Meng Jinghui has been the banner of China's "avant-garde drama" for nearly two decades. There are doubters from time to time, but "the convertible car does not pay attention to the sound of the roadside", and the voice criticizing Meng Jinghui's "non-avant-garde" and "pseudo-avant-garde" also means that people not only regard him as the banner of experimental drama, but also as the banner of mainstream Chinese contemporary drama. "Rhinoceros in Love", "Two Dogs' Life Opinions", "A Letter from a Strange Woman" and other extraordinary commercial successes, "Black Cat Troupe" and "Empty Flower Group" and other crews busy national tour performances, Hive Theater, Wuzhen Drama Festival, Beijing International Youth Drama Festival, Hangzhou Drama Festival, Shenzhen Contemporary Drama Biennale, Aranya Drama Festival and other domestic cutting-edge contemporary theater positions, Meng Jinghui is the "only" in the field of domestic contemporary theater and cannot be replaced.
As a result, "Meng Jinghui" has also become an adjective. "This play is too Meng Jinghui", the evaluation seems to have never changed, just as Meng Jinghui himself seems to have never changed. What is the definition of "Meng's aesthetics"? Although many theater lovers started from "Rhinoceros in Love", they naturally have a set of pictures in their minds that belong to "Meng Jinghui" - but are these pictures Meng Jinghui in the early 20th century, or Meng Jinghui now?
Stills from Rhinoceros in Love
With the 1999 premiere of "Rhino in Love" creating a commercial miracle and the establishment of the Beijing Hive Theater for the residency of "Rhinoceros in Love" in 2008 as two time nodes, the position of "Meng Jinghui" is different. Before 1999, he was the master of China's avant-garde experimental drama of the 1990s, but also "one"; after Rhinoceros in Love, he was the most successful theater director in China's commercial achievements, gaining mainstream fame. After 2008, he truly became the banner of Chinese contemporary drama, and his works continued to be exported, while laying countless positions for Chinese contemporary theater and shading generations of young dramatists.
More importantly, the establishment of the "home" of the Hive Theater has allowed old works to be conditionally remade, and even rearranged many times. "Rhinoceros in Love" can be divided into 4-5 versions regardless of actor iteration, the directorial form alone; "Bed bugs" is now the third iteration of the version, and "Meng's Aesthetics" has thus extravagantly "multi-point trial and error" in the rearrangement and reorganization of previous crew members, quietly evolving and upgrading. The small theater does experiments, the big theater harvests the results, and for more than ten years, while those unchanged "Meng Jinghui", the keen audience must be able to feel the change of a stage vocabulary.
On October 15, the opening drama of the 8th Wuzhen Drama Festival, Meng Jinghui directed the premiere of "Red and Black", which is the 2018 high-profile and controversial "Tea House", and after the premiere of "Song of the Sad Cafe" at the 2021 Aranya Theatre Festival, Meng Jinghui's latest grand theater tour work. Apparently, after the storm of criticism during the performance of "The Tea house", the waves caused by "The Red and the Black" were much calmer; a certain "tiredness" spread in the hearts of the audience and the critics - "no surprises, no changes", and more "offense".
Stills from "The Teahouse"
There is no need to do any more desperate confrontation with such a complete existing form as "Tea House", and "Red and Black", which freely blooms "Meng's aesthetics", unexpectedly shows a pure authorial style, which is no different from all of Meng Jinghui's small theater works in recent years, like an aesthetic demonstration: if "Meng's aesthetics" has indeed undergone metamorphosis and transformation, and "Red and Black" is the warmest and firmest kind of conviction after the process of confusion and exploration.
01
"Meng aesthetics", there are countless interpretations
Meng Jinghui's master's thesis at the Central Academy of Drama is entitled "On the Directing Art of Meyerhold", and past researchers believe that "Meng Jinghui's Aesthetic Style" is the inheritance of three aspects of Meyerhold's directorial style: first, the persistence and development of the stage hypotheticality; second, the pungent irony and criticism of the text; and third, the "organic modeling technique" of actor's physical expression (Xue Jian, "On Meng Jinghui's Acceptance and Transcendence of Meyerhold's Drama Theory"). These three points summarize the audience's basic impression of Meng Jinghui's work: a conceptual stage completely detached from the realist reality, all scenes are based on conceptual metaphors and the assumption of characters; deconstruction, parody, collage, absurdity, out-of-line, wanton, subversive and hilarious text presentation; yelling, collective dance, bungee jumping, morbidly distorted actor's body expression, "group dance" style of singing team and stage atmosphere - along with these intuitive "Meng's pictures", the same will be referred to as the phrase "rough", or " Raw".
This kind of coarseness is the roughness of the chaos of the surging tide of the commodity economy in the 1990s, the coarseness that has been crushed by fixed aesthetic standards, and the roughness of the transitional stage of the urbanization process. This coarseness is fundamentally close to the survival of the so-called "avant-garde spirit": integrity and unity are illusions, and the incompleteness and non-conversion after destruction are the undertones of resistance.
Stills from "The Song of the Sad Cafe"
Obviously, the remarkable change in "Meng's aesthetics" in the past decade is the disappearance of this "roughness". The aesthetic "refinement" of Meng Jinghui's current works is the root of his accusations of "deviating from the vanguard".
Today's Meng Jinghui has obviously taken refuge: with the emerging city as the creative base, the constant influx of fresh blood surges the breath of the city, and in the continuous rehearsal, his works have become a perfect "urbanization" model, an amplified writing of postmodernity in the contemporary urban life state. With the commercialization of the pursuit of personal aesthetics, Meng Jinghui's stage is getting closer and closer to the forefront of stage performances, constantly crossing borders, and at the same time, he completely embraces urbanization internally - he is no longer just a Beijing director, but a director belonging to the city: the elements of his works rooted in the Beijing region and born out of the "capital" are gradually generalized.
This evolution of "urbanization" means, on the surface, "rich" in the first place: the hospital bed that fills the stage with two revolvers and black and white eyes, the amazing steel wheel in "The Tea House", the almost brutal and barbaric steel bracket space in "Red and Black", the huge finger sculpture in "Song of the Sad Cafe"... At the same time, the lighting design is exquisite and aesthetic, and high-specification multimedia, real-time images and other technical means are part of the commercial appeal of the work.
Stills from "The Red and the Black"
Now Meng Jinghui's consistent unrealistic hypothetical stage is no longer satisfied with simplicity and freehand, and his stage design collaborator Zhang Wu prefers to use sublime elements such as reinforced cement and magnificent giants to make the stage "more is more", with the purpose of filling all the space and creating an unprecedented sense of oppression. The stage itself becomes a metaphorical world, and the hypothetical implementation of the stage is no longer "a space has innumerable explanations", but tends to a pluralistic chaos of "countless spaces composing countless interpretations".
The actors took off their usual clothes in daily life, and gradually moved away from the strange contemporary fashion, but implemented a set of modern but difficult to say contemporary styling styles with a strong personal aesthetic paradigm: regardless of the background of the work, the actors always wore large-size dark blazers with intricate design and neo-Gothic style, with white shirts or white dresses, and always maintained punk underts and black leather boots; the common "country bungee" and "collective dance" in the past were brought by the Black Cat Troupe and Zhang Ziqi's crew. Instead of the content of modern dance and contemporary body theater used in the immersive works, the former grounded "dance of demons" has evolved into a body exploration and sculpted body language from the white space of the art museum.
02
Not to be chosen by the audience, but to choose the audience
But "rich", a more "exquisite" stage, more delicate actor training, and deeper commercial development are definitely not the whole of Meng Jinghui's "urbanization". What the audience intuitively feels is the increasing madness of Meng Jinghui's actors on the stage, and the increasingly extreme and self-consumption expressed by the actors - the "modern urban disease" that is undisguised and refuses to be treated.
The actor's line expression has become "roaring", and the actors do not even have many opportunities to line up and keep static to recite the confession. The audience, who was frightened by the "roar" of the actors who spread throughout the whole scene and never stopped, angrily rebuked "Meng Jinghui is not crazy, the whole audience is roaring" on the Douban page of "The Sun and temple", and all the actors in the first act of "The Tea House" deliberately did not wear headsets to shout their lines, and even triggered the anecdote that the actor was seen by the audience the next day to go to the pharmacy to buy throat lozenges.
The popularity of "roar" means that the director's command of the actor goes to the extreme of "emotion", "roar" is only the appearance of the actor's emotions in an extreme state of collapse at all times, the disappearance of the text and the dominance of emotions are the deep logic behind it: any drama is reduced to twisted extreme emotions in rehearsal, every line of lines is interpreted as the despair of emotions that cannot find an outlet, and every character is infected with the hopeless "modern urban disease" and indulges in it.
The further involvement of rock music and electronic music is more dominant than the popular songs of Zhang Guangtian in "Rhinoceros in Love": "The Song of the Sad Cafe" would be unimaginable without music, and represented by "Good People in Sichuan", the actor's "singing" was reduced to an instrument and emotional expression, and no one cared about the lyrics - just as few people cared about the text of Meng Jinghui's plays.
Stills from "The Good Man of Sichuan"
This does not mean that the text is weak: in fact, Meng Jinghui is dabbling in more serious topics, challenging profound literary masterpieces, and the text of the play is increasingly philosophical and clear in life with the blessing of foreign textual compositions (such as the theatrical composition from Germany, Sebastian Caesar) - all the evaluations of Meng Jinghui's "not profound", "superficial" and "superficial" are not taken into account.
However, these evaluations are reasonable: after all, the actors can't hear the lines clearly in the "roar", the lines are not expressed according to normal plot logic and character emotions, the narrative is interrupted by large monologues and foreign texts constructed, the music, limbs, and rituals continue to attack the text, the text of the play is blurred, the narrative component is canceled in multiple dimensions, so that the audience can often only have an impression of "superficial" things, and the ingenuity of the text is put into the garden where the path is forked, and only the prepared audience can pick it up The audience, who is directly captured by the emotional stage presentation, is caught in a vortex of sensory stimulation round after round, in an irrational frenzy or addicted, or disgusted, or incomprehensible—
The audience is chosen in turn: if the audience does not choose to actively integrate, then the audience will be abandoned. In the past decade, Meng Jinghui's target audience has also changed with Meng Jinghui's "urbanization", and the urban white-collar workers and middle class have gradually occupied the territory that belonged to the literary and artistic youth. This subconscious choice of the audience means that the "Meng aesthetic" sees the ultimate direction: not only embracing urbanization, but also no longer hesitating, no longer attached to the past - the idealistic bitterness that always spreads in the work with emotion as the carrier has finally been alleviated to a certain extent.
03
"Extreme" is a kind of happiness for the artist
Wuzhen's performance of "Red and Black" (including "Song of the Sad Cafe", which premiered at the Aranya Theatre Festival), may be a landmark event in the stereotype of "Urbanization Meng's Aesthetics": in the past, "Alive", "Four Dreams of Linchuan", "Tea House" and other large theater works, it is also always connecting the "Meng Jinghui Drama Universe", showing the successful traces of past classic works, trying to "seek perfection", finding a balance between personal style and general perception, and still hovering between pre-urbanization and urbanization, confused, trying to both, and "Red and Black", It is purely a work of Meng Jinghui's urbanization vocabulary.
The crew of Meng Jinghui's "Murder in the Hanging Garden", who is responsible for performing "The Red and the Black", regards the coliseum as a daily experiment of the small theater, and what the "empty flower group" does in the small theater usually does, so what it still does in front of the grand theatre and the classic masterpiece text - in the face of a "1830 year" full of historical positivism, Meng Jinghui has no scruples about incorporating it into the pure self-"erotic" reading, and no longer says that he is carrying out the "Meng aesthetics" in the assembly line of industrial production as before As creators of the same age gradually fall into the dilemma of repetition of techniques and single expressions, Meng Jinghui can continue to refine his technique and style — even if the direction is extreme, extreme, and more extreme.
Stills from Murder in the Hanging Gardens
The method and goal are so clear, what about the assembly line?
Yu Lian, played by Zhang Yicheng, finally warmly chose to exchange his life for the satisfaction of lust, and Meng Jinghui confirmed the belief in "Meng's aesthetics" and "urbanization" after the maturity of "Meng's aesthetics" and "urbanization" with a large theater work. Meng Jinghui is already "synonymous" with Contemporary Chinese drama, and "Meng's Aesthetics" is also synonymous with contemporary urban aesthetics. He may no longer be so "rough" and no longer "experimental", but it has matured, it is convincing, it is incomparably firm, it is no longer hesitant.
"Extreme" is a blessing for artists. Perhaps In "The Red and the Black", Meng Jinghui, while finding the "cruel truth" of Stendhal's pen, also encountered the "happiness that belongs to a few people".