"The New National Theatre" by Juan Yin: "Journey to the West" and Dialogue with the Chinese National Theatre Movement

The article analyzes the performance by director Huang Ying "Journey to the West" (2018) as a key example of the "new national theatre" (新国剧) in the context of the Chinese national theatre movement of the 1920s. The first part of the article details the multifaceted symbolic system of Wu Cheng'en's novel "Journey to the West" (1590). The author then traces how Huang Ying makes a conceptual shift, moving the focus from the mythological hero Sun Wukong to the historical figure Xuanzang, and examines the reasons for the director's appeal to Chinese opera (jingju) as a source of expressive means. Special attention is given to three key semiotic techniques that Huang Ying applies to the arsenal of traditional theatre: deceleration (de-automation) of gestures, isolation of signs from their habitual context, and re-contextualization of old forms. The theoretical framework is provided by Yuri M. Lotman's cultural semiotics (the concepts of semiotic sphere, boundaries, and cultural memory), supplemented by theatrical anthropology (analysis of the signification of gesture, intonation, costume) and methods of visual and performative analysis. The novelty of the work lies in the fact that for the first time in Russian sinology, three techniques have been identified and systematically described through which Huang Ying transforms the traditional signs of Peking opera into the language of the "new national theatre": deceleration (the gesture "cloud hands" shifts from a sign of strength to a sign of doubt), isolation (the white square, bamboo sticks, solo guqin compel the audience to reconstruct meaning), re-contextualization (traditional operatic makeup in the scene of the false empress is endowed with the meaning of illusion and deception). It is shown that Huang Ying's appeal to the operatic form is not accidental: this theatrical language possesses the most developed system of conventional signs, capable of carrying profound cultural memory. The conclusions of the study affirm that Huang Ying's "new national theatre" is not an archaic restoration, but a dynamic semiotic sphere where cultural memory is preserved just enough to be recognized and updated just enough to remain relevant.