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Brecht's theory of alienation and the Peking Opera
BRECHT'S THEORY OF ALIENATION AND PEKING OPERA
Bertolt Brecht was one of the most original and provocative
Western playwrights of the twentiety-century. It is not surprising
that when he first encountered the Peking Opera at performances by
Mei Lan-fang and his company in Moscow in 1935, this exposure to a
great school of acting so different from anything he had known,
proved to be a powerful stimulus. In 1936 he wrote an essay entitled
"Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting"(1) in which he describes
certain striking features of the Chinese theater that were new to him
and that he saw as of potential value to the revolutionary type of
theater that he was promoting. He says of the Chinese actor that, in
contrast to the actor in Western "realistic" theater, "he rejects
complete conversion" of himself into the character he is playing: "he
expresses his awareness of being watched;" and he "observes himself"
consciously.(2) According to Brecht, the effect of this kind of
self-conscious performance on an audience is very different from what
the Western realistic theater strives for. The realistic theater
wants the illusion of "Real Life" on the stage; by contrast Peking
Opera does not hide but asserts its theatricality. But this
theatricality is produced by _both_ the actor and the audience. When
the actor is playing a part and at the same time is conscious of how
he is playing it, the audience accordingly develops a cetain kind of
observant attitude--an attitude that is deeply sympathetic and at the
same time consciously critical. This effect, which prevents the
audience from losing itself passively and completely in the character
created by the actor, and which consequently leads the audience to be
a consciously critical observer, Brecht calls the "Alienation
Effect."(3) If we compare this ingenious interpretation with the
_Chinese_ understanding of Peking Opera, we find that it is a very
personal, Brechtian vision of "Chinese acting." It is a vision which
deserves some careful examination.
The key quality of Chinese acting that Brecht fixes his
attention on is the actor's detachment from the character he is
representing. He points out that the Chinese artist never acts as if
there were a "fourth wall" in front of him delimiting the real space
of his world; he is well aware of the existence of his audience out
there; he knows himself to be playing a part. Similarily, Brecht
continues, the audience can no longer have the illusion of being the
unseen spectator of an event which is really taking place. They
cannot identify themselves with the actors in their performance on
the stage as does the audience in Western realistic theater. The
actor is aware he is "playing" and being watched; the audience is
aware that the performance is a theatrical event produced with a
highly refined style. "This," says Brecht, "immediately removes one
of the European stage's characteristic illustions....A whole
elaborate European stage technique which helps to conceal the fact
that the scenes are so arranged that the audience can view them in
the easiest way, is thereby made unnecessary."(4)
So far Brecht's reading of Chinese acting in Peking Opera would
be understandable to a Chinese theater-goer. As he continues the
discussion, however, a questionable generalization emerges. From his
observations of Chinese acting by Mei Lan-fang's company, Brecht
claims that "the artist's object is to appear strange and even
surprising to the audience. He achieves this by looking strangely at
himself and his work. As a result everything put forward by him has
a touch of the amazing. Everyday things are thereby raised above the
level of the obvious and automatic."(5) He calls this feeling
produced in _him_estrangement;" by Mei Lan-fang's performance
"estrangement;" moreover he notes, "One has to be able to imagine
them achieving an A-effect among their Chinese spectators too."(6)
I do not think that his description of thie theatrical effect
corresponds to the Chinese audience's experience. The Chinese
artist's objective is _NOT_ to appear "strange" or "surprising" to
the Chinese audience, and the feeling of estrangement produced in
Brecht _as a European_ cannot be shared by a Chinese audience.
First, we may be justified in saying that the artist avoids
identifying himself with the character played, and always retains a
very subtle detachment as a sort of "observer;" yet such "detachment"
is based not on the individual consciousness of the performer but
rather on highly conventional formulas of acting. The extremely
refined stylization of the performance accordingly requires a very
strict training which partially accounts for the fact that actors of
Peking Opera are often adopted by family-troupes and start their
apprenticeship at a very early age. Tan Xin-pei and Mei Lan-fang are
two prominent examples(7) Conventions are so important that they not
only underlie the actor's performance in every detail of gesture and
movement, but permeate all aspects of Peking Opera such as makeup and
costume.
Conditioned so completely by such an elaborate body of
conventions, the development of this art demands the emergence of a
well-informed and well-trained audience to appreciage it. With
words, music, movements, gestures, costumes, makeup and properties
all full of symbolism or stylization, the audience needs to be
already familiar with their meaning. The main conventions and
symbols are readily understood and the main gist of the story is
easily gathered.
Further, the traditional audience contained a body of amateur
experts known as _Piao You_ or "gentlemen of some leisure," whose
rich experience and knowledge of this highly stylized art constitute
a kind of esoteric connoisseurship that provides standards or norm of
appreciation. They give leadership to the general audience and
contribute to shaping the artistic form of this genre.
Brecht does not seem to be fully aware of this larger cultural
framework. What he sees is simply that the Chinese audience responds
"freely" to the performer on the stage by shouting "Bravo!" or
"Poorly done!" In his essay Brecht criticizes two people, presumedly
Europeans, sitting in front of him in the Moscow theatre: "When Mei
Lan-fang was playing a death scene, Brecht says, " a spectator
sitting next to me exclaimed with astonishment at one of his
gestures. One or two of the people sitting in front of us turned
round indignantly and sshhh'd" "They behaved as if they were present
at the real death of a real girl. Possibly their attitude would have
been all right for an European production, but for a Chinese it was
unspeakably ridiculous. In their case the A-effect had misfired."(8)
Because in Chinese acting, Brecht argues, "He(the performer) can be
interrupted at any moment. He won't have to 'come around.' After an
interruption he will go on with his exposition from that point. We
are not disturbing him at the 'mystic moment of creation.'"(9)
As the Chinese audience knows very well, the performer _cannot_
"be interrupted at any moment," but rather only by the audience
responding vigorously "at the proper time." More precisely, he is
not being "interrupted" at all, but rather his trained audience is
co-operating or participating in the play with him. Any improper
response is considered emb arrassing proof that a member of the
audience is "poorly experienced" or simply "ignorant" or deliberately
"trouble-making." Indeed the audience of Peking Opera has an
opportunity to express its positive or negative judgement on the
performance; yet this expression is not given in various individual
ways as Brecht seems to think, but in a ritualized collective manner.
Now, we may ask, does Brecht completely fail to recognize the
conventional or ritualized aspects of Chinese acting? Obviously not.
On the contrary, he is very conscious of them. In his essay he says:
"We see this theater as uncommonly precious, its portrayal of human
passions as schematized, its idea of society as rigid and wrong-
headed; at first sight this superb art seems to offer nothing
applicable to a realistic and revolutionary theater."(10) So he does
not explore the conventions of "Chinese acting" further, but focuses
on the effect of "estrangement," the thing that really caught his
attention when he saw Mei Lan-fang's performance and tries to develop
a dramatic theory of "alienation" out of it. Why does Brecht feel
this effect so strongly and make such an effort to develop the theory
of Alienation-Effect out of it?
For Brecht, the essential force of the Alienation-Effect as
mentioned above, is to lead the audience not to identify itself with
the theatrical presentation subconsciously, not be to, as it were,
hypnotized by it, but to remain conscious of being an observer, and
therefore capable of approaching, questioning, understanding, and
eventually mastering it in a critical manner. He uses science as a
metaphor:
Nobody can be a mathematician who takes it for
granted that "two and two makes four;" nor is
anybody one who fails to understand it. The man
who first looked with astonishment at a swinging
lantern and instead of taking it for granted
found it highly remarkable that it should swing,
and swing in that particular way rather than any
other, was brought close to understanding the
phenomenon by this observation, and so to
mastering it. Nor must it simply be exclaimed
that the attitude here proposed is all right for
science but not for art. Why shouldn't art try,
by its own means of course, to further the great
social task of mastering life?(11)
This "mastering of life," in the case of theater, according to
Brecht, is a process of critical observation, comprehension and re-
evaluation of the dramatic imagination of human life contained in
theatrical representation. This critical attitude that Brecht wants
the audience to adopt is aimed at changing a certain type of
consciousness that had dominated the Western theater since the 19th
century, the theater of the middle class or bourgeoisie. As Brecht
sees it, the "incidents portrayed" by this theater, far from being
specific, transitory pieces of human life, are universalized as the
unfolding of the human essence in a timeless form. In the face of
the conception of "Abstract Humanity," Brecht argues: "Mankind's
highest decisions are in fact fought out on earth, not in the
heavens, in the external world, not inside people's heads. In this
"external world" he describes, people are differentiated by their
social positions and functions and their accordingly developed
values. Brecht concludes: "Nobody can stand above the warring
classes, for nobody can stand above the human race. Society cannot
share a common communication system so long as it is split into
warring classes. Thus for art to be 'unpolitical' means only (for
it) to ally itself with the 'ruling group'"(12) The dramatic means
to break away from this tradition of the ruling group's theater, he
claims, is establishing and materializing his Alienation Effect in
acting, thereby building up a new theater. He started this effort
long before he was ever exposed to Peking Opera. In a notebook entry
dated 10 February 1922, we can see the embryo of his notion of
Alienation Effect.(13) And about 1926, he begins to insist upon the
need for what he calls a "smokers' theater." This is a theater where
the audience would puff away on cigars as if watching a boxing match,
and consequently, according to Brecht, would develop a more detached
and critical outlook than was possible in the ordinary German theater
of his time, where smoking was not allowed. He says in a fragment:
I even think that in a Shakespeare production
one man in the stalls with a cigar could bring
about the downfall of Western art. He might as
well light a bomb as light his cigar. I would be
delighted to see our public allowed to smoke
during performance. And I'd be delighted mainly
for the actor's sake. In my view it is quite
a impossible for the actor to play unnatural,
cramped and old-fashioned theater to a man
smoking in the stalls.(14)
After reading such a description, one cannot help thinking that
this "smokers' theater" strikingly resembles the Chinese traditional
theater, especially Peking Opera, where the audience could sit
drinking tea, or cracking melon seeds and having a little
conversation while they watched the performance. However, it was not
a place for real, "free" communication as in Brecht's "smoker's
theater:" everything is actually organized in a conventional way, and
is rooted in established relations among people. The seating and the
service vary greatly with social identity and status; women being in
a section separated from the male audience, for example. This is a
theater which forms and confirms part of the Chinese social cultural
tradition. Brecht's "smokers' theater" is designed for a very
different purpose. It means to make the audience consciously
critical of the illusion-making middle class theater: it means to
give a revolutionary challenge to the humanistic tradition of this
theater in its relation to the social and historical situation at
that time.
As scholars generally agree, Brecht's time is characterized by
drastic transformations. It may be an oversimplification to say that
the various conflicts and potential crises inherited from the
restless birth of the industrial age were increasingly aggravated and
culminated in the First World War. However the established order of
Western society was indeed in serious trouble if not total crisis in
the period _including_ the two world wars. The picture of Universal
Humanity which Brecht describes as the image of "Man with a capital
M," "Man of every period and every colour,"(15) and in which Brecht's
contemporaries used to believe, turned out to be a kind of Utopian
illusion. In Brecht's understanding, the general belief in universal
human progress which pervaded the previous century could not hold
together people who were living in an increasingly chaotic and
extremely divided society. This is a historical moment when "old" is
disintegrating and"New" has not yet come into being. This is an "era
of anxiety."
In his creative writing from 1918(_Baal_) up to the 1930s
(Mahagonny_). Brecht discloses an increasing sense of the loss,
frustration and alienation characterizing his generation in a world
full of drastic transformations. In those essays written during the
1920s and the early 1930s, Brecht searches for a different theory of
dramatic acting in order to have done with the norms of a middle
class realistic theater in which he clearly is not at home. It is
while preoccupied with such thoughts and anxieties that Brecht
discovers Peking Opera. The actor's detachment from the character
played, and the audience's self-conscious observation and
participation in the process of performance that Brecht finds in this
Eastern classical art is conditioned by the social and historical
setting in which Brecht lived and from which he wanted to break away.
One can say that Brecht uses his "reading" of Chinese acting as a
means of defining his own attitude to the Western theater, rather
than of opening up to another culture. What he finds is indeed
contained in and implied by Chinese acting in Peking Opera; and it is
appropriated and theorized about by Brecht in a process of
Displacement. In short, Brecht extracts from Peking Opera something
that bolsters his theory. As he puts it: "the Chinese actor's
Alienation Effect is a transportable piece of technique: a conception
that can be prised loose from the Chinese theater."(16) In Brecht's
vision, this piece of the cultural "Other" serves the purpose of
rethinking the Western theatrical tradition. "In point of fact," he
says, "the only people who can profitably study a piece of technique
like Chinese acting's A-effect are those who need such a technique
for quite definite social purposes."(17)
Although Brecht's play, _Mother Courage_ was produced by Huang
Zuo-lin (18) in Shanghai as early as the 1950s, his theory of theater
was not influential for almost four dacades later. Since 1978,
however, Brecht's theory of the Alienation Effect has appealed more
and more to people in China--in theatrical circles in particular and
intellectuals and scholars in the humanities in general. In the
autumn of 1985, for the first time, an internation conference on
Brecht Studies was held in Beijing. The dominant concern of the
conference was the significance of Brecht's theory of the Alienation
Effect in theater. How Chinese artists and theorists read Brecht
under the current social, political and cultural conditions, and what
kind of "Brecht" will be discovered, presented, and appropriated,
will remain an important question to explore in the field of
comparative literature and in the realm of cultural studies.
Yan, Hai-ping
Cornell University/China
NOTES
1. _Brecht on Theater_, trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang,
1957) 91.
2. Ibid. 92.
3. Ibid. 95.
4. Ibid. 92.
5. Ibid. 92.
6. Ibid. 96.
7. Tan and Mei were the leading actors and founders of two schools in
Peking Opera in the 1920s and the 1930s.
8. _Brecht on Theater_, 95.
9. On this point, we might note that the ligitimate "obserber
function" of the audience contains more opportunities for spectators
to "communicate" with or "interrupt" the performance than in current
Western theater. However, if such "communication" goes beyond the
accepted "proper limits," if it becomes a real interruption, it will
be condemned just as it would be in the Western theater.
10. _Brecht on Theater_, 95.
11. Ibid. 96.
12. Ibid. 196.
13. Ibid. 9.
14. Ibid. 8.
15. Ibid. 97.
16. Ibid. 95.
17. Ibid. 96.
18. Huang Zuo-lin is the first Chinese dramatist who introduced
Brecht's works into China. He has been the artistic director of
People's Theater Company in Shanghai since 1949.
> E N D <
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