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Panel 1
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Writing Evanescence: Pan Zhiheng’s Essays on Acting
Thomas Kelly, Harvard University
Can performance be documented without betraying the promise of its presence, its liveness? I examine how Pan Zhiheng 潘之恒 (1556–1622), a leading Ming drama critic, responded to this conundrum in essays and verse. Pan never composed a play but spent his career writing about acting troupes, courtesan-actresses and boy actors, guidelines for singing libretti, open-air music festivals, bespoke musical instruments, and itinerant street performers. Pan not only departs from many of his peers in his curious reluctance to compose a play, but he also diverges from other theater critics of the period in his preference for writing informal prose and occasional poetry about the activity of spectatorship rather than technical manuals on arias or prefaces for full-length dramas. I argue that Pan’s prose in seeking to broach the evanescence of the performance event asks readers to find value in that which cannot be reproduced or seen again.
To demonstrate this point I examine Pan’s writings on the most talented actress he knew, a mercurial figure named Yang Xiandu 楊仙度 (or Yang “Transcendent Bearing”). As both the personal name of a performer and a concept in a theory of acting, xiandu 仙度 embodies the slippages and friction in Pan’s writing between the contingencies of a virtuosic actor’s movements and the interpretative frameworks within which they might be placed. The double-meaning of Yang’s name stages a theatrical displacement of body into stage presence, reality into appearance—and vice versa. Theory (xiandu), for Pan, cannot be divorced from the fleeting circumstances of its enactment (Yang Xiandu). Yang’s elusive stage presence in this sense revives the performative possibilities of writing itself.
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In Search of Bad Singing: A Disarticulation of the Automaton, or a Mathematical Critique of “Self-So” Cosmology
Ling Hon Lam, UC Berkeley
Recent studies in Ming-Qing history of knowledge rekindle interest in sound, voice, and music in their cosmological affinity to “the natural” (“self-so”), overlaying the otherwise familiar narrative of cosmology and its decline—from nature to artifice, from universality to historicism—with an undisrupted trajectory of Hegelian abstraction and sublation that inevitably heralded the advent of modern China. Symptomatically, this recounting of late imperial phonology and musicology invokes mathematics as the underlying codification that bears out the timeworn premise of the Way, liyi fenshu 理一分殊 (the Principle is singular, while manifestations are disparate). This paper reflects on this cluster of issues by studying an early treatise of aria singing, Changlun 唱論, dating from the early fourteenth century. What distinguishes this treatise from its later counterparts is not just how much space it generously allocates to curating long lists of descriptive terms about bad singing but how musical the concatenation of those terms, mostly onomatopoeias or expressions in parallelism, in itself ironically sounds. The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century discourse would later discipline singing virtuosity with the trope tianran jigua 天然機括 (the naturally self-so machine) supposedly opposite to human artifice. By contrast, bad singing as an earlier source of attraction in Changlun exposes the ineradicable artificiality of the natural as a disarticulated, stuttering, “can’t-help-itself” automaton, thus threatening to collapse the boundaries between musicality and noisy small talks precariously upheld in Zhuangzi. It is right in these singing voices as chatty deliriums that we see the radical potential of sethood—the “count-as-one”—where Oneness itself is defined by multitude, not the other way around.
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Panel 2
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Surprise as Method: Performance Aesthetics in Yuan Sanqu Songs
Patricia Sieber, OSU
The Complete Yuan Sanqu Songs (Sui 隋, Quan Yuan sanqu 全元散曲, rev. 1989) contains hundreds of songs that refer to live performance in one form or another—singing, dancing, playing musical instruments, playing games, and staging theater among others. However, apart from a few very famous song-suites (Idema 2021; Myhre 2021; Myhre 2022), this corpus has not been systematically explored for what it can tell us about the emergence of a self-reflexive discourse on “performance aesthetics” and “performance theory” in Yuan times. Some reasons for why I would want to advance such an inquiry include the following overarching observations. First, in terms of a “media archeology” (Huhtamo and Parikka 2011; Elsaesser 2016), Yuan materials figure as an important intermediary for late Ming theorizing on performance. Such a role is evident in the troping of the history of musical theater (Llamas 2021), publishing practices (inclusion of Yuan paratexts in late Ming publications) (Sieber 2003), and remediations of Yuan forms within late Ming performance-connected genres (Wang 2021), among others. Second, with regard to genre specificity within a broader performance “media ecology” (Cali 2017), at least one influential Yuan critic claimed that sanqu songs are designed to “surprise and startle” (song 聳) the audience (Sieber 2021). The larger question to be examined here is whether or not sanqu songs begin to orient themselves around the idea of “audience response” as their primary expressive objective in contrast to the longstanding notion of “intent” (shi yan zhi 詩言志) characteristic of shi 詩poetry (Sieber 2014) and if so, how does such a reorientation manifest at the level of individual songs?
In this paper, I will focus on a subset of Yuan-printed songs found in the two seminal collections of sanqu, that is, Yangchun baixue 陽春白雪 (around 1324) and Taiping yuefu 太平樂府 (preface 1351) that feature various types of performances. One objective of this paper is to find out whether additional sanqu songs should be identified as key texts within a history of late imperial/early modern “performance aesthetics” and brought within the ambit of scholarly investigation in the manner of certain late Ming sanqu on performance (Zeitlin 2014). One related area of concern here is to explore whether certain forms of performance occupy a privileged place within an emergent economy of play. A second goal of the paper is to explore how performance is staged within such songs in order to bring them into dialogue with competing scholarly notions of “spectatorship” (Lam 2018; Schoenberger 2019) that are said to operate within Yuan-dynasty performance-related sources. In this regard, I will pay particular attention to how focalization and the use of homodiegetic (within story world) and heterodiegetic (outside of story world) narratorial perspectives (Genette 1980) are deployed in such songs. In short, through close readings of performance-related sanqu songs, I aim to delineate what kinds of experimental sensibilities and discursive conceits might be encoded at the level of literary form, narration, and rhetorical personae.
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The Image of the Book and the Performance of Reading in The Drunken Man’s Talk and the Early Huaben
Canaan Morse, Boston University
Representations of classical literature within the description of imperial-era oral storytelling in the preface to the c. 13th-century anthology The Drunken Man’s Talk (Zuiweng tanlu) may be more accurately understood as persuasive figures of speech than as concrete references to history. A figurative reading of these representations reveals how the preface, as it articulates how storytelling should be understood, appropriates images of literature as sources of performative authority. It does so by invoking classical texts and authors as symbols of a communal and ever-present cultural inheritance, to which the performer offers access through their performance of those authors’ works. Referencing the concept of the “charter text” from other oral traditions offers further insight, highlighting how the preface describes oral performance as an act of reconstituting lost texts through the performance of reading. Extending these observations into texts of contested origin like the early vernacular short stories (huaben), we find that they inspire a new reading of a seemingly “literary” feature called the “poem chain,” a sequence of linked classical poems and lyrics at the beginning of a story. Whereas scholars have understood the poem chain as a “literary game” added by literati writers, it may be more appropriate to read it as a textual representation of performative virtuosity, which unlocks an affective experience of the tale, enriched by immanent tradition, for readers familiar with the rules of performance.
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Panel 3
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Pan Zhiheng’s Connoisseurial Experience and the Aesthetics of Contingency
Yinghui Wu, UCLA
This paper argues that Pan Zhiheng 潘之恒 (1556–1622) departed from his contemporaries in turning qu connoisseurship into a dynamic, site-specific media experience that hinged on the bodily presence of performers and audiences as well as the contingencies of locational and environmental circumstances. I take a close look at Pan’s representation of his connoisseurial experience in three essays: “Yuan jin” 原近 (On the Inclination toward Theater), “Hongtai” 虹臺 (Rainbow Terrace), and “Xiaoxia” 消夏 (Allaying the Summer Heat). On the one hand, he presents a performance event as a singular occurrence that unfolded at a specific time and location and was contingent upon the season, natural surroundings, a particular congregation of spectators, the fine-tuned skills of performers cultivated through long-term training, etc. Much as he desired to capture this all-round experience in writing, it appeared to be too elusive to be fully retrieved or repeated. On the other hand, his representation of performance also made it an intertextually woven cultural experience that seemed to resist the passage of time and transcend the particulars of rules, sites, and circumstances. Through these writings, Pan redefined the connoisseur as simultaneously a physical, feeling body in close interaction with its surroundings and a person of heightened critical acuity. As he moves between the moment of performance and the moment of writing, he invites readers to immerse in multisensory immediacy and offers a glimpse into the process of the formation of his aesthetic views at the same time. He interweaves the actual performance and site and their cultural implications, and sparks a new understanding of connoisseurship and life experience as interpenetrating and mutually transformative.
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Vocal Imaginaries: Connoisseurship of the Operatic Voice in the 16th Century
Ming Tak Ted Hui, University of Oxford
This paper delves into the connoisseurship of the operatic voice during the Ming dynasty, focusing on the appreciation of vocal skills in Kunqu opera. Drawing from anecdotal accounts and travelogues by renowned connoisseurs such as He Liangjun 何良俊 (1506-1573) and Pan Zhiheng 潘之恆 (1556-1622), the study explores the significance placed on refined vocal abilities, including clear tones, precise execution, and expressive interpretation. Through an examination of these writings, the paper investigates whether connoisseurs valued specific vocal characteristics or preferred singers who demonstrated a wide vocal range. It also explores how connoisseurs attempted to comprehend the nuances of actors’ and actresses’ voices and the language they employed to articulate their vocal imaginaries. The paper also incorporates other forms of writing, such as arias on courtesans, to provide additional insights into the topic. By considering these perspectives, this study aims to explore how the description of the operatic voice was constrained by the limitations of language in capturing the nuances of sound. The study investigates the attempts made by these connoisseurs to find new possibilities in describing vocal qualities beyond the conventional linguistic frameworks. By analysing their writings, the study seeks to uncover the creative approaches employed by these connoisseurs to articulate their vocal imaginaries and expand the boundaries of vocal description.
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Panel 5
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Bibliography as Critique: Cataloging and Categorizing Drama in Premodern China
Guojun Wang, McGill University
More than mere booklists, bibliographies reflect structures of knowledge within specific cultures. Bibliography as a field of scholarly expertise emerged in China as early as the first century BCE. The earliest extant bibliography of drama appeared during the Song-Yuan transition (13th century). In the past decades, some groundwork has been laid regarding drama bibliographies in premodern China. In this presentation, I would like to bring attention to bibliography as a form of drama critique. Such critique is manifest through the naming of drama in leishu 類書, the cataloging of dramatic works based on their quality or aesthetics, and the various ways of categorizing drama in comprehensive bibliographies.
During this workshop I will focus on the exclusion and inclusion of drama in comprehensive bibliographies –– primarily bibliographies of state book collections, private book collections, and bibliographies in official histories. A case in point is Pipa ji 琵琶記 (The Lute), which was included in some comprehensive bibliographies of the Ming-Qing era but was explicitly excluded in others such as Siku quanshu 四庫全書. Why did comprehensive bibliographies start to include entries of drama, and why did that practice receive criticism? What characteristics of drama gave rise to the debates about its inclusion or exclusion? Exploring such questions will help us better understand the conceptions of drama and theatricality in premodern China.
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Rethinking Metatheater: From Wu Bing to Jiang Shiquan
Kangni Huang, Harvard University
Ever since Lionel Abel coined the term “metatheater” in 1963, scholars of Western drama have foregrounded self-consciousness as a staple for modernist theater. As the prefix “meta-” indicates, the term refers to a type of drama that is self-aware of its own status as theater and, therefore, can be read as commentaries on theatricality. This paper proposes to rethink metatheater as a literary form through several plays featuring the famous playwright Tang Xianzu 湯顯祖 (1550-1616) as a character, including Liaodu geng 療妒羹 by Wu Bing 吳炳 (jinshi 1619), Fengliu yuan 風流院 by Zhu Jingfan 朱京藩 (fl. 1620s), and Linchuan meng 臨川夢 by Jiang Shiquan 蔣士銓 (1725-1785). Through these examples, I am making two interrelated arguments. Within the context of late imperial China, I show that self-conscious theater goes beyond specific story cycles and must be understood within a broader interest in the process of mediation. From a comparative perspective, I hope to dissociate the emergence of metatheater from the dissolution of the fourth wall and, instead, resituate it within an ecology of literary genres that is rooted in self-awareness.