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Performing Gender at the Beginning of Modern Chinese Theatre Siyuan Liu

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Performing Gender at the Beginning of Modern Chinese Theatre Siyuan Liu Performing Gender at the Beginning of Modern Chinese Theatre Siyuan Liu The modern Chinese genre huaju (spoken drama) marked its centenary in 2007. An imported form, huaju is different from traditional Chinese theatre in a number of ways, including its use of gender-appropriate casting rather than female impersonation. However, while actresses started playing female characters in the mid 1910s, gender-appropriate casting only became a standard practice in the 1920s, when modern “scientific” discourse that emphasized the marked differences between the biological sexes made cross-gender casting seem an unreasonable choice in huaju.1 Throughout the first decade of huaju (1907–late 1910s), which is generally referred to 1. In Sex, Culture and Modernity in China: Medical Science and the Construction of Sexual Identities in the Early Republican Period, Frank Dikötter argues: “With the rise of medical science, differentiation between other groups of people also became more important: through an investigation of their sexuality, people were more rigidly classified according to their gender, age and social position” (1995:9). Siyuan Liu is a Franklin Fellow and visiting Assistant Professor of theatre at the University of Georgia. He received his PhD in theatre and performance studies from the University of Pittsburgh and has published several research articles on modern Chinese and Japanese theatre in Theatre Journal, Asian Theatre Journal, and Text & Presentation. TDR: The Drama Review 53:2 (T202) Summer 2009. ©2009 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 35 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2009.53.2.35 by guest on 25 September 2021 as wenmingxi (civilized drama) or xinju (new drama), female roles were generally performed by actors rather than actresses.2 This was the case with the first huaju production, the 1907 adaptation of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin entitled Heinu yutian lu (Black Slaves’ Cry to Heaven). This production was staged in Tokyo by the all-male student group Chunliu She (the Spring Willow Society), comprising Chinese students studying in Japan.3 The practice of all-male casting continued when the students returned to Shanghai, where wenmingxi flourished in the 1910s. Although challenged by the emergence of actresses, first in 1912 in all-female troupes and two years later in 1914 in mixed-sex companies, the practice of female impersonation continued to dominate the wenmingxi stage and was still considered the best performance of femininity throughout the 1910s. If the new, imported spoken drama was supposed to break from traditional Chinese theatre such as jingju (Beijing opera) and follow the conventions of Western dramas and theatrical productions, how can we understand the persistence of female impersonation in the first decade of huaju? Two scholars in the past decade have attempted to tackle this issue as part of their broader studies of Chinese theatre. They offer two perspectives on wenmingxi’s performance of gender: as an appropriation of traditional theatrical conventions in the anti-authoritarian and radical spirit of modernity; and as a mode of performing gender drag that followed Western realism without the benefit of traditional theatrical conventions (Chou 1997:141–50; Lei 2006:101–07). Unfortunately, this dualistic view of female impersonation in wenmingxi as either modern or traditional is historically inaccurate since it overlooks the fact that wenmingxi’s immediate predecessor in cross-gender performance was neither Chinese jingju nor Western realism, but the onnagata (male actors in female roles) of Japan’s first modern theatre,shinpa (new school drama).4 Shinpa started in Japan in the 1880s as a modern reaction to kabuki and reached the height of its popularity in the first decade of the 20th century, when the Spring Willow Society was formed in Tokyo. Like wenmingxi that followed it, shinpa combined elements of Western spoken drama such as colloquial speech and modern staging techniques, with certain conven- tions of traditional theatre, including female impersonation. By the time the Spring Willow Society staged Heinu yutian lu in 1907, shinpa had been in existence for two decades and had established its own conventions for performing Japanese femininity. Shinpa onnagata were also Figure 1. (previous page) Kawakami Sadayakko as Tosca with Matsumoto Kōshirō VII as Scarpia in a 1913 production of La Tosca at Tokyo’s Imperial Theatre. (Courtesy of The Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre Museum, Waseda University) 2. Apart from casting female impersonators, wenmingxi was different from later huaju in several other ways, includ- ing the use of scenarios and improvisation instead of written scripts, the occasional inclusion of music and songs, and the appropriation of certain stylized acting conventions from jingju (Beijing opera). 3. In this essay, I use both “Spring Willow Society” (Chunliu She) and “Spring Willow Theatre” (Chunliu Juchang). The former term refers to the group of Chinese student actors in Tokyo. The latter is the name of the company established by the same group in Shanghai in the 1910s. At times, I use “Spring Willow” to highlight the consis- tency of their performance style from Tokyo to Shanghai. 4. In their studies on this subject, Chou Huiling and Daphne Lei do mention the connection between wenmingxi and modern Japanese theatre, but both seem unaware of the shinpa onnagata. Chou mistakenly attributes the Japanese influence to a different and later modern theatrical form, shingeki (new drama; 1997:141, 143). In reality, shingeki emerged around the same time as the Spring Willow Society and followed Western theatrical conventions much more closely than shinpa, including gender-appropriate casting. Similarly, although Lei correctly identifies shinpa as an important source for wenmingxi, she seems unaware of the presence of the onnagata in shinpa, since she considers “the reintroduction of actresses” as part of shinpa’s “Western-inspired experimentation,” along with the “use of Western-style staging and everyday speech, adaptation of Western plays, and so forth” (2006:102). SiyuanLiu 36 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2009.53.2.35 by guest on 25 September 2021 beginning to establish conventions of performing Western female identity, following the example set by shinpa’s only female star Kawakami Sadayakko, who had seen Sarah Bernhardt, Ellen Terry, and other top European actresses during her theatrical tours to the US and Europe with her husband Kawakami Otojirõ and his Company. It was in reality this shinpa model of female impersonation—a combination of kabuki and European melodramatic conventions, a liminal form between tradition and modernity, East and West—that was the direct precedent of cross-gender casting in wenmingxi. There is a clear link between shinpa and gender performance in kabuki. Shinpa’s impact on Spring Willow’s productions in Tokyo and Shanghai and, via Spring Willow, on gender perfor- mance in wenmingxi, is part of the “sedimentation” or “materialization” of modern, European- oriented sexuality in China. It is only through this broader socio-historical context that we can truly understand the performance of femininity in early modern Western-style theatre in China. Shinpa: Spring Willow’s Model for Gender Performance Shinpa originated in Japan in the 1880s from two sources. The first was the so-calleds õshi shibai (rough young men’s theatre) that arose in Osaka out of post–Meiji Restoration discontent among a group of young men who used theatre to promote their ideas of social and political reform. Its most famous representative, Kawakami Otojirõ, brought the form from Osaka to Tokyo and national prominence in 1893. Between 1899 and 1902, Kawakami Otojirõ and Sadayakko together toured the US and Europe twice, performing kabuki-style plays and observing, among other things, mainstream Western theatre’s performance of womanhood. Upon returning to Japan, they set out to reform Japanese theatre, calling their brand of shinpa seigeki, a direct translation of the Western “straight theatre.” As Ayako Kano points out, although they aimed to “straighten” Japanese theatre by eliminating such conventions as singing, dancing, and cross-gender representation—which they deemed incompatible with modern, “direct” theatre (Kano 2001:57–84)—they were only partially successful, especially in the realm of gender performance. The couple did succeed in introducing Sadayakko as the first (and only) female shinpa star by billing her, in the newspaperYomiuri shinbun on 28 Janu-ary 1903, as knowledgeable of and experienced in the performance of female roles in the West (reprinted in Shirakawa 1985:374). It was her performance of Desdemona in a localized production of Othello in 1903 that set her on the path to stardom,5 and she continued with other heroines favored by Bernhardt and Terry in such plays as Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice (both in 1903), and other European dramatic and melodramatic classics. Since Sadayakko introduced these European plays to Japanese audiences, her style had a great influence on shinpa’s performance of Western womanhood. However, Sadayakko’s popularity failed to undermine the legitimacy of shinpa onnagata, even in the realm of performing Western womanhood. In fact, she often shared the spotlight with shinpa onnagata, who undoubtedly benefited from her direct experience with Western melodramatic conventions which, as Michael Booth points out, were just as stylized as the techniques of the onnagata: “Gesture, facial expression, speech, and movement were strongly emphasized within set acting patterns” (1965:190) and strict conventions governed “the Theatre Chinese in Gender Performing specialized acting necessary for the portrayal of the stock character types” for both men and women (198). As can been seen in a picture of Sadayakko in a 1913 production of La Tosca (fig. 1), the actress was clearly utilizing melodramatic gestures and postures. Shinpa onnagata borrowed Sadayakko’s techniques and blended them with their kabuki-based conventions to create their own performance of Western womanhood.
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