Adherence And Breakthrough Avantgarde Drama Spirit Of Meng Jinghui

Avantgarde drama director Meng Jinghui’s work Rhinoceros in Love has been adapted for5times since it was put on the stage in1999. Over a thousand of its performances had been put on by8August,2012. Rhinoceros in Love has been rated as a myth in Chinese little theatre drama. Each adaptation has greatly extended the audience circle of avantgarde drama. As a successful example of drama adaptation, Rhinoceros in Love is also an epitome of Meng Jinghui’s avantgarde drama path. Each adaptation is a conscious adjustment of history and reality. Therefore, we can have a restricted view on the flow condition of Meng Jinghui’s avantgarde drama creation concept in the course of time and the development status of Chinese avantgarde drama over30years.With Rhinoceros in Love as the entry point, this paper cognizes Meng Jinghui’s adherence to and breakthrough in avantgarde drama on the whole and accurately masters his attitude toward avantgarde drama by virtue of Meyerhold’s "Stage Assumption" theory, Aalto’s "Cruel Drama" theory and Peter Brook’s "Empty Space" theory through the contrastive analysis on stage setting, performance of performers and experience of audiences in the process of adaptation. On the other hand, this paper studies the emphasis of each adaptation from the perspective of accepting aesthetics and highlights Meng Jinghui’s change in avantgarde drama creation, i.e. he paid more and more attention to theatre effect, which accords with the drama concept "people’s drama" put forward by himself.Meng Jinghui’s avantgarde drama has been deeply marked with times imprint. Whether the survival predicament of modern people described in Rhinoceros in Love or thinking on the dilemma of his own drama path, Meng Jinghui’s creation has always been closely connected with cultural thoughts at each stage, which determines the mobility of his avantgarde drama attitude-coexistence of adherence and breakthrough.Therefore, this paper analyzes the former four editions of Rhinoceros in Love with multiple stage practices and relatively fixed audiences and goes deep into the core of Meng Jinghui’s drama spirit from the characterization of his avantgarde drama attitude so as to provide reference for the survival path of current drama.