The Stage in the Temple. Ritual Opera in Village Shanxi by David Johnson

David Johnson has been working for several decades on the ritual dimensions of village society and culture in northern China, and southern Shanxi Province in particular. He has been documenting the richness and complexity of a ritual culture that was vibrant until the mid-twentieth century (even though in some cases, decline had begun earlier) but that is now moribund at best. He has also consistently argued for the "ritual autarky" of villages that developed their own practices independently of any larger institutions, including Buddhist and Daoist clergies, and insisted on how jealously villagers maintained their own traditions and were proud of the differences between their village and the others. This was a key theme in his 2009 book, Spectacle and Sacrifice: The Ritual Foundations of Village Life in North China, that explored the great sai 賽 festivals of southeastern Shanxi. One element of these festivals that was poorly documented was the opera plays, and so Johnson embarked on a specific study of them as a sequel to that earlier book.

The present book focuses on opera played during village rituals (especially but not solely during New Year) in another, adjacent area: southwestern Shanxi (around and north of today's Yuncheng city): this is because collections of handwritten scripts from that area (some of them dating back to the eighteenth century) have been preserved by local and provincial cultural institutions; Johnson has obtained copies and made them available at the Starr East Asian Library at UC Berkeley. The genre of these plays is called luogu (or naogu) zaxi 鑼鼓雜戲 (鐃雜戲), referring to the gong and drum accompaniment of the performances, but a more general term found in other regions as well is zaju 雜劇: it refers to plays with very little or no singing and no melodic music, but with long spoken parts alternating with drumming and, often, battle scenes.

The Stage in the Temple is organized in three parts: the first describes in detail the plots of eight plays, the second surveys the history of the genre of zaju from the Song period onward, and in Shanxi in particular, and the third attempts to reconstruct the past context and experience of these performances, which are not a living tradition anymore. Such reconstruction is based on close reading of ethnographic and folkloristic studies published by local scholars since the 1950s, as well as some field interviews.

Johnson's core thesis is that this sort of village opera, played by the villagers themselves (in many cases, roles were owned by families who transmitted them hereditarily), is found, with endless local variations, throughout the Chinese world and has existed since the early Song dynasty (and possibly earlier). It is fundamentally derived from and organically linked to storytelling, not to singing and dancing; the frequent presence of a narrator-director on stage is one marker of this origin. He provides two comparative cases, one geographically very close (Tiao opera 跳戲 across the Yellow River in Shaanxi) and one further away (Nuo opera 儺戲 in central Anhui) to bolster his case. These local traditions have evolved very slowly (Johnson calls them "primitive"), and when high-brow opera developed under the Yuan and later (the famed Yuan zaju shares the same name but is fundamentally different, as it is literary and musical, with role types), the two traditions, elite and village, parted ways. As a result, the second became invisible in elite sources—but nonetheless remained central to rural culture and society. The rural versus urban dichotomy here would call for more critical discussion (why would such amateur ritual opera have been absent from urban neighborhoods?), but this passionate search for recovering a neglected and almost-dead "other China" definitely drives the book and gives it its edge.

A second major argument Johnson makes is that the plays that villagers chose to write and perform for their festivals, at least in the case of southwestern Shanxi, were almost all historical-martial, telling the stories and battles of famous generals from the Han, Tang, and Song periods. Spectacular battles were staged with real weapons. The message conveyed by these epic stories is rarely moralistic, as cunning, brutal strongmen usually win over do-gooders; furthermore, bawdry scenes (yuanben 院本) were often part of the programs. And, even though the plays were performed for the gods during the temple festivals, gods themselves (unlike in other Chinese operatic traditions) rarely appear in the plays. Pondering why this should be so, which is the main theme of the conclusion, Johnson convincingly argues that the plays articulate local and empire-wide identities and senses of history. I am less convinced by his claim that zaju plays involve historical figures rather than gods because the latter would be sacrilegious—gods are present on stage in many ritual contexts in most parts of China, and the exorcistic functions of zaju suggest that amateur actors were endowed with divine powers when performing.

This beautiful, meticulously researched yet passionate book opens windows onto many tantalizing research questions and will hopefully spur future projects. One of those, obviously, is cross-regional comparisons and the way performing arts, among other elements (language, local cults, etc.), shed light on the particular trajectory of a local society's integration into the Chinese world and imperial system. It seems clear that southern Shanxi society took the form it has had until the mid-twentieth century in a particular historical context (as a result of the Tang-Song transition) that is linked to the style and contents of zaju plays performed by villagers and to the specific configurations of local gods for whom these plays were performed. This begs comparison with other parts of the Chinese world, both in the "north" and elsewhere, looking for other (rather than similar, as Johnson does here) local configurations and trajectories. Johnson thus powerfully shows that theater studies should be part of mainstream historical research and not (only) a separate, self-contained subfield of literature.