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4 Li Yuru — The Jingju Tradition and Communist Ideology Time: From 1949 to the early 1960s. Location: Mainland China. Principal subject: Li Yuru (1923–2008). Role type: Dan. Main issues: How a child dan star in the Republic was transformed through the Communist Theatre Reform into “a people’s artist”. How a young actress managed to be original when facing the further refinement of the dan performance art after the Four Great Dan, and how she negotiated between a strong theatrical tradition and a formidable ideology. In 2007, Li Yuru was one of the four recipients of the Great Achievement in Performing Arts awarded by the All-China Association of Literature and Arts, honouring her contribution to jingju stage work and her recent research on acting in the genre. This is the sixth year the national award has been run, and the performing arts category covers actors in modern and traditional theatres, dancers (ballet and folk) and singers (bel canto and folk).1 In order to prepare material for the gala’s commemorative brochure, I helped Li sort through old photographs and newspaper cuttings. Among these I was surprised to see a page of “confession” that had been written during the Cultural Revolution. I thought we had burnt all such documents when they had been returned in order to erase our memories of that nightmare. In that turbulent period, Li had written numerous confessions in which she had to make self-criticism and list her “crimes” under the following categories: her bourgeois thought and individualism demonstrated in striving for fame; her bourgeois lifestyle 1 There were also six recipients of the Great Achievement in Formative Arts. 122 The Soul of Beijing Opera in wearing make-up and fashionable clothes; and the counter-revolutionary plays she performed on the stage, such as romances between a scholar and a beautiful girl, ghost plays, or works in which she was alleged to have undermined the image of the female revolutionary. These accusations sound ludicrous today. However, they offer a glimpse of what Li and other performers did from 1949 to 1966, and how the new People’s Republic fundamentally changed everyone’s lives, mentalities and, ultimately, their artistic works on the stage. The unprecedented evolution of jingju and its performers started with the Theatre Reform that had been launched before the official founding of the new People’s Republic of China on 1 October 1949. The indigenous song-dance theatre’s mass popularity meant it occupied a prominent position on the Communist Party’s agenda for a top-down reconstruction of theatre that was to form part of a revolution in every aspect of life in China. On 13 November 1948, the Communist Party newspaper, the People’s Daily, published an editorial titled “A Step-by-Step Plan for Reforming the Old Drama”, stating that “reform of old drama” was one of the Party’s “historical tasks” (1948, 1).2 It is important to note that, in the campaign of Theatre Reform, “theatre” referred only to the traditional indigenous song-dance drama (xiqu), excluding the modern spoken drama in which many Communists and left-wing practitioners were involved. The Theatre Reform presented the Party’s design for the future stage: it would force performers to alter their behaviour, from their external appearance to their internal thought processes. The minutest details were at issue, such as what clothes or shoes to wear, what hairstyle to adopt, whether or not an actress should apply make-up, and how much a performer could earn. Having to make this vast range of adjustments, which reflected all the changes “new China” was undergoing, had a deep impact on what performers thought, on how they should think, and eventually on what they would perform on stage. TheideologybehindtheTheatreReformcouldbestbeillustratedbytheletterthat Mao Zedong wrote in 1944 to jingju practitioners in Yan’an (where the Communist Headquarters was based in 1936–49). After seeing a performance of Driven to Join the Liang Mountain Outlaws, an ideologically motivated rewrite of a traditional play based on the classical novel Water Margin, Mao wrote enthusiastically of reforming traditional theatre because it could successfully reverse the “reversal history” to show “its true face”. To Mao, “The people, and the people alone, are the motive force in the making of world history” (1969a, 104). He claimed that all Chinese historical works since Sima Qian’s Records of the Grand Historian (compiled from 109 to 91 BC) had reversed the true history by focusing on rulers and leaders, and had...

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