I did my doctorate in an area studies department that stressed written Chinese over spoken Chinese and literature over performance, as was very common then, even in the case of literary traditions that were not very “literary” and were thought to have been heavily influenced by oral storytelling. These processes of textualization, along with some of the forces driving them (especially state censorship), worked to stabilize performance practice and remove a lot of the fluidity and improvisation that marked the tradition in its earlier stages.Ĭertain aspects of my scholarly career have led me to stress written forms of Jingju (Peking opera) and to spend more time reading its libretti than most anyone I know. Written forms of this theatrical tradition became more important as its status, and the status of its practitioners, rose in society. This book focuses on the processes by which this theatrical tradition became textualized in a wide variety of forms, for a wide variety of purposes, for a wide variety of practitioners, consumers, and government censors. Mainly for this reason, and because of the common conception that Jingju actors tended to be functionally illiterate, there has been a tendency to underestimate the importance of Jingju playscripts and other kinds of the textualization (in any media) of how plays have been or should be performed. Jingju 京劇 (Peking opera) 1 is known as a performance medium that privileges the actor over the playscript.
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