Kun Opera in China and America

“Young Lovers’ Edition” of The Peony Pavilion.

Xu Ben writes in the op-ed section of The Beijing News about whether or not Kun Opera is a living form of drama:

Not long ago, the Suzhou Kunqu Opera Theatre performed the 27-act, three-part, nine-hour, “young lovers version” of The Peony Pavilion on three successive days at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Auditorium, and the performance was a huge success. During the several weeks prior to the performance of The Peony Pavilion, Kenneth Hsien-yung Pai (白先勇) talked up the play in Chinese-language print media and television programs in the San Francisco Bay area. In the eyes of many Americans, The Peony Pavilion is Kun Opera, and Kun Opera is The Peony Pavilion. To complement the performance of The Peony Pavilion at Berkeley, the Institute of East Asian Studies at Berkely held a symposium on Kun Opera, and at the start of the new academic semester on 28 August, the department started a class on kunqu. After the performance of The Peony Pavilion at UC Berkeley, it also showed at the Irvine, LA, and Santa Barbara campuses as well.

At the Berkeley performance of The Peony Pavilion, I was only able to attend one night due to back problems. I never would have imagined that when I went to class the following week, two colleagues of mine from the English department said that they had read the report in the San Francisco Chronicle, and asked me about The Peony Pavilion. After telling them briefly about the plot and the performance, I then informed them that in 2001 kunqu had been among the first group of “masterpieces of the oral and intangible heritage of humanity” as designated by UNESCO; I never expected that this would raise an argument from one of the professors in the department. This professor teaches drama and has been to China; she asked me, why was it called “heritage”? Don’t we call something heritage only when something no longer has any useful function anymore? Like the Great Wall, which no longer functions for national defense, or the Imperial Palace, which no longer hosts an emperor. Has Kun Opera as a dramatic form lost its ability to tell a story on stage? Is The Peony Pavilion a live specimen of a nearly-extinct dramatic form?

Talking about Kun Opera with this professor was basically just shooting the breeze. Unexpectedly, on Suzhou’s news network a few days ago I read a report about Kun Opera in Suzhou that really reminded me of her calling it a “live specimen of a nearly-extinct dramatic form.” The Suzhou news net report said that in 2002, the first kunqu class at Suzhou Institute of Education recruited 26 freshman students. Four years later, these college students have matured into kunqu actors able to perform on stage, but what awaits them is not the stars’ acclaim that The Peony Pavilion cast received, but rather a cold reception from even the older troupes.

For these young people entering the theatrical profession, kunqu is just one small speck within commercialized entertainment. To find opportunities to perform, the teacher of the kunqu had to take them to the tourist attractions in every county in Suzhou for guest appearances, and the appearance fee was bargained down again and again: “With a performance fee of 1000 yuan for one appearance by a 15-member troupe, even if they performed three times a day, the teacher and students wouldn’t get very much compensation. But even to get that bit of money, the students were already quite pleased.”

On 21 September this year, as an item on the program for the Mudu Tourism Festival, the teacher of the Kunqu class sent ten students to the Yan Family Hall in town of Mudu to perform The White Rabbit for yourist. This was the first commercial gig the kunqu class had accepted since its start. The actors performed onstage, but “the tourists passed back and forth in front of the stage, the guides’ megaphones obscuring the sound of singing; no one was willing to stop for even a second to listen to her sing, and the attentive audience and the sound of applause that she was waiting for were absent.”

I thought about the warm applause from the audience at the close of The Peony Pavilion at the Zellerbach Auditorium. In many reports, this applause was used to acclaim the success of The Peony Pavilion, and also to demonstrate that Kun Opera was flourishing. But does the success of The Peony Pavilion truly mean that Kun Opera is flourishing? At the Zellerbach Auditorium, what people saw was a dazzling living specimen; at Mudu, what people saw was the nearly-extinct dramatic form of Kun Opera. These two visions are both real – how to interpret the present and future of Kun Opera depends on how you reconcile these two visions.