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Abstract

This paper is a reflective study of the researches on Song-Yuan drama's essence and existence done in the past century. It tries to define what Song-Yuan drama really is, and demonstrate how it is put on the stage and why it is staged in such a certain way. These issues have been tackled in Wang Guowei's Song-Yuan Drama History but have not been clarified since, so they have met with much misinterpretation. Three types of reasons lie behind the misinterpretation, and this has become the conundrum in the study of Chinese opera history. The first type proposes that Wang defined Chinese Song-Yuan opera as drama, song text, or writing. The second, which adopts Western theater theory to explain Chinese opera, does not distinguish between drama and opera, and therefore the genesis of Chinese drama and that of Chinese opera are indiscriminately studied. The third type of scholars usually share a view of speech-impersonation with Wang Guo-wei who claimed that Chinese opera should perform in such a way as to integrate speech, action, and singing into the story-telling. These scholars usually take Chinese opera as a composite art form instead of taking it as an art alive in the theatre. Scholar are accustomed to textual, static and planar approaches instead of dynamic and multi-dimensional ones. The paper proposes that the study of Chinese opera should return to the site of performance in order to investigate its nature of existence, focusing on "how to perform," and with this focus the study can then examine the confluence of horizons and symbiosis between dramatists, actors, characters, roles, and audience, and the analysis of the meaning, function and discursive modes of dramatic text can be possible, while the who, how and why in the performance can be revealed in the context of theatric communication.

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