The Thinking Through Performance in China workshop, which will be held on 4/12 and 4/13 at 2 Divinity Ave, reconsiders the significance of critical writings about acting, singing, and theatrical performance in China (c.1200–1850). How did artists, intellectuals, and critics reflect on experiences of watching or listening to live performance? How did the act of writing about spectatorship become an artform in and of itself? What might these texts offer for theater and performance studies across the world today? The central question these texts address —namely, “what is the function of Chinese theater?”—has ramifications for students of Chinese history, literature, and thought more broadly.
Theatrical artforms flourished in China from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries. While current scholarship largely focuses on playwriting and surviving play-texts from the Yuan to Qing dynasties, this period also bore witness to a boom in writings about performance, from manuals on aria composition to poems on the operatic voice to epitaphs for actors. Rather than treat these materials (often referred to in Chinese as quhua 曲話, qulun 曲論, or julun 劇論) as supplementary evidence for a general history of playwriting, this workshop approaches the act of writing about performance as a vibrant field of artistic expression. Texts about theatrical performance not only shed new light on the social history of acting during this period, but they also speak to broader issues such as constructions of gender and sexuality, the politics of patronage, the place of allusion, and conceptions of artifice and naturalness in Chinese aesthetic thought. In as much as these texts struggle to document the evanescence of live performance, they also reflect on the purpose and limitations of writing itself.
In general, the workshop will ask what it means to speak of “performance theory” in the premodern Chinese context. At the same time, the workshop seeks to uncover valuable perspectives from premodern China for teachers, students, and practitioners of the performing arts today.
For more information, and for the full schedule, please visit https://sites.harvard.edu/ttpc24/.