A Missing Piece of the Collage: The Stage Practice in the National Theatre Movement

Abstract

Drawing on the idea of “history as collage,” this article looks at the stage performances in the National Theatre Movement that have been shunted aside in modern Chinese theatre historiography, in an attempt to shed light on understanding the development of modern Chinese theatre as a nonlinear, heterogeneous, and stochastic process. Despite current studies devoted to the National Theatre Movement, the movement’s theatrical engagements have not received enough scholarly attention. In fact, there were a total of three performances throughout the course of the movement, one in New York and two in Beijing. These productions deserve more probing scrutiny as they add a practical dimension to our understanding of the National Theatre Movement as having juxtaposed theoretical abstractions with empirical realities. Through historical archival research, this article finds that the National Theatre Movement ventured into a new approach to theatre production that relied on the combination of the formal elements of “masses, lines, and colors” as the main means to decorate the stage. This production method was proposed by Yu Shangyuan through “dynamic intertextuality,” that is, “proactive engagement with and adaptation of previous texts,” in this case the work of Sheldon Cheney, one of the staunch proponents of the American New Stagecraft Movement. It was based on Cheney’s depiction of the aesthetic theatre that Yu Shangyuan proposed an antirealistic theatrical paradigm and directed the three performances in accordance with this new scheme. The examination of the stage practice of the National Theatre Movement reveals the close connection between the National Theatre Movement and the New Stagecraft Movement, mapping out a neglected terrain in modern Chinese theatre historiography that encourages new directions and interests.