"Seventy-two Tenants" And The Study Of Modern Urban Culture In Shanghai

It has been a cycle of sixty years since the premiere of the farce The House of 72 Tenantsin the late 1950s.With the representation of lively scene in daily life and the comprehensive artistic focus,it explores the development venation of the urban cultural history and provides inspiration and thought for research.As a classic urban culture play,The House of 72 Tenants has already taken root among the people.The name of the play has become an idiom in the daily life of people.The House of 72 Tenantsis about the urban life and the complicated interpersonal relationship among citizens,butit also fully reflects the urban management pattern characterized by the "three concessions and four countries" of modern Shanghai,the urban economic pattern characterized by industry and commerce,financial industry,service industry and entertainment industry,and the urban social pattern characterized by immigrants taking up more than 80%of the total urban population.Condensing these contentsin a unique daily living space using artistic means,the unique cultural form of modern Shanghai is able to be presented on stage.This paper takes the new Marxist urban culture theory as theoretical basis for subject research.Using literature collating,investigation and interview,text interpretation and other research methods,and with the theatrical narration and stage performance of House of 72 Tenants,it focuses on the trivial events occurred in the daily life ofordinary people in Shikumen lane in modern Shanghai,taking those trivial matters as objects to observe its urban politics,urban economy,urban management,urban society,urban folk customs and other aspects.House of 72 Tenants presents an extreme concentration in which a small community reflects the whole society;trivial events reflect macro-history;and ordinary people reflect a big group.The symbolized stage presentation of this drama provides us with inspiration and thinking for our research of finding the fabric and traces of development of urban history and culture in the versionsystem of a classical drama performance.This paper consists of Introduction,Main Text and Conclusion.The Main Text has five chapters.The Introduction mainly focuses on discussion of significance of the research,its current status,andresearch methods.The first chapter of the Main Text conducts a systematic review of the versions of House of 72 Tenants evolving from monodrama to funning drama,from stage play to teleplay,and the narration text for modern Guangzhou and modern Hong Kong in its film version.The second chapter carries outdiscussion and research by mainly centering on the relation between competition for commercialization of Shanghai fine arts and public aesthetics of an immigration society,and the inheritance of Shanghai urban literature and arts byfarce art.The content of the discussion includes the coming into being of Shanghai farce and "three farce masters",House of 72 Tenants and all masters from Dagong Farce Troupe,Shanghai farce and Shanghai style arts.The third chapter gives an interpretation of a group of petty bourgeois,small traders,narrow lanes,small communities,trivial events and skirmishes that are performed in House of 72 Tenants.From this interpretation,it explores how the immigration society in modern Shanghai,guided by the commercial awareness,displays the thought of revering business and valuing material gain and the contractual spiritin its urban culture,and how the farce art works are brought to ordinary citizensrepresenting the main consumption body of urban culture to ubiquitously induce the interest-oriented thoughts and contractual spirit and other values of a commercial society in the urban culture of modern Shanghai.The fourth chapter gives an interpretation of versions of House of 72 Tenants.Based on this,it carries out a discussion of the living space and traits of character of immigrants in modern Shanghai,and analyzes their language characteristics,further expounding the inner logical relations between the farce art and the immigration society of modern Shanghai,and their factors that have mutual influence.The fifth chapter conducts observation and study of the stage performance of farce art to explore the urban folkculture of modern Shanghai that are affected by Western culture and customs,Jiangnan culture and customs and commercial and entertainment conventions.The Conclusion argues that what House of 72 Tenants reveals is a daily life setting where immigration groups in modern Shanghai live their life in a narrow and small lanelike "Spiral lions establishing mandalas within their shell",and it conveys the urban culture code of modern Shanghai through both the socialized symbols on the stage performance and the performization of symbol in social space.Urban culture scholar Lewis Mumford argues that a city is a stage of the human society.When this extensive stage is required to shift into a theater to be performed,it can select one certain urban space to display a full and artistic scene of citizen life in a historical period.Carrying the emotion and memory of several generations of people in Shanghai for this metropolis,House of 72 Tenants employs the way of heterogeneous isomorphism to give a full diagram of the characteristics of urban culture of modern Shanghai from the social space,stage space and art space:with a body of immigrants from all parts of the world,its inclusive urban spirit is nurtured;with a mode of management of foreign settlements influenced by Western cultures' its modem and fashion urban idea is promoted and displayed;with a rapid development of commercial economy,its urban values of revering business and valuing material gain is induced;and with a public literature and arts mixing Eastern and Western cultures,its urban aesthetics of inclusiveness is inspired.That gives this classical farce art work a decisiveposition as a representative in the interpretation and analysis of urban culture of modern Shanghai.