Zhang, Fuchen
(um 1988) : Professor der Central Academy of Drama
Subjects
Index of Names : China
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Literature : China : Drama and Theatre
Chronology Entries (2)
| # | Year | Text | Linked Data |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1984 | Performance of Long day's journey into night (Act 4) by Eugene O'Neill by the Central Academy of Drama under the direction of Zhang Fuchen |
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| 2 | 1988.06.06-14 |
International Conference 'Eugene O'Neill – world playwright' for his hundredth anniversary of his birth, co-sponsored by Nanjing University and the Eugene O'Neill Society at Jinling Hotel in Nanjing, June 6-9. O'Neill theatre festival June 6-14 in Nanjing and Shanghai ; initiated and organized by Liu Haiping. The festival belonged to a composite project that included the international symposium and a book exhibit, with over a hundred scholars, critics and theater professionals from China, Japan, India, United States, Britain, Germany, Belgium and the Soviet Union. Co-sponsored by the Nanjing University, the Jiangsu Culture Bureau, the Nanjing Television Network, the Jiangsu International Culture Exchange Center and the non-government Amity Foundation in Nanjing ; the Shanghai Culture Bureau, the Fudan University, the Shanghai Academy of Drama and the Shanghai Culture Development Foundation in Shanghai. The festival consisted of ten professional and two amateur productions of O'Neill's plays. Cao, Yu. Letter of greeting from the People's Republic of China to the Conference. Dear Professor Haiping Liu, Thank you for your kind invitation to the international conference in commemoration of Eugene O'Neill's centennial. I would indeed like to attend, yet I very much regret to say my poor health prevents me from coming to Nanjing. I hope you will understand and forgive me. I am so glad to learn that the conference is extremely well planned and prepared. I can imagine how much time you and your colleagues must have put into it. But you can be assured that the conference will be a great, unprecedented event in the history of the exchange of drama and theatre between China and the United States. It will, I am sure, win glory for the academic and theatrical circles. As for the papers to be presented at the conference, I hope they can be collected and published later as a book, so that other people, either O'Neill scholars or those merely interested in him, might also benefit from the conference and have a better understanding of this great dramatist's work. I avidly look forward to such a publication. Thank you for inviting me to be an honorary adviser to the conference. I accept the honor with gratitude. Best wishes for the success of the conference. Sincerely, Cao Yu, President Chinese Dramatists' Association. Speech by Huang Zongjiang at the Conference : "I am not an expert or scholar on O'Neill like you. I am only a fan of Eugene O'Neill. When a high school student, I read the early translations of O'Neill's plays and Beyond the horizon by Gu Yuocheng. How I dreamed of going beyond the horizon ! Then I went to college but did not finish it, just like Eugene O'Neill. I went onto the stage, became a professional actor, then a sailor, again following in the footsteps of Eugene O'Neill. There was World War II, of course. Patriotism. But I became a sailor mainly because of Eugene O'Neill. When the war was over in 1946, I went back to college, but was still unable to finish. I got TB, just like O'Neill. When my first play was published and performed, I thought I was a Chinese O'Neill. Then came the liberation in 1949. We were isolated. You call it iron curtain or bamboo curtain ; anyway there was a curtain. So, I accused and condemned Eugene O'Neill in this or that way. Then came the Cultural Revolution. I was persecuted, of course, as you can understand. The chief crime I was accused of was my worship for Eugene O'Neill. Then, when the Cultural Revolution was over, I was invited to visit the United States. It so happened that the sponsor of my trip was the Eugene O'Neill Theatre Center in Connecticut. You might wonder what we accused or condemned Eugene O'Neill of in those years. The first thing was his fatalism. The second was his pessimism. But it seems to us now, whether a fatalist or not, whether a pessimist or an optimist, O'Neill depicted life sincerely. I think the most important thing we have learned from Eugene O'Neill is that we are still learning. Another accusation was that O'Neill is not a realist in his art. Probably you cannot even understand why that was a problem in China. You know we advocated revolutionary realism. If you were not a realist, you were not a revolutionary ; you were a counterrevolutionary. I think O'Neill used expressionism, symbolism, modernism, even absurdism, to make the reality he presented more real. Again, what we have learned from O'Neill is the fact that we are still learning. That is my, or our, long voyage home from beyond the horizon, my life's journey into day. It is such a bright day now that we can have this bright international conference. I think you know what it means to me, to you, and to the whole world." Ile as an adaptation in Western-style opera by the Shanghai ge ju yuan (Shanghai Opera Company). Mourning becomes Electra by the Shanghai yue ju yuan (Shanghai Yue Opera Company), directed by Jiao Huang and Lou Jicheng in Beijing ; Jiao Huang as Brant and Orin, Lou Jicheng as Mannon, Lu Shichu as Lavinia. A group of students from the Shanghai Academy of Drama staged a less realistic version of the performance under the direction of Zhang Yingxiang. Beyond the horizon as performance ; under the direction of Xiong Guodong in Nanjing. Xiong announced in the program : "The communication between O'Neill's dramas and us can easily be established. The stories and the dramas seem to be happening around us. We ourselves even seem to be the very characters in the dramas. How successful we produce the play Beyond the horizon finally depends on how profound we can understand our life and the humans." The production was reset in the 1920s in a Southern Yangzi river village near Suzhou. The architecture, furniture, costume and cultural idiosyncrasies of the locale and the time lent realistic, even naturalistic, details to the nativized adaptation. The setting employed woodenware from farmhouses in Jiangsu countryside. Some of the Chinese audience reacted to the adaptation divergently, while some welcomed its Chinese consciousness and enjoyed its portrayal of the Chinese rural life, others criticized it as having gone to an extreme. Speech by Xiong Guodong at the festival : "For the cast and staff, this is our first experience with an O'Neill play. I should say we had a spiritual meeting with Eugene O'Neill. In staging this play, we found not only O'Neill but also ourselves. Whenever I read the play, I always had a strange feeling as if I saw O'Neill standing beyond the horizon looking at me, and sometimes as if I were standing over there looking at him. I came to see that each of us stands at once on both this side of the horizon and beyond it. From this revelation, I decided to adapt the play to a Chinese background, by putting it in the milieu of a rural village in the low reaches of the Yangzi river and let each of the characters bear a Chinese name. I hope that by doing so, it can help eliminate the distance between my Chinese audience and the American play. It is my understanding that although the play is entitled Beyond the horizon, the real emphasis is laid on this side of the horizon. It portrays successfully many true-to-life characters. So, I said to my cast and staff that we should do likewise on the Chinese stage. We strive to represent quite realistically Chinese rural life. That is why we use so many authentic stage properties and costumes. In fact, the cast and staff spent several weeks in a village in the Yangzi Delta experiencing daily life before we actually began rehearsals. People in different cultures behave differently. The ways to show love and hatred vary from culture to culture. So, we have made a lot of changes from the original script. We read each scene in O'Neill's play again and again and tried to make out what O'Neill meant by this or that, and then figured out ways to render it in the language of the Chinese theatre." The emperor Jones in form of a ritualistic dance by the Jiangsu Drama Troupe, under the direction of Feng Changnian, literary advisor Liu Haiping, choreograph Su Shijin, designed by Wang Zhengyang in Nanjing, Cai Wei as Brutus Jones. Second production of The emperor Jones by the Chinese Dramatists' Association in Beijing. Feng decided to bring into a single work elements of spoken drama, mime, music, dance, plastic arts and gymnastics. The production reduced the play's spoken language and psychological elements to the minimum and applied a ritual-like performance combining dance and pantomime instead. The dance chorus wore black or white leotards and featureless masks of the same color in order to 'give prominence to the main character and augment the production's style'. Speech by Feng Changnian at the Conference : "I have always been an admirer of Eugene O'Neill. I had the idea of producing The emperor Jones even when I was a student at a drama school. So, this production has fulfilled my long-cherished dream. The emperor Jones is a play with a long production history both in China and in the West. So the crucial thing for me is to find a new theatrical approach. Whenever I read the play, I am always struck by the horror of the dark, primitive forest, the suffocating drumbeat of the African tom-tom, the mysterious atmosphere and the simple grandeur of the play. I am also fascinated by the play's deep probe into the psyche of its characters, the elaborate sets of symbols, and the philosophical and psychological ramifications of the play. It seems to me that a realistic, conventional theatrical approach is absolutely inadequate. So, I felt I had to use more expressive means to do the play justice. Hence the new form – pantomime-dance – of this production. Another consideration in choosing this form is the Chinese audience. Since the form is a good mixture of action, pantomime, music and dance, it is in a sense similar to the form of Beijing opera, though our performance is much more abstract and modern than the traditional art. I think, therefore, it is an effective way to bring O'Neill to the Chinese theatregoers. To put it in a nutshell, the main emphasis of our performance is the overall mood and atmosphere created by the pantomime-dance based on the psychological truth of the protagonist Emperor Jones, which can be very different from the logic of our day-to-day life. For example, in certain scenes, we see human bodies or clotheslines hanging from tree branches. This is used to reflect Jones' state of mind. It is expressionistic, rather than realistic. The second emphasis of our production is the symbols ; for instance, the use of the cross in two scenes. The third emphasis lies in the treatment of time and space. At times, we try to blur the line between reality and illusion, or to juxtapose the real and the illusory, so as to effectively show the reality in Jones' illusion and the illusion in his reality. An example comes from the scene in which the Emperor is encircled by the natives running at a dizzying speed, each with a flaming torch in hand. Another point is that throughout the performance we try to maintain a delicate balance between pantomime and dance, relying on the traditional language of the theatre and our real life." The great god Brown by the Shanghai Youth Drama Troupe, under the direction of Hu Weimin, designed by Li Rulan in Shanghai, Zhang Xianheng as William Brown, Ren Guangzhi as Dion Anthony and Song Ruhui as Cybele. The production had opened at a university auditorium on May 28 and had eleven performances at the Changjiang Theater. With full use of symbolic masks. The actors wore plastic masks covering only part of their own features. The masks should 'represent the duality of human mind and disclose the truth of human nature'. Macro millions under the direction of Jackson Phippin. Long day's journey into night by Qian xian hua ju tuan (Drama Theatre of the Nanjing Military Subarea of the People's Liberation Army), under the direction of Zhang Fuchen, in the translation by Jiang Hongding. Speech by Yao Yuan at the festival : "We feel proud that this is the first American play ever done by our company, and it also marks the premiere of Long day's journey into night in China. I believe the Nanjing/Shanghai O'Neill theatre festival and this production will have great impact on Chinese life. With his integrity and insight as a true artist, O'Neill helped create the American drama and thus won high respect from people all over the world. Though China and the United States have different social systems and different political faiths, the Americans and the Chinese belong to the same human race. We are all thinking of ways to solve our common problems. Human beings have always been seeking light in darkness. It is the good artist, intellectuals, and so on, who hold the torches to light the human path. And Eugene O'Neill is one of them. It is based on this knowledge that we present O'Neill's masterpiece on the Chinese stage." Mourning becomes Electra in Yue opera, an interpretation of Hugie by the Shanghai Youth Theater in Nanjing. Hugie by the Shanghai Youth Drama Troupe, under the direction of Hu Weimin, in the translation by Liu Haiping in Shanghai. The Shanghai production differs from the American one not only in costume and language, but also in theme and style. Taking place in 1928 as the original play, the Chinese version of O'Neill's one-acter underwent transplantation from New York to Shanghai. The settings, costumes and sound effects contribute to a sketch of the mesmerizing Chinese city in the 1920s. Jiao Huang and Lou Jicheng cast as night clerk and gambler, appeared in traditional attire and adopted comic devices of the Chinese folk art of cross talk. Ah, wilderness. Student productions by Nankai University in Tianjin, Fudan University in Shanghai and Beijing University. |
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