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IN general, language is one of the central elements of a theatrical drama. However, the subtleties of a script can be lost in translation, and when the audience and players don’t share a common tongue the language barrier becomes seemingly insurmountable.
As China’s cultural influence follows the path of its ever-expanding economic influence, Chinese theater groups taking their productions to the world stage are exploring ways to bypass this barrier.
Last September audiences at the 2012 Beijing International Youth Theater Festival were treated to one of the results of these explorations. Zhao Miao and his theater company Santuoqi presented their new drama Shuisheng, which had spent a stint at the Festival d’Avignon earlier that summer.
Language Barrier
Language barrier is a problem that must be addressed before Chinese the- atrical productions can be enjoyed by a global audience. In Shuisheng the actors present the story using body language without any dialogue, which allows foreign audiences to understand the plot without difficulty. In Avignon the play received praise from the French media for its impressive use of body language to present a Chinese dreamscape with both intensity and subtletly.
Shuisheng is the adaptation of the story Wang Liulang, literally meaning the sixth son of the Wang family, from the Chinese classic Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio (Liaozhai Zhiyi). The story is about a troubled ghost of a youth who had drowned in a river. The spirit had to take the life of another before he could be reincarnated. When the oppor-tunity of killing a fisherman with whom he had made friends finally came, the spirit hesitated. He knew that if he killed the man, the dead man’s family would suffer great sorrow and the dead man himself would become spirit who would in turn have to kill another innocent. In the end, he gave up and resolved not to take anybody’s life.
Santuoqi managed to convey this tale to the audience without the use of words. Chen Lidan, a professor of mass communications at Renmin University of China and researcher at the Institute of Journalism and Communication of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, explained to China Today that language is the most important tool in human communication and a useful vehicle for people to exchange their thoughts.
But the world’s immense variety of languages, Chen continued, which number anywhere between 6,000 and 7,000, have become barriers for communication between different cultures. Literature such as novels and poems all rely on words to pass on meaning, making learning about other peoples difficult. Many plays fall into the same trap –William Shakespeare was not accessible to the vast majority of Chinese people until a Mandarin translation of Hamlet was published 300 years after the great Bard’s death. However, as a form of performance art, plays by their very nature have the potential to transcend such restraints. During the 2012 Festival d’Avignon, China sent three dramas featuring little or no dialogue. Where dialogue was necessary, subtitles were shown on a screen near the stage to help the audience follow the plot. Shuisheng, one of the three entries, relies entirely on body language.
Several dozen dramas from over 20 countries and regions shown during the 2012 Beijing International Youth Theater Festival were also performed primarily using dance and body language rather than dialogue to facilitate communication to the audience.
Body Language
“We need to find out ways to overcome language barriers in theatrical communication and probably body language is the best choice,” said Professor Chen Lidan. According to Chen, people communicated with each other in voice tone and gestures before language developed. “I believe on stage anything can be presented clearly through body language,” he added.
This approach, in fact, has had a significant presence since the second half of the 20th century, when theater professionals began to address language barrier in their productions.
In Western countries a movement inspired by Antonin Artaud eschewed the use of language in performances. Artaud, a French director, among other things, advocated more physical theater, emphasizing expression through gesture and action rather than dialogue. Although the movement took this to the extreme, it led to the development of theater towards pluralism. Later, in China, exploration of physical theater emerged alongside the development of avant-garde theater.
Zhao Miao himself grew to love avantgarde theater as a high school student in the mid-1990s, when he and his classmates would attend performances at the Central Academy of Drama. Together they decided to establish a drama group and named it Santuoqi, writing and rehearsing plays during their free time.
In 2001, Zhao Miao became a student of the Central Academy of Drama, where he had many opportunities to exchange ideas with foreign counterparts. These precious interactions led him to discover completely different ideas about Constantin Stanislavski, Bertolt Brecht and Peter Brook from the ones he had learned in textbooks.
“I found that most of the visiting foreign theater groups presented their drama without much use of dialogue and preferred body language. I was impressed by their performances and found this kind of expression can help a drama be understood by a wider audience,” Zhao said. Inspired, since 2001 Zhao has guided the development of his group Santuoqi according to the motto “expressing love with the body.” Sixteen years after its founding, Santuoqi created Shuisheng especially for the Festival d’Avignon. The director chose this story because he was captivated by its storyline. “Although it is a ghost story, it reflects certain occurrences in today’s society. In Avignon I presented an old Chinese story, but I wanted to allude to phenomena in modern China,” Zhao said.
Cultural Obstacles
Santuoqi’s solution to the problem of language barrier is only one of many. Translation can also be useful, and some productions use subtitles.
A successful example was a 1980 performance tour of esteemed dramatist Lao She’s Teahouse in Germany, France and Switzerland. The play made a stir in European theatrical circles, and its hefty amount of dialogue did not hinder the understanding and appreciation of its European audience, thanks to its excellent script and the Western world’s curiosity about China, which had just been opened up to the outside world.
In fact, language barrier not only exists among countries but also within, particularly those as large as China. Zhao believes that the Chinese theater must increase contacts with foreign counterparts and audiences and develop diverse stage languages in order to breach cultural differences and put Chinese drama across to international audiences.
Chinese producers are taking steps to make this happen. During the 2012 Beijing International Youth Theater Festival, for example, the Alice Theater from Hong Kong staged their production of One Hundred Years of Solitude, an adaptation of the magic realism novel by Gabriel García Márquez. Though performed in Cantonese, which most Beijingers can’t decipher, the actors’ excellent performances and the popularity of the novel enabled the play to attract a large audience. With the help of subtitles, the audience found no difficulty in following the story and understanding the emotions portrayed by the actors.
For Santuoqi, body language remains the most effective tool for its cross-cultural theatrical exploration.
Zhao, however, realizes that efficient communication is not necessarily achieved just by removing spoken language from a piece or translating it into the local tongue. “The real barrier is in fact not language, but cultural differences,” he concluded.
As China’s cultural influence follows the path of its ever-expanding economic influence, Chinese theater groups taking their productions to the world stage are exploring ways to bypass this barrier.
Last September audiences at the 2012 Beijing International Youth Theater Festival were treated to one of the results of these explorations. Zhao Miao and his theater company Santuoqi presented their new drama Shuisheng, which had spent a stint at the Festival d’Avignon earlier that summer.
Language Barrier
Language barrier is a problem that must be addressed before Chinese the- atrical productions can be enjoyed by a global audience. In Shuisheng the actors present the story using body language without any dialogue, which allows foreign audiences to understand the plot without difficulty. In Avignon the play received praise from the French media for its impressive use of body language to present a Chinese dreamscape with both intensity and subtletly.
Shuisheng is the adaptation of the story Wang Liulang, literally meaning the sixth son of the Wang family, from the Chinese classic Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio (Liaozhai Zhiyi). The story is about a troubled ghost of a youth who had drowned in a river. The spirit had to take the life of another before he could be reincarnated. When the oppor-tunity of killing a fisherman with whom he had made friends finally came, the spirit hesitated. He knew that if he killed the man, the dead man’s family would suffer great sorrow and the dead man himself would become spirit who would in turn have to kill another innocent. In the end, he gave up and resolved not to take anybody’s life.
Santuoqi managed to convey this tale to the audience without the use of words. Chen Lidan, a professor of mass communications at Renmin University of China and researcher at the Institute of Journalism and Communication of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, explained to China Today that language is the most important tool in human communication and a useful vehicle for people to exchange their thoughts.
But the world’s immense variety of languages, Chen continued, which number anywhere between 6,000 and 7,000, have become barriers for communication between different cultures. Literature such as novels and poems all rely on words to pass on meaning, making learning about other peoples difficult. Many plays fall into the same trap –William Shakespeare was not accessible to the vast majority of Chinese people until a Mandarin translation of Hamlet was published 300 years after the great Bard’s death. However, as a form of performance art, plays by their very nature have the potential to transcend such restraints. During the 2012 Festival d’Avignon, China sent three dramas featuring little or no dialogue. Where dialogue was necessary, subtitles were shown on a screen near the stage to help the audience follow the plot. Shuisheng, one of the three entries, relies entirely on body language.
Several dozen dramas from over 20 countries and regions shown during the 2012 Beijing International Youth Theater Festival were also performed primarily using dance and body language rather than dialogue to facilitate communication to the audience.
Body Language
“We need to find out ways to overcome language barriers in theatrical communication and probably body language is the best choice,” said Professor Chen Lidan. According to Chen, people communicated with each other in voice tone and gestures before language developed. “I believe on stage anything can be presented clearly through body language,” he added.
This approach, in fact, has had a significant presence since the second half of the 20th century, when theater professionals began to address language barrier in their productions.
In Western countries a movement inspired by Antonin Artaud eschewed the use of language in performances. Artaud, a French director, among other things, advocated more physical theater, emphasizing expression through gesture and action rather than dialogue. Although the movement took this to the extreme, it led to the development of theater towards pluralism. Later, in China, exploration of physical theater emerged alongside the development of avant-garde theater.
Zhao Miao himself grew to love avantgarde theater as a high school student in the mid-1990s, when he and his classmates would attend performances at the Central Academy of Drama. Together they decided to establish a drama group and named it Santuoqi, writing and rehearsing plays during their free time.
In 2001, Zhao Miao became a student of the Central Academy of Drama, where he had many opportunities to exchange ideas with foreign counterparts. These precious interactions led him to discover completely different ideas about Constantin Stanislavski, Bertolt Brecht and Peter Brook from the ones he had learned in textbooks.
“I found that most of the visiting foreign theater groups presented their drama without much use of dialogue and preferred body language. I was impressed by their performances and found this kind of expression can help a drama be understood by a wider audience,” Zhao said. Inspired, since 2001 Zhao has guided the development of his group Santuoqi according to the motto “expressing love with the body.” Sixteen years after its founding, Santuoqi created Shuisheng especially for the Festival d’Avignon. The director chose this story because he was captivated by its storyline. “Although it is a ghost story, it reflects certain occurrences in today’s society. In Avignon I presented an old Chinese story, but I wanted to allude to phenomena in modern China,” Zhao said.
Cultural Obstacles
Santuoqi’s solution to the problem of language barrier is only one of many. Translation can also be useful, and some productions use subtitles.
A successful example was a 1980 performance tour of esteemed dramatist Lao She’s Teahouse in Germany, France and Switzerland. The play made a stir in European theatrical circles, and its hefty amount of dialogue did not hinder the understanding and appreciation of its European audience, thanks to its excellent script and the Western world’s curiosity about China, which had just been opened up to the outside world.
In fact, language barrier not only exists among countries but also within, particularly those as large as China. Zhao believes that the Chinese theater must increase contacts with foreign counterparts and audiences and develop diverse stage languages in order to breach cultural differences and put Chinese drama across to international audiences.
Chinese producers are taking steps to make this happen. During the 2012 Beijing International Youth Theater Festival, for example, the Alice Theater from Hong Kong staged their production of One Hundred Years of Solitude, an adaptation of the magic realism novel by Gabriel García Márquez. Though performed in Cantonese, which most Beijingers can’t decipher, the actors’ excellent performances and the popularity of the novel enabled the play to attract a large audience. With the help of subtitles, the audience found no difficulty in following the story and understanding the emotions portrayed by the actors.
For Santuoqi, body language remains the most effective tool for its cross-cultural theatrical exploration.
Zhao, however, realizes that efficient communication is not necessarily achieved just by removing spoken language from a piece or translating it into the local tongue. “The real barrier is in fact not language, but cultural differences,” he concluded.