“Brand China” on the World Stage Jingju, the Olympics, and Globalization Megan Evans
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“Brand China” on the World Stage Jingju, the Olympics, and Globalization Megan Evans On the evening of 16 March 2009, excerpts from the jingju (Beijing/Peking opera) play Red Cliff flashed on giant LED screens in New York’s Times Square. Cao Cao, one of jingju’s most famous villains, played out his treacherous but ultimately inept scheme above the enormous neon NASDAQ billboard displaying the rockiest financial news since the Great Depression. The broadcast was not a jab from China at greedy American financiers, but was organized by the National Performing Arts Center in Beijing to mark its one-year anniversary (Gondo 2009). Times Square viewers saw footage of famous traditional jingju characters in a reworked pro- duction aspiring to the scale of Western grand opera. The Times Square broadcast followed less than a year after the Beijing Olympics opening ceremonies where the sole jingju-related performance featured jingju music and four small puppets that replaced jingju’s live actors, in Figure 1. Jingju actor Yu Kuizhi as Zhuge Liang in Beijing’s National Centre of Performing Arts production of the “newly written historical” jingju play Red Cliff, broadcast in New York’s Times Square on 16 March 2009. (Xinhua News Agency/Shen Hong) TDR: The Drama Review 56:2 (T214) Summer 2012. ©2012 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 113 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_a_00170 by guest on 28 September 2021 a hastily developed fill-in for a giant puppet segment cut due to technical difficulties (CCTV 2009).1 A big presence in Times Square, yet almost nothing at the Beijing Olympics: such con- trasting deployments of jingju are symptomatic of the continuing internal debate concerning China’s 21st-century cultural branding that increasingly emphasizes a synthesis of traditional and contemporary elements. Framed by iconic images of the multinational market economy, the jingju video took its place in the emerging 21st-century campaign for “Brand China.” Synthesis (zonghe) is a core aesthetic principle of jingju and applies particularly to the artful integration of disparate performance elements (Tianjin 1995:12–13).2 As the forces of globaliza- tion threaten to overwhelm national identity, traditional performing arts have been blurring dis- tinctions between national and cultural identities, connecting home and diasporic communities with the force of multinational corporate brand recognition (Lei 2006:255; Mackerras 2005:22– 23). Now in the second decade of the 21st century, we see the confluence of disseminated arti- facts of popular cultural production and officially approved narratives in the constructions of national and cultural identity (Anderson 2006:113–14; Appadurai 1996:54–55; Lee 2003:73–75). Thus both domestic officially controlled elements and externally devised commercial indices, such as the image of a jingju fan in traditional costume on a McDonald’s take-out bag, are con- tributing to an emerging, internationally legible Brand China. Though sometimes derided as an outmoded cultural cliché, jingju is proving a resilient marker of contemporary Chinese-ness able to negotiate the complex, often conflicting impulses Brand China conveys. In China’s 20th-century passage from Republican warlord chaos through early Communist optimism to the brutality of the Cultural Revolution, xiqu (the umbrella term for the more than 300 regional forms of Chinese opera) and particularly jingju (the nationally promi- nent form of xiqu since the late 19th century) has served as an arena where official and popu- lar impulses have come together to forge a “modern” Chinese national identity. In the 1930s, jingju actor Mei Lanfang, a self-appointed cultural ambassador, triumphantly toured the United States and Russia offering a carefully constructed program designed to introduce the Western world to a glorious example of 20th-century Chinese cultural expression, simultaneously con- firming jingju’s status at home as a nationally representative performance form. According to Joshua Goldstein, the drive to reposition jingju as China’s national cultural brand culminated in Mei’s 1930 US tour: “For a brief moment Mei’s tour proved that it was possible for a Chinese national subject to actively overcome and master the almost insurmountable contradictions that colonial modernity imposed, to embody both authentic tradition and modern national cit- izenship simultaneously” (2007:277). Mei’s iconic status has been repeatedly invoked in 21st- century iterations of cultural Brand China as an internationally legible symbol of the successful synthesis of tradition and modernity. 1. Jingju music had been in the running to accompany the deleted segment, despite the fact that visual markers in the segment were drawn more directly from a regional xiqu (Chinese opera) form called qinqiang, from Sha’anxi province (CCTV 2009). 2. My choice to analyze Brand China in terms of “synthesis” instead of “hybridity” is in line with Erika Fischer- Lichte’s investigation of “interweaving cultures.” She questions hybridity as a metaphor for intercultural theatre practice because it suggests the linking of things that by their “nature” do not belong together (2009:399). Megan Evans is a Senior Lecturer in the Theatre Program at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. She received her MFA and PhD from University of Hawai’i at Manoa and has studied Chinese xiqu performance with members of the Jiangsu Province Jingju Company at the National Academy of Chinese Theatre Arts in Beijing. Her research on continuing experiments by xiqu artists to maintain cultural relevance and commercial viability in contemporary China has appeared in Theatre Research International and Asian Theatre [email protected] Megan Evans 114 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_a_00170 by guest on 28 September 2021 During the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), when China turned violently inward, the battle over xiqu reform took center stage. Traditional culture was repressed in favor of mas- sive efforts, led by Mao’s wife, the actress Jiang Qing,3 to create “model” jingju works extolling Communist ideals of class struggle and resistance to foreign oppression (Clark 2008:10–43). In the Deng Xiaoping post-Mao transition to a market economy and comparative openness, the relationship between cultural identity and xiqu has been less politically charged. Nevertheless, xiqu remains an internationally recognized marker of Chinese cultural identity. According to Daphne Pi-Wei Lei: In its various [intercultural] contact zones, Chinese opera is often figured as a lotus flower [rising out of putrid mud] resisting hybridity and assimilation and used to represent a unique, intrinsic, pure, and stable Chinese identity. Yet without the threat of contamina- tion such purity could not be envisioned or celebrated. (2006:4) Although xiqu is effectively deployed to represent Chinese identity, the perception of purity that Lei observes in relation to the potential for contamination also masks actual significant con- flict and contamination of the xiqu “lotus flower” itself. In 1998, testifying to at least a perception of contamination, the Shanghai Ministry of Culture canceled an 18-hour-long production of the kunqu (jingju’s Ming Dynasty predecessor) masterpiece Mudan ting (Peony Pavilion) coproduced by Shanghai Kunju [Kunqu] Company and New York’s Lincoln Center on the eve of its departure for the United States. Shanghai Ministry of Culture officials accused Chinese-born, New York–based director Chen Shizheng of including “feudal, superstitious and pornographic” as well as other inauthentic elements in the production making it unworthy of the internationally renowned performance venue of Lincoln Center (Melvin 1999; see also Oestreich 1999b; Jain 2002; Wichmann-Walczak 1998). A reworked and highly acclaimed version of Chen’s production was staged a year later, inde- pendent of Shanghai Kunju Company and without Chinese government approval (Oestreich 1999b; Faison 1999; Cameron 1999).4 Ironically, two later productions of Peony Pavilion (one by the Kunqu Society of New York, the other by the Shanghai Kunqu Company funded by the Shanghai government) were derided in the Western press for failing to match Chen’s Lincoln Center production’s levels of authenticity (Oestreich 1999a) and innovation (Melvin 1999; Faison 1999). The official Chinese concern for xiqu purity that was ostensibly the reason for the 1998 Peony cancelation has diminished markedly in the last decade. Xiqu, and particularly jingju, has been integrated with a diverse range of contemporary elements to represent Brand China. Like other traditional art forms around the world pressured by film and television, jingju and other xiqu forms struggle to attract young performers and new audiences in China. One scholar even pronounced jingju “definitively dead” (Huot 2000:76). Fearing the art form’s extinction, the Chinese Ministry of Education initiated a pilot project in 2008 to include jingju arias in public school music curricula (Xinhuanet 2008a; Sun 2009). Yet elite and popular examples of jingju’s continued cultural relevance also exist. In 2007 the National Peking Opera5 Company opened its impressive $14,000,000 Mei Lanfang Grand Theatre (CPG 2007), and one of 3. [For more on the legacy of Jiang Qing see the article by Yawen Ludden in this issue.—Ed.] 4. The elaborate set and costumes for the original production had been constructed in China but were financed