Your past is our future
Mar. 5th, 2008 12:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusOn March 13th, 1935, Bertolt Brecht travelled from Copenhagen (where he was hiding from the Nazis) to Moscow. Between March 23rd and 28th Mei Lanfang, a Beijing Opera dan (an actor specialised in feminine roles), was playing a series of shows at the Moscow Concert Hall, singing, acting and dancing representations of well-known beauties: "the righteous, quick-witted, and rebellious Zhao Yanrong, the miserable and self-pitying court lady Yang Yuhuan, the kind-hearted, constant and self-sacrificing Yu Ji". Brecht was transformed by what he saw, and, thanks to the impact of his acting on Brecht's thinking about theatre, Lanfang changed Western theatre.
"In the physically grubby Moscow theaters of the twenties and early thirties," writes John Fuegi in Brecht and Company, "Meyerhold, Stanislavsky, and Tairov rubbed shoulders with Mei la-Fan from China, Piscator, Gordon Craig from England, French writer André Malraux, and a host of Americans including Joseph Losey, Hallie Flanagan, Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg, and Stella Adler -- all visibly dazzled by what they saw and heard." On this trip Brecht also met film director Eisenstein -- master of epic non-naturalism and what Brecht would later call the "quotable gesture" -- and the literary critic Viktor Shklovsky, who framed the concept of ostranenia, or making-strange. These encounters, made in the still-progressive Soviet Union, would prove crucial turning points not just for Brecht but for art in the West. It was the moment when two collective cultures (communism and traditional Chinese culture) impacted on Western individualism -- apparently the final state of human history, the convergent outcome of all modernity -- and became its future.
To give you a brief, silent impression of what this decisive encounter must have been like, here's the film Eisenstein shot of Lanfang in 1935:
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And here's a much later film of Lanfang playing a female role in Peony Pavilion, in colour and with sound:
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What struck Brecht is probably also what strikes us today: the undisguised artifice of the acting. It's not just that this is a man playing a woman, or that the vocal mannerisms sound so strange to our ears. It's not just the fact that Mei Lanfang could become a woman whether or not he was transformed by elaborate makeup and costumes, just by changing his movements. There were also different theatrical conventions to absorb -- the fact that instead of getting swept towards identification, tears, catharsis, sorrow and pity (as Aristotle put it), the audience at the Beijing Opera will interrupt even the saddest moments to shout the actor's name and remind everyone that it's a performance, or that the whole house stays lit (rather than plunging "some in darkness, the others light", as Brecht put it in The Threepenny Opera), or that Beijing Opera, like kabuki, consists not of unified plots building to a climax, but a series of episodes which can be chopped up and presented on their own.
Above all, there was the absence of the fourth wall illusion, the actors' constant awareness of the audience, the audience's awareness of the play, visible stagehands, the communication of emotion through the structure of movement, the domination of convention over innovation and collectivity over individuality.
When Brecht got back to Europe he combined the revelations he'd experienced watching Lanfang with ideas of estrangment he'd gleaned from Shklovsky. He wrote an essay entitled "Verfremdungseffekte in der chinesischen Schauspielkunst”; Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting. Published in the winter of 1936 in the London review Life and Letters, it was the first appearance of the famous Brechtian "alienation effect", and it came out of the “strangeness” (Befremdung) Brecht felt as he watched Lanfang in Moscow.
Of course, it's always possible that what was "defamiliarization" for Brecht was very familiar indeed to the Chinese. "Was it ethnocentric for Brecht to assume that the feeling of strangeness he experienced watching Mei Lanfang was intended by Mei?" asks Douglas Robinson in The Spatiotemporal Dialectic of Estrangement. "Can one talk about the Verfremsdungeffkt at all without generalizing from audience response to artist intention, or from artist intention to audience response?"
Brecht was certainly using the Chinese theatre as a stick to beat lazy Western actors and audiences with -- and therefore being "ethnocentric" in the way the Zen cooking in the film How to Cook Your Life is; like chef Edward Espe Brown, Brecht had work to do tackling the ills of the West, and Chinese theatre -- seen through the refracting prism of Russian Formalism -- was a useful alternative world.
"Only those familiar with - or who have in mind - the typical, superficial creations of Western actors," Brecht wrote, "who create their characters from lots of tiny nervous traits of little significance, more or less private in origin and devoid of any typical quality, will find it impossible to imagine that modifications in gestures can inspire fundamental innovations in the process of creating a character. The Chinese show not only the behaviour of people, but also the behaviour of the actors. They show how the actors, in their manner, perform the gestures of the people. For the actors translate the language of daily life into their own language. Watching a Chinese actor, one sees no fewer than three people simultaneously: one presenting and two being presented."
But, as Georges Banu points out, the Lanfang performance was only the flashpoint for formalist-realist arguments the West -- and Russia -- were already debating. Brecht later said that "the new German theatre developed the technique of distanciation in complete independence, without submitting in the least to the influence of Asian dramatic art". Meanwhile, in Moscow the progressive theatrical audience secretly saw Lanfang's style as a triumph for the formalist ideas of the early Soviet Union and a defeat for the socialist realism school already beginning to win favour under Stalin.
"Mei Lanfang arrived with his opera troupe in Moscow in March, 1935, at a critical moment for Soviet art and theater," writes Haun Saussy in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture review, "the beginnings of the imposition of an orthodoxy of "socialist realism" and the condemnation of such avant-garde movements as Formalism and Futurism. The reactions of the Soviet theater intelligentsia to Mei's performances, recorded at the time, show that their interpretation of Chinese theater made of it a covert means of defending such Formalist ideas as "defamiliarization" and the autonomy of art. Bertolt Brecht's theory of the "alienation-effect" in performance, developed at this moment, draws on both Mei's example and the Formalist precedent."
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"The Russian interpretation of Mei as a Formalist artist--or at least as Formalism's happiest example--pairs strangely with the critique of classical Chinese theater in China some two decades before Mei's voyage to Moscow. That critique had condemned the classical theater as a relic of an earlier stage of literary evolution. Classical theater was branded as being, among other sins, "formalist," that is, of failing to imitate prosaic reality as a proper modern genre of art should. The very techniques that so impressed Russian audiences by their non-representational modernity had been ridiculed by Chinese modernists for their failure to resemble real life."
Saussy concludes that we need to define what we mean by "modernity" -- a question that comes up often here on Click Opera too, especially when the West's avant garde has more in common with other cultures' antiquity than their modernity. The idea that the future of the West might be the past of the East still freaks us out as much as it excited Brecht back in 1935 in Moscow.
"In the physically grubby Moscow theaters of the twenties and early thirties," writes John Fuegi in Brecht and Company, "Meyerhold, Stanislavsky, and Tairov rubbed shoulders with Mei la-Fan from China, Piscator, Gordon Craig from England, French writer André Malraux, and a host of Americans including Joseph Losey, Hallie Flanagan, Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg, and Stella Adler -- all visibly dazzled by what they saw and heard." On this trip Brecht also met film director Eisenstein -- master of epic non-naturalism and what Brecht would later call the "quotable gesture" -- and the literary critic Viktor Shklovsky, who framed the concept of ostranenia, or making-strange. These encounters, made in the still-progressive Soviet Union, would prove crucial turning points not just for Brecht but for art in the West. It was the moment when two collective cultures (communism and traditional Chinese culture) impacted on Western individualism -- apparently the final state of human history, the convergent outcome of all modernity -- and became its future.
To give you a brief, silent impression of what this decisive encounter must have been like, here's the film Eisenstein shot of Lanfang in 1935:
[Error: unknown template video]
And here's a much later film of Lanfang playing a female role in Peony Pavilion, in colour and with sound:
[Error: unknown template video]
What struck Brecht is probably also what strikes us today: the undisguised artifice of the acting. It's not just that this is a man playing a woman, or that the vocal mannerisms sound so strange to our ears. It's not just the fact that Mei Lanfang could become a woman whether or not he was transformed by elaborate makeup and costumes, just by changing his movements. There were also different theatrical conventions to absorb -- the fact that instead of getting swept towards identification, tears, catharsis, sorrow and pity (as Aristotle put it), the audience at the Beijing Opera will interrupt even the saddest moments to shout the actor's name and remind everyone that it's a performance, or that the whole house stays lit (rather than plunging "some in darkness, the others light", as Brecht put it in The Threepenny Opera), or that Beijing Opera, like kabuki, consists not of unified plots building to a climax, but a series of episodes which can be chopped up and presented on their own.
Above all, there was the absence of the fourth wall illusion, the actors' constant awareness of the audience, the audience's awareness of the play, visible stagehands, the communication of emotion through the structure of movement, the domination of convention over innovation and collectivity over individuality.
When Brecht got back to Europe he combined the revelations he'd experienced watching Lanfang with ideas of estrangment he'd gleaned from Shklovsky. He wrote an essay entitled "Verfremdungseffekte in der chinesischen Schauspielkunst”; Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting. Published in the winter of 1936 in the London review Life and Letters, it was the first appearance of the famous Brechtian "alienation effect", and it came out of the “strangeness” (Befremdung) Brecht felt as he watched Lanfang in Moscow.
Of course, it's always possible that what was "defamiliarization" for Brecht was very familiar indeed to the Chinese. "Was it ethnocentric for Brecht to assume that the feeling of strangeness he experienced watching Mei Lanfang was intended by Mei?" asks Douglas Robinson in The Spatiotemporal Dialectic of Estrangement. "Can one talk about the Verfremsdungeffkt at all without generalizing from audience response to artist intention, or from artist intention to audience response?"
Brecht was certainly using the Chinese theatre as a stick to beat lazy Western actors and audiences with -- and therefore being "ethnocentric" in the way the Zen cooking in the film How to Cook Your Life is; like chef Edward Espe Brown, Brecht had work to do tackling the ills of the West, and Chinese theatre -- seen through the refracting prism of Russian Formalism -- was a useful alternative world.
"Only those familiar with - or who have in mind - the typical, superficial creations of Western actors," Brecht wrote, "who create their characters from lots of tiny nervous traits of little significance, more or less private in origin and devoid of any typical quality, will find it impossible to imagine that modifications in gestures can inspire fundamental innovations in the process of creating a character. The Chinese show not only the behaviour of people, but also the behaviour of the actors. They show how the actors, in their manner, perform the gestures of the people. For the actors translate the language of daily life into their own language. Watching a Chinese actor, one sees no fewer than three people simultaneously: one presenting and two being presented."
But, as Georges Banu points out, the Lanfang performance was only the flashpoint for formalist-realist arguments the West -- and Russia -- were already debating. Brecht later said that "the new German theatre developed the technique of distanciation in complete independence, without submitting in the least to the influence of Asian dramatic art". Meanwhile, in Moscow the progressive theatrical audience secretly saw Lanfang's style as a triumph for the formalist ideas of the early Soviet Union and a defeat for the socialist realism school already beginning to win favour under Stalin.
"Mei Lanfang arrived with his opera troupe in Moscow in March, 1935, at a critical moment for Soviet art and theater," writes Haun Saussy in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture review, "the beginnings of the imposition of an orthodoxy of "socialist realism" and the condemnation of such avant-garde movements as Formalism and Futurism. The reactions of the Soviet theater intelligentsia to Mei's performances, recorded at the time, show that their interpretation of Chinese theater made of it a covert means of defending such Formalist ideas as "defamiliarization" and the autonomy of art. Bertolt Brecht's theory of the "alienation-effect" in performance, developed at this moment, draws on both Mei's example and the Formalist precedent."
[Error: unknown template video]
"The Russian interpretation of Mei as a Formalist artist--or at least as Formalism's happiest example--pairs strangely with the critique of classical Chinese theater in China some two decades before Mei's voyage to Moscow. That critique had condemned the classical theater as a relic of an earlier stage of literary evolution. Classical theater was branded as being, among other sins, "formalist," that is, of failing to imitate prosaic reality as a proper modern genre of art should. The very techniques that so impressed Russian audiences by their non-representational modernity had been ridiculed by Chinese modernists for their failure to resemble real life."
Saussy concludes that we need to define what we mean by "modernity" -- a question that comes up often here on Click Opera too, especially when the West's avant garde has more in common with other cultures' antiquity than their modernity. The idea that the future of the West might be the past of the East still freaks us out as much as it excited Brecht back in 1935 in Moscow.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-03-05 09:52 pm (UTC)Sorry for the pedantic attitude but I spent a lot of time doing research on Brecht and anyway, it's a strange happenstance that you wrote about Brecht on the very day, well, anyway...
I don't think it's bad one way or another. I quite like it when things work in a symbiotic relationship. The only thing that's annoying -and I'm a victim of this too- is the (western?) obsession that things have to be new and fresh and and and. There's plenty to learn anywhere you look. Even your navel.
-Shane (Nathan's roommate, who is soon coming back to Berlin and should you wish, will be going to see die Massnahme at the beginning of April...)
(no subject)
Date: 2008-03-05 10:11 pm (UTC)The whole "Brecht as plagiarist" meme is so boring. It's John Fuegi's big narrative in "Brecht and Company", and John Carey picked up on it too. The kind of people who see dialectical thinking as "hypocrisy" tend also to see collective writing as "plagiarism". They also tend to have a very different political stance from Brecht. They're all about individualism and property. They use Brecht's collectivism / theft as a stick to beat him with, but just end up sounding petty and, well, bourgeois. But I don't mind it being bracketed with appropriationism and reenactments and sampling and so on, although it's a bit anachronistic.
Seeing Die Massnahme with Nathan would be good!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-03-05 10:49 pm (UTC)i have no problem with his working methods but only how he chose to represent them and himself. i think his whole collective technique was amazing, but why did he often shy away from admitting he worked collectively -only willing to admit this when it would get him out of trouble? Why use a bourgeois edifice -i.e. the great author in charge of it all- if he wanted to critique it (there are ways to get around this commentary, I know)? you even see this in the massnahme. only his name and eisler's grace the page but clearly he was working with other people on it. Again: why not give credit where credit is due? Maybe that's petty and bourgeois of me. Maybe he was using his name as some collective name but I doubt that -see some of his poems when he was in L.A. for instance. But it seems that if this is his/your argument I wonder why he would then ban plays that weren't done in the way he (and very clearly, only he wanted this) wanted them to be done? That is, where did the collective spirit go? Why can't we learn from Brecht the way Brecht did from others? This smells of ego if you ask me and for all of Brecht's soapboxing, you find a lot of egotism in his letters -and the poem in L.A. where he's pissed that no one knows his name, that no one knows who he, Bertolt Brecht!, is.
I'm just wary of the ideas we have of intellectuals and the historical reality. It makes me nervous when people start saying what such and such stood for when, well, it didn't always work out that neatly or clearly; there are examples, but why bother. There are a lot of contradictions and that's fine, we're all very complicated.
I think Heiner Müller captured a lot of the problems with Brecht much like Hume did with Berkeley. Wanting to believe but no longer able to. It's like that Simpsons episode when Lisa goes on the date with Ralph and then Bart watches the tape saying 'you can actually see the moment when his heart breaks...'
I think too it's an interesting place to go, but it seemed to me you were misrepresenting what happened: that this event changed him over to the ways of 'Oriental.' I quote: "Brecht was transformed by what he saw, and, thanks to the impact of his acting on Brecht's thinking about theatre, Lanfang changed Western theatre." Or again: "When Brecht got back to Europe he combined the revelations he'd experienced watching Lanfang with ideas of estrangment he'd gleaned from Shklovsky."
Now that there seems to be anachronistic.
Later the post changes it's point of view. I was just bringing this to the fore. Again, apologize for being pedantic.
I think we basically agree but I could be wrong.
I will now disappear and leave you to yours.
i'll be at the april 4th showing. nathan will be out of the country still. maybe i'll see you there
(no subject)
Date: 2008-03-05 11:24 pm (UTC)Coldly and impersonally
Using the driest words
(I seemingly fail to recognise you
In your particular nature and difficulty)
I speak to you merely
Like reality itself
(Sober, not to be bribed by your particular nature
Tired of your difficulty)
Which in my view you seem not to recognise
So why didn't Brecht sign this poem "Reality"? Perhaps because "Brecht" is a more modest signature than "Reality".
(no subject)
Date: 2008-03-06 11:36 am (UTC)Heinz Emigholz, Schindler's Houses