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Mei Lanfang and the International Stage in the 20th Century: The Positioning and Replacement of Chinese Drama is the first monograph at home and abroad to study Mei Lanfang's influence on the international stage in the 20th century. Focusing on Mei Lanfang's visits to Japan, the United States and the Soviet Union, the author examines the existence and positioning of Mei Lanfang and Chinese drama on the international stage in the context of transnational politics, ideology, culture and drama in the 20th century. This book carefully explores the intercultural interpretation and appropriation of Mei Lanfang's art and Chinese drama by important figures such as Brecht, Meyerhold, Eisenstein, Taylov, and Barba, and also explains in more depth the mutual cultural formation and construction of international drama in the 20th century. In addition, the author examines the Chinese support and opposition to Mei Lanfang's visit, as well as the cross-cultural impact of Mei Lanfang's visit and performance on Chinese understanding and defining her art.
Text / Tamin
For critics of modern China, playing the role of women, if not all of Mei Lanfang's art, is the core of his art, and it is also the most controversial place in Mei Lanfang's art. Mei Lanfang is praised by admirers and supporters as the king of the world because of his superb art in shaping female characters; and he is slandered by the denigration because the denigrations either think that his female characters are too well portrayed or that he does not portray female characters well. He was praised for being the first famous actor to venture abroad to show and disseminate Chinese national drama and culture; but also for the same reason, some people attacked him for not only bringing glory to the Chinese nation, but also bringing shame, and he projected China as a socially and culturally weak country, a nation with a weak feminine temperament.
Although the above controversy over men's and women's clothing seems to have social and cultural rationality and inevitability in China, it has had little impact on Americans' acceptance of Mei Lanfang's art of dressing up as a woman. However, for Mei Lanfang and her peers, this also caused a huge ideological burden. They are very concerned about how American audiences and critics will react to Mei Lanfang's performance, and how they will view Chinese theater art.
In order to let American audiences understand and appreciate Mei Lanfang's Qiandan art and preemptively avoid negative reactions, the Chinese side included an article in the English materials prepared for the visit to the United States, which introduced Mei Lanfang's art to American audiences as a reasonable continuation and improvement of the long tradition of Chinese theater history. Ms. Yang Su, the female host, will emphasize to the audience every night before the start of Mei Lanfang's program that Mei Lanfang is different from the men and women on the Western stage, he is not pretending to be a woman, but strives to present an "imaginary ideal female image" or symbolize the "eternal female ideal of the East".
Mei Lanfang herself stressed in an interview in New York that his art was historically justified and necessary as an organic part of a recognized tradition, which did not allow women to take the stage until the victory of the Xinhai Revolution in 1911: "The vast theater audience in China has become so accustomed to watching female characters played by men that when an actress plays a female role, if she does not perform in the traditional style of the male actor, she will be considered untrue." In another interview, Mei Lanfang tried to draw a line between his art and the realism of Western men dressed as women:
When Western civilization developed as far west as possible, it was also classical Chinese drama. For example, I once played a drunken woman in a play trying to seduce a eunuch. In American drama, this can feel unbearable animalistic. However, our Chinese drama only extracts the essence of the characters' emotions and behaviors, so that the performance is free from vulgarity and vulgarity, but the meaning is still clear and clear.
In the premiere and subsequent performances, American critics praised Mei Lanfang's art of dressing up as a man and a woman almost unanimously, marveling at Mei Lanfang's superb ability to transform herself into a female character. The following critic is quite representative: "His absorption and integration of female characters is so thorough and comprehensive that it is difficult to believe that he himself is actually a man." ”
At the same time, critics oppose the misinterpretation of Mei Lanfang's art as a simple act of dressing as a woman. One critic said Mei Lanfang "broke the Prejudice of Westerners about men dressing as women." These critics insist that Mei Lanfang's art symbolizes, condenses or embodies "the essence of femininity", "the sublimation of women is more feminine than women", "the eternal concept of Chinese women", "the eternal oriental female ideal", "the eternal female", "the universal element of female characters" and "has a universal femininity". Even the author of an important religious philosophy magazine, despite the traditional prejudice of Western religions against transvestism, declared Mei Lanfang to be the "most beautiful presence" he had ever seen on stage, believing that the Chinese actor "embodied all aspects of the 'eternal woman', that is, the most charismatic, the most unpredictable, the most delicate and delicate, and the most invincible qualities", and he even asked the confused question "what happens to today's women".
Joining in the praise of Ms. Mei are figures like Paul Claudel and Martha Graham. When discussing modern theater and music, Claudel once mentioned his experience of watching Mei Lanfang perform in New York:
Mei Lanfang only plays the role of women or girls, but he plays them with a brisk elegance, like a particularly good mirror, and he not only frees these characters from all sexual innuendo, but, I can say so, also frees them from temporality. He was neither a man nor a woman, he was an elf. Because of the pleasant fluidity of his figure, all emotions and emotions are not so much expressed as they are transformed into music by him and flowed out.
In a conversation with Kenneth Tynan, Martha Graham, a former student of St. Denis, recalled: "I have always been fascinated by Oriental theater... When Mei Lanfang came to the United States, I went to see it. He was the greatest actor in China at the time, always playing female roles. He was so unusual, both a complete man and a complete woman. ”
Of particular note is the comments of the writer and newspaper columnist Karl K. Kitchen. Kitchin compared Mei Lanfang to actors dressed as women in the United States at the time, such as Julian Eltinge and Karyl Norman. Kitchin believes that the vast majority of American male and female actors are "just a freak, rarely talented", while Mei Lanfang is completely different and reasonable, because China has a long-standing Qiandan tradition, Mei Lanfang is a man with dedication to his family, a family and children, and most importantly, Mei Lanfang's superb artistic skills make people "forget the sexual perspective" when watching his performances.
The famous American art historian A. Hyatt Mayor was also impressed by Mei Lanfang's "transcendent" art of "eliminating realistic details." Meier pointed out more than a decade later: "Mei Lanfang's performance is neither as eccentric and abnormal as the men dressed as women in the vaudeville show, nor is it as strangely pale and smirky as the Japanese female figure depicted by Sharaku."
Kitchin probably ignored Mei Lanfang's early Qiandan career and Mei Lanfang's social life under the stage after becoming famous. His (or Mel's) assessment, which gives Mei Lanfang's art the privilege of transcending the sexual appeal of her performance, is basically consistent with the views of most American critics discussed above, and represents the essentialization and aestheticization of Mei Lanfang's art. This anti-realistic and non-historical approach to modernism claims that Mei Lanfang's art represents an essential, universal and eternal feminine character that even actresses cannot claim to reach, thus providing legitimacy to Mei Lanfang's art. In this regard, the aesthetic modernity of Western anti-realist drama has formed a synergy with the aesthetic tradition of Chinese drama that defines the Qiandan art represented and defended by Mei Lanfang.
In addition, this both modern and traditional aestheticization obscures the fact that the essence of women is defined by the male perspective, so that this feminine essence is ultimately only a reconstruction of women's humanity, or more accurately, men's sexual imagination or fantasies about women. This feminine essence is by no means universal or permanent, but is conditioned by social and cultural contexts. In fact, there was nothing universal or eternal for the radical contemporary theater reformers, who attacked Mei Lanfang's art as too refined, aristocratic and decadent, trying to completely subvert tradition. But even postmodern feminist criticism itself, and its critique of the art of men dressed as women and its traditional and modern views, is neither universal nor permanent.
(This article is excerpted from Tian Min's book Mei Lanfang and the International Stage in the 20th Century: Positioning and Displacement of Chinese Drama, authorized by Jiangsu People's Publishing House.) ）
| of Humanities and Social Sciences Translate | drama
Mei Lanfang and the International Stage in the 20th Century: Positioning and Displacement of Chinese Drama
【Mi】Written by Tami
Translated by He Tian
Jiangsu People's Publishing House
January 2022
Tian Min received his Ph.D. from the Central Academy of Drama in 1990 and later stayed on as a lecturer and associate professor. He went to the United States in 1994 and received his Ph.D. in theater from the University of Illinois. He currently works at the University of Iowa. His research interests include comparative theatre and intercultural theatre. He has published the English books The Poetics of Difference and Displacement: Twentieth-Century Chinese-Western Intercultural Theatre (2008) and Mei Lanfang and the International Stage of the 20th Century: The Positioning and Displacement of Chinese Drama (2008). The Twentieth-Century International Stage: Chinese Theatre Placed and Displaced ,2012), The Use of Asian Theatre for Modern Western Theatre: The Displaced Mirror 2018), Chinese author of Shakespeare and Modern Drama: From Henrik Ibsen to Heine Miller (2006), and has also written Mei Lanfang's English material collection China's Greatest Operatic Male Actor of Female Roles: Documenting the Life and Art of Mei Lanfang, 1894-1961, 2010）。
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