Teaching AMERICAN Students the “Essence” of Chinese Theatre at the National Academy of Chinese Theatre Arts (Zhongguo xiqu xueyuan)

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Notes

¹ Besides its main website, http://nacta.edu.cn/, NACTA also has one designed to attract international students, http://international.nacta.edu.cn/en/. A 2007 promotional video in Chinese has been posted: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v = pn-nu51TZ3c, accessed July 4, 2015. It completely lacks narration, however.

² Professor Zhang has taken on the administrative position of Curriculum Dean for the whole academy since September 3, 2014. The current chair of the Jingju department is Professor Shu Tong 舒桐.

³ Although laoshi 老師 literally means “teacher,” it is also commonly used to address college administrators such as Teng.

⁴ Other forms of indigenous Chinese theatre are taught at NACTA, but Jingju predominates.

⁵ Both male and female roles perform movements with all three of these props, but fan and water sleeves have been a stronger focus for female than male roles. NACTA clearly chose these three props to introduce the typical stylized movements associated with the female and male role types to us beginners. Since we did not have any students who were interested in cross-gender performance, we simply put them into groups based on their own gender.

⁶ The four photos accompanying this article also appear in the set of twenty photos documenting the study trip made available as “supplementary material” at www.maneyonline.com/doi/suppl/10.1179/0193777415Z.00000000027. In that set they have different figure numbers.

⁷ For instance, this piece of music is played when the palace women offer wine to Precious Consort Yang in Guifei zuijiu 貴妃醉酒 (The precious consort gets drunk).

⁸ Scripts typically list her as a wudan role, despite the fact that today's audience would be more likely to think of her as a daoma dan 刀馬旦 role (the former tends to fight on foot and hand to hand and often has supernatural powers, while the latter typically fights on horseback).

⁹ Like many nuns who fall in love in popular Chinese literature, she was given to a nunnery when she was very young.

¹⁰ As will become clear below, from the beginning the idea was not to try and mount full productions of these plays but just short excerpts involving only one character for plays 1 and 2 and two for plays 3 and 4.

¹¹ The version of this play revised in the 1950s and taken abroad to compete for international medals that became the standard version has a total of four scenes. The excerpt performed by the students, the fight in the dark before it is interrupted by the appearance of more characters, represents basically less than one line of a stage direction in scene four: “Liu Lihua [the wuchou role] pries open the door [of the room where the wusheng is sleeping in the inn], goes in through the door, searches about in the dark, Ren Tanghui [the wusheng role] is startled awake, they fight….” 劉利華撥門, 進門, 摸索, 任堂惠驚覺, 搏鬥…. The script is conveniently posted online at http://scripts.xikao.com/play/04010005, accessed May 21, 2014.

¹² Two of these three faculty members, Andrew Buchman and Zhang Er, were affiliated with the year-long program at Evergreen from the start and taught different subjects within it. The third, Sandie Nisbet, will be introduced below.

¹³ Professor Du was the President of NACTA from 2001 to 2012. The current president is Mr. Ba Tu 巴圖.

¹⁴ Although students working with Hujia zhuang had to sing a section of Shui xianzi tune, they only had the time to memorize the tune and the pronunciation of the characters in the lyrics, with a very general understanding of what the song is about. There was no serious vocal training involved. In any case, the singing of this aria in this play is more for a general sonic effect than for particular character building as in normal vocal expression in theatre.