Theatre in Asia I: Background, India and China

The great religions in the Far East, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism presented tremendous dance-dramas throughout India, China, Japan, and other Asian lands – dramas very different from western plays, but equally important in the culture.  And in today’s western theatre these Asian forms are often incorporated and blended with western styles to create new theatrical forms. 

      

Unlike western theatre, the traditional theatres of Asia were highly systematized. Technical aspects of performance, highly complex, were handed down minutely from generation to generation.  A story is told of the famous Japanese actor who, on finishing his son’s instruction in the performing art (this process begins in early youth, and culminates somewhere in mid-life) admonished his son with these words:  “Above all, NO orginality.” In western drama, originality, new forms, and breaks between generations are the norm.  Not so in the traditional dramas of Asia.

      

In most forms of Asian performance, music, dance and drama are inextricably linked. In Sanskrit, the language of classical India for

 example, it’s been said that there are no separate words for “dance” and “drama;” it’s all one.  In all Asian countries, there has been a tremendous emphasis on highly trained, highly skilled performers as the center of theatrical art.  Today, in Asia as in any other part of the world, there are many breaks with tradition, and new forms are emerging, often mixed with western-style drama, but traditional performance (which is strongly subsidized in some of the Asian countries) remains highly systematic, tightly structured, and takes minutely detailed training.

      

With this basic background we’re going to look briefly at three major powers in the Asian theatre, India, China, and Japan.  While these are not by any means the only Asian dramatic forms, they are representative, and will have to serve in this relatively brief chronology. 

India

We’ll begin with India, because India is generally acknowledged to be the source of much Asian theatre.  In the Hindu religion, a manifestation of one of the most powerful gods, Shiva Nataraja –

 lord of the dance – stands on the demon of ignorance. “Shiva dances the birth, death, and rebirth of the entire universe.” In an artistic image that brilliantly combines the powers of art and divinity, “Shiva is at once sublime and sensuously human, all-powerful and a real dancer, filled with charisma and charm.” “In God’s endless dance of creation, preservation, destruction and paired graces is hidden a deep understanding of our universe…the upper right hand holds the drum from which creation issues forth.” “Nataraja's dance is not just a symbol.  It is taking place within each of us, at the atomic level, this very moment.” Hmmm…that makes dance fairly essential, wouldn’t you say?  A theatrical act helps create the world!

      

Hindu religion also has it that the god Brahma, commanded the first theatrical performance, a reenactment of the gods’ defeat of the demons.  And later, after Siva had danced the world into existence, it’s said thatBrahma confided all the secrets and rules of dance and drama to a mortal -- Bharata.  Bharata wrote out all that Brahma had told him in the second century AD work the Natyasastra, which catalogues all aspects of written drama, including what is and what is not allowed in plots (somewhat similar to Aristotle’s Poetics and Horace’s Ars Poetica).  In addition the Natyasastra describes all aspects of performance, from costumes and make-up to proper movements of the actor’s neck and eye. This huge work is central to the theory and practice of ancient Indian theatre.

      

The subjects for drama came primarily from two great epics, The Mahabharata and The Ramayana, which were written down in a final form by about 250 BC, but whose stories had been recited, sung and chanted for 1000 years before that.  There is a connection here, as between the Natyasastra and the Poetics, between early Asian and early western drama. As in India, there were two great epics on which much Greek drama was based: Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. 

      

The Mahabharata deals with the struggle between two families, the Pandava brothers and the Kaukava brothers, for power over the country, and all the tales of love and war and adventure that 

accompanied this struggle. This two-family feud is a metaphor for the greater struggle of forces throughout the world.  The Mahabharata is inherently dramatic, as Peter Brook proved in the 80s with his 10-hour production based on the work. One of the centerpieces of The Mahabharata is the Baghavad Ghita, in which the armies of the two families are lined up one against the other, but delayed by a long discussion between 

Arjuna, the great archer/warrior of the Pandava clan, and the god Krishna.  Arjuna is charged with firing the arrow that will signal the attack.  He is suddenly overcome by doubt and fear. In the pause before the battle Krishna gives him a long lesson in life, which enables him to throw off these fears and lead the attack. The action of an Indian drama can be as internal as external...of course so too is Hamlet!

   

  

The Ramayana tells the story of the expulsion of Prince Rama and his wife Sita from their kingdom; of their 14 years of wandering in 

exile; of Sita’s abduction, while searching for a beautiful stag in the forest, by a wicked demon-king; of Rama’s rescue of  Sita, with the help of the monkey-king; and of their triumphant return to their kingdom.  Many plays have been created from The Ramayana, and not only by Asian writers.  In the 

eighteenth century, Carlo Gozzi, an important Venetian playwright, borrowed the portion about the abduction while in search of the deer in his play The King Stag (so their story - the Ramayana - became Gozzi's story - de nobis, fabula narratur). To take their story is our story one step farther, Gozzi's play has been successfully adapted and revived by several theatres recently, including the ART in Cambridge MA.

The King Stag at ART - the production was directed by Andrei Serban, Michael Yeargan designed the sets, and Julie Taymor did the costumes, mask and puppets

      

These tales, and the dramas based on them, were written in Sanskrit, the language of the highest caste in ancient India.  Scholars identify a “golden age” of Sanskrit literature and drama, from which about 25 plays survive, between (VERY approximately) 100 and 500 AD.  Bharata describes the nature of Sanskrit drama in his Natyasastra. In very brief and simplified form, each play in Sanskrit drama may consist of many elements, but must fundamentally express one rasa (or one fundamental mood).  There are 8 rasas:  erotic, comic, pathetic, furious, heroic, terrible, odious, and marvelous.  To take this a step farther, a rasa is related to a basic emotion, or bhava, which can be portrayed on stage.  The 8 bhavas are pleasure, mirth, sorrow, wrath, vigor, fear, disgust, and wonder.  So in Sanskrit drama you display an emotional state (bhava) by using words, action, costumes, etc, in order to create the appropriate rasa.

      

Two of the most famous Sanskrit plays are The Little Clay Cart, by King Sudraka, and Sakuntala, by Kalidasa.  The first is about the kindest man in the city, who becomes impoverished by being (so? too?) generous.  So far this may sound to you like Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens, but it takes a different turn. The generous man falls in love with a beautiful dancing girl, a courtesan, and after many adventures, including the courtesan’s aiding a prince to regain his throne, the prince unites the generous man and the courtesan.

Sakuntala is considered the finest of Sanskrit drama.  It includes actions that range between heaven and earth, and tells the story of Sakuntala, who falls in love with King Dushanta.  But there is a curse on Sakuntala. The king returns her love and they are married, but then the king is made to forget ALL of this, by an evil spell. After a series of exciting episodes, the gods restore King Dushanta’s memory and the couple is happily reunited.

      

These Sanskrit dramas, in which singing, chanting, and dancing are all melded together into a complete work of art, went into a decline when the forces of Islam began to control India, and only in the late 19th and 20th centuries has the Sanskrit drama been revived.

      

Many different forms of dance-drama occurred at different times in India, but here we will look at only one of them, Kathakali. 

This highly conventionalized form has been incorporated recently into western theatrical forms,   Kathakali comes from southwestern India.  It’s about 300 years old, a much more recent form than Sanskrit drama. Much of its subject matter, similarly to the Sanskrit plays, comes from the two Hindu epics, The Mahabharata and The Ramayana. 

      

In Kathakali the actors rely on dance and mime and highly stylized costumes and make-up.  The musicians, on a platform off to one 

side of the action, tell the story in song and also set the mood by instrumental accompaniment, mostly sitars and a variety of percussion instruments.  The actors were all male in this form, though it is said that in the Sanskrit drama women performed, and there are strong traditions of female dance through Indian history. The performers  made use of a highly gestural language. In Kathakali there are more than 500 signs which are loaded with meaning for the educated spectator.  Kathakali is performed in an open courtyard on a square stage with a canopy decked with flowers, and performances can go on all night! 

In the early 1990s Ariane Mnouchkine, one of the great directors of the twentieth century, used Kathakali theatre when she and her famous French troupe re-told the Atreus dramas of Aeschylus in a

tetrology of plays she called Les Atrides.  But she subverted the sense of the plays by beginning the series with Euripides' Iphigenia in Aulis. In this play, I hope you'll remember, Iphigenia, daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, was sacrificed to the goddess Artemis so that the Greek fleet could sail to Troy and begin the Trojan War. Agamemnon tricked Clytemnestra into bringing Iphigenia to Aulis by saying that she 

was to be married to Achilles, not that she would be a human sacrifice, so from the outset of the 4-play series  audiences were able to relate to Clytemnestra. That wouldn't have been the case had Mnouchkine begun the series with Aeschylus's Agamemnon. Mnouchkine reached out to Kathakali drama because, like ancient Greek drama, that form relied heavily on a chorus and was less realistic than any re-imagining in a western style could possibly be. Another wonderful use of de nobis, fabula narratur!

 

another example of "their story is our story", when a Kathakali Lear was brought to the new Globe in 1999!     

During the eighteenth century the British added India to their empire and introduced western drama, including Shakespeare.  There’s a film, one of the first by the Merchant/Ivory team, that looks at a troupe of turn of the century, down-on-their-luck British Shakespeareans touring through India, called Shakespeare Wallah, that might be of interest to some of you. 

At the turn of the twentieth century the best known of modern Indian playwrights, Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) 

successfully blended Indian theatrical tradition with western styles in his plays, which include Chitra (1894) and The Cycle of Spring (1917). Tagore won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. The prize was for his entire body of work, not just his plays, but it is relatively unusual for a playwright to be awarded this prize, which places Tagore in relatively rarified company.

China

Like India, China combines music, dance, and drama in many different forms.  Records of performance there date back as early as 1500 BC, but at about 210 BC China came to be ruled by one man, who, among other things, built the “great wall.”  In his reign and subsequently, tremendously detailed records were kept of all sorts of activity, including performances at the court by entertainers of all sorts.  For the next 400 years arts and literature flourished, including theatrical activity, specifically mime, shadow and other puppet plays, and dance. 

      

By 618 AD the T’ang Dynasty took over and encouraged theatre in the combined form of music, dance, dialogue and acrobatics.  In fact, in 714 the emperor established a training school for performers called the “Pear Garden,” and to this day the term “student of the Pear Garden” equates with the western term “thespian.”  Between the tenth and twelfth centuries, during the 

Sung Dynasty, the storyteller (to whom you can compare the minstrels and mastersingers traveling through medieval Europe at the same time) became increasingly popular throughout China, and the art of storytelling grew quite complex.  Not only was the story narrated, but the story teller used stylized movement and gesture, singing and chanting to relate the tale.  It was also in the Sung Dynasty that the earliest written dramas from China were penned, but they were not uncovered until 1920. 

      

During the Yuan Dynasty (1279-1368) Chinese literary drama began to flourish, and in this period some of the first named Chinese dramatists were practicing.  Popular plays included Wang Shih-fu’s Romance of the Western Chamber, about the trials and joys of a pair of lovers, reunited after a long separation; and Chi Chun-hsiang’s The Orphan of the House of Chao, about a child who grows up to avenge his family, who have been killed by a corrupt general. This play became well known in the west during the eighteenth century, when Voltaire adapted it as The Orphan of China.  Perhaps the best known play from this era is Li Hsing-tao’s The Story of the Chalk Circle, which tells the story of two women who claim to be the mother of a child. A judge places the child inside a circle of chalk and orders the women to pull him out. Guess which one gets the child?  The most famous western theatrical version of this story is Bertolt Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle, written in 1944. Which according to Dr Jack is one of the finest plays of the twentieth century. And, not to repeat myself, but this IS history according to the good doctor, yes?

Although many plays exist from this and later eras, the focus in Chinese theatre is and has always been on the performer, who sings, speaks, and moves in a stylized and rhythmic manner, accompanied by music in a tonal scale unlike that of the west.

   

Nowhere did the art of the performer flourish more than in the Beijing Opera.  This, perhaps the form of drama most associated with China in the minds of westerners, is said to have begun in the late eighteenth century, when the finest players from China’s 

different regions were brought together in the capital, Beijing, to perform for the pleasure of the Manchu emperor.  Many of these players chose to remain in Beijing and to work together.  Gradually they developed a unique style that by the mid-nineteenth century dominated Chinese theatrical performance. 

      

This Beijing Opera is divided into two styles of plays, the civil, which deal with social and family themes; and the military, which 

focus on the adventures of warriors, outlaws, and the like.  All are derived from a variety of sources -- history, legend, myth, folklore, etc, and all end happily.  But again, in Beijing Opera, the play’s NOT the thing, the player is.   Rigidly controlled convention in movement, vocal tonality, and make-up is the order of the day in Beijing Opera performance.  

There are four kinds of roles:  male, female, painted face and comic.  Male roles are divided into old men, young men, and 

warrior types; female into gentle or vivacious women, warrior maidens, and old women; the comic role is the most realistic of the character types, and the actors who play them speak in everyday dialects. At times they even improvise!  Perhaps the most interesting and unique roles are the painted face type. Certainly the make-up of these characters is the most elaborate.  Often the most acrobatic performers, they are usually endowed with exaggerated strength.  They can be warriors, bandits, even gods and other supernatural beings. 

    

 

In the eighteenth century, after centuries in which seduction and scurrility had been associated with the theatre (this, it seems, is one of the most common themes throughout the world in theatre!), 

the emperor banned women from the stage.  In Beijing Opera, women’s roles were (and sometimes still are) played by men. In the 1920s women began to act again, but often in all-female troupes.  Today women generally play women’s roles, but only recently has this become accepted practice.  The most famous player of women’s roles in the twentieth century was Mei Lan Fang (1894 - 1961) who was known in his lifetime as “foremost of the Pear Garden,” perhaps the Laurence Olivier of Chinese acting.  Mei Lan Fang toured Europe in the 1930s and made a tremendous impression on many western theatre types, perhaps most importantly Bertolt Brecht.

      

The brilliant chinese film Farewell, My Concubine chronicles the lives of two Beijing Opera actors, one of whom specializes in male roles, the other in female.  The film takes them from the rigorous, some might say nightmarish training as children, through personal and political history of China, into the “cultural revolution” of the 1960s.  I highly recommend this film, in which you’ll learn not only about Beijing Opera, but perhaps more about this huge and important country which is difficult for many westerners to understand.  

Another recent theatrical piece which makes use of the Beijing Opera is David Henry Hwang’s play, M. Butterfly (some of you may know it from the rather unfortunate film version – the play’s better – so saith Dr Jack).  This play tells the story based on fact of a French diplomat who falls in love with a performer of female 

roles in the Beijing Opera, has intimate relations with...her?...him?...for an extended period, and claims never to know 1) that she is a he; and 2) that s/he is a spy for the communist government.  The story inverts the stereotypical western image of weak, impressionable Asian women who fall for strong manly westerners (as in Madame Butterfly, written as a play by David Belasco, and 

soon after operatized by Puccini), into that of a weak and confused western male totally outmanned (if you will) by an Asian female/male. It is much more complicated than that, but this tease should tempt you to read it. (“Oh yes, Dr Jack, we will!” “Oh, no you won’t…you SAY you will…but you won’t!)

  

    

An evening at the Beijing Opera is long and noisy, both onstage and off.  The spectator watches a series of short plays intermingled with acrobatic displays.  Well-structured dramatic action as in most western plays is not the point; rather there are builds to highpoints, usually very physical, that the audience watches for.  Otherwise, audience members come and go, eat, talk feely and loudly while the action continues with no intermissions.  The performance I saw, in Florence, Italy of all places, where it is called Opera di Pechino, was a unique, unusual and beautiful sight to the western theatrical observer -- at least it was to this one.

      

The typical stage of the Beijing Opera is a square open platform, raised a few feet, surrounded by a low wooden railing, with two 

doors on the back wall, and carpeted. The carpet protects the acrobatic performers to a point, and also helps to muffle sound as they leap and roll about  The orchestra, consisting of strings, winds, and percussion instruments, is visible on stage. There are only a few set pieces, such as a wooden table, a few chairs, and they are highly symbolic.  So too are the props.  Two yellow flags with wheels painted on them represent a wagon or chariot; four pieces of cloth carried by an actor running across the stage represents the wind; a banner with a fish painted on it indicates water.  To portray by this method suicide by drowning, for example, an actor jumps toward other actors who hold banners painted with waves and fishes.  These actors then cover the drowning man with the banners, and he moves offstage concealed beneath them. 

      

Beijing Opera remained dominant even after China became a republic in 1912, but beginning at that time many western plays began to be performed, especially those by Shakespeare, Chekhov, Shaw, and Ibsen.  In 1949, when the communists took over, they

revised Beijing Opera Plays to conform with their doctrine.  When the “cultural revolution” hit in 1966, traditional forms such as Beijing Opera nearly ceased to exist and were replaced by politically correct social melodramas, which taught the new party line.  Only after 1980 was there a revival of the old styles, but now China, like most of the rest of the world, seems to prefer 

TV to the theatre.  Interestingly, the current regime wants to keep the heritage of a form like Beijing Opera pure.  When, recently, a young director came up with new concepts for the Peony Pavilion, a Beijing Opera piece that was scheduled for the Lincoln Center Festival in the U.S., it was not allowed to travel.  After some embarrassment and considerable derision from the worldwide arts community, the next year the lengthy piece did play the Festival.

If Kathakali style can work for Shakespeare, why not Beijing Opera?  The production below played a fine performing arts festival that occurs early every summer in Charleston SC: