Faces of Tradition in Chinese Performing Arts , livre ebook

FACES OF TRADITION IN CHINESE PERFORMING ARTS
ENCOUNTERS: EXPLORATIONS IN FOLKLORE AND ETHNOMUSICOLOGY
Ray Cashman and Michael Dylan Foster, Editors
A Journal of Folklore Research Book
FACES OF TRADITION IN CHINESE PERFORMING ARTS
Edited by Levi S. Gibbs
Indiana University Press
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ISBN 978-0-253-04583-6 (pbk.)
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Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Faces of Tradition in Chinese Performing Arts / Levi S. Gibbs
1 Grasping Intangible Heritage and Reimagining Inner Mongolia: Folk-Artist Albums and a New Logic for Musical Representation in China / Charlotte D Evelyn
2 Chinese Singing Contests as Sites of Negotiation among Individuals and Traditions / Levi S. Gibbs
3 Dynamic Inheritance: Representative Works and the Authoring of Tradition in Chinese Dance / Emily E. Wilcox
4 Collecting Flowers, Defining a Genre: Zhang Yaxiong and the Anthology of Hua er Folksongs / Sue Tuohy
5 From Field Recordings to Ethnographically Informed CDs: Curating the Sounds of Yunnan for a Niche Foreign Market / Helen Rees
Glossary of Selected Chinese Terms and Phrases
Index
Acknowledgments
F IRST AND FOREMOST, I would like to thank Ray Cashman for his tireless efforts, patience, and insightful feedback throughout the process of seeing this edited volume to fruition. I am also grateful to Janice E. Frisch, Gary Dunham, Rachel Rosolina, and David Miller at Indiana University Press and Pete Feely at Amnet for seeing through the volume s production. Thanks also to Eileen Allen for creating the index. This volume began as a panel that I chaired at the 2013 American Folklore Society Annual Meeting, for which Sue Tuohy generously served as discussant. Thanks to Emily Wilcox for securing permission from Siqintariha for the wonderful cover photo, and to Michael Dylan Foster for providing valuable support early on in the project. Thanks also to Hilary Warner-Evans, Kristina Downs, Marisa Wieneke, and Ray Cashman for their careful editing work and to the anonymous reviewers of the individual chapters for their valuable comments and suggestions. Lastly, I want to thank Helen Rees for patiently providing helpful feedback along the way.
FACES OF TRADITION IN CHINESE PERFORMING ARTS
Introduction
Faces of Tradition in Chinese Performing Arts
Levi S. Gibbs
T RADITIONS ARE NOT static; they constantly adapt past practices to new circumstances (Toelken 1996). While a performance tradition may appear to be a monolithic institution, like a city viewed from an airplane, upon closer inspection one sees the people who inhabit and shape that city. Each performance tradition is populated by individuals who debate what and who belong, how the tradition should develop, and how to represent the tradition as a whole. In an ever-changing world, these artists and scholars choose paths between continuity and change. 1 Their choices revolve around particular areas of cultural production where traditions and individuals interact, such as those explored in this edited volume: CD albums, singing competitions, representative works, textual anthologies, and ethnographic videos. These symbolically powerful sites are where emblematic objects are formed, presented, and critiqued, where artists and scholars seek to traditionalize their performances, collections, and selves, endowing each with a dimension of traditional authority and making their mark on a tradition s landscape (Bauman 2004, 27; cf. Hymes 1975). The works they produce win acclaim, are forgotten, or fall somewhere in between; if individuals and their works do win approval, both may go on to become powerful faces of tradition that transform the topographies of the traditions they represent and provide inspiration for future artists and scholars.
In this edited volume, the authors explore five case studies in which individuals and their creations have become faces of Chinese performance traditions. 2 Rather than concentrating on the hegemony of broad traditions or the creativity of individual variations, we look for a balanced view of the push and pull between continuity and change. By exploring each of our five extended examples, we see how multiple voices meet and play in and around these pivotal discursive sites. When a CD is published or a representative work of Chinese dance is added to the contemporary canon, individual artists and their styles are validated, and yet that validation extends to other individuals as well-choreographers, TV producers, critics, scholars, editors, and so on. In addition, we often see how a bid to traditionalize may lead to a ripple effect of mutually reinforcing outcomes: winning a contest may strengthen an artist s association with a representative work and lead to the production of a CD album, which may then influence how scholars and producers write and organize future anthologies.
What, then, are the benefits of looking at Chinese case studies of performance traditions, and why now? China s opening up following economic reforms in the late 1970s and early 1980s has led to increased access for researchers, and each of the authors in this edited volume has conducted extensive fieldwork there. Through interviews and participant observation, we have come to know many of the players involved and how these traditions have changed over time. As in other places around the world, performance traditions in China are often presented as representing particular territories and ethnic groups, as well as the nation as a whole, and yet each of us has seen firsthand how individuals negotiate the minutiae of steps involved in adapting, performing, interpreting, and representing repertoires and traditions. With the expansion of available media and documentation-newspaper/web articles, TV programs, CD albums, documentaries, and government-funded initiatives to designate and preserve intangible cultural heritage-we can bear witness to a growing number of bids to traditionalize, the dynamics of how each of those bids functions individually, as well as how multiple bids interact and often reinforce one another. 3 In the process of this examination, we gain insight into how individuals and those who surround them continue to negotiate their places in traditions and how those traditions are represented and cultivated.
Our approach fits into an emerging body of literature on the mutual relationship between individuals and traditions-a topic that has gained attention in recent years in the disciplines of ethnomusicology, folklore studies, and dance ethnography. Scholars of China have noted an emergence of the individual in the post-Mao era (Kipnis 2012, 3; cf. Yan 2009), and there have been increasing efforts by Chinese and foreign scholars to look at the role of individuals in performance traditions (cf. Zhang J. 2004; Xiao 2004; Tian 2004; Qiao 2010; Zhang C. 1985; Hung 1993; Stock 1996; Tuohy 2003; Jones 2004, 2007, 2009; Rees 2001, 2009, 2016; Yung 2008; Schein 2010; Gibbs 2018; Wilcox 2019). Similar endeavors have been seen in studies on Japan and South Korea (cf. Howard 2006a, 2006b; Tansman 1996; Hughes 2008), and elsewhere (cf. Danielson 1997).
In what follows, I introduce various approaches to the individual and tradition, together with associated concerns about representation and individual agency, all of which provide a background for a discussion of what I call mechanisms of traditionalization. We hope that our examination of these mechanisms will inspire others to explore similar phenomena in a variety of geographical and temporal contexts. By concentrating on these discursive sites, we may transcend some of the pitfalls involved in focusing solely on traditions or individuals, continuity or innovation, and instead highlight the dynamic push and pull between them.
Approaches to Individuals and Traditions
Although research on any sort of tradition requires contact with at least one individual, in the final textual products, individuals may appear in a range of ways. The spectrum of possibilities extends from descriptions of anonymously populated traditions not dealing at all with individuals to works dealing exclusively with one individual (Ruskin and Rice 2012, 303). While most projects fall somewhere in between-dealing with at least some individuals-different factors may contribute to the visibility or invisibility of individuals in published works. This disparity may be due in part to disciplinary differences-Jonathan Stock and Helen Rees suggest a bifurcated approach in the focus on individuals in musicology and ethnomusicology, whereby the former has historically tended to emphasize biographies verging on hero worship, while the latter has often concentrated on shared musical activities at the expense of individuals (Stock 2001, 7; Rees 2001, 59). 4 Rees and Antoinet Schimmelpenninck point to a similar division they observed in China during the late twentieth century between loca