A study on the Modernization of Chuanju through the case of "Jinzi"

The modernization of Chinese traditional theatre was processed roughly in two steps in the hitory of People s republic of China. First step was the reformation of Chinese traditional theatre in the 1950s and the second step is the modernistic revisions after the cultural revolution, especially from the end of 20th century until now. Because the Chinese traditional theatre has so many different types and versions according to the dialects and locality, and the study on the Chinese theatre has to be done seperately in every local theatre In this paper, I focused on Chuanju, the local theatre of Sichuan province. It has a longer history then any other kinds of Chinese theatre such as Kunju, Jingju etc., so it has its own characteristics based on its local culture. In Sichuan province, the fertile tradition of religion and folklore was transmitted from generation to generation. So it created its own way of expression.The success of “Jinzi” of Chungqing Chuanjutuan can be induced from the reasons as below. First of all, the text was revised from Cao Yu s “Yuanye” and revised to embody the humanism then the thoughts of revenge of traditional society by the replacement of the hero Qiuhu with heroin Jinzi. Secondly, “Jinzi” is mainly based on the music of “Gaoqiang”, but it applied other sources of music freely to meet the need of the theatre. So the music was very expressive. Especially Gaoqiang has the way of side chorus, which can express the feeling effectively. Thirdly, it makd good use of traditional way of roleplaying and acting. The actor Shen Tiemei who took the role of Jinzi created such a vivid image of Jinzi to make everybody love her. She expressed that in order to create the role, she did research on the psychology of the character deeply and tried to use the traditional way of stylized acting to express the feeling and situation, So she not only inherit and develop the theatrical traditions well, but also created the character well. Forth, “Jinzi” make good use of special feat of traditional Chuanju. Because Sichuan has long history and fertile heritage of religion culture, on the stage of Chuanju we also can watch those wonderful performance of ‘Bainlian(changing masks)’, ‘Changdao(hiding the sword)’ etc. just for the situation. Chuanju “Jinzi” successfully achieved both the general artistic pursue and the distinctiveness of the local theatre. That s why it gains that much applause. It shows us a very good sample of revision from a modern theatre to a traditional form. It shows us a way of creation not only to keep the characteristics of local theatre from the view of cultural diversity and intangible cultural heritage. but also to meet the high standard of the artistic pursue.