(One Hundred Pieces of Kunqu, Master Performers Talk About Their Scenes): a Review Essay

CHINOPERL Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature ISSN: 0193-7774 (Print) 2051-6150 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ychi20 Kunqu baizhong, Dashi shuoxi (One hundred pieces of Kunqu, Master performers talk about their scenes): A Review Essay Kim Hunter Gordon To cite this article: Kim Hunter Gordon (2016) Kunqubaizhong,Dashishuoxi (One hundred pieces of Kunqu, Master performers talk about their scenes): A Review Essay, CHINOPERL, 35:2, 143-152, DOI: 10.1080/01937774.2016.1242835 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/01937774.2016.1242835 Published online: 23 Dec 2016. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 56 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=ychi20 CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature 35.2 (December 2016): 143–152 KUNQU BAIZHONG, DASHI SHUOXI (ONE HUNDRED PIECES OF KUNQU, MASTER PERFORMERS TALK ABOUT THEIR SCENES): A REVIEW ESSAY KIM HUNTER GORDON Royal Holloway, University of London, UK Kunqu baizhong, Dashi shuoxi 崑曲百種, 大師說戲 (One hundred pieces of Kunqu, Master performers talk about their scenes). 110 DVDs and an introductory booklet (55 pp.). Changsha: Hunan dianzi yinxiang and Yuelu shushe, 2014. RMB 1400. Kunqu baizhong, Dashi shuoxi 崑曲百種, 大師說戲. 5 vols. Changsha: Hunan dianzi yinxiang and Yuelu shushe, 2014. 1694 pp. Simplified character edition. Paper RMB 1000. Regular character edition. Paper RMB 1400. These volumes contain written versions of the lectures. Biaoyan yishu jia shuo biaoyan yishu 表演藝術家說表演藝術 (Performance artists talk about their performance art). Changsha: Hunan dianzi yinxiang and Yuelu shushe, 2014. 265 pp. Paper RMB 80. Material on the lecturers and their lectures.1 At the core of the project that is the subject of this review, hereafter referred to as Dashi shuoxi, is a set of 110 video lectures,2 each between one and two hours long, by 29 “master” performers of Kunqu 崑曲, most of whom were aged around 70 at the time of recording. While Kunqu once denoted a style of music and singing, it also has come to refer to stage performance that makes use of that musical style.3 Theater sung to Kunqu was dominant into the 19th century and has returned to a level of prominence since it was listed as “a masterpiece of the oral and intangible heritage of humanity” by UNESCO in 2001. Dashi shuoxi is not the first project to attempt to document how Kunqu is, was, or “should be” performed, but it is cer- tainly the most ambitious, both in terms of scale and its (problematic) attempt to present a definitive Kunqu repertoire within a highly systematized framework. For the researcher, it contains valuable information on the recent transmission histories 1 The list price for all of the above items, plus some “souvenirs” (jinian pin 紀念品) from the masters, in what was called a “special collector’s edition” (diancang ban 典藏版), was RMB 9000. 2 “One hundred” in the title should be understood as a “round” and not a precise number. A total of 108 or 109 separate performance pieces are the subject of the 110 lectures, as discussed below. See http://www.dashishuoxi.com/, accessed September 14, 2016 (which also gives the project’s preferred English title, “Master’s Lectures on 109 Excerpts: The Performing Art of Kunqu”). The term used most often for these performance pieces in the material under review is zhezi xi 折子戲, a performance genre/term that will be introduced below. 3 Some prefer to use the term Kunju 崑劇 to refer to the stage tradition. © The Permanent Conference on Chinese Oral and Performing Literature, Inc. 2016 DOI 10.1080/01937774.2016.1242835 144 CHINOPERL: JOURNAL OF CHINESE ORAL AND PERFORMING LITERATURE 35.2 of Kunqu performance, plus some wonderful anecdotes and insights into the con- siderations that go into staging “traditional” Chinese theater in the present era. No other single resource provides as much insight into the development of Kunqu in the PRC and its publication will, I hope, inspire more scholarship into Kunqu as a genuinely contemporary theater practice, rather than simply a repertoire of his- toric dramatic literature or an emblem of Chinese soft power. However, the way in which the project has attempted to certify one particular practitioner’s version of each piece of repertoire theater does deserve some scru- tiny. One characteristic of Kunqu performance practice is that individual zhezi xi 折子戲 (independent scenes, usually developed from a longer play, that make up the performance repertoire4) are performed over and over again by various actors, often from different troupes. These zhezi xi can be performed indepen- dently or “strung” together to give an idea of the whole story covered by the play they were developed from. Regular audiences become familiar with both the performance routines of individual zhezi xi and the personal styles of the actors associated with them. However, it is often assumed by some—in particular the enthusiasts who are the immediate market for this set—that a perfected sequence of fixed movements for each item in the Kunqu repertoire has been trans- mitted from teacher to student over the generations from the mid-Qing dynasty or earlier. Actors are expected to maintain and transmit this performance tradition, the quality of which is popularly thought to be in general decline. As lecturers in this project, the senior actors therefore occupy a difficult position in which they are asked to represent both an anonymous tradition and also their own mediation of it. In terms of format, the lectures are provided with Chinese subtitles on the videos, and the set also includes five volumes of written versions of the lectures.5 The lectures include short passages spoken by a voice-over narrator that are inserted at fairly regular intervals. While these are more often disruptive of the videos than informative, they are perhaps useful in punctuating the written versions of the long lectures.6 The basic format of the lectures is strongly reminiscent of Baijia jiangtan 百家講壇7 and other lecture series that have been popular on television and 4 The longer plays were usually chuanqi 傳奇 plays. Chuanqi plays were very long (some have more than 50 scenes) and thus difficult to stage in full. Even though the term zhezi xi is typi- cally used for pieces that were developed from scenes in longer plays, it is also used to refer to short plays in the Kunqu repertoire with no such connection to a longer play. In the different lists of the lectures and their contents in Dashi shuoxi given in the introductory booklet, five items lectured on are not identified as having such a connection to a longer play, and one is modern evening-length production based on zhezi xi from the same play. 5 Some of the lectures clearly underwent editing after they were recorded (there are breaks in continuity, for instance) and the written versions do not always attempt to record precisely what the master actually says (readability seems to have been privileged over the kind of accuracy and trans- parency expected if these were strictly transcripts). 6 Editorial oversight for these passages is attributed to Zhu Weizong 朱為總, director of editing (bianji zongjian 編輯總監) for the project. 7 When the voice-over narrator speaks, the text that is spoken is displayed, but when the master is lecturing, we see only what the camera sees. In Baijia jiangtan lectures visual material is sometimes inserted. HUNTER GORDON, Kunqu baizhong, Dashi shuoxi: A Review Essay 145 DVD in the PRC for decades now.8 Some of the masters use a lot of gestures, some very few. Some use simple props or items of clothing, but none are in costume or stage makeup. Something inherently visual, such as differences in the face pattern (lianpu 臉譜) of a character as painted by a variety of performers, will be explained orally. At such times the interdiction on the use of visual aids to clarify what the lecturers are talking about is keenly felt. Although there is a common structure to the lectures, there is also a certain amount of variety. Some of the masters, for example, expand on topics such as the bitterness that they endured as students or muse on the challenges faced by a professional Kunqu actor both as stage performer and teacher. The idea for Dashi shuoxi can be said to have developed out of two series of lecture-demonstrations by senior Kunqu actors at the Chinese Civilization Centre at City University of Hong Kong that began in 2005 and that eventually averaged between 20 and 30 a year. According to Professor Cheng Pei-kai 鄭培凱, director of the Centre at that time, Hong Kong financier Yeh Chao-hsin 葉肇鑫 attended all of the lectures, regardless of how bad the weather was.9 In 2007, Cheng brought in Wang Shiyu 汪世瑜, a senior Kunqu performer and artistic advisor for Bai Xianyong’s 白先勇 (Kenneth Pai) “Young Lover’s Edition” (qingchun ban 青春版)ofThe Peony Pavilion (Mudan ting 牡丹亭) to give 15 lectures about that production. The following year, Cheng and Wang developed plans for a series of lectures concentrating on the transmission of Kunqu that brought more than ten performers to Hong Kong.10 According to Yang Shousong 楊守松,Yeh’s interest was awoken by these lectures but he was ultimately unsatisfied with the limited amount of detail and depth they could provide. He had the idea to have lecturers analyze performance pieces like the “dissection of a sparrow” (jiepou maque na yang 解剖麻雀那樣).11 For his more ambitious project, Yeh asked Wang Shiyu to be the artistic director (yishu zongjian 藝術總監) and personally underwrote the entire cost of the project.12 8 Yang Shousong 楊守松, Damei Kunqu 大美崑曲 (The great beauty of Kunqu; Nanjing: Jiangsu wenyi, 2014), p.

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