By Wilt L. Idema
Unfortunately for all of us, the organizers of the symposium have
in their wisdom allotted fifteen minutes of your precious time
to me. I am very honoured to have been invited to perform this
function as drama has been one of my abiding research interests.
Moreover, in my opinion, the theme of the present symposium, "The
Performer as (Inter)cultural Transmitter" is a very timely topic
indeed.
In the study of traditional Chinese drama, it is commonplace to
state that Yuan drama of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries
emphasized the text, that the long plays of the Ming dynasty
(1368-1644) emphasized music, and that in the many varieties of
regional drama of recent centuries the performer occupied centre
stage. Nevertheless, so far research by philologists has
continued to emphasize the text over other elements, and if they
have looked farther afield, they have stressed the performance
rather than the performers as such.
Superstitious rites
In the Chinese case at least, this tendency has to be seen in
connection with the efforts of modern Chinese intellectuals in
the early part of this century to raise traditional drama to -
what they perceived to be - the level of Western drama. As a
consequence, a genre like Peking opera was divorced from its
ritual and social contexts in order to be presented as a form of
pure art, different from but equivalent to Western theatre. The
extensive body of literature that has been produced in China in
the course of the twentieth century on the performance of
traditional drama, starting with the seminal writings by Qi
Rushan on Peking opera, has continued to have a very prescriptive
character. When certain famous performers were celebrated, e.g.
the famous actor Mei Lanfang, this happened to the extent that
they exemplified in their work the ideals of the reforming
intellectuals.
Until quite recently writings on the performance of traditional
drama in China consistently slighted or completely ignored the
central place drama and theatrical performances occupied in the
ritual life of local communities and the essential role that was
played by the performers in the transmission of this tradition.
There are many reasons for this. First of all, traditional
Chinese scholars in general looked down upon the 'lascivious
sacrifices' of the lower classes. Western scholars for a long
time followed the lead of their Chinese teachers in this respect.
Western notions, whether of a Christian or a Marxist hue, only
strengthened the disdain of Chinese and foreign scholars alike
for these so-called 'superstitious rites'. In retrospect the
omissions in many sociological and anthropological reports are
only too glaring: even in the case of communities whose ritual
and social structure was determined by the organization and
performance of annual theatricals, drama may be only mentioned
in passing, and often it is treated more as a disturbance to
daily life than as the life-giving and meaning-providing central
activity it really was.
There is yet another side of the limited knowledge about the
ritual aspects of many forms of drama, at least in the Chinese
case. Ritual expertise is often is a family tradition and a way
of making a living. As such it often is a closely guarded family
secret. Centuries of disdain and years of violent persecution
have made many still living transmitters of the tradition
extremely reluctant to allow outsiders access to their texts and
their performances. Matters become even more complicated when,
as is often the case with local forms of ritual drama in the
Chinese countryside, the different roles that together make up
the annual ritual play, are divided over a number of families in
the village, each of which has already performed a specific part
for many generations.
Revitalization of tradition
As is well known, the government in the Chinese People's Republic
took long-term, massive and drastic action against everything
that smacked in its eyes of 'feudal superstition'. By the way,
its equally massive and drastic attempts to use every variety of
drama and performative art to impose an alien value system on the
local communities met with only a very limited success and should
warn us that it is one thing to transmit existing values and
notions through a popular art, but quite another thing to change
the popular way of thinking by using drama and other forms of
performative arts.
The centrality of drama to the social and ritual life of the
local communities is perhaps nowhere demonstrated in a more
striking fashion than once again in present-day China: despite
the disdain and the persecution the surviving performers have,
as soon as politics allowed them, resurrected and reconstructed
their traditional performances. In this respect I think the theme
of this seminar, 'The Performer as Transmitter', may not yet
fully do justice to the centrality of the performer in the
maintenance and continuous revitalization of the tradition.
Fortunately, in the Chinese case, now there is also is a wide-
spread interest in the study and documentation of the many
varieties of traditions of drama still actually existing in all
their aspects, and modern scholars, helped by modern inventions
such as the video camera, have come to realize more and more the
central role of the performer as a transmitter and creator of
culture.
I have mostly talked about developments in the study of Chinese
drama and the important shifts of focus taking place there. This
is partly because Chinese drama happens to be my background and
I am most familiar with the situation in that area. It is an
extremely rich and varied theatrical tradition going back for
many centuries. However, most of all I have thought it
appropriate to use the time allotted to me in this fashion in
order to remind you that probably there has been no other country
in this century where more drastic action has been taken by
outside forces to stamp out certain forms of drama and to re-educate the performers into functioning as propaganda tools.
However, the debacle of these attempts has also demonstrated, I
believe, that performers can only effectively play the part of
cultural transmitters if they have their own say in the
message.
Wilt Idema is professor of Chinese Literature at the Sinological Institute, Leiden University. This is an edited version of his opening speech for the Seminar on Asian and African Performing Arts.
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