A Hong Kong Effort to Save Traditional Kunqu Opera

Hong Kong – “Without visiting this garden,” a beautiful woman resplendent in a Ming Dynasty robe, sings. “How could I ever have realized this splendour of spring?”

Her walk is graceful; the words she sings are poetic. Although she is on a bare stage with little scenery, her voice and gestures ignite the imagination of the audience. They hold their breath and follow as she points to the imaginary green hillside, the red azalea, the thread of sweetbriar and the peony.

This is the last day of the Shanghai Kunqu Opera’s five-day performance at the Hong Kong Cultural Centre. In the audience, Cheung Lai-chun applauds. She has watched every performance.

Cheung is not an ordinary member of the audience She not only knows every play on the stage, she is also an active promoter of this almost extinct form of Chinese opera.

The Mother of a Hundred Operas

Boasting a history of six hundred years and known as the “mother” of a hundred operas, Kunqu’s fate in modern China has been full of ups and downs. It became almost extinct in the 1940s. After a short revival in the 1950s it was neglected for about 40 years on the Chinese mainland. By 2001 there were about 800 Kunqu actors left; they called themselves the “800 martyrs”.

But Kunqu supporters in Hong Kong meanwhile became enthusiastic connoisseurs of this most refined type of Chinese theatre. They have helped to keep it alive.

The development of Kunqu in the 16th century marked the beginning of traditional Chinese theatre, from which all other forms performed today evolved. Kun refers to the Kunshan district near Suzhou where it originated. Qu means “music”. Kunqu is a synthesis of drama, opera, ballet, poetry and musical recital.

It remains the most refined and literary of all forms of Chinese theatre, but its refinement has tended to distance it from the general audience of the modern day. Peking opera, which retains many features of Kunqu opera but is much less refined and literary, begun to supersede Kunqu as the opera of the country by the middle of the 18th century. To most audiences today, the acrobatic movements in Peking Opera are much more attractive than the poetic libretto of Kunqu.

But the most devastating blow to Kunqu came between 1966 and 1976, during Mao Tse-tung’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. During that time, anything but “Mao Tse-tung thought” was considered old and obsolete, including traditional Chinese art forms. Opera, such as Kunqu, was labelled an old and bourgeois “poisonous weed” which would corrupt the masses. No training or performing was permitted. Kunqu lost both its performers and audiences on the mainland.

“Is it some local theatre from Kunming in Yunnan?”

Thirty years after the Cultural Revolution, when a TV programme asked people on the street what Kunqu was, eight out of 10 people looked puzzled and made a wild guess. “Is it some local theatre from Kunming in Yunnan?” one person asked.

Fortunately for Kunqu, Hong Kong was insulated from the Cultural Revolution, and it has people like Cheung Lai-chun. She got to know the art form in the 1980s through a Kunqu master who came to Hong Kong when there were no performances being staged on the mainland. An arts graduate from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Cheung said she immediately fell in love with Kunqu. “It’s just too beautiful,” she says.

For more than 20 years, Cheung has been learning and promoting Kunqu, both on the mainland and in Hong Kong. To learn Kunqu herself, she has paid visits to the surviving masters of Kunqu in Nanjing, Hangzhou and Beijing. She calls those masters “pandas,” as they are so rare today.

But to preserve and promote Kunqu is a much more complex task.

Cheung recalled a time in the early 1990s when Hong Kong Kunqu supporters paid a visit to the Shanghai Kunqu Theatre, and the bleak scene struck them all. “No performance was scheduled at the theater because no one wanted to watch,” she said. “We had to book the whole theatre to watch a performance. To our dismay, even when we gave out free tickets and invited people to come in, no one was interested.”

“I’m so nervous because I haven’t played it for so long,” — Ji Zhenhua

As for the performers, Cheung said they were given a small salary but “no one cared about their life or death.” Many left to become utility actors for TV dramas. Those who were devoted to the art stayed, but had few opportunities to perform.

Cheung said that one time they were very surprised to see the famous actor Ji Zhenhua smoking heavily before a performance started.

“I cannot help it. I’m so nervous because I haven’t played it for so long,” Ji told them.

The Hong Kong Institute for the Promotion of Chinese Culture, where Cheung has worked as volunteer for more than 20 years, started in 1987 to record the masters’ performances to preserve Kunqu. They were worried that if this handful of masters passed away, Kunqu would be extinguished forever. They also invited Kunqu troupes to perform in Hong Kong. These Hong Kong performances eventually became routine events for Kunqu troupes.

Through the efforts of supporters all over the world, Kunqu was listed as one of the Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO in 2001. This changed the dire situation of Kunqu. But new problems arose.

The founding director of Hong Kong City University’s Chinese Civilization Centre, Professor Cheng Pei Kai, witnessed the problems in the mainland government’s rediscovering of Kunqu.

The mainland government has a special fund to rescue Kunqu, but the authorities prefer to fund new plays and often refuse to fund traditional plays, which they think are old and not creative, he said.

Even though these classical plays are examples of refined literature, their number of classical plays being performed has been reduced from over 500 to about 100 in the past 80 years.

“What they want is new plays and grand performances to show that they have achieved something in preserving the culture,” Cheng said.

While the central government harbours ambitious plans to publish a Kunqu encyclopedia and promote new plays, the Civilization Center has more modest aims.

It is trying to preserve Kunqu in what Cheng called “a common sense way.” The centre has invited surviving masters to record and explain how and why they perform in every play. “Kunqu is a performing art, not dead words in the books. We record these for the generations to come as a reference,” Cheng said.

Renowned Kunqu actress Liang Guyin was invited to Hong Kong three times in 2009. That inspired her to relocate to Hong Kong where she will lecture about Kunqu and perform her art over the next two months. “Hong Kong supporters have been making a tremendous contribution to Kunqu,” she said.