Walking in Place: Theater and City Space in the Early Qing

• In Event: Living Text: Theatre’s Localities in Pre-Twentieth Century China and Japan

Abstract

This talk will consider the relationship of theater to representations of urban public space in the first decades of the Qing. I will begin with examining the representation of urban space in two of Li Yu’s chuanqi plays, Yizhong yuan (Ideal Love Matches), which centers on Hangzhou’s West Lake, and Bimu yu (The Paired Soles), in which two main plotlines dramatize the relationship between public rural theatrical performance and military defense of the empire in Fujian. I then bring these into conversation with representations of the spaces of theatrical performance in this period in other genres, such as notation books, poems, letters, and other occasional genres.
Both plays were written in the early Qing, when the place of theater itself was being reimagined. As Sophie Volpp has shown, plays in this period became items of public performance: thus, even as Yizhong Yuan’s characters dramatized the public urban spaces of Hangzhou, they simultaneously participated in a public (semi-urban?) space that was in the process of changing – precisely through cultural practices such as the performance of plays. Representation of space within these plays was never separable from the historical and political contexts of their crafting and production. As Tina Lu has shown, chuanqi plays frequently “mapped” the imagined worlds of the Qing empire, thus narrating and enacting imperial-patriotism. When plays mapped the rapidly growing urban spaces of their time, they interpellated these into this “map” of empire: producing a certain version of urbanity while encoding it within their aesthetic and performance practices.

Author

• S.E. Kile, University of Michigan