Li Yinan, you're a lecturer at the Central Academy of Drama in Beijing.
There is a statue of Stanislavski outside the new campus of the Central Academy.
Why is there a statue of a Russian theater director at a Chinese theater academy?
the Soviet Union at the beginning of the so-called new China history.
was also established in the year 1950.
From the very beginning of the new China.
of being part of the propaganda organ of the state.
So it is important to introduce the whole method of the Soviet Union way into China.
were also invited into our academy.
And they helped us to establish the academy.
also like a dogma in our academy.
The method has a lot of relationship with realism.
It started a lot earlier than that.
Chinese intellectuals wanted to use a new form of spoken drama.
used that as a tool to propagate the so-called new ideas.
The western new concepts in China.
Chinese approach to using these kinds of methods of realistic acting?
more stylized forms of theater that one does associate with China?
merge the two styles of theater acting together.
And they did a lot of experiments.
the so- called psychological realistic ones.
They began to merge together.
But the mixture was not perfect.
They're sometimes almost embarrassing to watch.
Because it's not genuinely realistic.
And it also changed the whole aesthetics of the traditional ones.
so-called stage theatricality, and everything has a symbolic meaning.
If there's a lot of objects, a lot of materials onstage, you can't just do that.
So at the very beginning, there's a problem.
the new method of the genuine realistic acting.
Chinese theater professors, theater professionals.
beautiful things and they're reluctant to do, to give up that for the new form.
there were, conflicts, there was friction.
And part of that is because of the aesthetic conflicts.
the experts because Soviet Union used to have strong power over China.
And they try to control everything.
They think we represent a new form of revolution, new form of society.
also belong to the past, belong to the old society.
And if you want to do the revolution, you should get rid of that.