Mounting a Production: Directing

Chapter 9 focuses on directing in model jingju. Based on the reported activities within the directors’ major areas of responsibility, the author begins with an examination of the director’s role during the creative process. In discussing the fulfillment of their directorial responsibilities, the author describes the model jingju director’s efforts to help performers develop a deeper understanding of scripts and characters through analytical discussion, their collaboration with fellow artists in realizing this modern understanding through jingju’s traditional stage conventions, and their innovative usage and arrangement of minor supporting characters. The last section delineates the work of technique directors for their accomplishments in designing movement, dance-acting, and stage combat. This chapter features personal interviews with performers, directors, and technique directors.

Foundation of Productions: Scripts and Playwriting

Chapter 5 examines the textual foundation for model jingju productions from five perspectives. It begins with the ten plays’ synopses, followed by a discussion of the roles and functions of three categories of dramatic characters. The author then analyzes a singular overarching theme and three major supporting messages in model jingju. To provide insight into the delivery of these important motifs, the author offers further analysis on a general plotting pattern and three scene types that contribute significantly to model jingju theatricality. The last section focuses on an especially noteworthy aspect—literary construction—examining the narrative structure and use of language in model jingju in the context of their connections to traditional practices. This chapter features Wang Zengqi’s first-person narrative of the creative process resulting in Shajiabang and a close analysis of rhymed vernacular speech with primary examples from Azalea Mountain.

The Broken and the Breakthroughs in Acting

Chapter 6 examines acting in model jingju from three perspectives: how it is related to the role-types, schools of performance, and the old form (song, speech, dance-acting, and combat) of traditional jingju. By examining the fusion of selectively adapted traditional practices and newly invented performance styles and techniques, this chapter offers an insight into how performance practices in model jingju are intricately related to traditional jingju, though their associations as seen through these three perspectives unfold in different ways. The author discerns an overall pattern of creation: the deconstruction of traditional practices and the liberty to select appropriate traditional elements and fuse them with new ones, be they borrowed from other performing arts or newly created. In some cases, to deconstruct means to destroy, and to break down leads to abandonment. In other cases, to break down leads to breakthrough; the deconstruction nurtures innovative and alternative practices that embody unique aesthetic qualities of model jingju. This chapter features personal interviews with the performers of principal heroes/heroines and other major roles.

Modern Jingju in Years of Uncertainty

Time: summer of 1956 to late 1963. As China went through numerous political movements, the nation’s economy and culture fluctuated as the government readjusted policies from one position to another and quickly back again. During these seven years, xiqu policy developed along two intertwined trajectories: vacillating attitudes toward the traditional repertory and a firm commitment to producing modern plays. Modern plays became the key element of a proposed new, national, socialist xiqu, and all xiqu forms were enlisted to present modern lives. In the jingju circle, professional practitioners began comprehensive experimentation on each and every aspect of the performance art, searching for solutions to the challenge of presenting modern stories in a convincing jingju style. Chapter 3 includes a survey of constantly changing xiqu policies, an examination of practical challenges to jingju practitioners in presenting modern lives, and a close analysis of the artistic experiments in the China Jingju Company’s 1958 The White-Haired Girl.

Jingju during the Xiqu Reform

Time: late 1948 to roughly 1956. Jingju went through comprehensive changes during the Xiqu Reform, one of the first major campaigns that the CCP initiated in the drive to construct a new democratic culture. The author explicates the challenges facing the new government, cultural policy makers, and jingju practitioners as they dealt with the multiplexed theatrical traditions from the past: The new regime was quite effective with systemic and personnel reform but was less prepared to deal with traditional repertory. The focus of attention in repertory reform was on themes and plots, resulting in a decisive impact on artistry and practice. Divergent opinions regarding the implementation of jingju’s artistic reform revealed the challenges in taking advantage of, or altering, its signature style when presenting modern lives. Chapter 2 includes a discussion of jingju’s repertory and strengths during the 1940s, a list of the twenty-six xiqu plays banned during 1950–1952, and a close analysis of the China Jingju Company’s 1956 Three Mountains, one of the first experiments in modern jingju.

Jingju at Yan’an

Time: October 1935 to March 1947. Jingju at Yan’an is examined in the context of the CCP’s vision of a new democratic culture, as articulated in Mao Zedong’s “On New Democracy” and “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art.” The author examines discrepancies between official doctrine and other sources including personal memoirs, performance records and script analysis, arguing that jingju at Yan’an offers cultural productions that are far more complex than those depicted in CCP’s official narrative. The author presents two overlooked aspects. One is that, although the CCP was determined to construct a new democratic culture, in terms of jingju performance in Yan’an, traditional repertory was more popular and was more frequently staged than both newly written historical plays and modern plays. The other is that, as a close analysis of the 1944 Driven to Join the Liang Mountain Rebels reveals, Mao’s claim of “an epoch-making beginning” of revolutionizing old theatre was only partly realized through adjusting thematic concerns; it did not reflect the practitioners’ dilemma of devising a satisfying form to serve new content.

Overture

The author refutes the flawed assumption that artistry was sacrificed to politics, or that there is not much art left, in model works. The author situates the study of model jingju at the intersection of three contexts: historic, comprising its original form—the jingju that originated in the late eighteenth century—and its revolutionary trajectory under the CCP from the Yan’an period (1935–1947) to the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976); artistic, encompassing the artistic choices in the five major aspects—playwriting, acting, music, design, and directing—and their practical application in mounting the final productions; and aesthetic, addressing the interrelation and interaction among the major artistic aspects which produce and define model jingju’s style, including its conformity to and deviation from the aesthetic principles of jingju. The author calls for close attention to practitioners and their lived experience of creating model jingju.

Model Jingju as Pinnacle of Cultural Reconstruction

Time: fall 1963 to 1976. China saw an increasingly intense struggle over literature and art, with modern jingju as a primary battlefield. The 1964 Festival of Modern Jingju Performances for Emulation reconfirmed the priority of modern plays in xiqu creation, reinforced the significance of modern jingju in literature and art, and firmly established Jiang Qing as the leader of this movement. Model works were designated as the exemplar of socialist culture construction, exemplifying such creative principles as the Basic Task, the Combination of Revolutionary Realism and Revolutionary Romanticism, and the Three Prominences. Chapter 4 includes a close analysis of Jiang Qing’s controversial role in supervising modern jingju creation and an analytical chronicle of five major versions of Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy—from the first version in 1958 to the final model version in 1970—as an illustration of changes in plotting and characterization during the creative process of model jingju development.

Coda

The coda offers an analysis of how the five major artistic aspects work together in model jingju in communicating a particular type of aesthetics. Focusing on the nature and expression of beauty, the author examines three interrelated questions: Did the notion of beauty matter during the creative process? What is considered beautiful and therefore aesthetically favored? And how is this sense of beauty communicated? The author highlights two dominant aesthetic qualities in model jingju: the beauty of the sublime and the beauty of masculinity. The author analyzes imbalance as a primary aesthetic feature in two spheres: gender representation and aesthetic expectations. Finally, the author proposes that the deep roots of the imbalance in model jingju lie in the varied levels of association among the three traditional aesthetic principles—conventionalization, stylization, and synthesis—and each of the five major artistic aspects—playwriting, acting, music, design, and directing, and that, ultimately, the overarching creative directive, the Combination of Revolutionary Realism and Revolutionary Romanticism, was a flawed premise for model jingju.

Visual Communication through Design

Chapter 8 examines the design of model jingju. The author focuses on three areas: scenic design, lighting design, and costume and makeup design. Each area is contextualized by its departure from that of traditional repertory and by its gradual creative evolution during the twentieth century. The author pays special attention to three issues: new concepts and practices introduced by the design teams of model jingju, the overall style and characteristics of design, and specific issues that challenged designers and their resulting strategies. This chapter includes a discussion of the aesthetic conflicts between representational scenery and jingju’s indicative style, and features personal interviews with key set, lighting, costume, and makeup designers.