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Chapter 3: Chinese and Chinese Immigrant Performers on the American Stage, 1830s–1920s
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Chapter 3 Chinese and Chinese Immigrant Performers on the American Stage, 1830s–1920s Although pushed to the margins of the music and theater industries, Chinese and Chinese immigrant performers were present on the American stage throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. American entrepreneurs who hoped to find commercially lucrative novelty acts introduced Chinese performers as human curiosities; Chinese agents also organized troupes to tour the United States, although with somewhat different motives and results. These acts traveled throughout the country, including cities and towns of the hinterland outside both NewYork City and San Francisco , and disseminated Chinese culture, sometimes for American audiences but also for Chinese immigrant communities. Most importantly, it was through these performances that white audiences observed Chinese music and theater practices on their own terms, and Chinese immigrants preserved and maintained contact with their cultural heritage. These performances also influenced how whites portrayed the Chinese, especially by the turn of the century, and expanded the types of spaces in which people of Chinese ancestry could represent themselves. The rise of Chinese immigration by the 1850s created a need for Chinese cultural institutions in the United States. Starting in California, new venues for Chinese music and theater sprang up with the growth of enclaves in the FarWest and in cities along the eastern seaboard. Many immigrants performed at the amateur level in their leisure time and for community celebrations or festivals. Chinese businessmen in the United States and China also financially backed visiting troupes and built permanent spaces for entertainment, such as restaurants, brothels , gambling halls, and theaters.These venues were extensions of traditions with which Chinese immigrants were well acquainted and helped them reconnect with their homeland. Outsiders also frequented these spaces out of curiosity. Although Chinese performances had to face American preconceptions about music and theater, these acts also left room for audiences to formulate a 57 variety of opinions, and perhaps even countered the mainstream discourse that Chinese musical and theatrical traditions were inferior.1 By this period, a few acts played to beliefs in Chinese virtuosity in certain areas, especially juggling and magic. Others, such as human curiosities and, later, entertainers at world expositions, were seen by whites as examples of Chinese inferiority and exoticism. Critics and theater managers also influenced attitudes through their descriptions of acts and their reviews, as, for example, equating Chinese music and theater with noise or earlier stages of European human development. In some cases, Chinese acts helped to expose songwriters and dramatists to new concepts of performance from which they could borrow.These imitations were often in the form of parody and ridicule, as in yellowface, but not always. Melodic structures, instrumentation, and staging could potentially be integrated into productions containing Chinese characters, or productions could be set in China to create a more exotic effect. More importantly, Chinese musical and theatrical practices influenced the performing arts in the United States more broadly, helping to break from the Western traditions that many artists believed by the end of the nineteenth century were too restrictive and commercialized. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Americans did not completely control the production of Chinese images on the American stage and in music. Chinese performers, although a small minority, found spaces, such as dime museums, Chinese immigrant businesses, and world expositions, in which to entertain and educate audiences.2 They also helped foster innovation in Western musical and theatrical practices. Outside the realm of the stage, Chinese performers influenced how Americans perceived race, nation, and culture, and where they stood in debates over how, and if, the Chinese belonged in the United States. Human Curiosities By the late 1820s, entertainment entrepreneurs were bringing Chinese performers, both individuals and groups, to the United States. Following the success of popular museums that had appeared earlier in the decade, impresarios tried to create acts that were amusing, educational, and ultimately lucrative in order to bring in as many people as possible, including semi-literate and illiterate audiences. Organizers often displayed human curiosities in museums or, if it was a large group, in theaters that accommodated the size of the act and its audience. In rural areas, entrepreneurs used whatever public hall or space was available.3 Chinese human curiosities appeared in a combination of what Robert Bogdan calls the exotic and aggrandized modes. Using the exotic mode, managers and showmen displayed non-Western people in ways that fed off the audience’s notions of exoticism and primitiveness. With Asian subjects, this 58 Ye...