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Interview with Dr. Li Yinan

Theatre and the Cold War; theatre as a site of the rivalry between East and West.

Learn how theatre and globalization have affected each other over the past century, and how to conduct your own research on global theatre histories.

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教学方

Christopher Balme
Professor

脚本

Li Yinan, you're a lecturer at the Central Academy of Drama in Beijing.

There is a statue of Stanislavski outside the new campus of the Central Academy.

Why is there a statue of a Russian theater director at a Chinese theater academy?

>> The importance of Stanislavski has something to do with the importance of

the Soviet Union at the beginning of the so-called new China history.

And our academy, the Central Academy of Drama,

was also established in the year 1950.

From the very beginning of the new China.

And, it has the position or importance

of being part of the propaganda organ of the state.

So it is important to introduce the whole method of the Soviet Union way into China.

So, at the very beginning a lot of other Soviet Union experts

were also invited into our academy.

And they helped us to establish the academy.

So from then, the so-called Stanislavski method became

also like a dogma in our academy.

The method has a lot of relationship with realism.

But it is not from the 50s that China got involved with

the so-called theater realism.

It started a lot earlier than that.

It's from the very beginning of the 20th century when some

Chinese intellectuals wanted to use a new form of spoken drama.

They tried to introduce that into China and

used that as a tool to propagate the so-called new ideas.

The western new concepts in China.

>> Would you say that there's been a, there's a special kind of

Chinese approach to using these kinds of methods of realistic acting?

I'm thinking of perhaps a kind of a fusion between realism and

more stylized forms of theater that one does associate with China?

>> Educators found problems to

merge the two styles of theater acting together.

And they did a lot of experiments.

And there's also some mixture of the two forms, the stylized ones and

the so- called psychological realistic ones.

They began to merge together.

But the mixture was not perfect.

They're sometimes almost embarrassing to watch.

Because it's not genuinely realistic.

And it also changed the whole aesthetics of the traditional ones.

The traditional ones use a lot of the

so-called stage theatricality, and everything has a symbolic meaning.

If you destroy that.

If there's a lot of objects, a lot of materials onstage, you can't just do that.

Out perfect aesthetics onstage.

So at the very beginning, there's a problem.

And also in the 50s when the so-called Soviet

experts, theater experts, came to our academy to teach

the new method of the genuine realistic acting.

They also found some resistance from the old

Chinese theater professors, theater professionals.

Because they think the old form of Chinese acting also has a lot of

beautiful things and they're reluctant to do, to give up that for the new form.

>> So there is a, in this process of exchange,

shall we say, between the Soviet Union and China,

there were, conflicts, there was friction.

In these exchanges?

>> Yeah.

And part of that is because of the aesthetic conflicts.

And part of that was also because of the arrogant attitude from

the experts because Soviet Union used to have strong power over China.

And they try to control everything.

They think we represent a new form of revolution, new form of society.

And the old aesthetics of Chinese opera

also belong to the past, belong to the old society.

And if you want to do the revolution, you should get rid of that.

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