The Historical Development And Aesthetic Characteristics Of The "Crosstalk Drama"

Since the 1940 s,the practice and theoretical knowledge focus on the form of the “crosstalk drama” has gone through a process from simplicity to complication.In this paper,based on the summary of the creation and theoretical knowledge of mainland China & Taiwan,the process will be described in detail,and reviewed.The earliest creation of crosstalk drama in mainland China which was created by He Chi,and later the new crosstalk drama creations both have certain peculiarity in the combination of drama and crosstalk.Multi-layered situation,criticism,and the flexibility of performance are the main characteristics of these works.Relatively,funny Chinese opera(R?le travesti)belongs to Chinese opera,“farce” has become a specific noun because of losing inheritance,and the creation transplanted from burlesque is just a sort of comedy,all of these above do not belong to the category of the concept of crosstalk drama.Taiwanese crosstalk drama is based on the special cultural and historical background,and mainly affected by the western drama theory.Based on the multi-layered narrative methods and the tragicomic dramatic style,Stan-Lai's crosstalk drama reflects unique charm.The Comedians Workshop takes full advantage of the metafictionality and absurdity of crosstalk,brings richer forms to the crosstalk drama and expands its range of subjects.Comparing the crosstalk drama creations both in mainland and Taiwan,Taiwanese crosstalk drama reflects the uniqueness more obviously,and can cover the related mainland creations.Therefore,the concept of crosstalk drama mainly takes Taiwanese crosstalk drama as the object of summary.The main action of the performers of crosstalk drama is to “perform crosstalk”,and to build at least two narrative space-time during performance.Based on the contrast and contact between the performers' actions(mainly refers to dialogs)happen in different space-time,the rational discussion and emotional response focus on the central topic can be shown in the drama.The connotation of crosstalk drama includes four aspects: actions focus on the central topic;building multi-layered space-time based on the crosstalk form;diversified aesthetic style mainly on comedy and performance ways characterized by composite actions and improvisational responses.From the history of drama development,crosstalk drama reflects both characteristics of expressionist drama and symbolistic drama,and the crosstalk provides a productive tool for their combination.It has been 30 years since the establishment of Comedians Workshop in 1996.They have created more than 30 stage shows.The performers have dramatically reformed the crosstalk from the subjectivity of interpretation to the performance.Throughout the whole trend of their works,the structure of crosstalk jokes,the technique of taking advantage of parody to satirize and metaphorize the present by using the past,the tragicomedy of emotion expression basically stay the same,the whole structure has been changing into looseness from completion gradually,the plots have been changing into unpractical performance atmosphere from relatively fixed plots,while the subjective consciousness of the performers has been strengthening constantly,which reflects obvious metafictionality.From the existing works,crosstalk drama takes full advantage of crosstalk form,combines expressionism and the symbolism,and finally forms aesthetic characteristics with humor and metaphysics as its main points.The theories of parody and metafictionality play a guiding role in crosstalk drama creations.