aaa

Hi everyone, my name is Chen Yedong. I’m very glad to be here to hear and learn from you and share what I have.

Now I am working for a New York off-broadway theatre. 

## 1

My presentation today will focus on the Russian theatrical theorist Konstantin Stanislavsky and the theatrical communication that centered on him between Russia, Broadway in New York America and Yan’an China. I delimit the project specifically since 1939 when Stanislavsky and his system was first introduced in Yan’an, until Mao’s talk in 1942, and the startup of the 秧歌剧 movement in 1943. 

I will show how Stanislavsky was introduced and canonized in the Lu Xun Academy of Arts, 鲁艺, in Yan’an, not directly from Russia but from the leftwing theatre movement on Broadway, New York. I will also discuss the anxiety and many problems the specific theatrical genre spoken drama 话剧 encountered in Yan’an at that time. Then I will make a brief comparison of the text of the System with the performative technics that were devised by Republican theorists and practitioners like Hong Shen, showing how the latter’s aim at stimulating the audience, social management, war mobilization, etc. was abandoned at Luyi with their introduction of Stanislavsky in pursuit of expertization 专门化 and artistic advancement “提高.” This trend was later vehemently criticized by Mao in his Yan’an talk. After Mao’s talk, the whole reforming project of Chinese theatre which started off, broadly saying, from the New Youth magazine, went on a different route in communist Yan’an, by which I refer to the route of 新歌剧, 秧歌剧 and consequently 样板戏. In this sense, the short period in Yan’an between 1939 and 1942, when artists in Luyi were painstakingly studying Stanislavsky and his system, was a turning point for the arts of the communist party.

## 2

Before 1938, the year when Stanislavsky died, his name was only sporadically mentioned in Chinese publications and always mentioned as a staff member of the Moscow Arts Theatre. (PPT List) In these works, MAT is the absolute central point yet Stanislavsky is only a reference in passing. A systematic translation of S’s monograph /An Actor Prepares/ 演员自我修养 began in late1938 after Stanislavsky died. The magazine 剧场艺术 Theatre Arts first published Stanislavsky’s obituary and many memorial articles and then serialized Shumao and Shizhi’s abridged Russian-based translation of /An Actor Prepares/ from 1938 through June 1939. 

While Theatre Arts was serializing /An Actor Prepares/, texts of the /system/ traveled through two other ways into Yan’an and immediately got applied in practice and canonized as the textbook at Luyi. (In this sense, the communist artists were the first to apply Stanislavsky’s work in China.)

Texts I am referring here contained:

1. Two essays— “The Work of the Actor” and “Principles of Director”— respectively written by Iosif Matveevich Rapoport and Boris Zakhava. These two essays were co-translated in April 1940 by Tian Lan and Cao Baohua from the American magazine /The Art Workshop/, combined into a book called /A Course in Performance/ 演剧教程, and was immediately published by Luyi as the textbook for its theatre department. In addition, as recalled by Hu Danfei, then a graduate from Luyi, the two essays had already been used in acting training around 1939. 

2. The first eight chapters of /An Actor Prepares/ by Stanislavsky. 

In late 1940, 水华 brought to Yan’an eight chapters out of a then ongoing translating project collaborated by 郑君里 and 章敏 from the 1936 English version of /AAP/.

A few chapters of the above mentioned Shizhi-Shumao translation also got into Yan’an through 张庚. (The second to the fourth and part of the fifth chapter.)

So in all, before 1942, no more than the first eight chapters of /An Actor Prepares/ were accessible in Yan’an. 

The choice of, rather than Stanislavsky’s original text, the two essays directs our attention the magazine Theatre Workshop and the American lest-wing theatre movement on Broadway in the 1930s.

## 3

A trace of Stanislavsky’s spreading history tells us that the System was initially introduced into Broadway to help enhance the artistic professionalism and realistic nature of their productions. In the so-called “fervent years,” the Communist Party of America struggled to support and organize its own theatre groups in order to produce Marxist plays that would agitate the audiences and arouse political actions. However, the movement failed to attract New York spectators due to the too strong ideological propensity of the productions. Under this circumstance—certainly there were other historical coincidence like MAT’s tour in America—some of the enterprises, such as the Theatre Union, the Group Theatre, etc., introduced the Stanislavsky system into their actor training curriculum and their commercial productions in order to render the theatre more artistically professional and ultimately more attractive.

Compared to living newspapers and short agitprops—the two conventional communist theatrical forms—serious drama productions deploying the System were conspicuously more becoming to Broadway’s taste. Facing scarcity both in finance—due to the Depression as well as the unpleasant box-office—and in script repertory, a recourse in acing techniques turned out to be one of the few, if not the only, options for production improvement. Therefore, a number of leftist theatres on Broadway appealed to Stanislavsky and the system aiming at a realistic life reflexion to attract the proletarian who go to a Broadway theatre for entertainment on Saturday night or Sunday afternoon. The magazine Theatre Workshop, one of the official periodicals of the federation New Theatre League, was as well one of the Russia fans. The editors once defended this preference by saying:

> …much of our material emanated from the Soviet Union… it must be apparent… that the contemporary theatre looks to Moscow today /for artistic leadership/ just as, until but a very few years ago, the entire world flocked to Paris as the center of the best work in the graphic arts” (1936, 80).

The purpose of introducing the System into Luyi was similar: to expertise, professionalize and artistic-ize the spoken drama which then was mired in crisis of constant personnel reassignment and inadequate artistic competence vis-a-vis traditional operas and the new born modern opera. 

I will briefly touch on this point for time’s sake. Based on the timeline I am showing here we can get a sense how spoken drama 话剧, which was seen as a new, non-national form with a hue of modernity, and which was conceived capable of assisting reforming the old, national theatrical form, was never more marginalized, because of Luyi’s full efforts in producing modern operas like /Songhuajiangshang/ and traditional Peking Opera.

The advancement-aimed introduction of the system was also an immediate result of the debate around national that occurred at that time. Intellectuals in Yan’an around 1939,1940 were quite explicit in upholding “to advance.” For exmample, He Qifang wrote straightforwardly in 1939: “I think European literature is more progressive than Chinese old literature and native literature, so the continuous growth of new literature should above all imbibe this healthier, fresher and richer nutrition.” His words on the one hand testify to a foreign-friendly environment during that period, and on the other hand indicate a need for an advanced guidance in literature and arts. In terms of spoken drama, there were no other options for the guidance but the system.

Different forces converged together at the end of the 1930s and led to the canonization of the System. All these forces pointed to the professionalism and a higher artistic standard of spoken drama.

## 4

But what advancement did the system bring to Yan’an and what got lost as result of this pursuit of artistic advancement? We should now turn to Hong Shen whose work on acting technics epitomized the fruit of privious theatre reform and see what is the difference between Hong and the system.

A reading of Hong Shen’s oeuvre, in particular /Basics of A Drama Director/ 戏剧导演的初步知识 /Techniques of Acting for Film and Drama/ 电影戏剧表演术, shows that Hong, by devising a whole set of acting mechanisms, meant to deploy theatre as a tool of social management and mass mobilization serving the war.

I don’t have time to delve into this but I’ll read a quote to give a basic idea:

> “Performance is nothing but to stimulate the vision and hearing of the audience; but it does fail to be named performance when to stimulate recklessly. Performance has to have a purpose: it has to grant the audience, after watching the performance, a sufficient knowledge of life; it has to guide the audience to formulate an opinion and express an attitude towards life—the part represented by the story; it has to let the audience empathize with and comprehend the people who have been shaped and fashioned by environment and society and who are currently under exploitation and painfully struggling, and hence obtain a right estimation and conclusion… Performance also has to be of methods: it behooves an actor to take a full charge of his body, to apply muscles of each of his body rationally, practice his movements and voice as he wills” (109-111).

You can see in these pictures, for example, how Hong’s mechanism works. If you wanna perform… you have to… 

Hong inherited from traditional Chinese operas the idea of movement formulas but based all acting paradigms on certain scientific knowledges of psychology, linguistics, physiology, etc.

The set of mobilizing mechanism was abandoned at Luyi in Yan'an upon the introduction and canonization of the Stanislavsky system. For example, Rapoport’s “The Art of Acting” outlined notes on an actor’s self-concentration of attention, the inner life and motive forces of the character, and a section on “public solitude.” Zakhava called in his piece for unquestionable honesty, integrity and inner justification for every moment on stage. We can see that a lot of things Hong had called for were changed. The spectator centered theater was switched to an actor-center one. The actor needs to reproduce an emotion not by following a paradigm and strike a physical posture but by recalling a similar emotional experience from his own past so the emotion reproduced would make the actor live his part. Guided by this principle, the acting training came to, first, depend totally on an actor’s mental work on his own. 

Zhang Shuihua’s recollection is extremely revealing at this point. He says: 

> Textbooks of Yan’an Luyi at that time chiefly included A Course in Performance… and Stanislavsky’s An Actor Prepares… we… conducted actor training based on these [materials], practicing /shenyou/ 神游 and working our imagination out.” 

Zhang uses shenyou—wandering in mind, a term dating back to the Taoist classic Liezi—to describe what the rehearsal looked like in Yan’an at that time. It on the one hand vividly demonstrates the system's emphasis on an actor’s resort for expression approaches into his own experience and imagination, and on the other hand shows how disparate the method is from Hong Shen’s definition of theatre as a direct mimesis, “an interpretation, record and reflection of life… by a few impersonators’ imitating” (1937, 1).