Beilei Rao, M.A.
Topic
Cultural Interplay: Brecht's Epic Theater between Germany and China
Abstract
From China to Germany
The transcultural contact between Brecht’s dramaturgical conceptions and Chinese traditional performance art has long been a widely discussed topic both in Germany and China. One obvious reason might be that Brecht showed his great interest in Chinese culture at an early age and devoted himself to studying Chinese philosophy, poetry and performance art. In 1915, he wrote a poem about the soldiers in Tsingtao under the background of the German colony in China. Then, deeply influenced by the general enthusiasm for Taoism at the beginning of the 20th century in Germany, Brecht studied intensively the non-doing doctrine of Taoism and demonstrated his reflections in the literary creations. With regard to Brecht’s epic theater, the direct encounter with Peking opera in Moscow is worth mentioning. After seeing the performance by Mei Lanfang, a well-known actor, Brecht published the essay "Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting" in 1935, in which he discussed the symbolic representative style of Chinese art.
As a result, the research interest in this field is to some extent limited in the connection between the epic theater and the stylized performance of Peking Opera. Seldom mentioned, however, is the fact that Peking Opera deprives from an older traditional art form - yuan zaju. In addition, the thematic affinities and intertextual references between yuan zaju and epic theater, mainly in the Caucasian Chalk Circle and the Good Man of Setzuan, will also be taken into consideration. Previous research has reached the consensus that Brecht’s epic theater and Chinese drama are essentially heterogeneous. Moreover, his subjective interpretation of Chinese drama, especially symbolic forms, might be caused by misunderstanding towards Chinese culture. Thus, to explain the superficially similar phenomena which might have different origins and meanings, I will start with the interpretation of Chinese texts in original cultural context and trace the adaptation process in quite disparate place in world system. Therefore, we can observe how the non-understood in a certain culture is cultivated into a surface aesthetic and combined with the theoretic conceptions of individual recipients in this transition process.
From Germany to China
Correspondingly, since the establishment of PRC, Brecht and his epic theater are among the first to be introduced to China. In 1959, his play Mother Courage and Her Children was first performed in China, which aroused intensive discussions about Brecht’s dramaturgy as well as Chinese art of acting itself. Interestingly, despite the structural and thematic affinity with Chinese drama, the performance of Mother Courage and Her Children turned out to be a failure for the Chinese audience, which is probably caused by Brecht’s core principle of epic theater – the alienation effect. This term, first used in the essay “Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting”, refers to the way of playing that the audience was hindered from simply identifying itself with the characters in the play. However, Chinese performance art is intertwined with the effect of empathy. Therefore, the success of the premiere Life of Galileo (1979), performed according to Stanislavskian conception, can be well understood.
The reception and evaluation of Brecht’s epic theater in China experienced different phases in various historical contexts. In this transition process, the adaptations, as results of hybridity, indeed amalgamate different oriental and occidental traditions. Thus, the main focus in this part is the adaptation process of Brecht’s epic theater in specific cultural contexts in China at a macro-level. In addition, since the text is also lifted out of the original spatial-temporal frame, to examine how Brecht’s dramaturgical theory and his practice are translated, interpreted in a transcultural background, without neglecting the intertextual references, is also essential in this project.
Research fields
- Sino-German cultural relations
- world literature
- comparative literature
- intertextuality
- literary translations, adaptation studies
Biography
Beilei Rao (born 1991 in Shanghai) is a Ph. D. candidate at the University of Hamburg and a
member of the graduate program “China in Europe, Europe in China”. From 2009 to 2013,
she studied in the Department of the German Language and Literature at Tongji-University,
Shanghai. From 2013 to 2016, she completed her M. A. at Tongji-University in the
Department of German Studies with a thesis on Ingeborg Bachmann’s novel Malina. She
published three essays on German literature in Chinese academic journals. As a DAAD
scholarship holder,she took part in an exchange program with Ruhr University Bochum in
2014. Majoring literary translations, she studied at the University of Bonn in 2012. Beilei Rao
was granted a scholarship from the University of Hamburg.