1. Performing Arts and Cultural Identity
in the Era of Interculturalism
Sun Huizhu (William)
2007 marked the centennial of modern Chinese drama in China. Since 1907
western-style drama has largely been embraced by the Chinese and gradually become
mainstream. It is usually viewed as more progressive whereas traditional Chinese
opera, which has survived numerous attacks around the same time, especially since
the 1919 May Fourth New Culture Movement, as some residual of the past. In early
2008, however, China’s Ministry of Education announced that selected schools in ten
provinces will begin a pilot project -- new curricula including mandatory Chinese
opera teaching. Why is traditional opera chosen in a nation so eager to catch up with
international trends？
In fact, facing increasing western-oriented intercultural fusion, a “National
(Chinese) Studies” fever (guoxue re) has begun in China in recent years to counter
western influences that have been washing out many Chinese traditions in the past
couple of decades. Nowadays business schools join forces with Chinese classical
scholars to teach courses on Confucian, Taoist, and even Buddhist business strategies,
on top of their standard Harvard Business School’s case study textbooks. The popular
“Hundred Schools Forum,” of China’s state controlled central television station CCTV,
has showcased many well-known scholars’ lecture series on traditional Chinese
classical subjects such as Yi Zhongtian’s on Story of Three Kingdoms, Yu Dan’s on the
Confucian Analects, Taoist Zhuangzi. Both Yi and Yu became best-selling authors
along with their TV stardom. Aside from her lecture proceedings, Yu Dan also quickly
published a book on Kun opera, China’s oldest extant living opera genre of more than
400 years. All this promotion of Chinese classics, however, is mostly about reading
literature, little on performing arts. Even Yu Dan’s book on Kun opera is mainly a
book about appreciation of the elite artistic genre, not on how to practice Kun opera.
After the 17th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in October, 2007, a
Seventeenth Party Congress Reader was compiled by Beijing’s top officials to specify
decrees in various areas. In regards to education of traditional Chinese culture, the
Reader says:
In high schools and elementary schools, education of good traditional
national culture should be carried out really well […] There should be more
classical essays and poems in the curriculum. School students across the
nation should all practice classics recitation.1
Compare to all these measures, the Ministry of Education’s new project on
1
Yu Qing. “Building a Shared Chinese National Spiritual Home,” in Wang Huning, et al. The Seventeenth Party
Congress Reader. Beijing: The People’s Press, 2007. P. 295.
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2. singing Beijing opera is groundbreaking. It shifts the focus from China’s conventional
educational means, reading and memorizing, to practicing, though in a very small part
of the curriculum. When a traditional culture finds itself surrounded by more powerful
new cultures, to maintain the former is very important, yet at the same time very
difficult. In order to make people feel rooted with their cultural identity, it is crucial to
find traditional cultural elements that are still relevant and practicable. The key here is
practice. Daphne P. Lei in her book Operatic China: Staging Chinese Identity Across
the Pacific analyses a special kind of performance, identity performance. She writes:
Cultures change, but tokens seemingly don’t; tokens offer an imaginary
eternity for the culture, which is essential for identity performance. […]
All identities -- be they cultural, ethnic or national – owe a great deal to
performance. Such staged identity is essential in any “contact zone” of
international negotiation or multicultural collision. 2
Performing traditional arts as a way to maintain cultural/national identity is a
common practice of overseas Asians, as Daphne Lei describes in her book and as
Priya Srinivasan described in her paper “Dancing Indian Diaspora: Mapping
Transnational Labor Flows,”3 but far less so for Chinese living in China. In the US,
Chinese American and Indian American girls frequent traditional dance classes,
respectively, although more mainland Chinese prefer ballet and ballroom dance.
Homesick Chinese laborers invited Chinese opera companies to America and even
performed it themselves there, whereas Chinese intellectuals back home attached it as
stale and dated during the May Fourth New Cultural Movement. Mei Lanfang’s 1930
tour of the US, an unprecedented success for any foreign performer, was acclaimed as
quintessential Chinese art there, while his exquisite dance and singing skills devoid of
sociopolitical content was scoffed at by progressive literati such as Lu Xun and some
communists.
Now, the Chinese government wants to use opera to promote traditional Chinese
culture in the wake of western cultural products’ onslaught. Will this work? Questions
arose immediately, on the print press, on internet discussions, and at the sessions of
the People’s National Congress that took place in March, 2008. The most frequently
asked questions include: Why are most of the 15 arias assigned to students grade 1-9
taken from modern “revolutionary model operas?” Why is only Beijing opera
prescribed, ignoring the rest of more than 300 local Chinese opera genres? Can those
Beijing opera arias represent traditional Chinese culture?
What can represent traditional Chinese culture is an extremely difficult question
for modern Chinese. A related question is whether all traditional Chinese culture is
good and should be kept. The harsh criticism against traditional Chinese opera during
the May Fourth Movement, though proved to be overstating and futile in its attempt to
terminate it, is not completely unfounded after all. From a modern humanistic point of
view, many plays in the traditional Chinese opera repertory are stale and unacceptable.
Many pieces promote feudalistic doctrines such as subjects’ blind loyalty to the
2
Lei, Daphne P. Operatic China: Staging Chinese Identity across the Pacific. New York: Palgrave, 2006. P. 1-2.
3
Her paper was delivered at the University of California’s MRG Colloquium on Asian Performance on January 27,
2008 in Irvine, California.
2

3. emperor, women’ absolute subservience to their husbands, and children’s unreserved
obedience to their parents. Even some masterpieces, while demonstrating great
spiritual power and strong artistic originality, still cannot help but betray their
backward ideology. For example, The Orphan of Zhao Family, China’s very first play
ever introduced to the West and a favorite Chinese art work of such dignitaries as
Voltaire and Goethe, is a Yuan dynasty drama about a series of people giving up their
own lives and/or their child’s life, in order to protect a half-month old royal heir. The
problem is not whether people should sacrifice their lives for another one -- Steve
Spielberg’s film Saving Private Ryan also tells a story of several soldiers trading their
lives for another. The problem is that all the characters sacrifice their lives only
because they believe the late emperor’s infant son is infinitely more important than all
other people for his destiny of becoming a wise and loving emperor. Whether or not
people should sacrifice their lives for another one is a question never asked in the play,
but is asked in Voltaire’s rewriting of the play called The Orphan of China. When a
mandarin offers his own infant son to trade for the royal orphan’s life, his wife
interrupts him, arguing that every child’s live has the same value. In spite of the new
title, The Orphan of China, this character is more like a European woman than
someone living in ancient China. In making such a crucial change, Voltaire exposes
am unfortunate and undeniable defect in the traditional Chinese culture: subordinating
people’s lives to the rigid feudalistic order. One may say The Orphan of Zhao Family
can represent traditional Chinese culture, but do we want our children to take its
characters as role models?
Another type of Chinese operas that can represent traditional Chinese culture
poise another type of dilemma. The Peony Pavilion, for example, is an extraordinarily
ingenious take on the Confucian restrictions on young people’s private lives and
promotes free love. A best example in traditional Chinese theatre of exquisite poetry
fused with strong rebellious spirit, it is full of arias like this:
The spring a rippling thread
Of gossamer gleaming sinuous in the sun
Born idly across the court.
Pausing to straighten
The flower heads of hair ornaments,
Perplexed to find that my mirror
Stealing its half-glance at my hair
Has thrown these “gleaming clouds”
Into alarmed disarray.
Walking her in my chamber,
How should I dare let others see my form!4
They are often too flowery in imagery and too slow in pace for today’s school
children to appreciate, still less to sing together in classrooms. That is why The Peony
Pavilion, the best Chinese opera work according to most scholars, was not chosen as a
representative of traditional culture to be sung in schools. What the selectors wanted
4
Tang Xianzu: The Peony Pavilion, trans. Cyril Birch. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980, P. 43.
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4. was arias with faster pace and more down-to-earth content so that school children,
most of whom have never been exposed to traditional Chinese opera, would not be
alienated. These types of arias can be found in two categories: one is so-called small
genres of southern Chinese operas such as flower and drum opera, Huangmei opera,
and tea-picking opera; the other is modern Beijing opera. The problem with the
former is their use of local dialects, not Mandarin as in Beijing opera. That is why so
many modern Beijing opera arias were chosen. “Children of the Poor Become
Sensible Sooner,” for example, though an aria taken from Story of Red Lantern about
a communist railroad worker fighting the Japanese invaders, can still make sense
today, because there are increasing number of spoiled children. “Smart Repartee” is
from another WWII period Beijing opera Sha Jia Bang, eulogizing communist
fighters, but this aria is a suspenseful trio sung by an underground communist
disguised as a teahouse owner, her petty warlord customer, and his chief of staff
trying to make him side with the Japanese. Despite its stigma of model opera linked to
Jiang Qing, Chairman Mao’s wife, and the notorious Cultural Revolution, it is
oftentimes a favorite piece in variety shows in recent years.
While these arias are more accessible and likeable to today’s school children,
however, they contain relatively little elements of traditional Chinese culture. Some of
them, such as “Carry the Red Flag on Our Shoulders” from The Red Women’s Brigade,
are explicitly propagandistic, delivering a militant message of class struggle: “We
must bury all those counterrevolutionaries like the Southern Lord and the Northern
Lord.” That is why so many people have publicly opposed the choices of the Ministry
of Education.
Facing the dilemma between the slow and sometimes stale traditional opera and
the fast and militant revolutionary modern opera, how can Chinese opera be
performed by today’s school children and help them maintain national/cultural
identity?
The answer can be found in the body, which is indispensable in any performance.
In the past couple of decades, the body has become an increasingly popular topic in
western academia, especially in performance studies, gender and queer theories. In
my version of performance studies, social performance studies, focusing on the social
dimensions of performance, there is a need for a different type of body theory, one
that addresses physical training in general education. I concur with Terry Eagleton’s
argument that contemporary cultural theory has ignored the “starving body” in favor
of the sexual body. Yet my focus here is not on the “starving body” either. As a matter
of fact, it is precisely because the majority of Chinese people have forsaken the
starving bodies, that the “performing body” is to be examined. In his book After
Theory, Eagleton also says that “the body is a wildly popular topic in US cultural
studies - but this is the plastic, remouldable, socially constructed body, not the piece
of matter that sickens and dies”5. In fact, the Chinese have also reached a point when
they should take a serious look at their “socially constructed body.” This is not
necessarily the surgically remoulded, pierced, or tattooed body, but physically trained
body.
5
Terry Eagleton, After Theory. London: Basic Books, 2003. P. 9.
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5. Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punishment examines mostly negative
examples from prisons and hospitals, etc. that hurt humans’ well beings. But
discipline and punishment are not always bad for human development, as we can see
in Beijing opera and other traditional Chinese operas. Those who have trained in
Chinese opera, be it Beijing opera or other genres, usually look better in sitting,
standing, and walking, their bodies engrained with more aesthetic mannerism than
most people who haven’t had such training. When I was teaching in the US, one day
my students told me that they were amazed at Fan Yisong, a Chinese visiting
professor, because they had seen him sit in a beautiful pose, without touching the back
of his chair, throughout a three hour rehearsal period while watching them. Fan was
completely unaware of the students’ gaze, and was later surprised to hear they call it a
miracle. His six years’ training at the Chinese Opera School in Beijing had made
disciplined pose part of his “second nature,” even though he had left the Beijing opera
circles for almost two decades. And his pose is distinctly Chinese, not that of a ballet
dancer, nor of a boxer. Today’s school children across China could all benefit from
this kind of operatic manner if they take some body training consistently. Since the
May Fourth Movement brought down Confucianism as the dominant ideology,
discipline of manners in domestic education, which used to be a crucial part of the
Confucian Rites, has lost its ground. The 1949 revolution and the 1966-1976 Cultural
Revolution have further wiped it out. Without a proper training on manners, nowadays
most children get their manner lessons mainly from the ever-changing fashions on
television, mostly from the West.
British director Peter Brook believes that the body is a very important cultural
embodiment. He says: “The instrument of the body is the same throughout the world,
what differs are the styles and cultural influences.”6 He particularly admires some
traditional Asian ways of training the body:
Japanese children have infinitely more developed bodies than those in
the West. From the age of two, a child learns to sit in a perfectly balanced
manner between two and three, the child begins to bow regularly, which is a
wonderful exercise for the body. […]
When I took my daughter, then three or four years old, to a dance class,
I was appalled by the state of the bodies of the children. I could see children
of her age already stiff, without rhythm. […] Today’s children, spending
hours motionless in front of a television set, go to dance classes with bodies
that are already rigid. The instrument that is the body is not as well
developed with us during childhood as in the East.7
Unfortunately, Brook’s generalized and romanticized “East” is not always so
good in body training, at least in China now. The lack of body training Brook sees in
the West is no less serious in China. Fortunately, however, we still have a living
tradition of Chinese opera that can be utilized to help school children regain the
cultural instrument of the body. Another advantage the Chinese children have is the
6
Peter Brook, The Open Door, London: Anchor, 2005. P. 20
7
Ibid, P.20-22.
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6. 57-year-old tradition of “broadcast exercise,” a unique national physical exercise
practiced in all Chinese elementary and secondary schools, usually at the same time of
the day when the national radio station broadcasts the music from millions of loud
speakers to accompany the standardized exercise. In the past five plus decades this
exercise has been used only as a part of the physical education for health reasons, not
for cultural and artistic reasons. Therefore its style is neither male nor female, neither
Chinese nor western. In other words, it is a ten minute collection of robotic
movements of torso and limbs, often boring children because it is mandatory and
repetitive. If this exercise is re-choreographed as a work of performing art, not merely
a physical exercise, it can not only be more attractive to the dancers, but also carry
more cultural meanings that will enrich their spiritual and community life. This
artistic work will no longer be a unisexual, unicultual mechanical body exercise, but
be in line with a composite style of Chinese opera – including Beijing opera and many
other local operas’ movement patterns, and some martial arts style as well. It will be
divided into at least two types, for male and female dancers.
Is it a utopian fantasy to recreate a nation-wide physical version of Chinese opera
for today’s school children? Can the 50+ year old national broadcast exercise be
replaced by an artistic one? There is an encouraging case similar to what I propose
here. In the Tujia Ethnic Autonomous Region of Changyang, Hubei province, the
traditional ritual funeral dance (accompanied by music and singing) has been
reformed into an elite aesthetic dance genre called Bashan Dance to be performed on
stage by professionals. Then it evolved again into a mass dance/exercise form called
Bashan Exercise to be performed in public squares and school playgrounds, where it
replaces the standard broadcast exercise. It not only makes the physical exercise much
more interesting, often alluring groups of grownups to dance spontaneously and
endlessly, but also helps carry on the Tujia cultural heritage in an age of cultural
washout.8 What Tujia people have achieved with their ritual dance can also be done
with Chinese opera on a larger scale.
From today’s perspective, the value of Chinese opera is more in the embodied
cultivation than in their arias/stories. When the choice of arias/stories/genres has
encountered so much difficulty in terms of ideology and regional preference, it is even
more necessary to focus on the physical aspect rather than on the singing of Chinese
opera. The 300 plus Chinese opera genres differ greatly from each other in dialect and
music pattern. By comparison, their physical movement patterns based on certain
character types are much more similar with each other.
Focusing on the physical aspect of Chinese opera has another advantage. The
stylized movement in Chinese opera is often more expressive than realistic acting
originated in Europe, therefore it can be a strong means in rendering certain new
stories, including those from the West. It is also easier for Chinese opera’s physical
aspect to transcend cultural barriers than the vocal side, as my experiments in a
Beijing opera style version of Othello and a Yue opera version of Hedda Gabler have
8
Li Li. Negation of Negation：From Ethnic Tujia People ‘s Funeral Dance to Bashan Exercise. Dissertation,
Shangahai Theatre Academy, 2008.
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7. demonstrated. 9 Performing Chinese opera with western stories, with or without
singing, could be a very effective way of cultivating national identity, and embracing
interculturalism in the same time.
I believe this argument can also apply to other traditional Asian performing arts.
9
Faye C. Fei and William H. Sun, “Othello and Beijing Opera: Appropriation As a Two-Way Street，”TDR: The
Drama Review, 2006, spring.
7