Whither Theatricality? Toward Traditional Chinese Drama and Theater (Xiqu 戲曲) as World Theater
Patricia Sieber
Abstract
The essay provides a brief review of how certain approaches to theatricality evolved in response to particular theatrical archives or repertoires in non-Chinese contexts. It then considers a number of recent studies of Chinese drama and theater in light of the following issues: the nature of theatrical language, the emergence and uses of fictionality, and the reconstruction of performance aesthetics. In focusing on these particular areas, the essay seeks to show how such research can contribute toward countering entrenched characterizations of xiqu as “non-drama,” “spectacle,” or “pure heritage.” The final section of the article proposes some future avenues of inquiry in order to deepen the dialogue between Sinology and theater studies while providing tools for sustaining the practice of xiqu and fostering broader appreciation of traditional Chinese theater in Anglophone, Chinese-speaking, and other contexts.
Keywords: theatricality, traditional Chinese theater, theatrical language, fictionality, performance aesthetics
Introduction
In the 1960s, Peter Brook famously offered a minimalist definition of theater in order to home in on what he thought defined a theatrical experience: “I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space while someone else is watching him, and this all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.”1 With the hindsight of over half a century, Brook’s attempt to strip the theatrical act down to its base essentials can be seen to be clearly marked by certain spatial, ocular, and gendered assumptions, and as
such, far from offering a universal definition, it instead points to the pitfalls of broad generalizations. At the same time, theater scholars and practitioners hunger for ways to make a subject intelligible, especially if they feel that it has been ignored, sidelined, misunderstood, or maligned. Traditional Chinese theater (xiqu 戲曲, song-drama or musical drama) is one such topic where the need to define it succinctly may be accompanied by a perhaps even greater urgency to position it as an object of more and more in-depth investigations in order to make it part of a broader scholarly conversation and sustain its practice and appreciation around the world.
Historically, drama and theater have been at the forefront of popularizing “China” in the West. The acculturation often bypassed the categories of “theater” and “theatricality” altogether in favor of assimilating Chinese theater to either the category of “drama” and attendant terms such as “tragedy” and “comedy”2 or to the category of “opera” and its various musical instantiations (Peking Opera, Cantonese Opera, Yue Opera, Kun Opera, etc.).3 Hence, one of the challenges before us is how to frame a performative form that showcases all manner of verbal arts but gives equal due to singing, choreographed dance, and other kinesthetic tools to realize the performative potential of playtexts. In its non- conformity with Western categories of performance genres (theater, opera, dance, musical theater), traditional Chinese theater—or what we now call xiqu4—threatens to be miscategorized, shortchanged, or ignored. We can bemoan these terminological quandaries; alternatively, we can delineate how Sinologists from a variety of disciplines have used Chinese theater as a heuristic device to unpack entrenched binaries such as opera versus theater, China versus West, antiquity versus modernity, thereby laying a foundation to rethink the history of theatricality more broadly.
In what follows, I will give a brief overview of some influential approaches to theatricality in other world theaters with a view toward engendering a dialogue that does not relegate Chinese theater to the status of a footnote. Second, I will provide a sampling of how contemporary Anglophone China scholars have approached notions of xiqu theatricality in innovative ways.5 I will showcase work that seeks to elucidate the dynamic interplay between textual archive and performative repertoire.6 Scholarly explorations of theatrical language, theatrical representation, and performance characteristics have the potential to unsettle cultural stereotypes that have coalesced around traditional Chinese musical theater in Western contexts on the one hand and to broaden compar- ative discussions of drama and theatricality on the other. Finally, I will sketch out some possible future avenues of inquiry that could contribute to a deprovincialized history of theatricality and potentially reach new audiences in Anglophone, Sinophone, and other contexts.
Toward a Multidisciplinary History of Theatricality
As theater scholars have noted, the notion of theatricality is not a robustly developed category of analysis. For one, in everyday language, the meanings of the term shade from neutral description to pejorative characterization.7 Moreover, within the field of theater studies, theatricality is similarly beset by conflicting judgements on its desirability in actual theatrical contexts and on its heuristic value.8 Part of the challenge rests in defining whether theatricality is primarily a function of the theater or whether it is independent of theatrical activities. Even if the discussion is limited to theater itself, scholars largely agree that theater is a type of social communication,9 but they are not necessarily in agreement on what theater’s primary medium is. Is it verbal communication? Is it bodily movement? Is it musical expression? In an attempt to wrestle with the typically multisensory nature of theatrical communication, scholars have mobi- lized the tools of social anthropology, history, and literary studies among others to come to grips with the complexity of the phenomenon of theater. In doing so, they have developed different approaches to theatricality that are often tied to the particular archive and/or repertoire that they have chosen to investigate.
One group of theater scholars has chosen to make use of the concepts of social anthropologists. Such a convergence between theater studies and anthropology was perhaps most famously elaborated by Victor Turner who, in an attempt to present an “anthropology of performance,” noted that “the basic stuff of social life is performance” because “human beings” as a “species” are given to “dramatic modes of communication.”10 In keeping with this interest in defining the embedded and pervasive nature of “dramatic communication,” theater scholar Joachim Fiebach argues that theater’s primary specificity is “the ostentatious display of audiovisual movements” to denote “symbolic action.”11 In other words, in this view, the body takes precedence over other expressive means such as language, setting, or culturally specific definitions of the theatrical. Symbolic action can relate to otherwise invisible realities (belief systems, discourse, ideologies) and how it structures and potentially subverts social power (governance, social life, cultural forms). On the one hand, such a focus on embodiment seeks to elide an Aristotelian and potentially ethnocentric understanding of a text-centered form of theatricality and as such is suitable for non-Western contexts and societies based on orality; on the other hand, such a movement-oriented definition makes it hard to differentiate between theater and other kinds of kinetic arts such as dance, sports, and the like. In other words, since symbolic action encompasses a wide variety of activities, it may difficult to isolate a generic and fairly abstract idea of “performance” and the “dramatic” from specific instantiations of the “theatrical.”
In another approach to theatricality, history becomes the preferred sister discipline with which to examine theatrical practices. This approach has been most influentially advanced by Shakespeare scholars such as Stephen Greenblatt, Peter Stallybrass, Jean Howard, and others, who pioneered the “New Historicism.” Combining the study of print culture and a focus on the history of reading, such scholarship investigated playscripts and theatrical practices as they related to issues of power, ideology, and social relations in an updated take on the notion that “all the world is a stage” (theatrum mundi). Despite New Historicism becoming the dominant approach within early modern English drama studies, some scholars have cautioned against what they see as the potential blind spots of such an all-encompassing emphasis on state-society relations. In Thomas Postlewait’s view, if all analysis of early modern English culture conforms to a “dramatistic paradigm of social life” characterized by “total theatricality,” then the distinction between performance within the theater and the epitheatrical culture of self-fashioning threatens to be elided.12 As Postlewait polemically puts it: “But if the idea of theatricality serves as the grand theory of everything, what can the concept tell us specifically about anything?”13 As a suggestion for ways to go beyond this potential impasse, Henry S. Turner noted that perhaps a broadly conceived and sophisticated attention to “form” could address a fundamental question that had fallen out of favor in New Historicist approaches, namely, “what conventions allowed the theater to function as a specific kind of representation distinct from prose narrative, or poetry, or architecture or painting, even as it often drew on the imaginative and formal resources of these other modes?”14
Indeed, in a third approach to theatricality, the formal aspects of the artistic creation, transmission, and reception of playscripts are at the heart of scholarly inquiry into theatricality. In this view, theater is intimately related to the emergence of and cross-borrowing between well-defined but permeable and evolving literary genres. The study of ancient Greek and Roman tragedies and comedies has excelled in this area, partly because unlike the oral traditions examined by anthropologists (absence of playscripts) and the early modern European theater (continuity of language between then and now), these early classical traditions call for detailed linguistic examinations in order to become intelligible to modern readers. Thus in the copious and multilingual body of classicist scholarship on Greek comedy, for example, a subset of studies pays meticulous attention to question of dialect, register, pragmatic function, and modes of speech,15 types of laughter embedded in texts,16 and dramatic technique in order to explore to what extent “Athenian comedy was always metatheatrical, and found new ways of demonstrating its debts and awareness of other theatrical genres and the process of the theatre itself.”17 Insofar as Greek
comedy is typically periodized as Old, Middle, and New Comedy, such studies also seek to tie questions of linguistic theatricality to changing concerns among playwrights and audiences alike,18 thus showing that attention to form need not be blind to social contexts.
In a fourth approach, formal, temporary, and social consideration blend into a semiotic conception of theater as what theater scholar Marvin Carlson has most influentially termed a “memory machine.” In his celebrated book, The Haunted Stage,19 Carlson argued that theater is, at heart, not the sort of random encounter invoked in the initial quote by Peter Brook, but rather a kind of negotiated and evolving understanding between (professional) actors and a (paying) theatergoing audience centered around certain performance aesthetics. In his telling, the regularity and repetitive nature of the exchange between certain actors and regulars accounts for the power of the theater. In other words, it is not the one-time or one-off performance that theater scholars need to bring into focus but rather the unwritten contract between what actors offer and what audiences appreciate. Carlson terms this effect of shared memories of prior performances “ghosting.” Specifically, as plays are recycled and adapted over and over as a part of an evolving repertoire, regulars would compare one performance of a given play against another one that they might have watched there or elsewhere. Similarly, as actors develop reputations and specialize in certain styles or parts, a particular performance by that actor might evoke overtones of a previous performance of that or another play. Far from simply disappearing into the role, the social body of the actor may very well open up additional layers of meaning. In addition, in theater, though in theory it could take place anywhere, typically, mature theatrical traditions demarcate certain sites as “theatrical space” either because of repeated use of the same space or because of reliance on conventionalized physical markers to transform an ordinary space into a “theatrical space.” Thus, a given performance of a play by a certain actor could also trigger memories of prior performances in that same venue. Carlson’s calibrated approach allows scholars to keep theater’s dual identity as a collective and individual event in focus while inviting the investigation of cultural specificity in audience-performer relations.
Such methodological pluralism around approaches to “theatricality” in theater studies offers some advantages for the analysis of theatrical traditions that do not readily map onto Western or non-Western analogues. Social anthropology may have hogged the theoretical spotlight in the study of non-Western theaters, the new historicism may be dominant for early modern Anglophone drama, and literary approaches are richly represented in the study of ancient Greek theater. However, the remaining sources do not require us to favor one approach over another, given that Chinese theatrical history is long (at
least dating back to the Song dynasty); features orally transmitted components of theater (e.g., the pedagogy of acting); abounds in rich and as of yet understudied textual and visual documentation in manuscript, print, pictorial, and decorative media; has a continuously evolving and living performance tradition (dating back to the sixteenth century); and was represented at all levels of society in conjunction with many other forms of cultural display. We need not be compelled to explore Chinese theater from the vantage point of a ready-made theory to match a particular theatrical archive. On the contrary, we can look upon the complexity of the extant source materials and their ongoing transmission as an opportunity to “make historical distinctions.”20 As Fiebach notes, “an insightful and meaningful history of theater inevitably would have to be written as a specifically cultural history.”21 Precisely because the configuration of the theatrical archive in China is congruous neither with an oral non-Western society nor with a towering author like Shakespeare, neither with an Aristotelian schemata of tragedy and comedy nor with a clearly delineated genre distinction (opera vs. theater vs. dance), the writing of such a history also offers opportunities for new theories of the theater. Detailed studies can contribute to the writing of a new, genuinely global theater history that goes beyond the inclusion of China-specific encyclopedia entries,22 tokenistic incorporation of the same handful of plays,23 or grossly underresearched claims in current textbook histories of world theater.24
In what follows, I present recent work on a number of issues related to theatricality. Not all studies under review here necessarily foreground their approach to the theatrical in very explicit terms nor do they necessarily subscribe to a uniform understanding of theatricality. However, what they do share is a concern with “historical distinctions.” In grouping these discussions around questions of theatrical language, representation, and performance characteristics, the essay seeks to highlight research that challenges orientalist and self-orientalizing legacies of previous public and academic circulations of Chinese theater.
The Varied Theatricality of Dramatic Language
When French Sinologist Stanislas Julien (1797–1873) translated Huilan ji 灰欄記 (The Chalk Circle) in its entirety in 1832, he noted that the arias were particularly hard to fathom on account of the plethora of conventionalized poetic expressions. Undaunted and ever keen on besting his missionary predecessors, Julien nevertheless tried his best to address the linguistic complexity of the text in absence of relevant lexicographic tools.25 However, when we examine the popular reception of Chinese theater from the nineteenth century onward, European and American critics typically neglected the linguistic aspect
of drama in favor of other elements of performances—dance, music, costumes, singing, acrobatics, among others. To be sure, such audiences had to contend with the language barrier, but what is perhaps most striking is the near-total absence of curiosity regarding the verbal building blocks of the theatrical presentations they encountered.26 Hence, recent research that attends to the theatricality of the language of Chinese plays has the potential to dislodge the entrenched notion that Chinese theater is synonymous with spectacle.
Always alive to the imbrication of language registers, phrasing, and mood, Chinese theater critics from the Yuan dynasty onward commented on the peculiar texture of dramatic language. While some critics found drama too vulgar to count it among wenzhang 文章 (belles lettres) properly speaking,27 others were entranced by drama’s ability to bring very different modes of Chinese language into meaningful proximity with one another. The juxtaposition of high and low, Literary Sinitic and dialect, poetic arias and approximations of spoken registers among other binaries created many opportunities for a highly theatrical approach to language usage—that is, a self-conscious exploitation of the disparities of linguistic forms and their paralinguistic associations that were, in the words of Yuan song and drama critic-cum-anthologist Zhou Deqing 周德清 (1277–1365), designed to “startle” audiences.28 Sinological work on Chinese plays has used different approaches to tease out the ways that playwrights and actors alike sought to make good on the demand for novelty. Equally and importantly, however, as the discussion below illustrates, what Chinese theater practitioners hoped to accomplish with dramatic language also substantially varied over time. In that regard, studies on specific plays stand to enrich our understanding of how Chinese theater pushed the development of new literary forms in China while also expanding our awareness of the possibilities inherent in theatrical modes of speech in comparative contexts.
In her research on Northern zaju 雜劇 (lit. “varied” or “wide ranging” plays), Patricia Sieber argues that the amalgamation of different rhetorical stances to create complex protagonists given to a wide range of emotional and moral stances constituted one of the signature achievements of early zaju theater.29 In analyzing the fourteenth-century rendition of Baiyueting 拜月亭 (The Pavilion for Praying to the Moon, mid-fourteenth century), Sieber lists the following rhetorical modalities used by the main female lead: the language of filial tenderness, the language of filial counsel, the language of female decorum, the language of wifely care and worry, impassioned invective against the father, the language of wifely fidelity, the language of social satire, the poetic language of female longing, the invocation of Heaven, among others. Previously, these modes had appeared in isolation from one another in different written genres. In bringing them together in the space of four brief acts to characterize the main
lead’s aspirations, emotions, and situational adjustments, Baiyueting creates new complexity for the characterization of protagonists from all walks of life. Thus, far from being an incidental aspect of the play itself, linguistic variety created dynamic depth for the main lead, whoever that role happened to represent. In its capacity to give a nuanced voice to previously undervoiced characters such as maids, courtesans, widows, and young women in distress, zaju theater redrew the boundaries of public discourse.30
In a related vein, Regina S. Llamas’s work on nanxi 南戲 (early Southern drama) has drawn attention to the linguistic facets of the theatrical. As she notes with regard to the earliest extant Southern play, Zhang Xie zhuangyuan 張協狀 元 (Top Graduate Zhang Xie, 1408) “the verbal repertoire makes use of the ambiguity of language, puns, homophones, quips on the formation of characters, and the formality of rhyme, riddles, onomatopoeia, and incongruity, both in the form of absurd remarks and discordant replies.”31 Her discussion also highlights the metatheatrical aspect of “self-referential remarks to role-acting and costume.”32 In her view, “metatheater is employed throughout the play both as humor—perhaps intended as a parody of the object under consideration—and also to underscore the fictional nature of the theater.”33 For example, when the female lead Poorlass seeks out her newly graduated husband, the gatekeeper says, “Oh, it’s just a fake female” in allusion to the fact that men could play female protagonists.34 Furthermore, metatheatrical aspects also were sedimented in the dramatic structure of individual scenes. Specifically, the mo role interacts with the comic roles of the jing 淨 (comic) and the chou 丑 (clown), but rather than offering a punchline or an overarching assessment, he “conducts a contiguous commentary, not in dialogue with the comic, but directed away, to the audience or reader, making reference to commonly known stories . . . or restating the obvious.”35 As Llamas notes, such a role maintains a delicate balance between poking fun at human passions and excesses while also pointing to the importance of considered judgment and self-control. Thus in Llamas’s telling, attention to language demonstrates that a traditional Chinese play can neither be reduced to a didactic exposé nor to gross farce as modern critics have charged but rather should be understood as a dynamic construct that makes use of a plurality of voices within a play to make the audience laugh and reflect at the same time. Insofar as the longstanding preoccupation with tragedy has overshadowed the recognition of the comic genius of Chinese drama, such a nuanced consideration of Chinese humor challenges longstanding clichés.36
In her analysis of the seminal piece of the chuanqi 傳奇 (mature Southern drama) tradition, Tang Xianzu’s 湯顯祖 (1550–1616) Mudanting 牡丹亭 (Peony Pavilion, 1598), Sophie Volpp explores how the use of specific linguistic registers and literary allusions is designed to intervene in the literary and
philosophical debates of the late Ming period (1550–1644). Specifically, she argues that the language usage by minor characters serves as a foil to romantic heroine Du Liniang 杜麗娘’s richly textured, imaginative use of what has been variously called “vernacular,” “plain Chinese,” or “mixed-register” writing.37 For example, the heroine’s tutor, Chen Zuiliang 陳最良, not only embodies the stock figure of a pedant, but his mindless use of citations from the classic amounts to a “theatrical and thus inauthentic” speech mode that indexes how men of learning had instrumentalized the words of the ancients for the sake of careerism. In Volpp’s view, insofar as Tang targets both antiquarian and nouveau riche pretensions to Confucian mastery, the exposé of such blind mouthing of classical platitudes amounts to an “anti-theatricalist” stance. At the same time, as Volpp points out, Tang Xianzu was at pains to implode the boundaries between different literary modes as evidenced by the famous persiflage of Sister Stone, a Daoist nun, who remained unmarried on account of her impenetrable “stone hymen.” In Sister Stone’s retelling of her sexual history in the form of one of the most well-known childhood primers, Qianzi jing 千字經 (The Thousand Character Classic), the lofty and the obscene shade seamlessly into one another. In such humorous passages, “the puns . . . juxtapose two parallel linguistic worlds, a refined register and a vulgar register that mirrors and mocks it, by playing on the different significances of an ideograph in classical and vernacular Chinese.”38 Thus, in contrast to other reformist writers of the time, Tang does not locate authenticity in the vernacular register per se but rather conceives of the vernacular as a parody of classical language practices.39
Similarly, in her discussion of critic and playwright Wang Jide’s 王驥德 (d. 1623) lesser-known zaju Nan wanghou 男王后 (The Male Queen, before 1623), Volpp shows that verbal skills and rhetorical ingenuity rather than simple visual illusion are central to the protagonist”s cross-gender performance.40 Meanwhile, Kong Shangren’s 孔尚任 (1648–1718) Taohuashan 桃花扇 (Peach Blossom Fan, 1699) revisited the distinction between elite and vernacular registers in new ways. In Volpp’s reading, the play shows how the storyteller Liu Jingting 柳敬亭 (1587–1670), a highly educated performer, who was much in demand among elite circles, brought a seasoned eye to bear on the pretensions of the scholarly elite while being able to express himself in popular as well as elite registers. Yet in Kong’s prefaces to his play, he complained about the routine bowdlerization of fine plays by actors. Thus, in Volpp’s telling, Kong’s use of different language registers suggests that Peach Blossom Fan is construed as a training ground for readers to acquire the ability to fully immerse themselves in a play world while being simultaneously aware of its illusory nature.41
Hence, if we just look at these three examples drawn from zaju, nanxi, and chuanqi theater respectively, it becomes obvious that playwrights used the
theatrical juxtaposition of rhetorical devices for different ends. If zaju’s mixing of registers served to highlight depth of characterization and nanxi’s to balance entertainment with reflection, then chuanqi could be understood as a literary experiment in exploding stable boundaries between registers. Even within the chuanqi tradition, different playwrights deploy the contrast between high and low registers for different ends. If Tang was keen on drawing on the vernacular to parody standard classical usage, Kong foregrounded versatility across registers as a defining attribute of theatrically versed practitioners. In other words, within the Chinese theatrical tradition, the theatricality of language did not serve a singular purpose, but depending on genre, period, playwright and other factors, it could be mobilized for very different effects. At the same time, such differing approaches to language also point to another related issue, namely questions regarding the epistemological ground upon which dramatic writing and theatrical performance rested.
The Contested Nature of the Theatrical Imagination
In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Western discourses on Chinese theater, critics tended to concentrate on plot rather than rhetoric; moreover, plot was often pressed in the service of illustrating a Chinese custom or recounting an event in Chinese history.42 What came to be one of Western literature’s most prized features—its imaginative powers—was either largely overlooked or actively denied in translations or descriptions of Chinese theater. However, from a contemporary academic vantage point, it is noteworthy that Chinese theater was a relative latecomer to an already extremely rich and diverse literary and textual culture and as such has the potential for scholars to revisit the question of the importance of the imagination in the production, circulation, and consumption of Chinese literature anew. More specifically, theater can help us intervene not only in the question of how historical materials were adapted on the Chinese stage but also how theater engaged with different forms of fictionality. As Henry Turner observed in a comparative context, “the very large question of just how ‘fiction’ worked onstage has received less critical attention than it should and . . . seems . . . to mark an exciting horizon for new work.”43
The most ambitious effort to reconstruct the emergence of fictionality in Chinese theater is Lin Hong Lam’s The Spatiality of Emotion in Early Modern China. As Hu Ying notes, Lam’s is that rare book in Chinese Studies that is equally at home in the density of its source materials and in its theoretical engagement with principally French and German theorists.44 Lam’s research maps out a tripartite structure of how audiences related to theatrical productions in China over the course of the late medieval to the early modern period. In reading a set of literary sources drawn from many different genres, Lam
identifies three main modes of audience response, namely what he terms “weather,” “dream,” and “face-off.” The book insists that only one of these, namely the so-called face-off (sheshen chudi 設身處地), qualifies as an instantiation of “theatricality” as originally defined by literary critic William Egginton in an early modern European context.45 In this mode, audiences do not connect with their emotions either by being “naturally swayed” (weather) (Han period onward) or being “infinitely released” (dreaming) (Song/Yuan period), but instead, their feelings are only accessible through external mediation as readers (print) or through spectatorship (theater) (late Ming period).46 In this scheme, a clear epistemological boundary between fiction and reality in the audience’s mind did not take hold until the late sixteenth century when Tang Xianzu’s Peony Pavilion appeared (1598), long after the first heyday of full-blown Chinese theater in the Yuan dynasty.
Lam’s claims with regard to the dramatic and song literature of the Song-Yuan period have not gone unchallenged. In a recent essay, Casey Schoenberger argues for the existence of spectator-accessible fictional worlds within the corpus of Yuan and early Ming plays as a byproduct of urbanization.47 Schoenberger draws on “text world theory” to argue that we can distinguish between different epistemic layers within these plays: text worlds (playscripts), theater world (the theatrical apparatus), and a fictional world that distinguishes between spectator-accessible and character-accessible subworlds.48 Within that fictional world, Schoenberger draws on Wilt Idema’s observation that Yuan plays often feature an asymmetric relationship between a star and a subsidiary role designed to aid the audience to enter the fictional world.49 Rather than indicating a seamless movement between different dream states in the manner of Lam, such dramatic configurations constitute an innovative way to delineate “deictic fields,” that is, particular perspectives within the fictional subworld that the spectator is meant to access and shift between. In his close reading of Huolang dan 貨郎旦 (The Street Vendor in the Female Role), Schoenberger identifies two simultaneous, character-accessible subworlds where each protagonist puts on an act. The simultaneous pretense of each character for the benefit of the other necessitates suspension of disbelief on the part of an omniscient viewer, who must be, in what may be an early case of dramatic irony, aware of the fakery involved in order for the play to make sense.50
If in some cases, theatrical juxtaposition between different “acts within plays” served primarily comic effects, in other textual examples of this period, the implied pairing of theatricalized characters with textual or real-life avatars constituted a form of remonstration with the powers that be. In a detailed analysis of Sui Jingchen’s 睢景臣 (ca. 1257–ca. 1320) famous song suite “Gaozu huan xiang” 高祖還鄉 (“Han Gaozu Returns to His Home Village”), Karin
Myhre shows that, compared with relevant descriptions in the Shiji 史記 (Records of the Historian), the theatrical treatment of the encounter between the emperor and the villagers encodes a world that is distinct from historical precedent and from contemporary imperial practice. Not only is the reader given cues that the emperor in the song is presented as a protagonist on a stage, but the unhappy villager, a seemingly uncomprehending interlocutor, can be similarly understood as an actor. As Myhre observes, “Through selective use and inversion of historical models coupled with a shift of mode from a narrative to a performance, Sui has put into play the stability of normative frames and identities, as well as the boundaries between author, character, and player and reader and spectator.”51 In this view, theatricality is not aligned with ritual reenactment or moralizing self-expression, but instead, its linguistic habitus—the quotidian language, the excess of meanings, and the clash of storylines—gestures toward an erosion of the kind of interpretive authority encoded in the classics and in historiography.
In an essay on the Southern adaptation of The Orphan of Zhao, another zaju play with roots in the Records of the Historian and earlier historical traditions, Yuming He similarly highlights revisionist aspects of the theatrical imagination. If the Northern zaju had remained loyal to a small cast of aristocratic characters and their heroic retainers, the Southern chuanqi play cycle commonly known under the title Ba yi ji 八義記 (Tale of Eight Heroes) expanded the setting to become “a complex urban space of commercial exchange, social envy, and intrigue,” populated by a whole, newly invented cast of urban characters where “any concern for historical verisimilitude [has been thrown] to the winds.”52 Instead, as He documents, the printed playtexts as well as the accompanying illustrations draw together characters from different social strata—ordinary impoverished orphans, female wine shop owners, ambitious upstarts from the commoner classes—and place them into the world of the city streets. Importantly, as He argues, in contrast to the zaju version, the city space itself occasions the progression of the play more so than any single character. In other words, rather than making the transmission of official historiography the basis for a play,53 the play is suffused by “public spectacle and gossip”54 but also turns questions of identity on its head. Far from being a true orphan, the eponymous orphan of the play is in fact reunited with his parents thanks to the sacrifice of another orphan, who died in lieu of the orphan’s father. Moreover, rather than focusing on the orphan and his kin, the play’s focus rests on Tu’an Gu, the restless commoner with a surfeit of social ambition. Thus the chuanqi drama plays with the father-son bond as it is “replete with mistakes about parentage, of sons not knowing their fathers and of would-be fathers who fall victim to those they took for sons,”55 a theme underscored by different kinds of
themed comic routines that recontextualize canonical texts for comic effect. As He cautions us, just because the newly invented features of plays are claimed to be part of “antiquity,”56 it should not deceive us into thinking that Chinese theater is slavishly beholden to “history.” History, in this view, is always contested terrain that could be restaged in alternative guises.
In some cases, theatrical renditions of historical events not only experimented with fictional alternative but superseded the authority of historiographic accounts. In her recent book, Feeling the Past in Seventeenth-Century China, Xiaoqiao Ling revisits the divide between “history” and “theater” in her discussion of Kong Shangren’s Peach Blossom Fan.57 Rather than getting entangled in the question of whether the play is an accurate, historically based account of major figures active during the Ming/Qing transition or a fictional recreation, Ling instead approaches the play and assorted paratextual materials from the point of view of memory studies. In particular, she analyzes the famous section of “sources” that precede the play known as “Investigations” (“Kaoju” 考劇) as a “memorial archive” to argue that the list of twenty sources contained therein strives “to document a contested memorial landscape of the Southern Ming among a close-knit community of writers.”58 Specifically, Kong deployed dramatic tension to resolve conflicting accounts and created a network of solidarity of figures aligned against the archvillain Ruan Dacheng, himself an accomplished dramatist and troupe-owner.59 At the same time, the particular array of texts cited from many different genres underscores the “acquired nature of the historical events dramatized” in the play.60 As the play makes use of “two temporal sequences” as framing devices, Ling suggests that these frames call for different “modes of remembrance.”61 The first frame, instantiated by the Old Keeper of Rites as well as a fisherman (the storyteller Liu Jingting) and the woodcutter (music master Su Kunsheng), is construed as “emotionally invested mourners of the fallen Ming.”62 These figures model the remembrance of the past as an affective, identity-forming process in keeping with Kong’s overall aesthetic design for the play as a vehicle for cultural continuity and collective remembrance in the face of the traumatic experience of the fall of the Ming. At the same time, through an elaborate and unprecedented structure of character casting, Kong’s play also immerses the audience in the lives of the protagonists as they unfold in order to “actually feel”63 their emotions. Thus in the shuttling back and forth between different forms of remembrance, theatricality is neither externalized nor purely internal but mediates between different affective modalities.64 In its emphasis on recuperative feeling, Ling’s project points to another aspect that has vexed discussions of Chinese theater, namely irrespective of whether audiences believed what they read or watched was fiction or history, how were they thought to emotionally process theatrical texts and performances?
A Multimodal History of Performance Aesthetics
If Chinese theater has had any presence in comparative theater studies, it is via German playwright Bertolt Brecht’s (1898–1956) interaction with Mei Lanfang’s (1894–1961) theatrical performances. How much Chinese theater aesthetics contributed to Brecht’s influential theory of “Verfremdungseffekt” (alienation effect)—the desire to impel audiences to take revolutionary action offstage through an unmasking of the brutal nature of reality on stage—is a point of dispute among scholars. Even when the mediating aspect of Chinese theater for Brecht’s formulation is granted, there is no consensus on whether Brecht fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the Chinese theatrical tradition or whether he apprehended something of substance.65 For instance, Min Tian argued that, contrary to Brecht’s idea that Chinese xiqu conventions made the familiar strange to its Chinese audiences, the success of xiqu aesthetics in fact depended on the audience’s familiarity with and appreciation of such performance skills.66 Meanwhile, in Siyuan Liu’s view, while Brecht may have misapprehended the fundamentals of audience/performer relations in Chinese theater, his understanding of “gestus” (gesture, bodily comportment) as a “social (ized) gesticulation as opposed to psychologized facial expression [and] as contextualized and alterable comportment” nevertheless attested to Brecht’s insight into what Brecht described as the “masterly use of gesture as seen in Chinese acting.”67
In a nuanced reconceptualization of Brecht’s concern with “theatricalized ethics,” theater scholar Haiping Yan homed in on the communicative nature of audience/performer relations in producing xiqu aesthetics: “Fully cognizant of its [the performance’s] suppositionality, the ‘imaginatively knowing’ and ‘actively feeling’ audience is constitutive of the drama’s actualization through their decision-making process; their presence is integral to the acting process, and indispensable to the production of theatricality.”68 Expanding on Yan’s formulation of the pact between audience and actor, theater scholar Megan Evans pointed to the actor’s skill as a catalyst that makes ethically harrowing scenarios aesthetically thrilling and imaginatively actionable: “The embodied potency of extraordinary skill exhibited in a successful xiqu performance itself expands the boundaries of ‘what there is to know’ both in terms of how the actor feels about the character’s situation and how the audience responds to the performance.”69 Thus, most importantly, perhaps, the legacy surrounding Brecht’s intercultural theorizing foregrounds the importance of performance and more specifically, the actor and the audience, as a vital conduit for the realization of performance aesthetics. In this view, then, theatricality is not an abstracted universal, but a positively coded concept that revolves around identifying “the essential performance characteristics”70 of particular theatrical styles.
This performative line of emphasis has had particular currency among China scholars who have been trained in theatre studies and in some cases actively direct Chinese-style productions themselves. In her contribution to a special Asian Theatre Journal issue (1994) on desirable future English-language studies on Chinese theatre, Elizabeth Wichman called for studies on modern xiqu culture that could positively impact “the status and creative authority of xiqu performers in China today” through sustained attention to “performance and performers, their training and creative work rather than on scripts, history or sociopolitical issues.”71 In the interim, new research on the changes within the modern xiqu repertoire shows that the creative agency of individual xiqu performers was ineluctably intertwined with script, performance, and sociopolitical issues. In his analysis of the PRC reform campaigns of the 1950s, Siyuan Liu demonstrates how what he terms “xiqu’s gestic theatricality” was systematically diminished through official and informal interventions in the play repertoire and in the performance techniques.72 Meanwhile, scholars of dynastic xiqu have also expanded their scope of inquiry to include performative aspects, all the associated methodological quandaries notwithstanding. This body of work seeks to delineate the performance qualities of historical forms of Chinese theater while creatively working within the limitations of available sources. Among the different aspects of mise-en-scène relevant for theatrical performance, recent studies of stage directions (role types, exits and entrances, physical actions, emotional states, gestures, sound effects), costume, and voice techniques elucidate both continuities and ruptures in the long durée of Chinese xiqu performance and of related song traditions. A hallmark of such work is its intrinsically multidisciplinary nature.
Building on earlier work on stage directions in Yuan zaju and in Ming chuanqi,73 Judith T. Zeitlin’s The Phantom Heroine: Ghost and Gender in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Literature examines the figure of the female ghost, or what she calls the “phantom heroine,” in the context of the theatrical culture in late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century China.74 Attending to the female ghost both as a literary artefact and as a theatrical event, Zeitlin notes that tremendous theatrical potential inheres in the figure of the ghost. The staging of a ghost made visible what ordinarily was not visible as ghosts hovered on the threshold of the here and there, or as Alice Rayner put it, [theatrical] “ghosts wait for the secrets to be released into time.”75 Moreover, typically the same actor or actress embodied humans and their ghostly counterparts. Such a pairing of human and ghostly guises called for acting virtuosity (different forms of gestic embodiment)76 while also providing a window onto how the actor, the role, and the character were thought to relate to one another (metatheatrical doubling).77 In order to identify the theatrical differentiation between female humans (dan
旦) and female ghosts (hun dan 魂旦), Zeitlin draws on a multidisciplinary archive of sources to reconstruct a “semiotic code of ghosts in drama” through special attention to stage practices (e.g., stage business, sound effects) and acting conventions (e.g., special gestures, dance movements, costume and accessories, formulaic lyrics).78 Key among the source materials are stage directions in relevant plays, the particular arias sung by the actress in both of her guises, woodblock-printed illustrations of ghost scenes, associated paintings, as well as photographs of modern stage conventions.79 Stage directions proliferated as plays became part of a flourishing late Ming print culture.80 While they cannot be naively taken at face value, it is also true that many chuanqi playwrights were known to be intimately familiar with staging conventions, and thus, in Zeitlin’s view, such notations most likely were in dialogue with actual stage practices. Importantly, in contrast to early modern European stage directions found in print sources, printed Chinese stage directions utilized a specialized performance language, suggesting that “the imaginative reading process for Chinese drama may have always retained” an “indissoluble link to the stage.”81
Stage directions as well as woodblock illustrations and paintings also figure prominently in Guojun Wang’s exploration of how attire in historical and performative contexts entered into complex negotiations in his Staging Personhood: Costuming in Early Qing Drama. The new Qing rulers instituted strict regulations regarding attire among Manchu, Mongolian, and Han peoples alike. Importantly, they required the defeated Han majority to adopt the hairstyle of a queue and new forms of dress. Ming-dynasty state attire, by contrast, was relegated to the realm of theatrical costuming, while Manchu clothing was officially banned from performances in all settings, and the Manchus themselves were forbidden from attending theatrical performances in playhouses in order for strict segregation to be maintained between the ruling minority and the populace at large, even if such bans were unevenly enforced. The exception were the Manchu rulers themselves who recruited eunuchs and professional performers to enact plays in Ming-dynasty costume at court to relish the imaginative spoils of their military victory. However, for Chinese male Qing-dynasty subjects, the appearance of Ming dynasty clothing on stage might resonate in entirely different ways. Literati expressed strong nostalgia for the fallen regime and the associated way of life. As Wang demonstrates in his close readings of several seventeenth-century plays, such policies invited playwrights to exploit the stage directions devoted to costuming as a site to explore intertwined questions of gender and ethnicity in a period rife with shifting allegiances and commemorations. In examining theatrical costuming as a contested site for Manchu/Chinese identities and social relations, Wang notes that in a global context, the Ming/Qing transition may be a rare case where ethnic tensions surfaced in theatrical costuming.82
A multimodal approach has also informed research on the reconstruction of another vital aspect of Chinese theatrical performance, that is, the world of sound. In its most focused dimensions, the landscape of theatrical sound concerns specific singing styles, the art of voice production, and the pedagogy of singing. Accordingly, musicologists and other scholars have analyzed the musical contours of particular tune choices and their aesthetic effects83 while also seeking to reconstruct conceptions of singing and voicing,84 traditions of voice pedagogy, and methods of actor-singer training.85 In dynastic China, singing took place in many contexts, and given the importance of the audience/performer nexus noted above, song style, timing, and ambience all fed into the acoustic choices (singers) and the auditory experiences (audience). Hence, some scholars have insisted that the soundscape of singing performances cannot be divorced from the ambient site of the performance itself.86 In “Courtesan vs. Literatus: Gendered Soundscapes and Aesthetics in Late-Ming Singing Culture,” Peng Xu argues that theater scholars need to pay attention to a host of hitherto neglected questions: What was the sonic environment of singing performances? What was the audience’s ‘point of audition’? How did the specific place of the performance figure into the singing styles? What factors might have prompted the singer to make particular aesthetic decisions with regard to volume, vocal color, and ornamentation? Who were the singing teachers, and what pedagogies did they adopt? In plays, how was singing represented diegetically (e.g., characters, plot elements, settings) and extradiegetically (e.g., musical mode, tune pattern choice, prosody)? Through an examination of a range of late Ming textual and visual sources, Xu identifies two gendered singing styles associated with specific environments, that is, the feminine warbling of intimate banquet performances and the masculine whistling in mountainous nature settings. She goes on to suggest that certain chuanqi plays suggest that courtesan-actor-singers were expected to combine these styles. Xu’s nuanced exploration of the allure of “pure singing” (qingchang 清唱, singing devoid of other facets of dramatic performance), though distinct from a full-blown theatrical realization of those same tunes, underscores the importance of the acoustic dimensions of the late Ming cult of feeling.87 While sources are limited compared to the roughly contemporaneous development of Italian operatic bel canto singing, perhaps other methodologically inventive moves will further expand the exploration of the sonic aesthetics of dynastic Chinese plays and songs.
Conclusion: Future Research Horizons
The study, appreciation, and intercultural diffusion of traditional Chinese theater in European-language contexts have been a long and slow process. If Chinese drama was among the earliest forms of literature to catch the attention
of European scholars in the 1730s, the US academy did not begin to embrace instruction on Chinese theater until the 1940s and 1950s.88 In the interim, the last two decades have seen a steady growth of dissertations and books thanks to the pioneering efforts of a contingent of US-based faculty—Cyril Birch, J. I. Crump, Patrick Hanan, Robert E. Hegel, C. T. Hsia, Wilt L. Idema, David Johnson, David Todd Roy, Stephen H. West, and Elizabeth Wichman, among others—who trained cohorts of drama scholars at a number of research institutions. So what might be some exciting directions for the historiography of Chinese drama and theater adumbrated by the work that these new generations of scholars have undertaken?
Much xiqu research has a comparative angle, yet the findings of Sinologists about the history and practice of Chinese theater have yet to resonate more broadly among scholarly communities interested in world theater, world dance, or world music. Even general introductory surveys on world theater that address some facet of the xiqu tradition often describe Chinese theater in predictably formalistic terms.89 Thus, it might be incumbent on the field of Chinese theater studies to ask: how can we contribute to a global history of theater? Or to put it more pointedly, if we venture beyond essentialist, nationalist, or preservationist claims about the unique qualities of Chinese xiqu,90 how can we theorize the potentially distinctive aspects of this art form in a comparative context? Obviously, there are no definitive answers on how to approach Chinese theatricality as world theater, but I will sketch out some observations below.
In the area of the material aspects of drama, a global history of reading playtexts could be immeasurably enriched if we systematically worked through the rich corpus of published plays91 while also teasing out the complex interactions between print and manuscript traditions.92 We might work with the heuristic suspicion that reading drama in dynastic China was a different operation than reading drama in Shakespearean or other contexts. As noted above, stage directions figured in rather particular ways in the Chinese theatrical corpus, embedding theatrical modalities in the act of reading. In the realm of the structure of the text, perhaps further work can shed light on the complex operation of different kinds of language registers within the confines of a single play. Here, perhaps an analysis of the movement between different kinds of delivery (singing, declaiming, speaking) in combination with a consideration of the alternation of moods might shed new light on Chinese models of theatrical engagement. Furthermore, an in-depth consideration of the recoverable kinesthetic and musical elements in historical sources, as challenging as that might be, could provide a basis for better theorizing the nature of Chinese theater as a generically distinctive form that is a constantly evolving Gesamtkunstwerk that continues to eschew attempts to categorically or practically assimilate it to
Western-derived taxonomies of theatricality. At the same time, such a history also cannot be blind to the fact that modern xiqu has been continually engaged with various other theatrical traditions and as such cannot be reduced to the status of a “pure” heritage.93 Instead, perhaps we might want to have recourse to what Maggie Green calls “literary time”94—that is, the remarkable tenacity of certain sociocultural and aesthetic configurations that resist “campaign time” or “dynastic time,” all the variability and new inflections notwithstanding.
In terms of the social history of Chinese theater, three aspects may be particularly worthy of further investigation. First, in dynastic China, in contrast to the textual projects of official historiography and poetic self-expression, Chinese drama was at its heart a collective but institutionally pluralistic art form. Thus, conceptualizing Chinese theater in a frame of the “theatricality of power” is bound to fall short of the plural ways in which different communities generated their own forms of theatrical display and mobilized competing versions of ostensibly “identical stories.” Even if these different theatrical sectors entered into complex arrangements with one another, theater, even in its most moral guises, could be mobilized to speak truth to power. One way to further investigate the importance of this remonstrative aspect of the Chinese theatrical tradition may be a more comprehensive investigation of the breadth and depth of the theatrical archive beyond the handful of iconic plays that have received the lion’s share of scholarly attention.
Another avenue of inquiry might be to focus on the centrality of gender in the world of the theater relative to other forms of public discourse in dynastic China. Was China among the first world theaters to accord female actors the status of recognized artists? In light of the indentured nature of much theatrical labor and its embedment within an epitheatrical sexual economy,95 we also have to honestly reckon with the precarious social underpinnings of female stardom.96 By the same token, given the prominence of non-gender straight acting from the inception of the Chinese theatrical tradition to the present day,97 perhaps a more comprehensive history of how the aesthetics of cross-gender and transgender impersonation shaped playwrighting, actor training, and audience interest may also yield unexpected results. Needless to say, such a history would also need to come to terms with culturally specific yet changing notions of gender, sexuality, and family organization.98 And thirdly, while some work has been done to investigate audience/performer relations, we could push both archival work and our theorizing further in order to formulate compelling alternatives to Brecht’s alienation effect that would allow us to explain the ubiquity of Chinese theater and its affective import among different social strata in dynastic China.
To facilitate broader diffusion of knowledge of and appreciation of Chinese drama among new audiences, different types of translations might be another worthwhile endeavor.99 In the realm of zaju, Wilt L. Idema and Stephen H. West have translated dozens of plays from various textual strata of the Yuan corpus.100 Their pioneering and indefatigable efforts have paved the way for the adoption of Chinese texts into the undergraduate curriculum. In the meantime, we have only scratched the surface of an immense and varied corpus of longish chuanqi plays. Moreover, in addition to translating for the textbook market, we might also consider a more self-consciously literary approach either as a solo effort or perhaps most fruitfully as a translatorial collaboration between people with different skill sets and literary orientations.101 We might also think about producing “stage” or “performance translations” designed to be used in an actual production.102 As Elizabeth Wichman and Megan Evans have suggested, such translations could take the form of texts that are singable in one of the current xiqu styles; alternatively, they could be structured in such a way as to allow for integration with xiqu-style theatrical principles. Not only could such translations inspire new intercultural afterlives for the plays in question, but the opportunity to act in a xiqu style performance, even in English translation, might give rise to new acting pedagogies.103
And finally, we might also want to harness the power of the digital humanities. Not only would open access sites build audiences for xiqu around the world, but with the right kind of design, such digital resources might also invite informed, appreciative, or creative responses from those selfsame users. As noted above, xiqu has been driven by stylistic variation, individual creativity, and institutional mandates. Curated documentation of the archive and the repertoire of xiqu theatricality offers a window not only to historical practices but can also broaden access to a repertoire of creative solutions and future possibilities for theater practitioners in the Chinese-speaking world and elsewhere. Moreover, different facets of xiqu have engaged with modern media—spoken drama, film, dance, and the visual arts to name the most obvious.104 Thus such a digital future may also document the rich resonances and afterlives of historical and modern xiqu in the culture at large105 while, in Emily Wilcox’s words, contribute toward “decentering whiteness.”106 In that light, Brook’s attempt to imagine a “bare stage,” as the quintessential environment for “an act of theatre to be engaged” between two lone men, however fitting that might seem for xiqu at first glance, in all likelihood is impossibly solipsistic.107 Perhaps our work on Chinese xiqu can show that the ostensibly “bare stage” is ghosted by other technologies, alternate social constellations, different mental and sensory operations, and distinctive performance aesthetics while being every inch as theatrical in its diverse ways to make sense of the world through theater.
Acknowledgments
I want to express my thanks to the guest editor of this issue, Steve Roddy, for his persistent nurturing of this contribution through the COVID-19 global health emergency and the associated shadow pandemics. I am grateful for the incisive suggestions by the two peer reviewers. I am also indebted to my fellow contributors, particularly Martin Kern and Paola Varsano, for the observations and thought-provoking questions they raised during the symposium held for this special issue in summer 2021. I also want to acknowledge the inspiration derived from the comments of Wenbo Chang, Erxin Wang, and Mengling Wang about my presentation there. In different ways, these conversations prompted me to think about the notion of a global history of Chinese theater in more concrete terms. Finally, I thank Regina Llamas and Paize Keulemans for their thoughtful comments on an earlier draft.
Notes
1. Brook, Empty Space, 9.
2. Sieber, Theaters of Desire, 7–40. D. Chang, Representing China on the Historical London Stage, 52–96.
3. For a brief discussion on how the term Chinese opera gained currency in nineteenth-century usage in England, see Thorpe, Performing China on the London Stage, 10n3; on mid-nineteenth-century American English terminology for traditional Chinese theater, see Lei, Operatic China, 31–39. For an argument on its continued relevance, see Zeitlin, “Introduction,” 16–17.
4. On the problems surrounding the term xiqu, see Kang, Zhongguo xiju shi yanjiu rumen, 1–20. My thanks to Paize Keulemans for bringing this study to my attention.
5. For a survey of key studies from the first major wave of Anglophone studies of classical Chinese drama, see Guo, “Overview of Research on Classical Chinese Drama in North America.” My choice of studies to discuss is necessarily selective and has no pretensions to being exhaustive. For a synthetic account of a broader range of research on traditional Chinese theater, see Sieber and Llamas, “Introduction.”
6. On these terms and their relationship, see Taylor, Archive and the Repertoire.
7. Fiebach, “Theatricality,” 24; Carlson, “Resistance to Theatricality.”
8. Postlewait and Davis, “Theatricality: An Introduction,” 1–39.
9. See Nellhaus et al., Theatre Histories, for an attempt to write a global theater history with a communicative approach that is structured around different media (orality, manuscript culture, print culture, periodical print culture, electronic communication).
10. Quoted in Fiebach, “Theatricality,” 20.
11. Ibid., 17. In the discussion to illustrate this definition across cultures from Africa to Asia, he points to Antje Budde’s discussion that foregrounds the acrobatics in traditional Peking Opera and a “bodily skills”-centered etymology of a Chinese instantiation of such a body-centered definition of theater (19).
12. Postlewait, “Theatricality and Antitheatricality in Renaissance London,” 118–19.
13. Ibid., 120.
14. Turner, “Toward a New Theatricality?,” 29–35.
15. See, for example, Willi, “Language(s) of Comedy.”
16. Halliwell, “Laughter.”
17. Marshall, “Dramatic Technique and Athenian Comedy,” 145.
18. See for example, Foley, “Performing Gender in Greek Old and New Comedy.”
19. Carlson, Haunted Stage.
20. Postlewait, “Theatricality and Antitheatricality in Renaissance London,” 122.
21. Fiebach, “Theatricality,” 24.
22. See the short entries on Chinese playwrights and theatrical forms in Kennedy, Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance, and the somewhat longer ones in Leiter, Encyclopedia of Asian Theatre; for medium-length entries on Chinese actors, theatrical styles, and institutions, see Williams, Cambridge Encyclopedia of Stage Actors and Acting.
23. See the inclusion of Guan Hanqing’s 關漢卿 The Injustice of Dou E as the sole Chinese play in Gainor et al., Norton Anthology of Drama. Cf. Chun, “Introduction,” 2.
24. The above mentioned Nellhouse et al., Theatre Histories, is riddled with errors when it comes to traditional Chinese theater. For a particularly egregious example, see the chapter entitled “Secular and Early Professional Theatre, 1250–1650,” where the authors advance a set of patently false claims: “Print had a different impact in East Asia (China, Korea, and Japan). Even with movable type, printing was done by hand—a laborious and expensive process; perhaps that is why few plays were printed. To enjoy drama, Asian audiences needed to attend live performances” (151).
25. Julien, Hoeï-lan-ki, x–xxv. For the afterlife of such translations on the French stage, see Lo, La Chine sur la scène française au XIXe siècle.
26. In Dongshin Chang’s terminology, in historical British theater, a “Chinaface style” represented China on a “visual, formal level as opposed to a textual, conceptual level” (D. Chang, Representing China on the Historical London Stage, 2–6). For similar ideations among non-Chinese audiences in nineteenth-century California toward what she terms “Chinese nondrama,” see Lei, Operatic China, 43–50. On how contemporary New York audiences only spontaneously applauded for an acrobatic interlude in the 1998 performance of Peony Pavilion and the many visual stimulants in the performance more generally, see Rolston, “Tradition and Innovation in Chen Shi-Zheng’s Peony Pavilion,” 138, 140–41.
27. For a discussion of this debate in the Yuan dynasty, see Shih-pe Wang, “Plays within Songs.”
28. On Zhou’s language philosophy, see Sieber, “Flavor All Its Own,” 209–10.
29. Sieber, “Pavilion for Praying to the Moon and The Injustice to Dou E.”
30. In Western contexts, women did not become significant as actors or singers until the late sixteenth century. See Nellhaus et al., Theatre Histories, 169.
31. Llamas, Top Graduate Zhang Xie, 63.
32. Ibid., 63.
33. Ibid., 67.
34. Ibid., 274.
35. Ibid., 65.
36. Humor too was subject to historical change. For an exemplary study in the modern Chinese context, see Rea, Age of Irreverence.
37. Volpp, Worldly Stage, 89–128. The term vernacular was until recently the unchallenged standard term to refer to more colloquial registers of written Chinese. Plain Chinese was advanced as a back translation of baihua 白話 as a non-Eurocentric alternative in an influential article by Shang, “Writing and Speech.” In order to bring out the literary richness and diversity of the vernacular or plain Chinese more clearly, Sieber proposed mixed-register literature as yet another way to describe this written form. See Sieber, “Flavor All Its Own,” 226–27.
38. Volpp, Worldly Stage, 92.
39. Neither of the two 1998 Peony Pavilion productions referenced above, however, engaged with humor in this way. Sellars’s cut the humorous scene altogether in the interest of time, and Chen simplified the translation and created involuntary humor. See Swatek, “Boundary Crossings,” 149, 154. On Chen’s increased use of slapstick, see Zeitlin, “My Year of Peonies,” 128.
40. Volpp, Worldly Stage, 129–72. On this point, see also Tan, review, 433–34.
41. Volpp, Worldly Stage, 214–48.
42. D. Chang, Representing China on the Historical London Stage.
43. Turner, “Toward a New Theatricality?,” 33.
44. Hu, review, 471–72.
45. Egginton, How the World Became a Stage.
46. As Curie Virág cautions, it is not clear why the discourse of an audience’s emotions has to be stripped of all interiority, even if it might make sense to challenge the idea that emotions are exclusively interior events. See Virág, review.
47. Schoenberger, “Storytellers, Sermons, Sales Pitches, and Other Deceptive Features of City Life,” 131–33.
48. Ibid., 140.
49. Idema, “Why You Have Never Read a Yuan Zaju,” 783.
50. Schoenberger, “Storytellers, Sermons, Sales Pitches, and Other Deceptive Features of City Life,” 152–56.
51. Myhre, “Performing the Emperor,” 46, 47. For two other essays in the same issue that stress the theatrical dimensions of certain sanqu songs, see Idema, “Ultimate Sanqu Song,” and
W. Chang, “Performing the Role of the Playwright.” For related plays, see Idema, “Founding of the Han Dynasty in Early Drama.”
52. He, “Adopting The Orphan,” 165–66.
53. The Yuan zaju also introduced some imaginative elements. Specifically, Ji Junxiang added the eponymous orphan’s adoption by archvillain Tu’an Gu, thus heightening the dramatic conflict around which father to be loyal to. See Shih-pe Wang, “Orphan of Zhao.”
54. He, “Adopting The Orphan,” 169.
55. Ibid., 174.
56. Ibid., 181–82.
57. Ling, Feeling the Past in Seventeenth-Century China. For an alternative reading of the tensions in this play, see Li and Guo, “Peach Blossom Fan and Palace of Everlasting Life.”
58. Ling, Feeling the Past in Seventeenth-Century China, 251.
59. On Ruan’s place within the political and theatrical history of the period, see Zhang, “Green Peony and The Swallow’s Letter.”
60. Ling, Feeling the Past in Seventeenth-Century China, 251.
61. Ibid., 267.
62. Ibid., 268.
63. Ibid., 275.
64. Insofar as the fall of the Ming was the first major historical event that was dramatized across Eurasia, compelling possibilities of a comparative history of theatricality beckon. See Keulemans, “Tales of an Open World”; D. Chang, Representing China on the Historical London Stage, 15–51.
65. Yan, “Theatricality in Classical Chinese Drama.”
66. Tian, “‘Alienation Effect’ for Whom?” For a summary of this debate, see also Evans,
“Translating Bodies,” 110–12.
67. Quoted in Liu, Transforming Tradition, 8. Brecht noted that “the actor has to find a sensibly perceptible outward expression for his characters, preferably some action that gives away what is going inside him. The emption in question must be brought out, must lose all its restrictions so that it can be treated on a big scale.” Quoted in Liu, Transforming Tradition, 8–9. In a similarly sympathetic reinterpretation of Brecht, Haiping Yan observed that Brecht “astutely recognizes how subjunctive and suppositional performance could both inscribe a specific system of ethics and exceed the limits of the system, thereby activating transformative imaginations” (“Theatricality in Classical Chinese Drama,” 75).
68. Yan, “Theatricality in Classical Chinese Drama,” 86.
69. Evans, “Translating Bodies,” 111. For a similar understanding of the “goal of theatricalization as the display of exceptional achievement,” see Carlson, “Resistance to Theatricality,” 249. On the pleasurable surplus of theater, see Postlewait and Davis, “Theatricality: An Introduction,” 21.
70. Postlewait and Davis, “Theatricality: An Introduction,” 21, 22.
71. Wichman, “Xiqu Research and Translation with the Artists in Mind,” 99.
72. Liu, Transforming Tradition, 98–156. For the term “gestic theatricality,” see 155. For other relevant studies, see Greene, Resisting Spirits; DeMare, Mao’s Cultural Army; Fan, Staging Revolution; and some of the essays gathered in Mezur and Wilcox, Corporeal Politics, and in Chen, Chun, and Liu, Rethinking Chinese Socialist Theaters of Reform.
73. For a broad survey of theatrical techniques derived from Zang Maoxun’s edition of Yuan zaju, see Crump, Chinese Theater in the Days of Kublai Khan, 67–175; for a masterful statistical survey across different editions of Yuan zaju, see Tian, “Stage Directions in the Performance of Yuan Drama.” On Ming chuanqi, see Swatek, Peony Pavilion Onstage.
74. Zeitlin, Phantom Heroine, 131–80.
75. Rayner, Ghosts, x.
76. On acting virtuosity in Yuan zaju contexts, see Idema, “Traditional Dramatic Literature,” 801; and Sieber, “Pavilion for Praying to the Moon and Injustice to Dou E,” 80–83.
77. Zeitlin, Phantom Heroine, 134, 171–80.
78. Ibid., 140–71. In the late 1990s, a new subfield within theater studies arose, the so-called theater semiotics, which sought to reclaim theatricality as a positive concept (see Carlson, “Resistance to Theatricality,” 242–43). It aimed to describe the various theatrical codes that constitute a performance. While many useful studies were written under its auspices, no definitive models could emerge because of the complexity and variability of the communicative processes involved (see Postlewait and Davis, “Theatricality: An Introduction,” 22–25).
79. Zeitlin, Phantom Heroine, 140–71. For a detailed examination of a broad range of late Ming acting conventions through a comparison of visual sources from woodblock printed
books and modern stage photographs, see also Hsiao, Eternal Present of the Past, 87–174. For an analysis of text-image relations with regard to the stage and the reader’s imagination, see Sieber and Zhang, “Story of the Western Wing.”
80. Zeitlin, Phantom Heroine, 141–42. As Zeitlin notes, the increase in stage directions was a byproduct of the transformation of playscripts into reading material.
81. Ibid., 142. On the prevalence of the phrases “ke” 科 or “jie” 介 (gestures/acting out) by themselves or in combination with other performative markers in Yuan and Ming editions of Yuan zaju, see Tian, “Stage Directions in the Performance of Yuan Drama,” 407.
82. Wang, Staging Personhood, 42. For a discussion of stage directions in the context of various forms of Qing court theater, see Tan, “Song of Dragon Well Tea and Other Court Plays,” 316–18.
83. Mark, “From Page to Stage”; Lam, “Southern Story of the Western Wing.”
84. Zeitlin, “Pleasures of Print”; Zeitlin, “From the Natural to the Instrumental.”
85. Zeitlin, “‘Notes of the Flesh’ and the Courtesan’s Art in Seventeenth-Century China”; Xu, “Music Teacher.”
86. On the soundscape in communal settings, see Yung, “Mulian Rescues His Mother.”
87. On this point, see also Zeitlin, Phantom Heroine, 140.
88. Pang, “(Re)Cycling Culture,” 375.
89. Westlake, World Theatre, 52–58.
90. On the nationalist essentialism, see Goldstein, Drama Kings.
91. On a possible methodological model, see He, Home and the World.
92. Goldman, “Eight-Court Pearl”; L. Chen, Staging for the Emperors.
93. For an exemplary study of the transcultural dynamics at play in Mei Lanfang’s innovations in Beijing opera, see Yeh, “Mei Lanfang and Modern Dance.”
94. Greene, Resisting Spirits, 16.
95. Stevenson, “One as Form and Shadow.”
96. See for example, Bossler, “Sexuality, Status, and the Female Dancer”; Y. Chen, “‘Queering’ the Nation?’”
97. Kile, “Transgender Performance in Early Modern China”; Goldman, Opera and the City; Li R., Soul of Beijing Opera, 83–119; J. S. C. Lam, “Impulsive Scholars and Sentimental Heroes.”
98. Bossler, Courtesans, Concubines, and the Cult of Female Fidelity; Guo, “Male Dan at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century.”
99. For a history of early play translations in European languages, see Idema, “From Stage Scripts to Closet Dramas”; for French translations, see Li S., Zhongguo xiqu zai Faguo de fanyi yu jieshou.
100. Representative works include Wang Shifu, Moon and the Zither, and West and Idema, Orphan of Zhao and Other Yuan Plays.
101. For the literary results of a collaboration between scholars, students, and a poet, see Hsia, Li, and Kao, Columbia Anthology of Yuan Drama; for an example of self-consciously reflective translation practice in the context of the Yuan song tradition, see Sieber et al., “In Search of Pure Sound.” When the Royal Shakespeare Company launched the China Classics project, they paired a literary translator with a playwright with Asian roots. In the case of the Injustice to Dou, well-known translator Gigi Chang (of The Legend of the Condors translation fame) retranslated the play to provide the point of departure for Snow in Midsummer, contemporary playwright Frances Ya-chu Cowhig’s radically topical
reworking of the original story. For a performance review of Cowhig’s play, see Swatek, “Performance Review.”
102. For the hallmarks of such texts, see Bassnett, “Theatre and Opera.”
103. Wichman, “Xiqu Research and Translation with the Artists in Mind.” Evans lists the following xiqu principles as possible ways to create an embodied “replication” even without recourse to xiqu-specific gestures and vocal patterns: integration of music with onstage action, precisely scored rhythmic transitions, and clarity of emotional progression supported by precise physical score (“Translating Bodies,” 120). On how xiqu-style training inflected American film actor training, see Pang, “(Re)Cycling Culture,” 381–82.
104. Feng, Intercultural Aesthetics in Traditional Chinese Theatre; Ferrari, Transnational Chinese Theatres.
105. For relevant sites, see the TEXTCOURT Project (https://textcourt.web.ox.ac.uk/; accessed November 14, 2021), the Digital Library of Chinese Theatre (https://chinesetheatre.leeds.ac.uk/; accessed November 14, 2021), the Pioneers of Chinese Dance Digital Archive (https://quod.lib.umich.edu/d/dance1ic?page=index; accessed November 14, 2021), the Chinese Film Classics Project (https://chinesefilmclassics.org/; accessed November 14, 2021), and the Chinese Theater Collaborative (https://chinesetheatercollaborative.org; accessed November 14, 2021; under construction).
106. Wilcox, “Introduction,” 8–12.
107. On the puritanical, antitheatrical overtones of a discursive preoccupation with the “bare stage,” see Carlson, “Resistance to Theatricality,” 248.
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This article was published in English in 2022.
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