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Foreword Two Pairs of Eyes Eugenio Barba Is classical Chinese theatre really so distant from that of the West? Are the differences that distinguish us really as significant as they seem? Is what we have in common really common to both of us? Are we speaking of the same things when we speak of the same things, and speaking of different things when we speak of different things? Reading the script of Li Ruru’s book, The Soul of Beijing Opera: Theatrical Creativity and Continuity in the Changing World, I felt as if I were two people, as if two different pairs of eyes were looking at the lines and the chapters. The first glance enjoyed the variegated landscape of the theatre that, since my youth, I have known and loved under the name of Peking Opera. The second continually made comparisons — behind that landscape — with the European theatre. It is a split typical of cross-cultural vision. We cannot escape assessments and comparisons: us versus them. It is hard to break out of this exotic and familiar vice. For theatre practitioners in Europe, classical Chinese theatre has long been a legend. Then it became an apparition. Finally, it materialized into real encounters. At the beginning of the twentieth century, a few major artists of the Great Reform of the European stage experienced Mei Lanfang’s visit to Russia — an important episode in the history of our theatre, but also a tale that has become one of the founding myths of the Eurasian theatre. The Eurasian theatre is neither a style nor a geographical extension. It is a way of seeing, a mental category — or rather, an attempt to overcome the distinction between us and them. It implies the historical fact that, since 1900, theatre people all over the world have oriented themselves within the horizon of a shared theatre culture, including performance genres with both European and Asian roots. This constellation of imagined knowledge and real know-how has guided all those who have reflected upon the craft and the art of the actor — from Stanislavski to Brecht, from Meyerhold to Grotowski, from Copeau to Artaud and Decroux. xii List of Figures and Plates Why did the most creative European artists — those who were most dissatisfied with their own tradition and obsessed by the future — turn with voracity towards the Asian theatres, towards their ancient forms which belonged to backward epochs? Why did they consider them up to date? Was it only because they were refined models of performances that rejected realism? “This is not the only reason,” answers my friend Nicola Savarese. And he adds: “Think about the reaction of the poet François Prévert and his colleague Claude Roy when they saw l’Opéra de Pekin in Paris in 1955. ‘This’ — they said — ‘is the theatre of the actor who has not forgotten anything.’” François Prévert explained: “After all, what is a circus acrobat? An actor who has forgotten in which play he is acting. What is a dancer? A singer who has forgotten that she knew how to sing. And what is an actor? A dancer who has forgotten that he knew how to dance. The Chinese actor, on the other hand, is one who has forgotten nothing.” This may be so, but how can we explain why artists like Brecht or Meyerhold — revolutionaries, secret anarchists who were always hostile to the bourgeois mentality and art — admired Chinese theatre, which was an expression of a feudal culture, based on violence and revenge, on war and the repression of women? Georges Banu replies: “For the same reason that theatre people in China and Japan accepted the realistic and imprecise European way of acting, and acknowledged the ‘spoken’ theatre deprived of song and dance, in order to import from Europe the plays of Ibsen and later of Beckett, which raised the problems of contemporary men and women and expounded the anguish and the uncertainty of the future in their tragic nakedness.” Georges Banu is a professor at the Sorbonne in Paris and a collaborator with Peter Brook. Nicola Savarese is a scholar of Renaissance theatre and of Asian theatres, one of the founders of the International School of Theatre Anthropology (ISTA) and co-author with me of The Secret Art of the Performer. I ask them: “Then, according to you, in the twentieth century, was there a kind of complementarity established between theatres of a European tradition and Asian classical theatres?” Savarese and Banu...

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