Theatre is a long-established art. In the process of China's development, theater has experienced a historical process from prosperity to neglect, and gradually emerged in the eighties of the last century. In 1999, Meng Jinghui brought avant-garde theater into the public's vision, enriched the performance form of Chinese theater, and brought people back to the theater. After experiencing a harsh winter, the drama finally ushered in its own spring.
1. Meng Jinghui and the emergence of Chinese avant-garde theater
In the development of contemporary Chinese drama, Meng Jinghui is a crucial figure. He made important contributions to the development of experimental drama in China. There have been various attempts to define avant-garde drama, but due to its special nature, there is no relatively clear definition of avant-garde drama.
(1) The origin of avant-garde drama
The term vanguard originally originated in military parlance in the eighteenth century, and in the early nineteenth century, vanguard referred to the visionary of the future society. The vanguard at this time had extended from the military terminology of the past to the political sphere. It was not until the second half of the nineteenth century that the avant-garde became associated with art. And the avant-garde really had a direct connection with theater in the twentieth century. In the early twentieth century, avant-garde art reached its climax. During this period, many forms of thought and art such as impressionism, surrealism, and expressionism appeared, and they continued to develop.
Meng Jinghui believes that the vanguard is actually a state, a scene. Not defining avant-garde theatre is also in line with certain principles of postmodernism. Most people in today's theoretical community agree that avant-garde theater has three characteristics. First of all, avant-garde theater is experimental and is a form of drama that constantly explores and moves forward, and this theater form is anti-mainstream, anti-system, and anti-traditional, and requires constant exploration of new activity spaces and performance means. Secondly, from the aesthetic level, avant-garde drama criticizes and satirizes unreasonable social phenomena and imperfect institutions, breaking the authority. Finally, avant-garde theatre draws on the advantages of other art forms and innovates them for its own use.
(2) The background of Meng Jinghui's avant-garde drama
In the development of contemporary Chinese drama, Meng Jinghui is a crucial figure, he is not only a banner of Chinese avant-garde drama in the nineties of the twentieth century, but also a bridge in the development and change of Chinese avant-garde theater. The aesthetic orientation of Meng Jinghui's avant-garde theatrical practice is roughly divided into two periods. In the early stage, Meng Jinghui was a complete formalist and individualist, and Meng Jinghui at this time used a non-mainstream drama style as a shield, completely mixing personal ideological emotions and artistic pursuits into the drama, without considering the audience's acceptance. In the process of later exploration, he gradually formed a theatrical style that integrates ideals, thinking, banter, rebellion and other styles.
After rehearsing "I Love ×××", Meng Jinghui began to think about the way out of the development of avant-garde drama, he went to Japan for theater investigation, watched a large number of experimental dramas, decided to change his existing avant-garde drama model, took the initiative to give up the previous arbitrary avant-garde concept, began to communicate with more people, and brought new ideas and new models to China's experimental drama. Since then, Meng Jinghui has begun to coordinate and balance between the individual and the people, between education and entertainment, between seriousness and drama, between art and life, and China's avant-garde drama has since begun to get rid of the solitary state of being far from the world, which has also created new characteristics in the artistic expression of avant-garde drama.
2. The artistic characteristics of Meng Jinghui's avant-garde drama
In today's Chinese theater industry, Meng Jinghui has opened up new development ideas for the theater industry with his unique directing style, so that more theater directors have more creative inspiration and direction, and promoted the further development of Chinese theater.
(1) Humorous and satirical performances
Glotowski once said that "the individual performance technique of an actor is at the heart of the art of theater." The performance of the actor will greatly affect the performance style of the entire work. One of the main reasons why Meng Jinghui's avant-garde dramas are loved by everyone is that the language and performance of his works have a strong sense of humor and irony. He uses a humorous form to critique some ugly social phenomena, which can make the audience accept with laughter and can be along the edge of institutionalization without being limited by some political factors.
Meng Jinghui's avant-garde play "The Accidental Death of an Anarchist" is actually based on a true story. In 1968, student movements broke out in Italy and Western Europe, and the social situation was turbulent. In 1969, there was an explosion at the Milan train station. In order to calm the situation and calm people's minds, the local military quickly arrested a suspect and identified the anarchist as the murderer. During the subsequent interrogation, the anarchist inexplicably fell to his death, but the local police claimed that the person committed suicide in fear of crime. Based on this story, Meng Jinghui made extensive changes, and "played" the entire play in a form unique to avant-garde dramas.
Many of the body movements of the protagonist madman have been deformed and exaggerated. For example, some normal behaviors are expressed in slow motion, or a subtle action is magnified, so that each ordinary action becomes funny after processing. And such body language is not only to make the audience laugh, it also implies that what happens in this story is in an absurd social situation, teasing the ugly false faces of the real society.
The madman's move to jump into the audience makes the actor and the audience have a sense of communication, breaks the viewing relationship of traditional drama, breaks Stanislavsky's concept of the "fourth wall", and allows the space and time of the performance to be expanded indefinitely, integrating the audience and the actor into one, without obvious boundaries. The entire theater in the play, whether on or off the stage is a member of the play, the audience and the actors are more intimate and immersive, the audience has changed from a bystander to a performer, fully experiencing the role to understand the role, and personally feeling the joys, sorrows and sorrows of the actors, thus reaching a realm of "selflessness".
(2) Innovation of stage language
The stage of avant-garde theater has "hypothesis", and there are different definitions of "hypothesis" at different times.
The definition given by the former Soviet Union as follows: "'Presumptive' is a contract negotiated between the artist and the audience to make everyone believe in 'art'." Professor Hu Xingliang's "Modern Drama and Modernity" explains "hypothesis": "'Presumptiveness' is the premise of dramatic art, playwrights are 'writing plays', theaters are 'acting', audiences are 'watching plays', and people are co-creating stage performances under the premise of 'assumptions'. Professor Tan Peisheng also said: "It is the nature of all art." The meaning of 'hypothetical' is the deformation and transformation of the natural form of life, so that the image does not correspond to its natural form. In the dramatic arts, the only limit to the degree of hypothesis of each aspect is the 'convention' with the audience. ”
In this way, "hypothesis" is an artistic premise, a deformation of life. It is precisely because of the existence of "hypothetical" that avant-garde drama is more creative. In the process of creation, Meng Jinghui not only borrowed from Western modern drama, other artistic disciplines, but also parodies of colloquialisms.
In "I Love ×××", there is such a passage "I lost the collective dance I hope to be a group dance with a lot of sorrow like a lilac Above the tortuous lotus pond Near and far are all collective dances Son: Threesome, there must be a group dance I can't sleep horizontally After looking carefully for half the night, I could see from the slits of the words that there were three words written all over the book - collective dance Half sea Half group dance There is no smooth road on the road of science, only people who climb up the rugged mountain road without fear of hardship, to reach the culmination of the group dance".
In this short line, Meng Jinghui combines Dai Wangshu's "Rain Alley", Zhu Ziqing's "Lotus Pond Moonlight", Analects, Lu Xun's "The Scream" and many other classic passages from ancient times to the present, and expresses them through the unique performance form of avant-garde drama, which increases the effect of drama to a certain extent.
And this "I Love ×××" is a script composed of more than 700 extremely monotonous "I love ×××" sentences, but the content includes many characters and events that span the world and span more than a hundred years. During the performance, three women and five men are expressed in the form of multi-voice recitation, which enriches the form of the drama in form, but more importantly, it helps the audience understand the theme, which is the expression of the director's subjective understanding, and is an understanding and cultural recognition of today's world, but this cognition is reflected through different language forms.
(3) Subversion of narrative methods
In the narrative structure of traditional dramas, there will be a main line of development between characters, and as the plot develops, the contradictions and conflicts between the characters will gradually expand, resolve them when the story reaches its climax, and finally move towards the end of the story. This is in line with the classical "Trinity Law" principle, which is to tell a complete story in the same place and at the same time period. A relatively coherent narrative story, with a reasonable time shift, through dialogues and monologues to portray the character of the character and show the characteristics of the character, which seems to be more acceptable to the audience.
In Meng Jinghui's avant-garde drama, the narrative method is completely subverted, without a complete story structure, without the cause of the story or the final result of the story, and is biased towards postmodernism. The scripts of avant-garde plays also mostly adopt a collage structure, that is, unrelated events are grouped together according to a certain theme. The specific splicing situation is more complicated, and the most common is to combine the stories of different eras and different nationalities.
Meng Jinghui's "Sifan" is a collage of the relevant chapters of the traditional Chinese opera Kunqu opera "Sifan Shuangxia Mountain" and the Italian Boccaccio's novel "Ten Days Talk". These two works seem to be unrelated, but in fact, they both tell about young people's yearning and pursuit of love. "Sifan Shuang Descending the Mountain" tells the story of a little nun and a little monk who cannot bear the bitterness of eating fasting and praying Buddha, and escapes from the empty door together, and after adding the two stories in "Ten Days Talk", the whole drama presents a sense of confusion.
The four stories form a structure like this: the first two stories probably tell the worldly story of the love of the little nun and the little monk; The second story is the story of a young man who takes a fancy to the innkeeper's daughter and tries to live in a hotel and cheats with the owner's daughter; The third story is the story of the groom pretending to be the king and cheating with the queen. This collage successfully dissolved the sexual moral taboo that different peoples had called the "first taboo" at different times. Instead of making the drama look messy, the collage makes people watch their colleagues think, and the result of the collage has the effect of looking at the stories separately.
3. Evaluation of Meng Jinghui's avant-garde drama
Meng Jinghui has always been regarded as a representative figure of Chinese avant-garde theater, and he has constantly explored this path, attracting audiences with his unique Meng humorous style.
(1) Meng Jinghui's achievements in avant-garde theater
On the basis of absorbing traditional Chinese drama and Western drama, Meng Jinghui's avant-garde drama breaks through the shackles of the original Stanislavsky performance system and explores the essence of drama in more depth. It breaks the insistence of traditional drama in artistic expression, adopts changeable theatrical aesthetic means, multi-voice sound processing, and vivid language use, breaks the time and space of a single drama stage, allows the audience to enter the stage, integrate into the drama, and promote the critical and ironic spirit of postmodernism in terms of content and theme, which is in line with the spiritual pursuit of contemporary young people.
Through the continuous pursuit and innovation of art, from the "emotional expression and emotional expression" of the early works to the humanitarian road of "emotional care for the inner heart of human nature" in the later stage, following the psychological needs of the audience and paying attention to life and society. Meng Jinghui's avant-garde drama also conforms to the development of the times, is market-oriented and pays attention to publicity. The development of avant-garde theater has promoted the development of state-owned theaters, so that the actors of state-owned theaters have a sense of crisis and perform better, further promoting the development of Chinese theater. The emergence of Chinese avant-garde drama has broken free from the shackles of politics, interpreted the living conditions of people from various aspects such as human nature, love, waiting, and anxiety, and re-put people first.
Most of Meng Jinghui's plays are performed in small theaters, which have the advantages of low cost and easy communication with the audience. "Sifan", "Rhino in Love", "The Accidental Death of an Anarchist" and a series of classic avant-garde dramas have had a lot of influence here and have a group of loyal fans of avant-garde drama, which also promotes the development of avant-garde drama to a certain extent, it can be said that Meng Jinghui is the key figure to let the audience come out of the cinema and return to the theater, so that the avant-garde drama has been better developed.
(2) The inadequacy of Meng Jinghui's avant-garde drama
Meng Jinghui's avant-garde drama has made important contributions to the development of Chinese theater to a certain extent, but there are many shortcomings in its own development process.
Many of Meng Jinghui's scripts are collage-style combination scripts, and many of them are a combination of Chinese and Western cultures. There are still differences between Chinese and Western cultures to a certain extent, and the director modifies and arranges according to his own understanding of the script, and to a certain extent, he still cannot fully express the ideological connotation of the original work. And in this collage-structured script, the audience can not see the original work, if the audience has not read the original work before or have a certain understanding of the original work, then the audience can only see the actor's funny performance at the scene, can not deeply understand the intention of the screenwriter and the deeper connotation of the work to express, can not achieve the original effect.
The emergence of avant-garde drama is advanced, it exceeds the aesthetic level of the public to a certain extent, in the narrative structure of avant-garde drama is not like traditional drama is flat along a main line straight down, which will lead to some times many audiences who do not know enough about avant-garde drama are still in a state of clouds after the whole performance, affecting the effect of viewing, so that the distance between the work and the audience's aesthetics.
Without the audience's drama, no matter how profound the connotation, no audience will watch it. As Descartes of France said: as a sensual animal, the things that can make him happy are not difficult for his senses to distinguish, and things that are not sensitive to the senses cannot be forced in his opinion, and if the things that are not sensitive to feeling are forced to feel, it will cause a certain sense of fatigue and boredom in the senses.
IV. Conclusion
Drama is a comprehensive art, with many forms such as drama, opera and opera. Meng Jinghui's avant-garde drama has made an important contribution to the long development of Chinese theater, innovatively adopting humorous and satirical performance characteristics, and the actors use exaggerated performances to fully display the character characteristics, and also enhance the interaction with the audience, integrating the audience into the performance works. The stage style is also varied, not limited to one performance form, innovative stage language, highlighting the creativity of avant-garde theater.
The narrative method completely subverts the "Trinity Law" observed by traditional drama, and the collage-style script creation brings the audience a new art form. The emergence of avant-garde drama has carried out reform and innovation of contemporary Chinese drama, Meng Jinghui has played an important role in the development of avant-garde drama, the development of Chinese drama still has a long way to go, continuous reform and innovation, adhere to diversified development, is a necessary road.