The fourth edition of the Berlin Theatre Festival in China will bring "Odyssey" from the Thalia Theatre in Hamburg, Germany, and "Midnight Drums" from the Chamber Theatre in Munich, two of which were selected as the top ten most watched plays in the German-speaking part of the Berlin Theatre Festival in 2018. Another shortlisted play, Vojcek, was also screened at the Goethe-Institut (China) on the 16th of this month.
"Midnight Drums" at the Munich Chamber Theatre Photography | Julian Baumann
The Directors and Judges of the Berlin Theatre Festival introduced the finalists for 2018 and the development trend in 2019, and Chinese and German theater personalities discussed the concept of "machine theater" in the form of Wojcek "occupying" the stage with a giant mechanical device.
Talk to the person
Chen Ping, former Cultural Counselor of the Chinese Embassy in Germany
Director of the Berlin Theatre Festival in Yonne Biedenhelzell
Judge of the Margret Affoncelle Berlin Theatre Festival
Li Yinan is a professor at the Central Academy of Drama
Dean of the Goethe-Institut (China) at the German Cultural Center in Beijing
More than 30 German plays came to China in seven years
Chen Ping: I am the initiator of the "Berlin Theatre Festival in China" project, and I would like to briefly talk about a few numbers to let you understand the situation of Sino-German theater exchanges in the past six or seven years, which may be a little surprising. In six or seven years, 13 Chinese drama works were performed in German theaters or festivals. Guess how many German plays come to China? 30! About 30 plays from 12 theaters are performed in various cities and festivals in China. Even a European country is unlikely to invite 30 German plays in six years.
Berlin Theatre Festival logo
Currie: This year's "Berlin Theatre Festival in China" invited the finalists of the 2018 Berlin Theatre Festival, what are the characteristics of the 2018 Theatre Festival, and what changes will be made in 2019?
Margrethe Affoncelle: A lot of the European plays we saw in 2018 were about immigration. Another hot topic is to explore what the positioning of the theater is, how to rediscover the function of the theater as a place reflecting social reality, the role of the theater in social life, and what to do.
The 2019 Berlin Theatre Festival finalist "Boarding School" photography | Birgit Hupfeld
The dramatic picture of Germany as a whole is becoming more and more diverse, and there are many new developments in the way of directing. At present, directors pay more attention to the aesthetic form of the stage than to the performance, and do not emphasize the performance charm of individual artists and the artistry of individual performances, especially the new generation of artists. The overall performance of the creative team is the main goal pursued by the director, and the overall scene of the stage is more important.
New rules for the Berlin Theatre Festival – half of the shortlisted directors next year must be women
Currie: Starting in 2020, for at least two years, half of the directors of the finalists of the Berlin Theater Festival should be women. Why is there such a decision?
Yonne Biedenholzell: In the 56-year history of the Berlin Theater Festival, more than 300 directors have been shortlisted, of which only 27 are women, only 11.7%, and this figure says it all.
Every year, when the judging committee of the theater festival meets, the final discussion of ten selected works is finally discussed, and then everyone will say that there are still very few female directors this time. The new arrangement was originally proposed by a female judge who suggested setting an unofficial gender ratio, but we found that this ratio did not work, so we finally determined a hard number. There are negative voices that believe that this limits the freedom of theatrical creation.
Jury of the Berlin Theatre Festival Photography | Iko Freese / DRAMA Berlin
We counted that 60% of theatre directors in German-speaking countries are male and 40% are female. Now that we are in an era of drastic change, I sincerely hope to promote the theater to give women directors more rights and opportunities to make big productions when planning theatrical performances. We want to be able to spark sustained change, and two years may not be enough.
Margrethe Affonceller: 50% is very difficult to achieve. But I think it's an official signal that the repertoire of female directors is as important as that of male directors, that women have the same rights, the same opportunities, that they have the same status in the theatre market.
Machines become the core, people are "squeezed out" of the stage?
Margrethe Affonzelle: "Machine Theater" is often discussed in German-speaking countries. The stage of Ulrich Rashe, the director of Wojcek, uses the machine as the core of the director's approach, and all the actors perform on the machine. In addition to the rotating discs in Wojcek, there will also be treadmills, rolling mills, and so on. The director has also developed a variety of different models to apply to the performance.
Wojcek directed by Ulrich Rascher | photography Sandra Then
The machine in "Wojcek" is equivalent to setting up a certain rhythm, which is transmitted to the actor's body, affecting their breathing, and will affect the actor's performance of speaking lines. We see that the actor's action is actually relatively single, there is not much change, nothing more than going forward, going backwards, and walking backwards. Their costumes are also basically uniform, all black. The actors are all on the turntable, man and machine form a kind of competition, the freedom of the actors is restricted, and only walking and talking are left. The movement is limited, the actor's expression is very exaggerated, and if they try to represent the character, their lines are pronounced more intensely and prominently.
Vojcek
We are very interested in machines, to know how machines work, what functions they have, what effects they have, and what kind of expression they have on stage. There are many kinds of relationships between humans and machines, and there are theaters that make a robot according to a real person, and I communicate with his simulated robot on stage. There was a Korean director who put some rice cookers on the table and talked to each other through the sounds they made through their electronic functions.
Ulrich Raschel's version of Wojcek and the actor who performed it won the award. Language is the subject of the stage, the machine is only a means to complete the end, it enables the actor to exert expressiveness, interpret the role, which is a new and valuable way of presentation.
Ke Li: Professor Li Yinan talked about how to understand machine theater from the perspective of traditional Chinese drama?
Li Yinan: The machine theater's treatment of performers is to remove the psychological depth of the characters. The performance of the so-called psychologically profound man is a product of the bourgeoisie under the influence of the European Enlightenment, especially in the 19th century, which became the mainstream of European theater. Many theatrical styles and genres before and after that did not take psychological realism for granted as a pursuit of theatrical performance.
Machine theater is very much about the physical skills of the actors, and these artists are directly or indirectly inspired by Asian theater. Chinese theater aesthetics and traditional philosophical ideas have a lot in common, and the purpose of opera actors practicing from an early age is to better control themselves, just like manipulating a tool, letting the limbs take off the auxiliary tools and make puppet-like movements. Why would a person simulate a puppet on stage? It is out of human humility.
Through repeated practice, it is a measure of the performance skills of a Chinese opera actor. The ancient Chinese did not believe that the essence of man was fixed and unchanging, and that man had a so-called fixed ontology, which was the invention of European Enlightenment thinkers, and based on this, the drama of Western realism could stand firm. Chinese believe that man is flexible, constantly changing and developing, such as the cycle of the four seasons, metabolism, and is in eternal development. How to embody the vivid and vivid people? Man strives to forge himself with humility, tending to the way of heaven. Chinese opera action is based on the circle as the criterion, the circle is the way of heaven, and the movement and sound cavity both simulate the circle, which is considered to be in line with the laws of all things in the universe. So I think that Chinese opera in this sense, perhaps can be said to be a kind of machine theater, the operation of machinery should conform to the law of the operation of the universe, the purpose of machine theater is to turn people into a kind of "machine", and to turn machine cleverness into a law-abiding person to a higher level, that is, the artist.
A conversation around the topic of "Machine Theater"
Currie: Influenced by emerging media and the application of new technologies, actors as entities slowly disappear, and stage performance plays a major role, is there still a need for actors to exist, or what else do actors play?
Li Yinan: Now the training of theater actors is more problematic, and our performance system was established by Soviet experts in the 1950s. Now when you see many plays in state-owned theaters, you will feel that there are very few who really achieve psychological realism, and it is easy to overdo it. This is related to the traditional way of expressing emotions Chinese, because traditional Chinese used to show emotions with a symbolic thing, and when communicating, it has been stylized and symbolized. Starting from such a tradition, it is laborious to imitate Western psychological realism, so our drama training is not as good as starting from skill, practicing the body flexibly, and using opera to train our actors to do technical processing, maybe our theater and performance will be more interesting.
Photo courtesy of the dialogue scene| Goethe-Institut (China)
Wen | naïve
This article was published in the C5 edition of Beijing Youth Daily on June 21, 2019
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