It is not rare to go to a museum and find an area with costumes and accessories where visitors are allowed to try on garments from centuries ago and discover how our ancestors lived and dressed. This opportunity is obviously not on offer when it comes to art exhibitions, but an event currently on at the FM Centre for Contemporary Art in Milan allows visitors to become part of the show in a rather original way.
Curated by Marco Scotini, "The Szechwan Tale. China, Theater and History" (on until July 15) explores the relationship between East and West from the two perspectives highlighted in the title - the theatrical and the historical one - but does so in a rather unconventional way.
The title of the exhibition is a reference to the theatrical work by Bertolt Brecht, The Good Person of Szechwan (Der gute Mensch von Sezuan), staged by Giorgio Strehler at the Piccolo Teatro in Milan in 1957-58.
Brecht did not visit China while writing it: he begun the play in 1938 and completed in 1941, while he was in exile in the United States.
The play has got a very contemporary theme: protagonist Shen Teh is a prostitute who would like to lead a good life, but eventually realises that, to do so, she has also got to behave in a vicious, cold and pragmatic way. She therefore makes up a male cousin who protects her, Shui Ta, and she transforms into him through masks.
There is a very modern duality in the play as the good and bad constantly battle on the stage, while the protagonist constantly plays withher identity and with gender roles, acting like a woman or a man, and radically altering her behaviour.
The international and Chinese artists involved in this exhibition deconstructed this inspiration and the tools of the theatrical machine and then created artworks - from photography to video installations - inspired by them, inviting visitors to consider themes inspired by costumes (see for example Cao Fei's cosplayers), sets, backdrops, text, soundtrack, actors and audience.
Another key inspiration for this event is the figure of Mei Lanfang (1894-1961), one of the most famous Peking Opera artists who influenced Russian and German avant-garde theatre.
Lanfang often interpreted female roles and visited Russia in the mid-'30s where he and his company staged four plays - Revenge of the Oppressed, Rainbow Pass, Fei Chen-O and the Tiger General, The Drunken Beauty - and several dance performances.
Many American, English, French, German and Russian writers and directors saw his performances and were inspired by Lanfang, among them, Konstantin Stanislavsky, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Alexander Tairov, Sergei Tretyakov, Edward Gordon Craig and Sergei Eisenstein.
Lanfang is a proper theatre actor, but the event also celebrates other types of performers, including automata, marionettes and shadow puppets.
Rather than passing through the various spaces and just looking at the objects on display, visitors are invited to live and experience "The Szechwan Tale" in a very different way.
Visitors are first confronted by 80 traditional "da tou wawa" masks, part of Qiu Zhijies' work, hinting at the freedom of laughing in times in which laughter was repressed and forbidden.
They are then invited to pick and wear some of the costumes from Michelangelo Pistoletto's installation "Memory Wardrobe" (1968-2017) and prepare to step on the empty stage that is part of Céline Condorelli's installation "Theatrical Pieces" (2017) after passing through Ulla von Brandenburg's "Curtains" (2017), symbolical white, yellow, fuchsia and black theatre curtains that emerge in front of an unusual audience, the one portrayed in "La Trampa" by Santiago Sierra, featuring rows of underpaid and occasional workers from Chile.
There's more to take in this meta-theatre journey: fashion and costume design fans will be able to discover for example the lavish costume that the soprano Gina Cigna worn in the '30s for Puccini's Turandot at the Teatro alla Scala, but there are also musical instruments, documents and photographic installations such as Zhuang Hui and Dan'er recreation of a photography studio in Yumen, set to allow the local citizen to chronicle their lives and tell their stories in a colourful way.
Acting and performing becomes painful instead in Hsu Chia-Wei's "Ruins of the Intelligence Bureau" in which a group of masked Thai puppeteers in black clothes narrate their own fate to the Chinese veterans of the Kuomintang secret services.
At the end of their journey visitors emerge to see 80 black and white portraits of men, mug shots from the '50s and the '60s collected by Mao Tongqiang in the court archives of various Chinese provinces and chronicling the time when landlords and other privileged peasants were killed.
By taking part in this performance/exhibition, visitors turn into the protagonists of one or more narratives, they can act alone or in group, exploring new links and relations between the East and the West, changing their own perspectives and adopting those of the artists involved or the people portrayed in their works.
The ending to the play remains open and is left for interpretation to the visitors: should human beings change to make this world better or do we need gods or maybe a deus ex machina to help us? You can find the answer by making up your own ending, and if you're not satisfied, you can always go back to the beginning, change your role in Pistoletto's wardrobe and take the journey once again to tell more stories, explore new narratives and, well, find more satisfying and refreshing conclusions obviously combining and reuniting together the Eastern and Western cultures.
Image credits for this post
All exhibition images by Alessandra Di Consoli
Image 7: Mei Lanfang performing "Resisting the Jin Invaders" (Kàng Jīn Bīng) courtesy Mei Lanfang Memorial Museum, Beijing.
Image 19: Cao Fei, Cosplayers - A Mirage, 2004, Inkjet print, Courtesy the artist
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