Journal article
Meyerhold Meets Mei Lanfang: Staging the Grotesque and the Beautiful
Comparative drama, Vol.33(2), pp.234-269
07/01/1999
DOI: 10.1353/cdr.1999.0039
Abstract
The Russian avant-gardists saw in the Chinese master, who was officially invited by the Ail-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries for enhancing the Soviet-Sino friendship, a potentially powerful alliance in their on-going campaign against the naturalist theater and struggle for artistic freedom. Meyerhold was condemned and executed for the political implications of his artistic transgressions as manifested in his pursuit of the grotesque, whereas Mei was venerated as an icon of Chinese theater and culture tradition and was eulogized as "a creator of beauty" for his political allegiance and patriotism as well as his artistry.107 During the Cultural Revolution, like most of the Chinese artists and intellectuals, Mei, already dead, was attacked as a reactionary artistic authoritarian. Meyerhold's portrayal of the grotesque uses conventional means to consciously create contrast, incongruity and alienation; Chinese xiqu portrays, concentrates, distills, and intensifies the beautiful by way of artistic transformation of nature, life, and emotion (including the ugly) into the beautiful, and by way of artistic identification and harmonization of form and content, the actor and the character, the spectator and the performance.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Meyerhold Meets Mei Lanfang: Staging the Grotesque and the Beautiful
- Creators
- Min Tian - University of Iowa, Center for Asian and Pacific Studies
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Publication Details
- Comparative drama, Vol.33(2), pp.234-269
- DOI
- 10.1353/cdr.1999.0039
- ISSN
- 0010-4078
- eISSN
- 1936-1637
- Publisher
- Western Michigan University, Department of English
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 07/01/1999
- Academic Unit
- Humanities and Social Sciences/Scholarly Impact
- Record Identifier
- 9984558456402771
Metrics
6 Record Views