Three Relations between History and Stage in the Kunju Scene Slaying the Tiger General

The essay examines three relations between history and the stage in a kunju scene. First, the article explores how performance can mold audience experience of history; then how performance illuminates elements of historical processes through the career of the scene as a piece of repertoire; and, third, how performance and historical record might initially generate each other. These three separate relationships between performance and history are examined in the case of a scene known as Slaying the Tiger General (Ci hu), which concerns the assassination of a peasant general by a palace maiden during the Ming-Qing transition of the mid seventeenth century. This piece is chosen because of its overt, specific, nonfantastic, and relatively recent historical context, and because its career as an item of repertoire has been affected by the history of the last century. Thus, the three various relations between history and stage that can be examined for any piece of historical theatre are particularly prominent in this piece. Since all three relations interrogate and destabilize the historicity of any given stage content and reveal it as uncertain and constantly renegotiated, the achievement of historical drama lies instead in its ability to generate audience empathy across great temporal distance regardless of its relationship to historical fact.