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Time: Late 1970s to early 1990s. Location: Taipei. Principal subject: Kuo Hsiao-chuang1 (1951– ). Role type: Dan. Main issues: Why jingju was crowned as “guoju” (national drama) and became deeply interwoven with the whole problem of Taiwanese identity. How an individual young actress dreamed of reforming the genre, and how she tried to achieve her goal of establishing a jingju that would “belong to tradition, modernity and to you and me”. This chapter moves the investigation from the mainland to Taiwan. The central figure is Kuo Hsiao-chuang, a dan actress whose work in the 1980s was once described by Wang Anqi, a Taiwanese scholar, as “dazzling sunlight” that people either loved or hated.2 How could an individual performer play such an important role, altering not only the jingju tradition but even cultural trends? A photograph of one of Kuo’s performances might yield some clues. Plate 7.1 depicts Xishi, a historical beauty of the Spring and Autumn period (750–500BC), acted in 1993 by Kuo in her own company’s production of Passions of Returning to the Yue Kingdom. Kuo was born in Taiwan and trained from the age of eight at the school attached to the Grand Wing Jingju Company under the aegis of the Nationalist Air Force. After seven years of training, she became a full7 Kuo Hsiao-chuang — A Theatre That “Belongs to Tradition, Modernity and to You and Me” 1 Kuo’s name in the standard pinyin romanization system would be written Guo Xiaozhuang. 2 Chinese Television System (CTS), Good Morning, Today (Huashi, “Zaoan jintian”), 1993, interviewed Wang about Kuo’s work. This programme is recorded on a DVD supplied to me by Kuo. 216 The Soul of Beijing Opera time employee in the company until 1977, when she resigned to open her own experimental theatre, the Elegant Voice,3 of which she was the only member — acting as producer, director and performer. Looking at the picture, we see that the facial make-up is traditional jingju, with a sharp contrast of colour between the white forehead, nose and chin, and the deep pink on the eyelids and cheeks. Eyes and eyebrows, pulled by a tight band hidden inside the headdress, are painted raven black. At first glance, there appears nothing unusual about her robe. The light blue material with the tiny embroidered flowers in brown and blue goes well with the headdress. However, the design of the costume and the protruding belly are unprecedented for a jingju dan role. Xishi in the photograph is pregnant, and her costume shows it. Furthermore, the way that Kuo places her hands on her body is like a natural mother-to-be rather than a jingju gesture, which pays attention to the roundness, balance, height and width. Lin Weiyu, a Taiwanese researcher on modern drama, commented: I still remember the shock that my primary school classmates and I felt when we first saw Kuo Hsiao-chuang act a pregnant woman on stage. She was completely different from any jingju figure that we had seen before. I can’t remember which play it was, nor can I remember anything about the performance, but the image of pregnancy is etched on my memory forever.4 Wearing pregnancy padding to portray a pregnant woman in a dan role on the jingju stage challenged both the genre’s aesthetics and the acting conventions. As seen in previous chapters, jingju never attempts to represent detailed reality. By comparison with Aristotelian mimesis, which forms the core of Western drama, jingju is abstract and symbolic. The same theory applies to pregnancy: it is conveyed through speeches, songs, gestures and dance without a real pregnant image. The eponymous heroine of the Story of White Snake best exemplifies the method.5 To 3 The English translation cannot convey the pun of the second part of the company’s name of Yayin Xiaoji. In Xiaoji, xiao or little is the first character of Kuo’s given name while ji means to assemble those who are determined to reform the traditional theatre to work together. Meanwhile, “small ensemble”, in contrast to the “grand” jingju tradition, conveys Kuo’s modest attitude towards her own work. Zhang Daqian (1901–84), a world-famous twentieth-century artist, gave the name and wrote the beautiful calligraphy for the company (Liu Tianyi 1998, 80). 4 Interview notes, 10 September 2007. Her comments were confirmed by a television programme recorded in 1993, before the production premiered, in which the TV presenter discussed the...

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