EACS-2016. Book of Abstracts

Cinema, Theater, Performing Arts 21st Biennial Conference of the European Association for Chinese Studies 66 utes of the genre, determined by a technical foundation which is generative of repertoire, which in turn is the vessel and archive of technique. Technique is embodied by actors as well as situated in a corpus of narrative systems, and was historically orally transmitted through disciple-style learning of scenes drawn from these narrative systems. For any given performance, this capital is always subject to the decisions of a creative team which inherits older changes and must make alterations, cuts and additions while negoti- ating the limits perceived to be imposed by “tradition.” The festival program is thus built by mining the capital of the genre for particular iterations of performance tailored to the tastes of the various audiences and the needs of the troupe. Troester Mirjam (Goethe University Frankfurt) Demolishing Neighbourhoods, Establishing Communities of Sentiment: Touring Productions fromTaiwan and Macau in Mainland China Key words: Modern theatre; translocality; demolition; community of sentiment; memory Cityscapes in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and Mainland China have been changing rapidly in the last few decades. The demolition, preservation, or ‘replication’ of built heritage and residential areas, as well as the memories that are associated with these places have been broached in a number of recent touring productions by theatre groups of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau in Mainland China. Theatre is a specifi- cally apt medium to deal with rapid topographical transformation because it is able to embody the stories associated with the respective locales, while the ephemerality of performance itself necessarily reminds all participants of the vanishing character of both the performance and the neighbourhoods in question. Based on examples of productions from Taiwan and Macau that toured Mainland China in the 2000s and 2010s, this paper proposes that the staging of this shared experience of the reshaping of cityscapes facilitates the emergence of translocal 'communities of sentiment' (Appadurai). The plays (re-)create, interrogate, and fragment different ‘lieux de memoire’ (Nora) on stage. These are then set in motion and inserted into dif- ferent contexts of signification on the productions’ tours. The appeal of the plays discussed in this paper to a great extent results from their combination of the familiar with a certain variation in subject matter and, above all, perspective on the part of the touring productions. The plays connect to similar thematic engage- ments with demolition and relocation in Mainland Chinese drama. Besides, they tie in with feelings of loss and nostalgia shared by many city dwellers of the metropolises in question. Simultaneously, however, their translocal journeys also make differences between the localities — especially with regard to emotions associated with the reshaping of the cityscape — palpable. Tsai Hsin-hsin (National Chengchi University) On the Business Struggles of Taiwan gezaixi — Riguang gejutuan’s Post-War Stage Performances Key words: Taiwan xiqu; gezaixi; xiqu economics; xiqu history; xiqu modernisation As Taiwan has changed socially, economically, and politically over the last century, the indigenous xiqu form gezaixi has developed, matured and grown. Rooted historically in the ritual needs of sea- sonal temple festivals, and performed on outdoor stages, gezaixi developed into an indoor theatre/mass media/modern stage performance art as consumer society grew. After the Pacific War, gezaixi entered a second, vibrant phase during which more than 300 troupes were engaged in intense competition for an enthusiastic audience. In 1936, a troupe called Riguang gejutuan was established in Kaohsiung. As the colonial period ended, this troupe developed a composite business practice of diversification, performing everything from improvised theatre to fixed-script plays, incorporating variously live vocal performance to tape accompaniment, from gezaixi sung theatre to song-and-dance performance. In the post-war period, they expanded, establishing their own performance empire, impressing themselves on the history of mass entertainment in Taiwan and becoming representative of post-war Taiwanese gezaixi. Through the collection of photographic images, interviews with artists, audio recordings of