The peasants' theatre experiment in Ding Xian county (1932-1937).
详细信息
- 作者：Sun ; William Huizhu.
- 学历：Doctor
- 年：1990
- 导师：Schechner,Richard,eadvisor
- 毕业院校：New York University
- CBH：9113053
- Country：USA
- 语种：English
- FileSize：13844033
- Pages：313
文摘
The Ding Xian theatre experiment was a part of Chinas mass education movement sponsored by Americans including the Rockefeller family. The experiment was led by Xiong Foxi,once a student of Brender Matthews at Columbia University and then a leading playwright and theatre educator in China before he went to Ding Xian,a social laboratory of MEM in the 30s. Ding Xian had a strong tradition of yangge,a stylized sung drama performed at annual festivals and temple fairs. But Xiong and his colleagues showed peasants realistic social problem drama. The peasants not only loved it but soon organized village troupes to do it themselves. In learning and doing the new theatre,they brought with them their old habits cultivated in open-air festivals of sung drama. The most important was "breaking the curtain line." With no idea of the "fourth wall" demarcating performers and audience,fiction and reality,peasant spectators often spontaneously joined a performance in progress about their life performed by their fellow villagers. Xiong,taking advantage of the peasants frame-vagueness,wrote and directed "open-air masses plays" and designed special open-air theatres to facilitate massive audience participation for the village troupes. Coinciding with such Western experimenters as Meyerhold and Reinhardt,this environmental production mode mainly resulted from the peasants spontaneity and the professionals adjustment to their needs. This study traces how spoken drama replaced sung drama--then evolved into environmental theatre incorporating traditional styles yet presenting new ideas. It explores why such radical changes took place in the underdeveloped villages. It also sheds some light on contemporary theatre experimenters problem with audience participation: true audience participation occurs during audience-oriented performances done by performers akin to their audience.