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Abstract
All discourses of modernisation in the twentieth century Sinophone world engaged Western, Soviet and Japanese influences and models, and traditional Chinese theatre education was no exception. Although the Republic of China on Taiwan never confined theatre to state-sponsored organisations, a system of theatre education was created to ensure continuity of Jingju (i.e. ‘Peking opera’) performance, officially identified as the ‘national theatre’. Beginning with the 1957 establishment of a private vocational school, Jingju education adopted various (Western-inspired) models, moving from professional training colleges to the present single national post-secondary institution, the 12-year (elementary, secondary and post-secondary) National Taiwan College of Performing Arts (NTCPA). Since nationalisation in 1968, the school has featured in public debate surrounding the place of traditional theatre in Taiwan’s shifting cultural politics. Its curriculum and training methods notably came under scrutiny by a legislator in 1970, who found that the school was in desperate need of ‘modernisation’ to conform to education standards. Yet since actor technique is acquired through kinship-like student‒teacher relations, the adaptation of oral teaching to ‘Western’ and ‘modern’ ideas of education, as well as to an academic calendar, remains problematic and contested, with far-reaching implications for theatre performance.
Notes
1 Gao’s essay details the programme for modernising Jingju at the Zhonghua xiqu zhuanke xuexiao (Zhonghua Chinese Opera Music College), which operated from 1930 to 1940 in Beiping (the Republican-era name of Beijing). Other similarly innovative projects included the Shanghai xiju xuexiao (Shanghai Theatre School) and Xi’an’s Xiasheng xiju xuexiao (Xiasheng Theatre School).
2 Goldstein (Citation2007, pp. 32‒39) also gives an extensive account of the keban system in late nineteenth-century Jingju. When keban was used in 1950s Taiwan Jingju training, practices were only somewhat milder.
3 Taiwan’s political history has generated myriad terms for ethnicities and sub-ethnicities. Since this article is in no way concerned with aboriginal performance, ‘native’ will be used to indicate the descendants of Hokkien and Hakka settlers who arrived in the seventeenth to early twentieth centuries and form the bulk of Taiwan’s ethnic Chinese population. This group, often known as bensheng (within-province) has usually been contrasted with waisheng (outside-province) ‒ i.e. those who arrived in Taiwan in the late 1940s, during the closing stages of the Chinese Civil War. In terms of xiqu, which has always been almost exclusively a Han family of performance arts, the distinction has been between bensheng Taiwanese genres such as gezaixi and waisheng Mainland-originating genres, principally Jingju.
4 All xiqu forms were under pressure from Japanese authorities starting in 1937 as part of the kominka/huangminhua movement. While gezaixi did not disappear, it seems that there were probably no Jingju performances during 1937‒1945 (Guy Citation1995, p. 88, Guy Citation2005, pp. 15‒22, Chang Citation2007, pp. 54‒59, Hsu Y.-h. Citation2014, p. 103). Despite the complex terminological history, Jingju is now the consensus term for the genre, and for this reason will be used to refer to ‘Peking opera’ consistently in this essay, even if such usage is somewhat anachronistic.
5 This does not seem very different from the case in the English-speaking world until the emergence of drama schools in the mid-nineteenth century. The Continuum Companion to Twentieth Century Theatre notes that in the early nineteenth century, actors in the UK generally were ‘touring the provinces and learning the craft as an apprentice, through practical experience, particularly by observing the work of the leading artists in the company’ (Jenkins Citation2006).
6 Not incidentally, Jingju was known for decades in Taiwan as ‘Guoju’ (National Drama), a ‘sign of Peking opera’s position of superiority over other traditional opera forms’ (Guy, Citation1999, p. 518) before conforming to the Mainland name Jingju in the 1990s (Guy Citation1995, p. 85).
7 For instance, Jingju repertoire on the Mainland ‘underwent significant revisions in order to accommodate the presumed tastes of international audiences by highlighting movement and dance while sacrificing dialogue and singing, to emanate an upbeat face for the new China or to convey specific messages mandated by officials through significant revisions.’ (Liu Citation2013, p. 2)
8 The authors’ views on the subject are inevitably informed by their past affiliations with the institution. Tsai Hsin-hsin was vice-president of NTCPA in 2011‒2015. Josh Stenberg was a Fulbright Taiwan fellow at NTCPA in 2014‒2015.
9 Other xiqu forms, such as puppetry or nanguanxi, are less directly institutionalised, although their support through arts funding mechanisms also means the indirect influence of the West on training in the form of models of arts support.
10 Yen Chia-kan (pinyin Yan Jiagan; 1905‒1993) was a Mainland-born KMT politician who also served as minister of finance and became premier, vice president, and finally, upon the death of Chiang Kai-shek, president of the Republic of China (1975‒1978). The office of governor of Taiwan Province was, until streamlining in 1998, an important political post, even if the ‘province’ and the actually controlled territory of the entire Republic were in Yen’s time nearly coterminous.
11 It was meant at that time also to contrast with the PRC, where ‒ according to the ROC ‒ Chinese culture was being destroyed. As part of the PRC’s efforts to re-establish a continuity with pre-1949 Chinese historical narratives, the term fuxing has recently been revived there also, since it ‘implies that China is not “newly rising” but just “recovering” a status it had before the West humiliated it in the nineteenth century’ (Müller Citation2013, p. 128).
12 This expansion was funded by the Republic of China’s principal ally: the United States, and the system of education that developed featured ‘education principles based on Western economic capitalism’ (Chou and Chuing Citation2012, p. 40; cf. Altbach Citation1998, p. 186, Li and Li Citation1998, pp. 172‒173).
13 In 1966, the Cultural Revolution had begun on the Mainland. As Nancy Guy (Citation2005, p. 57) notes, ‘[t]he violence against traditional culture in China provided an opportunity for the Nationalist regime’ to represent itself nationally and internationally as ‘the guardian of Chinese culture’.
14 Hung Yen-chiu, pinyin Hong Yanqiu, 1899‒1980. Taiwanese-born, Hung studied in Beijing, co-founded the Mandarin Daily News and became a professor at National Taiwan University (NTU). He became a legislator in 1969, at the age of 71. NTU provides a biography at http://homepage.ntu.edu.tw/~chinlit/ch/html/MA3d005.htm.
15 Hung’s basis of criticism draws explicitly on the 1947 ROC constitution, which in turn seems to have derived its demand for universal education from the constitution of the Weimar Republic (Chang Citation2014, pp. 1‒2).
16 This partially accounts for the four name changes it has undergone in one half-century.
17 Such works include National Drama Division Textbooks for Theatre Schools (Juxiao guoju ke jiaokeshu), Stories from Chinese Traditional Theatre (Xiqu gushi), Voice and Recitation in National Drama (Guoju de fasheng yu changnian), Overview of Performance Psychology (Biaoyan xinlixue gainian) and Theatre History of China (Zhongguo xiju shi).
18 The school lasted only three years, leading one scholar to remark that the ‘gezaixi school received lukewarm, even oppressive, treatment from the state’ especially given the ‘wholehearted support’ available for Jingju (Hsieh, Citation2008, p. 198).
19 The underlying presumption is that education must begin at a young age for technical proficiency to be achieved. Indeed, there has never been a performer of any note who began training after puberty. This means the best Western analogy may be ballet. Indeed, the Royal Ballet School (RBS) ‘expanded to include academic studies’ in the 1940s and 1950s, facing the same challenge of providing academic studies and professional training (Craine and Mackrell Citation2010), although while the RBS must provide only secondary education, the NTCPA must provide primary, secondary and post-secondary programmes.
20 Under the danwei system, the place of work has been a basic and decisive factor for many aspects of an employee’s life. The danwei has been drastically weakened in the private sector, but remains important for those who work in the public sector, like most xiqu workers, especially in cities. The danwei system has meant that, relative to Taiwan or the West, there is still much less free agency of creative workers, including theatre actors and directors, most of whom will remain with one theatre company for their entire careers.
21 Kuo-kuang’s most famous Western-inspired work is probably Orlando, a 2009 collaboration with Robert Wilson, but such projects are not uncommon.