Acoustic Decorum and the Materiality of Stage Speech: Voice Training at the Central Academy of Drama in Beijing, 1953–1961

This paper tracks the formation of a voice training program at the Central Academy of Drama (CAD) in Beijing. Informed by the rules of acoustic decorum and Mao Zedong’s “national, scientific, and popular” formulation of socialist culture, phoneticians, repetiteurs, spoken drama (huaju) celebrities, and folk artists made common cause to explore vocal pedagogy. The program was embedded in the evolving intellectual landscape of modern China, in which a premium was put on a unified spoken standard and the folk tradition of oral performance was transvalued through scientific lenses. My paper begins with an in-depth study of a 1954 pronouncement made by the CAD president, Ouyang Yuqian, the architect of the program who enjoined huaju actors to learn rhyming and singing. I then proceed to examine a 1957 Symposium on Voice Pedagogy (Taicike jiaoxue zuotanhui) convened at the CAD. As a consequence, a four-year curriculum was drawn up, while a twin-track approach to training that combined the domains of diction and vocal production was settled on. After limning the given circumstances, I offer close readings of two mimeographed textbooks tailor-made for the CAD student actors, which address orthoepy (zhengyin) and vocal production (fasheng), respectively. Through musical and phonological analyses, I demonstrate how the voice of a student actor could be instrumentalized after training. Such an instrumentalized voice could in turn serve the theatrical purposes of experiencing and embodying dramatic characters.