Faces of Tradition in Chinese Performing Arts

Abstract

This notable volume, comprising five scholarly articles illuminating different aspects or genres of folk performance traditions in China, is solidly grounded on meticulous research and thoughtful discourse. While each of the authors (Charlotte D'Evelyn, Levi S. Gibbs, Emily E. Wilcox, Sue Tuohy, and Helen Rees) pens clearly focused case studies outlining individual trends in the past few decades, the larger dynamics linking them weave a more comprehensive exploration of individual vs. community, continuity vs. change, and tradition vs. innovation. China's growing economic position has notably spurred developments in the country's domestic arts and entertainment scene and led to expansion and reform (beyond state-run “friendship tours” overseas). Not that the world of art has entirely traded politics and propaganda for commercial models, but current artistic practices still fall squarely within the confines of what the Chinese government calls a “socialist market economy with Chinese characteristics.”Helen Rees’ chapter, “From Field Recordings to Ethnographically Informed CDs: Curating the Sounds of Yunnan for a Niche Foreign Market,” presents a first-person yet critically distanced slice of recent history, documenting her meeting and working with Zhang Xingrong and the extensive field recordings he began conducting with his wife in the early 1980s. Much had changed by the time Rees entered the picture, both in China's ethnomusicological landscape and in avenues to reach international audiences. The impact of such highly curated recording series was quite marginal in China, Rees admits, though the final products (involving a team of dedicated researchers) became significant historical documents filling many gaps in global scholarship, even resulting in several of the recorded practitioners being invited to perform abroad.Two articles in the collection stem from research in Inner Mongolia, a Chinese autonomous region where the Mongolian minority outnumbers the entire population of the Republic of Mongolia. In Charlotte D'Evelyn's “Grasping Intangible Heritage and Reimagining Inner Mongolia: Folk-Artist Albums and a New Logic for Musical Representation in China,” we first encounter the regional passions and political machinations involved with UNESCO's register of Intangible Cultural Heritage. D'Evelyn's account serves as a suitable primer in understanding the resulting pressure and power plays whenever China's ethnic minority folk artists engage with government leaders at the local, regional, or national level, as well as the changes in the general perception of minorities by the mainstream population. Levi S. Gibbs (the editor of this collection) contributes “Chinese Singing Contests as Sites of Negotiation among Individuals and Traditions,” tracking not only the success of Mongolian singer-star Qi Fulin through nationwide television contests, but also the effects these contests have on the evolution of that musical tradition. Actual video and audio documentation of these contests lies beyond the reach of a published volume, though such examples are easily found online.By far the most illuminating article is Sue Tuohy's “Collecting Flowers, Defining a Genre: Zhang Yaxiong and the Anthology of Hua'er Folksongs,” which traces the reception history of a pre-1949 collection of hua'er by Zhang Yaxiong (1909–1989). This genre of earthy mountain songs was once widely derided, but later won recognition as a key cultural artifact of China's northwest. (Zhang's choice in calling hua'er “flowers” rather than “weeds” led to a significant elevation in their perception, she claims.) Zhang's own life suffered ups and downs, particularly during the turmoil of the early decades of the People's Republic, which Tuohy documents in the context of China's widely swinging pendulum of political campaigns and propaganda.While the four articles above fall squarely within ethnomusicology, Emily E. Wilcox takes a side road into dance in “Dynamic Inheritance: Representative Works and the Authoring of Tradition in Chinese Dance,” opening with a concise history of Chinese dance suitably placing the nation's current climate of dance and dance academies in context. Of special note is her appraisal of Dai Ailian, who was born in Trinidad in 1916 and trained in London before migrating to the motherland in the 1940s and finally eulogized as the “Mother of Chinese Dance” at her death in 2006. Wilcox's case study, on the “Cup and Bowl Dance,” provides much insight into the political climate of the early 1960s when Siqintariha's dance piece, shortly after its premiere, won the Gold Prize at the 1962 World Festival of Youth and Students in Helsinki.The book's cover photo is densely packed with symbolic layers that should provoke much reflection on the role of folk art and government policy, tradition, and propaganda. With Siqintariha as the student, the elder folk artist Nashunhutu as the teacher, and two young women whose facial features can be attributed to different regions of the People's Republic, this scene in Hohhot engenders a sense of hope and harmony for a new socialist country. Now, a half-century later, Wilcox writes, anyone studying traditional Mongolian dance is required to learn Siqintariha's techniques and movements as part of standard curriculum.Wilcox dances lightly on terms such as “invented traditions” and “representative work” (the quotation marks are her own). Where Chinese audiences see tradition as a national style with equal proportions of new and old, Western viewers prone to a firm division between received tradition and individual authorship would probably side with the Western-trained Taiwanese dance scholar Chen Ya-ping, who wrote that Dai Ailian's dances are “endowed . . . with a presumed ‘authenticity’ [despite being] entirely fictional” (p. 80). In one deft stroke, Wilcox cuts to scholarship's core conundrum when scholars and their subjects use the same words to mean markedly different things.