Theatrical emotion has the characteristics of experiential and fully explicit.

Pushkin

Let's start with the experiential nature of each.

Dramatic emotion was first formed in the pen of a playwright. The Russian poet A.S. Pushkin wrote: "The truth of passion and the verisimilitude of emotions in hypothetical situations are what our wisdom demands from dramatists." "What Pushkin proposes here is the basic requirement for the playwright's way of expressing his feelings, that is, the truth of emotions in each hypothetical situation.

When Pushkin writes poetry, emotions flow directly, but not when writing a screenplay. The playwright must contain his basic emotions and make them infiltrate the work secretly. The work presents the emotional forms of the people in each play in various hypothetical situations. Pushkin, accustomed to lyric poetry, was the most sensitive to this, and was therefore qualified to point out the peculiarities of the playwright's emotional expression.

Chekhov put this question very succinctly: "Write others as others, not as yourself." ”

Li Yu's statement is more straightforward: "Who is it talking about, who is Xiao." ”

However, drama is not an objective portrait, and the so-called "writing as someone else" and "Xiao He Ren" requires the playwright to have an emotional experience of the characters one by one.

Li Yu explained:

The speaker, the voice of the heart, if you want to speak on behalf of this person, it is appropriate to set up your heart on behalf of this person. If you don't dream about fugue, what does it mean to put yourself in your shoes? Regardless of the person with a good heart, I should put myself in the shoes of the person and think of the upright; Even if I encounter those who have evil intentions, I should also give up the scriptures and follow the power, and temporarily think about evil spirits. Make sure that the heart is faint, spit out casually, say one person, Xiao one person, don't make the same, make the Buddha floating.

To speak on behalf of the character, you must first stand up for the character, even if the playwright cannot agree with the character, you must temporarily put yourself in the shoes of the character. It is naïve to think that experiencing the feelings of the antagonist will go against the basic emotions of the playwright. Li Yu said very clearly that compared with the playwright's own feelings, the playwright is only "temporary" for the evil thoughts of the bad guys in the play, but he must "be", otherwise he will not be able to make the bad guys' hearts faint and spit out casually. If the endorsement is not like the person, then the theatrical style of the endorsement body cannot be established.

Brecht's Galileo

Brecht himself hated the Roman Catholic Church's proposal to ban free scientific research, but when he presented the Roman Catholic Church's exposition of the proposal in his play Galileo, he wrote it wittily and persuasively. He is said to have smiled and said, "I seem to be the only person in the country who has defended the Pope." "Dramatists often have to argue with people and things they hate, as if they have become a different person altogether, with a different emotion. Of course, none of this is the ultimate effect of dramatic emotion. In terms of most of the ultimate effects, the clarity of the playwright's subjective emotions has been achieved. This phenomenon can be said to be the "return" of the playwright's emotions through temporary sideways.

Even if many beginners know that they need to experience each character individually, they lack the capital to implement it, and they can only resonate emotionally with some characters that are close to them. Talking about the difficulties, Brooke said:

It's not easy to create a play. The very nature of drama demands that a playwright enter into the mental world of opposing characters. The playwright is not a judge, but a creator – even if he starts writing a play with only two characters, and whatever form he takes to write it, he must be with them all the time. In the process of writing, moving completely from writing one character to writing another character is a task that is beyond the reach of ordinary people at any time. But in theatre, it is a principle, on which the entire theatrical works of Shakespeare and Chekhov are based. This requires an incomparable talent, perhaps a talent that is not appropriate for our age. A beginner's work is always thin, most likely because he has not yet expanded his understanding of human emotional resonance.

The playwright's artistic progress is largely determined by the expansion of the scope of his emotional experience.

The playwright passed the baton of each experience to the actors. Actors, like playwrights, also need to create the emotional reality of each character in each situation, but the playwright experiences and creates in his own hypothetical situation, and the actor experiences and creates in the situation that the playwright has prescribed. To this end, Stanislavsky noted that Pushkin's words about "the truth of passion and the verisimilitude of emotions in a hypothetical situation" are addressed to the playwright, but the actor should do the same; "The difference is that what counts as a hypothetical situation for a writer is a ready-made situation for us actors—a prescribed situation."

Playwrights need to be multi-tasking and experience each role separately, while the emotional experience of an actor is more singular and focused than that of a playwright, but it also has its own special difficulties. If the actor plays a role that is completely contrary to the actor's basic emotions, the actor needs to hide his feelings more secretly than the playwright. The playwright can achieve a general balance in the emotional transformation of each character, but the actor cannot. As a result, the actor's emotional experience is more alien than that of the playwright. The restoration of the actor's own emotions lies in the overall effect of the play.

If the role created by the actor is quite close to the actor himself, then it is possible to achieve a state of integration with the character when the actor plays the role by an experiential actor. For example, when Stanislavsky played Ibsen's play "Doctor Stockman", he quickly entered the full experience because of the similarity of life feelings, inner reserves and characters. Stanislavsky recalled:

The image and emotions of the characters became organically my own, or rather, my own emotions became Sstockman's. At this time, I experienced the greatest pleasure of being an actor, which is to speak other people's thoughts on stage, to subordinate myself to other people's emotions, and to do other people's actions as if they were my own.

But this kind of merging into one is not always possible, and even he himself says: "Dr. Stockman is one of the few characters in my repertoire who is very happy." ”

Qiu Shengrong "Qin Xianglian"

Expressionist actors do not advocate entering the experience every time during the performance, but they are not opposed to finding an "ideal model" of performance on the basis of experience. Chinese opera actors do not exclude the experience of roles, for example, when Peking Opera actor Qiu Shengrong performed the play "Yao Period", even if he went backstage to rest, he maintained the identity of the role, did not talk to people much, like a prince returning home to rest. On stage, whenever the actor who played Concubine Guo handed him wine, he could always hear him softly chanting "Don't dare, don't dare". It's something the audience can't hear, it's all a natural consequence of his experience with the character. According to Qiu Shengrong's own words, "I play him, I am him, and I am always thinking about what he thinks, so I will think what I think." It is not difficult to find a similar meaning in the articles of other opera actors talking about their artistic experience.

The full individual experience enables each character on the stage to have their own believable emotional system, so that they can become a reliable object for the audience's emotional projection, regardless of whether the projected emotion is positive or negative.

No matter how real and complete the dramatic emotion is, it is also the load body of the audience's emotion.

In addition to the individual experiential nature, the dramatic emotion is also fully explicit.

Theatrical emotion is based on experience and explicit for purpose. Experiencing it inside, it can be called theatrical feelings; Exposed, it can be called a dramatic expression. Theatrical emotion and theatrical expression are two interdependent aspects that make up dramatic emotion.

Dramatic expressions, in a narrow sense, refer to the form of expressions based on the facial expressions of actors; Broadly speaking, it refers to the entire explicit form, including actions and speech.

In the ancient Indian drama theory work "Dance Theory", it is said: "The nature of human beings who have pain and happiness, and the performance of physical performance, is called drama." This is a very succinct illustration of the explicit nature of dramatic emotion. Schiller also said that drama should show not only the passions of the characters, but also the events and actions that produce those passions.

The relationship between the internal basis and the explicit form of theatrical emotion is very complex. Generally speaking, the former is cause and the latter is effect, but in artistic practice, this causality is not presented in a one-way straight line. When inner activity is in a particularly complex state, there is a deliberate disobedience in the explicit form. The heart is sad, but you can force your face to laugh and pretend to be relaxed; The heart is happy, but it can be silent, and even tears are fake. This illusion embodies the strategic deformation of the inner basis in a particular situation.

In "The Legend of the West Chamber", Zhang Sheng cried under the pretext of Buddhism in order to get close to Cui Yingying, Kong Ming was nervous and chic in "The Empty City", and Zhou Yu was jealous and laughed in Kong Ming's heart in "The Heroes". It is necessary to let the audience see the appearance that is not very consistent with the true feelings, but also not let the audience get lost in the appearance and not be able to peek into the true feelings.

The emotional outward appearance of European drama is often more subtle. Especially in the 18th and 19th centuries, theatrical works that expressed feelings in a subtle way were widely welcomed. Diderot advocated a kind of drama in which questions and answers in dialogue are based on subtle emotions and transient mental activity. Diderot's advocacy was later fully realized in Chekhov's plays. For example, in the play "The Seagull", Chekhov writes about the emotional journey of a heroine who has been deceived and abandoned, and does not use the shocking "necessary scenes" that most dramatists would do, but allows a person who once loved the heroine to narrate calmly, and there are many intriguing pauses in the narrative. It is not difficult to see that the effect of this explicit form of emotion has a lot to do with the aesthetic level of the audience. Diderot quipped: "If I had a son who could not be connected here, I would rather not have such a son." But he can ask of his son in the same way, but he can't ask of the majority of the audience in the same way. Therefore, many dramatists, while acknowledging the high level of Chekhov's drama, are also exploring artistic ways to make feelings fully visible without being shallow.

Traditional Chinese opera answers this question.

A poster is immersed in an unspeakable inner contradiction, and the audience sees that the actor's yarn hat wings are slowly shaking, hinting at tense inner activity. Trembling here and there, implying that he thought this way and that, and the inner struggle was very fierce. Suddenly, both yarn hat wings stopped, and the audience could immediately conclude that he had made a decision.

A negative man abandoned his wife and remarried, and the maid who led him into the cave room was played by the actor who played his original wife.

The explicit form of emotion in the Sichuan opera "Fanwang Palace" is a prominent example. A girl falls in love with a condor hero, and the two look at each other for a long time. The girl's sister-in-law came to greet her, the girl didn't say anything, the sister-in-law understood, and actually made a virtual action of pulling out a "line" from the girl's eyes, and pulled out a "line" from the hero's eyes, and tied the two "lines" together, so a pair of lovers seemed to be really tied together, as long as they pulled the invisible line, their bodies trembled. When the girl left the hero and returned from the sedan chair, the face of the sedan chair man changed into the hero's face many times, showing the girl's emotional state in a trance in the sedan chair.

This method of expression of traditional Chinese opera has brought inspiration to modern Western dramatists. The American dramatist Eugene O'Neill advocated the adoption of masks, and his basic reasoning was that "masks did not eliminate the Greek actors, nor did they prevent theatrical performance in the East from becoming an art." "The mask is a symbol of people's inner world," he says, and "those who doubt it can study masks in Japanese Noh theater, masks in Chinese theater, or primitive masks in Africa." O'Neill states that his efforts are entirely aimed at "showing, in the clearest and most economical theatrical means, the deep contradictions hidden in the human mind that psychology continues to reveal to us."

O'neill

In his own creative practice, O'Neill strives to use various stage techniques, including masks, to make the play's emotions manifest. For example, in the play "Brown the Great", the characters wear masks for a while and don't wear them for a while, clearly showing the duplicity of their hearts. In the play "Endless Period", two actors are used to play a role to show split personalities. It is not appropriate to simply compare O'Neill's technique to the "face change", "different role" or "different role in the same role" in Chinese opera, but the pursuit of inner and outer appearance is common.

Expressionist drama, represented by O'Neill, takes inner and outer appearance as the main goal of the art form. Expressionist dramatists try their best to transform feelings, experiences, emotions, and even the subconscious into perceptible stage images, appealing to the audience's intuition the psychological activities that are most difficult to form on stage. Clark, a modern American theorist of drama, once theoretically summarized the special explicit technique of expressionist drama, saying: "It is not enough to record what seems to be what someone has said or done, but it is necessary to express his thoughts, hearts, and actions concisely with the help of a symbolic language or performance, plus scenery and lighting." ”

According to the Swiss stage designer Abia, the mission of the explicit form of theatrical emotion lies not in its harmony with the internal basis, but in its connection with the audience's feelings. In his view, the dramatist is not so much looking for an explicit equivalent to the inner emotion of the drama as it is looking for a visual equivalent for the audience's feelings.

From Chinese opera artists to O'Neill, Brooke, and Abiyah, their practices and propositions on the externalization of theatrical emotions are all aimed at directly acting on the audience. They directly connect with the audience's feelings through the full and external expression of inner feelings, so that the works can have the shortest distance of psychological communication with the audience.

Liu Xian, said that a work of art can make hidden emotions soar, so that the blind can see the shape and the deaf can hear the sound ("the letter can be accumulated and stagnant, and the blindness can be deaf and deaf"). The direct manifestation of the inner emotions of the drama is also close to this.