Castello Livello, an Italian Renaissance scholar, once said: "It is impossible to convince the audience that a few days and nights have passed in the performance of a few hours, and they refuse to be deceived." "This is to use the perception of life to ask for theater perception, confusing the two. In life, of course, people are reluctant to accept unconscionable exaggeration and compression of time, but in the theater, people are willing to see a few days and nights in a few hours, and even longer developments. Contrary to Castelvetello's assertion, the audience would rather be "deceived".

Confusing the perception of theater with the perception of life is an important root of the "Trinity Law" of classicism. Its theoretical origins can be traced back to Aristotle's "imitation theory", although the distortion and absolutization of Aristotle by the classicists is obvious. Aristotle's imitation does not require art to copy life, he has stated the principle that art is more universal and philosophical than life and history, but this mainly refers to the difference in content. Aristotle's failure to distinguish between life and art in perceptual characteristics leaves a gap for his unintelligent successors to distort. Without recognizing the peculiarities of theatrical perception, the defenders of the "Trinity Law" often use the standard of life perception to attack all mutated actions.

A few minutes to show a long night, the audience is not too short; The momentary "inspiration" was accompanied by a large inner monologue and slowly poured out, and the audience did not dismiss it; Thousands of miles away are juxtaposed in one, and the audience does not blame them for being fake; The distance of a few steps is a long time, and the audience is not to blame for its slowness. Where is the "clock of perception" that is quite accurate in life? Clearly, there is a new standard of perception that rules the audience in the theater.

Theatrical perception, that is, perception based on psychological experience, has a clear relativity. In real life, people take objective or recognized time and space coordinates as the main content and measurement standard of perception, but in drama, the audience perceives "subjective perception of time and space", and its standard is neither objective nor stable.

Zweig

Zweig once wrote brilliantly about the subjective perception of time in his novel The Story of Chess. Dr. B was held in solitary confinement by the Nazis in a room, sunk in an "emptiness without time and space", waiting all day for something to happen, but nothing happened. The writer writes: "Without the concept of time and space, no one can describe, measure, or illustrate how long time is in general." Later, Dr. B occasionally got a chess book, and not only memorized it well, but also played blind chess with himself. The chess addiction is getting bigger and bigger, and I almost have a sense of torment, so excited that I can't even sit still for a while. Dr. B later recalled, "Even the quarter of an hour when the guards came to clean the cell, the minute or two when the food came to bring me, made me hotly irritable. Sometimes the box of food was left untouched until the evening, and I forgot to eat it when I played chess. "This feeling of time is both strange and believable.

The audience sitting in the theater is also a bit like Dr. B imprisoned in the room, because they have also lost the objective time standard. The Nazis stole Dr. B.'s pocket watch, but the dramatist made the audience forget what they were carrying. It is futile for some mediocre classicists to carefully calculate the time of each act and try to make it even, because the time they give the viewer is never equal to the time that the viewer feels. In this regard, Diderot once said to one of his friends:

If a scene is empty and full of lines, it will always be too long; If the lines and plot make the audience lose track of time, then it's short enough. Will anyone watch a play with a clock? It mainly cares about the feelings of the audience; And you're counting pages and rows.

A little later than Diderot, Herder further ridiculed those who looked at pocket watches in the theater. He said, "If a person has watched a scene, he should look at his pocket watch and consider whether the plot of this scene can happen in such a period of time", "What kind of character is a person who will make this his main pleasure!" "It would be even worse if a dramatist also had such a bad habit of confined the plot time to the objective time of watching the play," he is a poor celebrity! It is the miscellaneous staff of the theater, not the creator, the poet, the god of drama! Herder writes in aggressive terms:

Is it necessary to prove that space and time are nothing in themselves, they are the most relative things, conditioned by existence, action, passion, the process of thought, and the degree of subjective and objective attention? Kind-hearted people who watch clocks and watches while watching dramas, have you never felt in your life that sometimes a few hours become a few moments for you, a few days become a few hours, and vice versa, sometimes a few hours become days, and a few periods of night duty become years? …… Don't you feel how insignificant place and time are, shadows, of insignificance compared to action, of the action and necessity of mental activity? Don't you feel that it's just this mind that creates space, world, and time standards for yourself at will?

Herder

Herder argues that Shakespeare's plays are exemplary in actively mastering the criteria of mental time. At the beginning of many of Shakespeare's plays, events move very slowly, like a spring that has not yet started, and everything is still laborious. The event itself may not take much time, but the audience still has a sense of strangeness and barrier psychologically, and it must take some time to rub, wait, and guide. At this time, the theater time must be turned from fast to slow. However, as events unfold, the speed and frequency of change become faster and faster, the words become shorter and shorter, the action and passion become more and more swift and unrestrained, and at the end of the play, everything takes a sharp turn, and many things that should have happened one by one for a long time are all in an instant.

Shakespeare's way of dealing with theatrical time was recognized by the European theater scene after a long dispute. However, on the stage of traditional Chinese opera, objective time (i.e., "pocket watch time") has never been too rigid and more subordinated to psychological time. Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai's lingering farewell can be performed longer than "three-year classmates", which seems to be a matter of course; Kou Zhun stayed overnight, from the first watch to the fifth watch, the sound connection was very close, and no one thought that it was better to use "dark turn" here; Qin Xianglian revealed to Bao Gong that Chen Shimei borrowed a knife to kill people, Chen Shimei denied it, Bao Gong immediately ordered his entourage to go to the scene to retrieve the evidence of the crime, the scene should not be very close, but the evidence was taken back in a blink of an eye, and no one thought that it was a little bizarre here. Maybe some directors will arrange some entanglements between ordering the collection of criminal evidence and retrieving the criminal evidence, but in this way, although it feels a little reasonable, it slacks the audience's anxious expectation, and the gains outweigh the losses. At this moment, the greatest reasonableness is to satisfy the audience's psychology like a ghost.

In the theater, the perception of the audience is the god who controls time.

This is true of the perception of time, and so are the perceptions of other beings.

Some people once put a slide lantern on the banks of the Ludi River and the turbulent river for the Sichuan opera "Autumn River", and some people imagined making the scene of the black fighting in the Peking Opera "Three Forks" darker, or simply using "chasing the light" to deal with it. All of these are attempts to replace the particularity of visual perception in the theater with the generality of visual perception in real life.

If the canopy of "Autumn River" really shows the river and the riverbank, then the audience's perception will spread along the way: what about the boat? What about the water under the boat? What about the sound of water? And so on; If the stage of "Three Forks" is really dim and hazy, then the audience will passively think that it is just dim and hazy, and the various actions set up for the scene of "reaching out and not seeing the five fingers" seem absurd. Theater perception could have perceived the mighty river in the absence of rivers and water, and could have perceived the deep night on the bright lights and on the stage, but when people did not trust the initiative of theater perception and used qualitative methods to invade and interfere with this initiative, theater perception would lose its own characteristics and return to the general life perception, and the dramatist was not able to fully satisfy people's general life perception.

Sasai, who values the audience, is still incisive on this issue:

This is called the collective existence of the audience, and it is characterized by the structure of the eyes. They have the strange privilege of seeing things in a different way than they are in reality, and there is another light to illuminate and change them; They will see other lines outside of some lines; In addition to some colors, other colors can be seen.

Sassai further points out that the viewer's eyes "have a strange ability to change the shape of foreign objects, and if you put human events in front of them as they appear in reality, it will make them feel fake"; "If a set artist brings the tones he sees in nature to the background, his image will look grotesque when illuminated by the glare of the footlights. The same will be true of the fact that the facts and emotions of reality are brought to the stage as they are. It is absolutely necessary to adapt them to the special state of mind of the audience".

In order to suit the law of variation perceived by the audience, the artists have created a series of regular means of transformation. When this means of transformation is screened over a certain period of time and condensed into a certain fixed and universal artistic norm, it is the so-called program. The program, which acts on the audience's senses in a series of conventional ways, is an affirmation of the variation of the perception of the theater on both the artist and the audience. A program is a materialized form of mutated perception.

If it weren't for the mutated perception, the program would not have been created. Riding a horse is really like riding a horse, drinking is really like drinking, and opening the door is really like opening the door, then the performance becomes a simulation and does not need a special program. However, people don't want to watch the real horse go on stage, they don't want to look at the hot wine, they just want to see the horseback riding posture that shows a little meaning, and they just want to watch the rhythmic drinking action of raising an empty glass. As a result, the program of "only seeking its meaning, not its truth" was left.

In short, the deformation in order to achieve a better theater perception effect, and the stereotyped in order to encompass a larger range of audience perception, constitutes a stereotyped deformation, which is the psychological basis for the program.

Dramatists use artistic means to cast the variation of the audience's aesthetic perception for various purposes. Some people hope that through mutation, they will bring some strangeness and a sense of isolation to the audience, so that they will be shocked and get the essence of life that they usually ignore; Some people hope that through mutation, they can screen out unbeautiful impurities, expand aesthetic pigments, and achieve beautification through purification; Some people hope that through mutation, some external appearances that can better reflect the essence will be highlighted, so that the life form will be more profoundly presented in front of the audience.