Kunqu Opera: The Peony Pavillion (Excerpts, Commentary, Context)

(The Conflicting Aesthetics of Kunqu Opera Singing in Contemporary China)

By Peng Xu, University of Chicago graduate student

At 2-4 PM, on Sun. May 15, 2011

hosted in House of Fortune Restaurant, 2407 S. Wentworth Ave,Chinatown

and organized under the

US China Peoples Friendship Association-Chicago Chapter

 

Sun. May 15, 2011 meeting
are 2-4 pm @

Synopsis: Peng Xu has chosen the great play, The Peony Pavilion, completed in 1598, as the vehicle to expose the audience to a wide range of materials regarding Kunqu Opera, from 17th-century song books of this play (including her own performance of selections) to a 2004 stage production which has toured internationally. She will also use this content to focus on the wider question of the nature and role of this traditional Chinese art form in the contemporary performing art scene in China today.

In 2001 Kunqu opera was named as one of the Oral and Intangible Heritages of Humanity by the UNESCO and since then has been enjoying a kind of nation-wide, if not global, revival. This talk, however, goes in the opposite direction, discussing a diminishing scholarly tradition of singing in Kunqu performance from the past to the present, how it actually works, and how it is aesthetically different from the music we hear in new popular productions tailored for modern ears. Peng wishes to open one window on this remarkably neglected tradition which is gradually fading from modern theater, and perhaps encourage the audience to reflect upon the thorny questions about the modernization of Chinese music.

Kunqu Opera essentially originated and developed during the Ming Dynasty in and around the city of Suzhou, in today’s Jiangsu Province, and flowered during the era of Suzhou’s private water gardens and expanded throughout the current Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces, in the Yangtse River valley; then to Peking, and eventually to all of China. [Kun means Kunshan, a suburb of Suzhou and qu means music.] Toward the middle of the 18th century, the Manchu Emperor, Chienlung, encouraged the offshoot of Kunqu Opera which became known as Peking Opera, and which, with imperial support, quickly superseded Kunqu Opera. Kunqu Opera was a favorite of Premier Zhou Enlai, and he stimulated its revival in the mid-1950’s.

In both Peking Opera and Kunqu, the basic plot is generally based on some historical event or well known story that has particular cultural significance to the Chinese people. However, the plots of Kunqu theater tend to focus more on human relationships and the inner life of the individual (befitting its audience of princely officials and gentry), while Peking Opera tends to focus more on public moral conduct (befitting its imperial encouragement).

A beautiful scene of Kunqu Opera was exquisitely performed by a leading Beijing performer as part of the Dec. 4-5, 2009 China Friendship-Beijing Performing Arts Gala organized by the USCPFA-Chicago Chapter at Northwestern University’s Cahn Auditorium.

Bio: XU Peng is a Ph. D candidate at the University of Chicago. An award-winning Kunqu and Peking opera singer trained in the connoisseur circle in Beijing, she is currently writing her dissertation on elite amateur singing of Kunqu opera and its relation to drama publishing and writing in the century ranging from the late sixteenth to early seventeenth century. She has given numerous speeches and demonstrations about Kunqu on different occasions, including Annual Meetings of “Chinese Oral and Performing Literature” (Chicago, 2009; Atlanta, 2008) and a public lecture at Tufts University, Boston (Apr 2010). She is also planning on teaching an undergraduate course “Peking Opera” at the University of Chicago.

($20 dinner/talk)