The Touring Canteen: Notes from the 2014 European Tour of the Quanzhou Liyuan Theatre

THE TOURING CANTEEN: NOTES FROM THE 2014 EUROPEAN TOUR OF THE QUANZHOU LIYUAN THEATRE JOSH STENBERG Nanjing University In my experience, members of theater troupes do not spend most of their time on the elements of the art that are their formal products: movement, voice, set decoration, music, costumes, etc. Even taken broadly to include design, creation, rehearsal—execution of the artistic aspects, while being the axle around which everything turns, and which justify the whole megillah (when one is forced, by some profundity or pedantry, to justify it)—is not the constant or necessarily even a daily occupation. Because troupes, perhaps especially Chinese traditional theater troupes—with their cohorts of actors and musicians and technicians and administrators who generally share the same native place and the same education, and whose members have known and befriended each other, feuded, married, divorced, and not infrequently borne children who become the next generation— are institutions, almost organisms, that infiltrate every aspect of the life of their constituents. In such troupes, the rhetoric of life/work balance sounds absurd, untranslatable; while the legend of the “one big family” seems to point, for once, to something substantial. A good troupe is often headed by a genuinely parental director, who takes an interest in or even the whole responsibility for questions of housing, retirement, family planning, further education, romance, proper leisure, etc., in ways that are not at all approximated in Western troupes, with their basis of artistic free agency, rapid turnover of staff, considerable separation between administration and artists, and of both from technicians. Most xiqu 戲曲 (indigenous Chinese theater) actors have never had any employer other than a statesponsored troupe, and most never will. As a consequence, theater scholarship that elides the backstage world often feels disconnected from the everyday texture of life in a Chinese theater troupe. Yet the patterns and rhythms of a theater troupe are inseparable from the stage product.Sometimes(always?)whatappearstobeanartisticquestionisactuallyoralso a question of scheduling, of resources, of temperament, of interpersonal relations. Artistic decisions and organizational life are linked, and the dramas offstage are more complex, and as compelling, as the crystallized versions that occur on stage. Consequently, it gives a more holistic view of the Chinese theater troupe to provide an account of those offstage experiences that are not written or recorded, but which compose the bulk of theater life. # The Permanent Conference on Chinese Oral and Performing Literature, Inc. 2015 DOI: 10.1179/0193777415Z.00000000029 CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature 34.1 (July 2015): 46–56 This travel journal records impressions from the June 3–24, 2014, tour of thirtysevenmembersofQuanzhou ’sLiyuanTheatre(Liyuanxijutuan梨園戲劇團)1 inParis, Lyon, and Athens, none of whom spoke a non-Chinese language (and a few of whom, one might add, speak Mandarin with reluctance). I was involved with them from morning to night, often late at night, in the interpreting, translation, facilitation, planning and preparation surrounding the twelve shows (one of which was canceled due toinclement weather)ofLiyuan’s Dongshengyu Li-shi 董生與李氏(ScholarDong and Widow Li).2 The title of the play was translated into French as La veuve et le lettré (The widow and the scholar) and was performed with superb subtitles by Pascale WeiGuinot and Sarah Oppenheim (who were also employed full-time by MC93, the French theater that invited the troupe, to translate and otherwise assist with the troupe during the tour).3 In some ways, the experiences of the actors might approximate those of other Chinese travelers: (“Are the black people French, too?” “Where is the Mona Lisa?” “The bread is so hard, how do they eat it?”, etc.), but a theater tour has many uniquefeatures,anditismyhopethatthisjournalwillgivesometexturethroughafirsthand account, scribbled in rare breathers during the tour, and edited into some kind of order in the days immediately after the events, while I recovered from the whirlwind. A white carton full of porcelain figurines, representing the protagonists of our show—a widow and a scholar from the indeterminate Chinese past—in the cutesyanime style, has vanished. As a consequence, thirty-seven Chinese actors and technicians are clogging the exit from the luggage zone of Charles de Gaulle Airport. A customs official, puffed with authority and boredom, gets moderately threatening...