches Theatre in Hamburg, rehearsed Ibsen's 1896 realist play into an expressionist-style absurd play. The stage was arranged as a windowless concrete bomb shelter, cold, dark and suffocating. Actors wore ghostly masks that walked through it. Banker Bockman was imprisoned for corruption, and after five years in prison, he returned home, took a lofty house, and never went downstairs. The wife lived downstairs and hadn't seen her husband in eight years. Desperate women pin all the hope of their lives on their son, Huhart. At this point, another woman appears: her twin sister, her husband Berkman's young lover, and Eller, the adoptive mother of her son Huhart. Elle came to take Hart away from her. When Heinkel rehearsed this famous play, she highlighted her female perspective. The core character relationship became the twin sisters. They first appeared on stage as ghostly childhood figures, competing for a teddy bear from each other and eventually tearing it in half. After that, they competed in the same way to contain Hart. The adult Huhart was pulled by the two old women on the sleeves of their coats and pulled into a cross, forming a picture of Christ Jesus crucified. And then Hart said, "Mom, I don't want to live for you." This is not life. "The younger generation does not want to be the redeemer of the older generation, but wants to be themselves. At the end of the play, two old women abandoned in this dark house by young people who have left their homes watch Bokman die, and then run to the front of the stage hand in hand. Mistakenly thinking that the play was over, the audience began to applaud, and their scramble began again: "This is my applause." "No, it's mine." "My..." By breaking the box, the character relationship between the people in the play extends to our daily life today. Heinkel's theatrical construction was also composed by Sybille Meier of the Deutsches Theatre in Hamburg. Based on what they feel about the German present, the two female creators retelling Ibsen's story from their own perspective as contemporary people, making the relationship between characters and characters full of contemporary feelings. The modernization of the old texts not only crosses the times, but also crosses national borders, so that today's Chinese audiences also feel that the play is close to their own lives, and they emit bursts of heartfelt laughter when watching it on the spot.
John Gabriel Borkman
From the perspective of form and style, the current-oriented theatrical composition has also prompted the continuous innovation of theatrical performances in German-speaking countries, which is in line with the appreciation habits of contemporary audiences. For example, "39 Steps" staged at the National Centre for the Performing Arts in 2017 is deeply loved by Chinese audiences for its novel and bright style. "39 Steps" was originally the famous story of the 1936 spy war movie of the master of suspense Hitchcock. Nuremberg State Theatre director Petra Louisa Meyer turned the suspense film into a hilarious comedy through parody. The stage artist designed the stage as a folding picture book, while the four actors have been deliberately dressing around in 2D and 3D spaces to create comedic effects. In this work, the influence of many Italian improv comedies, castanet comedies, kabare and other traditional European comedy performance forms can be seen, and the actors' performances are wonderful. In comedy performances, the rhythm is very important, and if the rhythm is half a second apart, the audience will not laugh. In the theater of the National Centre for the Performing Arts, the Chinese audience laughed continuously, and finally stood up to cheer for the actors, seemingly completely without language and cultural barriers.
The 39 Steps
Another German theater work that has attracted widespread attention and discussion in the Chinese theater industry with its sense of form and distinctive style is "He, She and She" directed by Helbet Fritzsche. The work premiered on the Berlin Liberty Stage in February 2015. The text is adapted from a poem by the Viennese Dadaist poet Konrad Bayer of the 1950s. Beyer doubted the meaning of language and rejected its communicative function, and his poems are stitched together of irrational, anti-meaning words that emphasize the sound and sense of picture of language. Sabrina Zwach, a playwright, was Flitch's old partner and a writer herself. She plucked the passages needed for stage performances from Bayer's poems, constructing a highly rhythmic stage book. Fritzsche continued the formal aesthetics of the Baiye script, closely combining the musicality of the text with the actor's physicality and stage art, and constructing a wonderful grotesque style of Cabare. According to Fritzsche, "Theater has to be mesmerizing. It's got to make the audience hysterical, to drive them crazy, and it's best to get them to get up from their chairs. And this purpose of his was also achieved in the Chinese performance of "He She And It".
Der Die Mann
Berlin's "Return of the NobleWoman", which still came to China in 2017, also crossed the cultural boundaries and was sincerely loved by Chinese audiences. Director Bastian Kraft and theatrical architect Ulrich Beck find Clara's counterpart, Lady Gaga, the Avenger in contemporary pop culture. They interspersed a large number of Lady Gaga pop songs in the actor's performance, interpreting Dürrenmatt's more than fifty-year-old script into a highly stylized music Cabare, connecting with today's contemporary culture. In the morning of the Chinese premiere, some audience members asked today's Chinese whether there were any cultural obstacles to watching the play. I replied, "Not much, because today's young germans listen to Lady Gaga, and young chinese listen to them." Kraft and Baker also believe that although this is an old script from the 1950s, after the theatrical composition, it is very current, and today the audience will not feel a sense of distance. Sure enough, after the performance that night, the applause was thunderous. Audiences have reported that they feel that the work is close to them, and there is no condescending feeling and cultural strangeness.
"The Lady Returns Home"
In recent years, Chinese audiences' impression of German theatre works has gradually changed. From the introduction of typical director's theater plays such as "Beyond the Gate" and "Hamlet" in the Lin Zhaohua Drama Invitation Exhibition, everyone has always felt that German drama is not easy to understand, the so-called "industry applause, but not popularity", and even prejudice against it. In fact, this is because only typical directorial theater works were introduced at that time, and Chinese audiences were not accustomed to the excessively strong sense of the director's personal style, and they also lacked understanding of the theme of the rehearsal of the drama structure of these plays. Today, with the performance of various styles of German plays (including documentary plays from realistic materials, educational dramas with a high degree of audience participation, Kabare-style comedies, etc.) in China, and with the guidance lectures, post-performance talks and other supporting activities hosted by the drama architects of each play, fully communicating with the audience, the Chinese audience's impression of German drama has gradually changed, and they feel that there are not many obstacles to acceptance. In fact, the key to German drama construction is to pay attention to the present, closely linking classical texts and social reality. It is believed that with the opening of the drama composition major in the Central Academy of Drama and the popularization of the way of drama composition, Chinese theater creation will also benefit from this way of thinking.
*This article was originally published in China Literature and Art Review, No. 10, 2017
*Reprinted with permission from the author
exegesis:
[1] The original title of this article is "German Theatrical Performance in China"
[2] Speech by Marion Tidek at the Symposium on Dramatic Composition in Beijing on 13 October 2009.
[3] The documentary drama in this article is the Documentary Theatre
"Urban Action and documentary theatre" feature screening and discussion series
Thematic Planning / Endless Goethe-Institut Coordinator / Sun Yuexing Yi Yang
Read the original article: Urban Action and Documentary Theater | Theatrical Composition Facing The Current Society"