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  • Repertoire Is Technique:Programming Transmission at a Xiqu Festival
  • Josh Stenberg (bio)

Xiqu (known in English as “Chinese opera”) is often identified as a “traditional” form of art, which means that contemporary performance draws heavily on practices of the Chinese stage predating contact with Western theatre. What specifically constitutes that tradition varies radically from genre to genre, troupe to troupe, region to region, and performance to performance. In countless ways—including lighting, stage dimensions, costume materials, performance length, ritual importance, patronage system, political control, actor training, audience composition, makeup ingredients, ticketing, performer social status—there can be no doubt of drastic, unavoidable, and constant change. Xiqu is as mutable as any other form, despite its reputation as a static theatre, the result of a false traditional/modern dichotomy privileging Western-inspired forms.1 Ashley Thorpe’s observations that Jingju (“Peking opera”) “has been constantly reformed and altered” and that “defining Jingju as a singular set of practices has always been problematic” (33) can be extended to any genre of xiqu. Since efforts to protect or transmit the heritage of xiqu can smack of “salvage ethnography” (Taylor 23) when they are conducted “without understanding the working of repertoire, the ways people produce and transmit knowledge through embodied knowledge” (24), fieldwork studies, consisting of long-term engagements with specific practitioners, are necessary in order to give particular practices of repertoire and transmission their due.

In many ways—movement, repertoire of texts, vocal production, musical system, orchestra composition, prosody, thematics, set and props practice—a measure of continuity can legitimately be identified as “tradition.” It is this technical continuity (differently constituted by each genre) that generates the attributes of xiqu. These attributes in turn set xiqu squarely apart from other forms of theatre as a genre. The purpose of the preservation of tradition (and the justification for state subsidy) is therefore “not to make fossils of the past … but to integrate safely into the present those parts of the past that continue to have meaning for the current age and … for future generations” (Ruggles and Silverman 7), even when an appeal to “age-old tradition” is a rhetorically convenient shorthand. Theatres, critics, and fans alike thus identify the principal responsibility of theatre practitioners as the safeguarding of this embodied capital, particularly in the older genres. One way of catching hold of the slippery idea of “tradition” without venturing too far into abstraction is thus to examine the relationship between repertoire and technique.

How is repertoire technique? Specifically, how do repertoire and technique constitute each other? The issue is best approached by addressing the false (but rhetorically persistent) dichotomy between tradition and innovation. Such oppositions spuriously posit Chinese (and other Asian) genres as bounded by tradition, as opposed to a supposedly emancipated and experimental West. One might believe, for instance, that privileging an established repertoire was the product of entrenched conservatism. Attention to training and programming strategies, however, shows that this is not the case. Technique in xiqu emerges through the rehearsal and performance of repertoire and defines its elements and boundaries. The relationship between technique and repertoire provides the framework for a genre that can then accommodate new, innovative pieces with original scripts that are fleshed out by performers. Tradition is enacted through constant decision-making and adaptation; innovation is a question of pouring existing matter into new molds. [End Page 117]

This essay addresses the question of how tradition and creativity are practiced in xiqu through a case study of manageable scope: the 2015 instance of the annual series of performances leading up to the Lantern Festival (Yuanxiaojie), the fifteenth day of the Chinese New Year, in Quanzhou, a coastal city in southern Fujian.2 Developments in the orchestral makeup or in vocal technique will not be considered here, since even within this limited performance series, narrative and movement offer more than enough material for discussion. The performance genre in question is liyuanxi, a stage genre that claims descent from nanxi (southern drama) and is musically closely related to UNESCO-recognized nanyin/nanguan orchestral art. Its performance texts, although largely not written down until the 1950s, bear a close relationship to nanxi scripts published during the Ming and Qing dynasties, as well...

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