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On the subject of Brecht's effect upon Chinese theater practitioners, Huang Zuolin, the late director of the Shanghai People's Arts Theater, probably commands most of our attention, not only because he was one of the most eminent and persistent Brecht pioneers, but, more importantly, because his creative response to Brechtian dramaturgy led to the establishment of a new theater style of modern Chinese spoken drama, called Xieyi theater. Though mainly a technical integration of Brecht, Stanislavsky and Mei Lanfang, Huang's Xieyi theater, nevertheless, represented a return to Chinese culture. The couple of decades immediately following the end of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), when the country opened up to the outside world, saw modern Chinese theater bursting with new forms and styles with the compelling demands of a changing epoch. At the same time there was also a revival of interest in Western modernist drama. It was against this background that Huang was finally able to test the possibility of combining disparate theater traditions into a new form of drama. He did this by reviewing China's native theater tradition from a new theoretic angle and through a long process of experimentation.
Like many other Chinese aesthetic terminologies, Xieyi is also particularly difficult to translate. (The opposite is Xieshi, literally write-object, meaning "graphical," which is sometimes used as a substitute for realism in Chinese.) Michael Gissenwehrer simply translates it literally as "write-meaning."1 Adrian Hsia coins the word "imagistic" for it,2 recalling Ezra Pound. Huang himself tried to put the term into English in 1979 when he described to Arthur Miller his idea of Xieyi theater by comparing it with traditional Chinese drama. However, Arthur Miller could only understand, perhaps still vaguely, what Huang's coinage of an "intrinsicalistic theater" meant after he went together with Huang to watch the production of the Suzhou opera The Tale of the White Snake (Bai She Zhuari). One year later, Huang came up with an English word which seemed literarily close to the meaning of the Chinese term: "Essentialism" or "Essentialistic Theater." It was towards the end of the 1980s that Huang hit upon the term "ideographies" as opposed to photographies to describe his particular style of theater which integrates elements of both Western and Chinese theater traditions.
Huang's idea of Xieyi...