The involvement of the audience's emotions is generally caused by real perception first, then by attention and will, and finally resonance.

Realism is also believability. The establishment of trust is the foundation of emotional reciprocation. This is true of the relationship between people in life, and the same is true of the relationship between the audience and the play in the theater.

Stanislavsky elaborates on this process in great detail:

Performances at the Theater Basel, Switzerland

Set design by Swiss stage designer A. Abia

As soon as the audience feels the actor's open heart, peeps into it, and realizes the truth of his emotions and the physical reality of his expression, they immediately fall in love with this emotional reality and believe uncontrollably what they see on stage. In place of the beautiful and theatrical falsehood, the audience will immediately recognize the truth on stage. But not the small reality that the notorious external naturalism creates on the stage, but another, that is, the highest reality of the actor's spiritual feelings, thus creating on the stage the beautiful and sublime spiritual life of man.

The fragrance of living life, which is very rare on stage, is more shocking and mesmerizing than spectacular theatrical magnificence, and they are more suited to the requirements of the stage. Truth and belief are mutually causal and mutually supportive. If the belief in the actor's emotions arises from the truth, then the truth, in turn, reinforces the belief of the actor and the audience. The audience believes what happens on stage, starting with the set and ending with the actors' experience. Not only that, but when watching the performance, the audience themselves will directly participate in the stage life with their own emotions.

The audience goes from "believing uncontrollably" to "directly participating in stage life with their own emotions", which is the starting point and destination of the audience's emotions.

However, there is still a long way to go from the starting point to the destination. When the audience begins to have their first trust in the stage, his emotions may sprout, but this possibility is not yet true; Even when the audience's emotions have already been generated and show a synchronous trend with the work, this trend is likely to be disturbed, diluted, and interrupted; Even after the audience's emotions have been glued to the work for a long time, an unreal, inappropriate, and inappropriate artistic treatment can become a new barrier and cause the two to go their separate ways......

In this process, the will acts and is the patron saint of emotions. the basis of emotion, which makes the will reasonable; And the continuation of the will makes the emotion strong and has a clear direction. The will that the artist needs is the will that is emotionalized, and the emotion that the artist needs is the emotion that is volitional. The action process that lacks emotional basis, no matter how tenacious and unyielding, it is difficult to enter the play; In the same way, the expression of emotions that are divorced from volitional behavior, no matter how dripping and abundant, is not suitable for drama.

The Peony Pavilion performed on the Kunqu Opera stage

The audience, only when they see that the emotions of the people in the play are controlled by a will and are attached to the corresponding actions, can they face up to and approach this emotion. Without the simple expression of volitional action, it is easy to get tired of the audience, just like Xianglin's sister-in-law in Lu Xun's novel "Blessing" repeatedly talks about the sorrow of losing her son and is tired of the villagers. On the contrary, when the emotions of the drama are presented one by one in the volitional action, the emotions of the audience begin to be induced and gradually shifted.

We can use examples to analyze this mental process.

Tang Xianzu's "Peony Pavilion" very clearly takes "love" as the central purpose. Tang Xianzu's "emotion" is not equal to the emotion in psychology, its scope is larger than emotion, but it also includes emotion. "The Peony Pavilion" is more than 50 plays long, where did it start, and the emotions of the play attracted the audience's emotions tightly? Starting with the tenth "Nightmare". Du Liniang had a dreamy dream in the garden and experienced the ideal of love, her highly volitional emotions were enough to wrap the audience, and as a result, even the strange plot of her life and death for "love" could be accepted and appreciated by the audience. Only when the will to act is intertwined, will love become the most affectionate, and the audience's emotions will be tightly absorbed by it.

The attraction of Puxian opera "Spring Grass Breaking into the Hall" to the audience is amazing. It is a bit difficult for the majority of foreign audiences to listen to the dialects of Putian and Xianyou in Fujian, but it is reported that some viewers even "clapped their hands red" due to their continuous applause. An important reason for the success of this play lies in the high degree of unity of clear emotions and long willpower.

What a difficult thing it is to find an innocent young man who killed the son of a scholar of the Ministry of Justice, and the person who presides over it is a lowly maid. The obstacles in front of Chuncao are not only the high-ranking officials and their wives, the confused prefects who tend to be inflammatory, but also the Miss Xiangguo and the Lord Xiangguo himself who they serve. What's even more troublesome is that this matter has no other way than to promote the male protagonist and Miss Xiangguo to marry, and it is almost whimsical for a maid to decide the marriage match in Xiangguo's mansion. However, Chuncao did all this with extraordinary willpower, risking death again and again to remove all obstacles and reverse the rights and wrongs of reaching the heavenly court. Through a series of volitional actions of Chuncao, the audience's emotional state rises to a burning desire, and they are also secretly working hard offstage. This increasingly urgent desire is more active than the ordinary distinction between love and hate. This is the deepening and sublimation of the emotions brought about by the action of the will.

Puxian Opera "Spring Grass Breaking into the Hall"

If the audience's emotions are caused by the rise and fall of the will of the people in the play, the example of "The Legend of the West Chamber" can still be cited. Whether it is Zhang Sheng or Cui Yingying, the pursuit of happy love has never subsided, but their will strength is not enough. As a result, Wang Shifu launched a maid matchmaker with both strength of will and action in front of the audience. The audience agreed with her ridicule of Zhang Sheng, her ridicule of Cui Yingying, and her criticism of the old lady, admired all her actions to promote the union of the hero and heroine, and admired her calmness and eloquence under the threat of severe torture in order to bear the consequences of her actions...... In short, she is not the protagonist of love, but the protagonist of will and action, as a result, looking at the whole play, it is this little girl outside the love circle who is most closely integrated with the audience emotionally.

This combination of wills, with the matchmaker as the supreme representative, is extremely important, because this combination of wills guides the flow and merger of the audience's emotional shift.

It can be seen that the process of the audience's emotional involvement is a process that is first imported from real perception and then led by volitional action to depth.