Pub Date : 2017-01-02DOI: 10.1080/01937774.2017.1337691
Anne Rebull
Theatricality, or an aesthetics of exaggeration, is the highlight and defining characteristic of the stage in xiqu (indigenous Chinese drama). When Maoist art fell under the general aegis of socialist realism, however, xiqu leaders undertook significant changes to performance practice, including the general execution of traditional gesture. These changes initiated a conversation about the value of theatricality that spanned across the theater industry, and fundamentally challenged the hegemony of the realist aesthetic regime. Amidst the crescendoing discussion on theatricality, the hit Kunqu play Fifteen Strings of Cash (Shiwu guan; 1956) helped revive interest in the rich tradition of aestheticized movement. At the time of its move to the silver screen, the film world was debating how to respond to the aesthetic consequences of the clash between an actor-centered, theatrical art and an immersive, realist one. Fifteen Strings of Cash interfaced the concerns of the cinematic world with the continuously changing discourse on theatricality. In this article, I use this government-sanctioned, popular culture hit to look at the dynamic history of official discourse on theatrical gesture. I explore the influences on the revival of theatricality, whether from rival portions of theater officialdom, or the force of entertainment culture across media, and how these factors mixed with nationalism.
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Pub Date : 2017-01-02DOI: 10.1080/01937774.2017.1337692
Hsiao-Chun Wu
This essay investigates the construction of the notion of gewu (song and dance) by Qi Rushan (1875–1962), main advisor to the famous performer of female roles, Mei Lanfang (1894–1961), in his writings on Chinese opera/xiqu, taking contemporary Peking opera/Jingju as its epitome. Originally put forward as a theoretical basis on which to ground the new developments in the theatrical realm that he was trying to introduce, Qi's concept of gewu later became central to the scholarship and historical narrative of Chinese opera. This paper examines how Qi made use of the Confucian classics and pre-Song dynasty literature to invest the notion with historical depth in tracing back to antiquity the roots of the new (re-)emergence of synchronized performance of singing and dancing that he claimed was best illustrated in Mei's plays. This article also studies Qi's theoretical works in conjunction with the historiographical debates of the time. As such, it brings to the fore the influence of contemporary opera production and consumption on the formation of a new history of Chinese drama, and how the construction of a new aesthetic informed a new understanding of Chinese theatrical arts.
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Pub Date : 2017-01-02DOI: 10.1080/01937774.2017.1337697
A. McLaren
Singing on the River is the first monographic study in English of the song culture and living conditions of a little-known subgroup in China, the men who propelled timber junks through the treacherous rapids of the upper Yangzi River until the emergence of modern means of boat transport in the earlyto mid-twentieth century. Chabrowski offers an unparalleled picture of the daily life of these men, who scaled sheer cliffs and toiled painfully along winding tracks cut high into the rock face, hauling the junks with pulleys by sheer physical strength. The songs they sang, known as work chants of the Sichuan Rivers or chuanjiang haozi 川江號子, captured the imagination of successive generations of literati during the imperial era and numerous Western observers from the mid nineteenth century. The singers of these songs are now for the most part deceased and the song culture built around boat tracking in the upper reaches of the Yangzi was in sharp decline by 1937, finally coming to an end in the early years of the reform era (late 1970s). For this reason Chabrowski did not interview singers and collect songs in living transmission. In this regard, his scholarly project differs from that of other specialists in Chinese song who have had the opportunity to conduct ethnographic studies of song traditions still in active performance in the late twentieth century and beyond. Chabrowski relies on a corpus of song scripts collected for the most part in the 1980s from Eastern Sichuan, in the region of Chongqing. Specifically, his haozi come from the Zhongguo geyao jicheng Chongqing shi juan 中國歌謠集成 重慶市卷 (Chinese song compendium Chongqing city volume; 1989) and another volume entitled Chuanjiang haozi 川江號子 (Work chants of the Sichuan rivers; 2007). The song collections of the reform era, valuable as they are as omnibus compendiums of local traditions, were produced with the aim of conserving what was considered to be the highlights of the genre and to bolster regional pride. The government-sponsored collections aimed to present otherwise obscure oral traditions in a written form palatable to contemporary readers. This could involve partial collection procedures and even a degree of bowdlerization of material considered “obscene” or too vulgar (as noted by Chabrowski, p. 35). In the twenty-first century, decades after the song tradition of the Sichuan boatmen has disappeared, reliance on this type of corpus presents considerable methodological challenges. Chabrowski’s general response to these difficulties is to corroborate thematic material he discerns in the songs with what can be established from a range of historic, social, economic and cultural sources. He also
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Pub Date : 2017-01-02DOI: 10.1080/01937774.2016.1242824
Y. Wah
This is certainly the most up-to-date study of Cantonese opera in English. Relevant books in the English language are mainly older works by ethnomusicologists (e.g., Bell Yung’s book from 1989 and Sau Y. Chan’s book of 1991). However, Wing Chung Ng’s book is more a social and cultural history of this theatrical genre, and probably the first one by a historian. The book focuses on the birth and development into maturity of the genre, which took place during the period from the late Qing dynasty to the 1930s, but features some significant figures in the profession who remained active until the late 1950s. While previous works mostly center around actors, actresses, troupes, the complex musical system of Cantonese opera, and the standard repertoire that has been sustaining the genre, Ng’s book focuses on how the profession operates—how its practitioners interact with each other, with the owners of theaters, and the government; and how they respond to the ever changing political, social, and cultural environment in Late Imperial and Republican China, colonial Hong Kong, and the Cantonese-speaking diaspora. The book makes use of an ocean of data from newspapers, magazines, diaries, travelers’ notes, and documents from archives in various Western and Southeast Asian countries. Despite the large amount of information, Ng is successful in outlining a detailed but dynamic picture of Cantonese opera activities during the period he concentrates on. A photo of the famous Cantonese opera actor Gui Mingyang 桂名揚 (1909– 1958) appears on the book cover and reappears in the final chapter (p. 179), along with a brief mention (p. 186). He is then the focus of a special section (pp. 191–95) that ends the conclusion and the book. Although Ng does not go into a lot of detail about the last part of Gui’s career, he ends the book with these words summarizing his career (and how it represents elements of the history of Cantonese opera): “He was one of those revered practitioners of stagecraft who had seen the best and the worst of times during the rise of Cantonese opera, both in South China and in far-flung corners of the diaspora.” Besides an introduction and conclusion, the book has eight chapters, divided into three parts. Part I, which includes chapters 1–3, is headed “Formation of Cantonese Opera in South China”; Part II has two chapters and is entitled “Popular Theater and the State”; while Part III is entitled “Local Theater, Transnational Arena” and includes the last three numbered chapters. In what follows I will not attempt to
这当然是最新的英文粤剧研究。英文的相关书籍主要是民族音乐学家的老作品(如1989年的Bell Yung的书和1991年的Sau y Chan的书)。然而，吴永忠的书更多的是这种戏剧类型的社会和文化史，可能是历史学家的第一本。这本书聚焦于清末到20世纪30年代这段时间内，体裁的诞生和发展到成熟，但也介绍了一些一直活跃到20世纪50年代末的业内重要人物。以前的作品大多围绕着演员、剧团、粤剧复杂的音乐系统和维持粤剧类型的标准剧目展开，而吴恩达的书则关注这个行业是如何运作的——演员之间、与剧院老板和政府之间是如何互动的;以及他们如何应对帝国晚期和民国时期不断变化的政治、社会和文化环境、殖民地香港和讲广东话的侨民。这本书利用了来自西方和东南亚各国的报纸、杂志、日记、旅行者笔记和档案文件的大量数据。尽管有大量的资料，吴成功地勾勒出了他所关注的时期粤剧活动的详细而动态的画面。著名粤剧演员桂明阳(1909 - 1958)的照片出现在书的封面上，并在最后一章(第179页)再次出现，同时还简短地提到了(第186页)。然后，他是结束语和本书的一个特别部分(第191-95页)的焦点。虽然吴恩达没有详细介绍桂民海职业生涯的最后一部分，但他在书的结尾总结了他的职业生涯(以及它如何代表粤剧历史的元素):“他是那些受人尊敬的舞台艺术从业者之一，在粤剧兴起的过程中，他见证了最好和最坏的时代，无论是在中国南方还是在遥远的散居角落。”全书除引言和结语外，共八章，分为三个部分。第一部分，包括1-3章，题目为“粤剧在华南的形成”;第二部分有两章，题为“大众戏剧与国家”;第三部分题为“地方戏剧，跨国舞台”，包括最后三个编号的章节。在接下来的内容中，我将不再尝试
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Pub Date : 2017-01-02DOI: 10.1080/01937774.2017.1337693
Peng Xu
Noise as an element evocative of teahouse atmosphere was part of the voice of opera in China at the turn of the twentieth century. As such, Chinese listeners embraced the talking machine wholeheartedly from the very beginning and reckoned with its musical force within the paradigm of high-class arts. We find an opposition in the early reception of the phonograph in the Western context in which concert-hall or opera-house performances encouraged the serious spirit of nineteenth-century musical romanticism. In this essay I list specific examples of teahouse theaters with phonographic musical accompaniment to early film. Such examples gleaned from newspapers do not appear consistently after the year 1910, suggesting that year may reasonably be considered a watershed in terms of the tentative endings of the symbiotic existence of phonographic music and live operatic performance. This special Chinese mindset paved the way for the gramophone to enter urban households as an “operatic singing machine.” I contend that the Chinese listening habit cultivated in the boisterous acoustic environment of teahouse theaters had prepared the Chinese opera buff to focus on the meaningful operatic voice against the sonic backdrop of the “ambient” noise, an aesthetic experience similar to listening to early opera records.
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Pub Date : 2017-01-02DOI: 10.1080/01937774.2016.1242796
Hongchu Fu
while the underworld bureaucracy is, like the administration in the world of light, all staffed by men, it is not therefore even more misogynistic. Underworld judges are quite ready to be impressed by the virtue of women as the many stories show that contrast the fate in hell of good and evil women. The traditional underworld has not only a rather well-defined bureaucracy but also a rather stable geography, which is ignored by Gao Xingjian, who also introduces into the underworld deities such as the thunder gods who, to the best of my knowledge, rarely venture there. I make these remarks here not to criticize Gao Xingjian, but only to point out that his picture of the underworld is highly idiosyncratic. Gao Xingjian is, of course, utterly free to compose any underworld he likes, but students may perhaps like his version even better if they can make meaningful comparisons. In this connection one also wonders whether they (and performers) would not have benefited from illustrations showing these traditional deities in their grotesque shapes. Even simple reproductions of black and white woodcuts would have greatly enhanced the attractiveness of this volume, one would think. It might have been noted too that Gao Xingjian was not the only theater practitioner in the 1980s and beyond who was interested in plays on Zhuangzi and his wife. For instance, the Kun opera version, known as Butterfly Dream (Hudie meng), has been revived, a process that has been chronicled by Lei Jingxuan 雷競 璇, Kunqu Hudie meng: Yibu chuantong xi zaixian 崑劇蝴蝶夢:一部傳統戲的再 現 (The Kun opera Hudie meng: The re-presentation of a traditional play; Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 2005). Again, Gao Xingjian’s deliberate modernization of a traditional play might have been put into greater relief by a brief comparison with these attempts to revive the tradition. Plays do not necessarily sell very well, so perhaps the translators have been urged by their publisher to keep their introduction and other explanatory materials as succinct as possible. While a proliferation of notes may well scare off potential readers, a short appendix on the development of this “ancient morality tale” and its modern life could have been an alternative. Even with such an appendix this still would be a very slim volume. Instead, teachers who want to include these translations in their classroom readings (as I would strongly advise them to do) will have to provide the needed background information themselves.
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Pub Date : 2017-01-02DOI: 10.1080/01937774.2016.1242808
W. Idema
In the early 1980s Gao Xingjian 高行健 established himself quickly as one of the most innovative critics and playwrights of the People’s Republic of China. Because he soon attracted the attention of the authorities, he has been living abroad since 1987, where he has continued to write and publish both in French and in Chinese. His fiction and drama earned him the Nobel Prize in 2000, the first time this prestigious distinction was awarded to a Chinese author. His fiction has been rendered in numerous languages and his plays have been performed on many occasions. Gilbert C. F. Fong and Mabel Lee both have established a solid record as English translators of Gao Xingjian, and this slim volume, presenting two plays in fluent translations, is yet another welcome addition to their earlier work introducing Gao to Western audiences. Gao produced the first draft of City of the Dead (Mingcheng冥城) in 1987, only a few months before he left the PRC, then revised the text in Paris in 1990, and produced a final version in 1991. The translation in this volume is by Gilbert Fong. Song of the Night (Yeyoushen 夜遊神) was first drafted in French in 1999, and revised in 2007. That second French version served as the basis of an English translation by Claire Conceison that was published in 2010. Mabel Lee’s translation here is based on Gao Xingjian’s Chinese version of 2009, which was first published in 2014. Song of the Night is a very simple play: it only features one female actor who speaks, but she is accompanied on stage by two female dancers and a male musician. City of the Dead, in contrast, requires a large cast and incorporates many elements of traditional Chinese drama; the stage directions are so demanding that its stageability was seriously questioned (apart from an earlier version as dance drama performed in Hong Kong in 1988, it was first performed on the basis of the present text in Korean translation in Seoul in 2011). The introduction to this volume, titled “Gao Xingjian: Autobiography and the Portrayal of the Female Psyche,” is signed by Mabel Lee. In it she treats both of these two plays by Gao Xingjian as reflections of his lifelong obsession with the relation between men and women. In City of the Dead the wife of the ancient philosopher Zhuangzi is portrayed as the victim of brutal patriarchy in this world and the next, as well as of
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Pub Date : 2016-07-02DOI: 10.1080/01937774.2016.1183318
Po-wei Weng
This article focuses on the transmission of the percussion music of Jingju (Peking opera) through a system of transcription known as luogu jing in both oral and written forms. It examines how luogu jing, an onomatopoeic system that uses verbal syllables to represent percussion sounds with indication of instruments, playing techniques, and musical expression, is used by Jingju practitioners as a special musical “language” to “speak” of music, transmit musical concepts, and communicate with each other in rehearsal, training, and even daily conversation. It then analyzes the forms, concepts, and uses of notational representations of luogu jing, with a discussion of how these written forms correspond to or contradict the “oral notation” and have influenced scholarship and musical practice in Jingju percussion music. These written forms, which all strive to authentically represent the music, have failed to gain significant acceptance (particularly among the musicians and actors) due to their limitations when it comes to appropriately representing the actual sounds of live performance and accommodating the flexibility of Jingju percussion music. Because of this, luogu jing as an oral form continues to play an indispensable role in Jingju percussion music today for musical conservation, communication, concept transmission, and the relaying of cultural meanings.
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Pub Date : 2016-07-02DOI: 10.1080/01937774.2016.1242831
W. L. Idema
On April 22 and 23, 2016, the Department of Chinese of National Taiwan University (NTU) organized a conference, Zeng Yongyi xiansheng xueshu chengjiu yu xinchuan guoji xueshu yantao hui 曾永義先生學術成就與薪傳國際學術研討會, in honor of the academic achievements of Professor Tseng Yong-yih (Zeng Yongyi 曾永義). Professor Tseng, who recently was elected a member of the Academia Sinica, has been an overarching presence in the study of traditional Chinese drama and popular literature for over 40 years now. He started his academic career at National Taiwan University where he obtained his M.A. in 1967 with a thesis on Changsheng dian 長生殿 (The palace of lasting life) and his Ph.D. in 1971 with a dissertation on the zaju 雜劇 of the Ming dynasty. Retained at National Taiwan University, he taught there for many decades. Upon his retirement he continued to teach at Shixin University in Taipei. He supervised over 170 M.A. and Ph.D. theses, and many of his students went on to leading positions in the field, becoming eminent scholars in their own right. Eighteen of them paid tribute to the transformative influence of their teacher in issue 371 (volume 31, issue 11, April 2016) ofGuowen tiandi國文天地 (The world of Chinese).Many foreign scholars have benefitted from his teaching and advice. Starting from the late 1970s, Professor Tseng has published prolifically—the list of his books and articles compiled on the occasion of this conference runs to over 20 pages. Apart from his academic works, Professor Tseng also published several volumes of essays on a variety of topics, and since the 1990s he also manifested himself as a productive and at times quite successful playwright, producing scripts for Kunqu 崑曲 and other theatrical genres. There is no indication that Professor Tseng plans to slow down: the conference participants not only received copies of his collected dramatic works in two volumes (Pengying wunong 蓬瀛五弄 and Pengying xunong 蓬瀛續弄), but also the first hefty volume (752 pages) of his Xiquxue 戲曲學 (Studies in Chinese indigenous theater), which is planned to run to four volumes. In the years that scholarship from the PRC was still suffused by the “vulgar Marxism” of the day, Professor Tseng’s publications were a breath of fresh air as they were always based on an intimate knowledge of the primary sources, wide reading in secondary scholarship, and original thought, whether he was dealing with matters of detail or drawing general lines of development. Throughout his CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature: 35. 2 (December 2016): 176–178
{"title":"A Report on the International Conference in Honor of Professor Tseng Yong-Yih (Zeng Yongyi), Taipei, Taiwan, 2016","authors":"W. L. Idema","doi":"10.1080/01937774.2016.1242831","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01937774.2016.1242831","url":null,"abstract":"On April 22 and 23, 2016, the Department of Chinese of National Taiwan University (NTU) organized a conference, Zeng Yongyi xiansheng xueshu chengjiu yu xinchuan guoji xueshu yantao hui 曾永義先生學術成就與薪傳國際學術研討會, in honor of the academic achievements of Professor Tseng Yong-yih (Zeng Yongyi 曾永義). Professor Tseng, who recently was elected a member of the Academia Sinica, has been an overarching presence in the study of traditional Chinese drama and popular literature for over 40 years now. He started his academic career at National Taiwan University where he obtained his M.A. in 1967 with a thesis on Changsheng dian 長生殿 (The palace of lasting life) and his Ph.D. in 1971 with a dissertation on the zaju 雜劇 of the Ming dynasty. Retained at National Taiwan University, he taught there for many decades. Upon his retirement he continued to teach at Shixin University in Taipei. He supervised over 170 M.A. and Ph.D. theses, and many of his students went on to leading positions in the field, becoming eminent scholars in their own right. Eighteen of them paid tribute to the transformative influence of their teacher in issue 371 (volume 31, issue 11, April 2016) ofGuowen tiandi國文天地 (The world of Chinese).Many foreign scholars have benefitted from his teaching and advice. Starting from the late 1970s, Professor Tseng has published prolifically—the list of his books and articles compiled on the occasion of this conference runs to over 20 pages. Apart from his academic works, Professor Tseng also published several volumes of essays on a variety of topics, and since the 1990s he also manifested himself as a productive and at times quite successful playwright, producing scripts for Kunqu 崑曲 and other theatrical genres. There is no indication that Professor Tseng plans to slow down: the conference participants not only received copies of his collected dramatic works in two volumes (Pengying wunong 蓬瀛五弄 and Pengying xunong 蓬瀛續弄), but also the first hefty volume (752 pages) of his Xiquxue 戲曲學 (Studies in Chinese indigenous theater), which is planned to run to four volumes. In the years that scholarship from the PRC was still suffused by the “vulgar Marxism” of the day, Professor Tseng’s publications were a breath of fresh air as they were always based on an intimate knowledge of the primary sources, wide reading in secondary scholarship, and original thought, whether he was dealing with matters of detail or drawing general lines of development. Throughout his CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature: 35. 2 (December 2016): 176–178","PeriodicalId":37726,"journal":{"name":"CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73825988","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2016-07-02DOI: 10.1080/01937774.2016.1242837
Josh Stenberg
This annotated translation of a lecture by Zhang Jiqing 張繼青 (1938–) on how she performs the role of Cui-shi 崔氏 in the zhezi xi 折子戲 Chimeng 痴夢 (The mad dream) is intended to call attention to a new resource in Kunqu 崑曲 research and appreciation, Kunqu baizhong, Dashi shuoxi 崑曲百種, 大師說戲 (One hundred pieces of Kunqu, Master performers talk about their scenes), hereafter referred to as Dashi shuoxi. Funded by private rather than government money, this project invited 29 Kunqu masters to give separate lectures on the leading roles that they
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