Nanguan Meets Modern Chinese Poetry: Wang Xinxin’s Nanguan Shiyi (Nanguan/Poetic Meaning) Taiwan Tour, May 2015

Abstract

PERFORMANCE REVIEW: NANGUAN MEETS MODERN CHINESE POETRY: WANG XINXIN’S NANGUAN SHIYI (NANGUAN/POETIC MEANING) TAIWAN TOUR, MAY 2015 JOSH STENBERG University of British Columbia At fifty, Wang Xinxin 王心心 is probably the best-known individual nanguan 南管 (known also as nanyin 南音)1 performer, drawing sizable crowds in Taiwan and the Mainland, and invited to perform and collaborate abroad at venues and events such as the Musée Guimet, the Festival d’Avignon, the San Francisco World Music Festival , and the ONE ASIA Project in Auroville, India. Wang drew on her training in the state nanyin troupe of Quanzhou, Fujian, before arriving in Taiwan in 1992, becoming one of the key members of Han-Tang Yuefu 漢唐樂府 before founding her own ensemble, the Xinxin Nanguan Ensemble (Xinxin nanguan yuefang 心心南管樂坊), in 2003. Her career has shifted between the traditional nanguan repertoire, newlywritten nanguan (such as her recent setting of the Heart Sutra [Xinjing 心經]),2 and collaborative experimentation that has gone from matching nanguan to Schumann (Dichterliebe & Nanguan) to Azerbaijani kamancha music (The Epic Project). Her Nanguan shiyi 南管詩意 (translated on promotional materials as Poetic Landscape along with Nanguan) was, again, formally adventurous and collaborative .3 The core of the ninety-five-minute show consisted of six poems by major Taiwanese poet Yu Guangzhong 余光中 (1928–) set (principally) by Wang to nanguan music and prefaced by the poet’s comments on each composition. Born in Nanjing but of Quanzhou descent, Yu’s work and biography are characterized by the longing for a lost homeland, and are a good match for the melancholy and yearning at the heart of many canonical nanguan songs. The Quanzhou connection—most obviously in his childhood poem “Luoyang Bridge” (“Luoyang Qiao” 洛陽橋)— also complicates the politics of nostalgia for the Mainland and underpins the 1 Neither term should be confused with Liyuan xi 梨園戲, a theater genre which uses the nanguan/nanyin musical system, as well as many of the same texts. The history of these genres is further complicated by the fact that in the early Communist period, three separate genres were amalgamated to form the first state-sponsored Liyuan xi troupes. In Taiwan, the theatrical form is also often called Nanguan xi, although Taiwanese troupes which perform the genre are semi-professional. 2 A performance by Wang Xinxin can be found beginning at 11:04 during the program, “Dangdai nanguan yishu jia Wang Xinxin” 當代南管藝術家王心心 (Contemporary nanguan artist, Wang Xinxin), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gl3M8xvm8Tc, accessed August 28, 2015. 3 The show was performed in Kaohsiung on May 2, in Tainan on May 6, in Taipei on May 8, and in Taoyuan on May 16. CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature 34. 2 (December 2015): 179–181© The Permanent Conference on Chinese Oral and Performing Literature, Inc. 2015 DOI 10.1080/01937774.2015.1096565 Minnan connection which justifies its setting to nanguan.4 The settings of the poems were bookended by instrumental pieces, during which members of the Xinxin Nanguan Ensemble (a mix of Wang’s Taipei students and visitors from Quanzhou) were joined onstage for some numbers by the a cappella group Voco Novo (founded 2009) and the dancers Cheng Xinyi 程心怡 and Wu Chien Wei 吳建緯. The director for the program was Wu Su-Chun 吳素君, known for her work combining xiqu 戲 曲 (indigenous Chinese theater) and modern dance. As Chen Wu-ming 陳午明, one of the best-known figures in Taiwan’s a cappella scene, noted in the program, “until things collide, no one knows what the result will be” 在沒有對撞之前, 沒有人會知道產生什麼結果. So how did the nanguan– modern poetry–a cappella collision go? Very well, as far as nanguan and the poetry went. After the performance, only the most hidebound traditionalist could claim that nanguan was unsuited to contemporary texts. Some of the texts— especially the two that Wang sang herself, “Longing for the Hometown” (“Xiangchou ” 鄉愁) and “Little Question for the Skies” (“Xiaoxiao tianwen” 小小天問)— benefited greatly from the attention that nanguan’s slow pace demands from an audience. Yu’s lines from the former, “and later/ longing for hometown was a low low grave/ I was outside/ mother was inside” 後來啊/ 鄉愁是一方矮矮的墳墓/ 我 在外面/ 母親在裡頭, could compete for poignancy with any in nanguan’s traditional repertoire. The audience surely left with a better appreciation for Yu as a poet...