Stage to Page: The Textualizations of Peking Opera from the Nineteenth Century to the Early Twentieth Century

University of Michigan's David Rolston will give a lecture on pre-modern China at Columbia University.

There are hundreds of traditional Chinese theatrical traditions. In some of them, such as Kunju, written texts featured prominently from the beginning (the middle of the Ming dynasty) and plays tended to have known authors, whereas in others, such as Dingxian yangge, plays were not textualized until social scientists came to transcribe them. Even in the case of Kunju, over time actors became more important than playwrights and attention was focused primarily on performance. This privileging of the actor and of performance was especially the case with Peking opera (Jingju), which developed in the nineteenth century and became the predominant form of traditional Chinese theater before that century ended. Over the history of Peking opera, we move from a world in which the circulation of play-scripts that did exist was carefully restricted, to one in which, in the early Republic, they were printed for mass consumption. This talk will trace the various kinds of textualizations of the plays that occurred, along with the factors that shaped their production and consumption.

Professor Rolston specializes in traditional Chinese fiction and theater.  His past research was focused on traditional Chinese criticism of the novel and he is presently working on the cultural history of Peking opera.  He is the editor of How to Read the Chinese Novel (1990) and the author of Traditional Chinese Fiction and Fiction Commentary: Reading and Writing Between the Lines.