A Performance-Based Study of Kunqu
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Royal Holloway, University of London Contesting Traditional Luzi ('Choreographic Paths'): A Performance-Based Study of Kunqu A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences in candidacy for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Drama, Theatre and Dance by Kim Hunter Gordon December 6, 2016 Abstract Kunqu has been conceptualised as a comprehensive performance art of ‘fixed’ appearance and unassailable pedigree. This thesis demonstrates that it is literary, political and professional elites’ continual attempts to archive and categorise Kunqu performance that leads to this notion of ‘fixity’. This argument is complemented by a careful analysis of the luzi (‘choreographic paths’) of contemporary performance. By analysis of two major monologues from Peony Pavilion, this thesis shows that actors continually carve out and maintain competing artistic identities by choosing to adopt, adapt or replace ‘traditional’ luzi. This new understanding of the relationship between performance and the archive of performance allows me to intervene in major debates from the works of Aoki Masaru to Lu Eting— not only regarding Kunqu historiography, but also in respect to the literature on Chinese theatre in general, where this apparent fixity is cited by Kunqu’s advocates as an orthodoxy that lends it cultural pre-eminence over other performance genres. At the centre of my study, then, are the insights garnered from the practical experience of learning luzi over three years at the Jiangsu Province Kunju Theatre in Nanjing. This experience has enabled me to interpret many hundreds of hours of previously unanalysed video footage, much of which represents material that has only become available in recent years. From this analysis I establish the centrality of the luzi as the key locus where the actor seeks to validate his or her mediation of the tradition. Drawing upon Derrida’s conception of archivism as an active force in the creation of meaning and Diana Taylor’s critique of UNESCO strategies that commit intangible repertoire into an archive, I demonstrate how multiple archiving projects have been continually implicated in the formation of Kunqu since its inception. Informed by Baumann’s ideas of mediation and performance, I further argue that audiences’ and practitioners’ increasing awareness of canonical luzi through the video archive actively shapes, rather than simply records, Kunqu performance. 1 Table of Contents ABSTRACT 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS 2 A NOTE ON STYLE 4 INTRODUCTION 5 Methodology 10 Tradition as authorship 19 Aspects of ‘traditional’ Chinese performance 22 The luzi as template in a modular system 28 Kunqu and social status 34 Authority and competition 38 Research material 39 Literature review 42 Thesis structure 49 1. TEXT AND PERFORMANCE 51 The playlet as performance format 53 Musical notation 61 Shenyin jiangu lu and performance 69 Concluding remarks 78 2. FIXED LUZI IN THE CONTEMPORARY REPERTOIRE 80 The Chuanxisuo as a living archive 81 Transmission in state institutions 88 The current repertoire 93 The traditionalised luzi: Si fan 111 Concluding remarks 118 2 3. THE FLORID AND THE ELEGANT: CONTENDING TYPOLOGIES AND PATRONAGE 120 Transnational scholarship and global heritage 121 Contesting the elegant and florid sections 130 Star-system and state subsidy 136 The PRC and juzhong 141 Kunqu as dance 145 Concluding remarks 152 4. THE ARCHIVE AS CONSTRUCTED HERITAGE 154 Wei Liangfu and Kunqu mythology 154 ‘Six hundred years’ 158 Hand-written shenduanpu 160 Concluding remarks 170 5. PERFORMANCE AS A MULTIPLICITY OF LUZI 171 The Startling Dream 173 Picking up the Portrait 212 Concluding remarks 237 CONCLUSION 237 BIBLIOGRAPHY 249 3 A note on style Chinese words are otherwise written in pinyin are italicised (for example xiqu and xiju), however Jingju and Kunqu (where ‘Jing’ and ‘Kun’ refer to places, Beijing and Kunshan respectively) are considered proper nouns and are therefore not italicised. Traditional Chinese graphs are provided for names (in the first instance), ambiguous terms, and quotations of classical Chinese only. 4 Introduction While many studies of Kunqu take the UNESCO designation of 2001 which identified Kunqu as ‘one of the oldest forms of opera still existing in China’ as their starting point, I argue this designation should be recognised as just the latest imprint in a long trajectory of archivism that has for over three centuries incrementally constructed Kunqu as a cultural category. By archivism, I refer to the project, largely lead by non-practitioners, through which Kunqu has been documented and recorded over several centuries. I argue that the products of this archivism cannot be regarded simply as objective records to be mined to uncover a historical Kunqu; rather we must see them as traces of the creation of Kunqu by those who create and organise the archives. For centuries prior to its 2001 UNESCO designation as ‘intangible heritage’, Kunqu has been defined by an archival impulse the likes of which perhaps no other intangible heritage can compare. The sheer range of the archiving projects that Kunqu has been subject to stretch from the 18th century block-printing of musical scores for a previously oral tradition to ‘correct the mistakes of vulgar actors’, to the box set of over a hundred DVD lectures in which just one ‘grandmasters’ ⼤師 was chosen for posterity as the authority on each of its ‘traditional’ independent excerpt scenes (zhezi 折⼦, hereafter referred to as ‘playlets’). Successive waves of compilation, notation, categorisation, designation, and definition have over centuries constructed ever more rigid paradigms over the underlying fluidities of performance. By examining successive waves of archivism, I will explore how these apparently contrasting genre delineations have developed. I will also show how the fluidities of performance have been 5 increasingly documented by social, professional and political elites of several contrasting periods, but that with this trend toward rigidity has come increasing dynamism at the fringes, with interpretation and personal expression relocated to ever finer details of performance. While the repertoire and traditions on which 20th century Kunqu troupes have drawn derive from three immediate practices— those of the itinerant troupes of the Jiangnan waterways, the urban commercial theatres of Shanghai and Beijing and the lyric singing traditions of the national intellectual elite—the projected heritage of Kunqu however is created from its archival instinct, expanding at an unprecedented rate as digital recording technologies file modern practice within a historical category which attributes immutable, unitary performance and simultaneous song and dance (zaige zaiwu 載歌載舞). As I will show in this thesis, prior to the 20th century there is in fact much Kunqu repertoire in which instead of dancing, the actor conventionally sat down at a table and sang. Aestheticized choreography was added to Kunqu, as it was to its rival category, Jingju, as a result of the National Drama movement 國劇運動 in the Republican era. However, the melisma of the Kunqu, which allows word-characters to be matched to individual movements, each of which must be danced, is precisely what the uninitiated are told is what makes ‘traditional’ Kunqu ‘so beautiful’ (e.g. Pai 2008, pp. 22, 71, 427).1 In 1986, the Ministry of Culture Kunqu Revival Advisory Committee 文化部振興崑劇指 導委員會 enshrined in policy the requirement for actors to ‘excavate’ 挖掘 repertoire for which choreography had fallen out of transmission. Much of repertoire is perceived as 1 The pihuang 皮黄 style to which most Jingju repertoire is sung is of faster tempo and thus difficult to add movements to (Qi 2014, 60). Prior to the ascendancy of Kunqu as a category ‘Jing’ referred primarily to the troupes (ban 班) of the capital rather than their musical style, of which there many including kunqiang. There are still a great number of Kunqu scenes in the Jingju repertoire. 6 ‘traditional’ when in fact they it was choreographed in the later years of the 1980s. Moreover, even these newly choreographed pieces are presented as fixed and unchanging. However, as I will show, rather than there being just one standard, there are also pieces in which several methods of performance or choreographies are performed in the current day. Since the late 1980s, these have been vying to be recognised in the archive as the historical (or historicised) benchmark. At the centre of this thesis, then, is the luzi 路⼦, literally meaning the ‘path’, ‘way’ or ‘route’ of tackling a performance—the idea that each Kunqu scene has its own unitary choreography of performance, identical across all performers and lineages. The following quotes are taken from the memoirs of Zhou Chuanying 周傳英, the founder of the Guofeng 國風 troupe that became the PRC’s first Kunqu theatre. These reflect the centrality of the luzi in contemporary Kunqu. Indeed, by their very publication they have also promoted that centrality. Any given scene, as long as it originated from an old master, regardless of who is performing it or where they learned it, has the same structure and manner. People call this ‘the Kunju standard’ or ‘the Suzhou benchmark’ (Zhou & Luo 1988, p.26) As soon as you sing there is movement, and the movements have to be beautiful; this becomes dance. So you can say that in Kunju there is only un- sung dancing and no un-danced singing. (Zhou & Luo 1988, p.132). The memoires were assembled by the music and theatre scholar Luo Di 洛地 and published soon after Zhou’s death in 1988. 2 Both Zhou and Luo were members of the 2 In the preface to Luo’s collected works (2007, vol. 2 p.4), Luo alludes to the fact that much of the content in Zhou’s biography is in his own summation rather than that of Zhou. He refers specifically to first quote as one such example. These circumstances have also been related to me by Xie Yufeng 解玉峰, a student and close friend of Luo’s, as well as a specialist in Kunqu history and theory.