Tong Soon Lee’s interesting and informative study of the historical and socio-political dimensions of Chinese street opera in Singapore illustrates one of the classic problems with the modernist approach to folkloristics: the tangled and blurred boundaries between formal and informal cultural practices, between oral and written transmission, and between “elite” and “folk” cultures. For this reason, as well as for its thorough ethnographic account of street opera performance, folklorists and students of folklore can certainly profit from examining this work.
While the book traces the full historical lineage of Chinese street opera practices in Singapore, Lee focuses particularly heavily on the period from 1960 to the present. The main contention of the book is that beginning with this period, the practice of Chinese street opera became particularly entangled with the emerging national identity of Singapore. In the years between 1960 and 1980, for instance, the professional performance of street opera was increasingly devalued by a nationalist rhetoric of economic development. Professional opera performers were stigmatized as practitioners of an outmoded and impractical tradition that stood in opposition to the modernizing program of Singapore as a nation. Interestingly, however, this devaluation also corresponded to the proliferation of amateur opera groups. These opera groups, which were relatively marginal before the 1960s, were subsequently adopted into the official program of multiculturalism and heritage preservation which arose as Singapore’s economic prosperity began to alter its national concerns around 1980. In this capacity, amateur Chinese opera groups served as a palliative to what was increasingly seen as the deleterious effects of Western materialism in Singapore. As the average amateur performer is an educated, white-collar professional, the image of the ideal amateur performer was in line both with the nationalistic vision of an economically prosperous yet non-Western Singaporean population and with the classical Confuscian aesthetic ideal, which values artistic performance only for its own sake.
While aspects of this argument run through all parts of the work, Lee leaves most of the theoretical discussion until the final three chapters. The first chapter sets the stage for the ethnography by laying out the basic historical progression of the genre from 1840–1960, running from its ethnic roots in the early Chinese immigrant communities from Fujian, Guangdong, and Chaozhou to the boom of professional opera as secular entertainment at amusement parks by the middle of the twentieth century. The next two chapters provide detailed historical, ethnographic, and social accounts of professional and amateur opera performers respectively. Each chapter details the contemporary aesthetic practices of each group including detailed descriptions of the composition, adoption, and adaptation of libretto; the rehearsal process; the accompanying instrumentation; the layout of stage space; the various modes of performance and improvisation; and the reception of these performances among audience members.
The fourth chapter, perhaps the most interesting of the book, focuses on problematizing the nationalist image of the decline of professional street opera. Initially, Lee points out that professional troupes have generally moved from their stint as secular popular culture back into their historical role as performers associated both with religious festivals and ethnic identity. However, focusing on a particularly important religious festival produced by the Lorong Koo Chye Sheng Hong Temple, Lee moves on to demonstrate the way in which this contemporary professional performance festival “critiques the notion that professional Chinese opera is a stagnant, even dying tradition in Singapore” (116). This festival period, which has run as long as 109 days and has employed more than fifty different opera troupes, provides a space for professional performers to both engage with and critique the aesthetic principles forwarded by amateur troupes. Although the festival is religious in its origins, its intense focus on opera performance allows professional troupes a rare opportunity to present themselves on a strictly artistic basis, to balance their functional religious value with the aesthetic standard that is typically the domain of amateurs. Other aspects of the festival, however, such as the practice of individual patronage for particular performances or the festive environment that allows for increased audience participation, challenge the staid, “highbrow” practices of amateur troupes.
In the fifth chapter, Lee makes a similar move from general to particular in his treatment of amateur performers. Zeroing in on a particular performance setting, the heritage performances orchestrated by various governmental entities at Clarke Quay, a major tourist zone, Lee skillfully demonstrates the way in which various aspects of these performances and the discourse surrounding them attempt to obliterate Chinese street opera’s historical connections to professional troupes, ethnic identity, local environment, and religious practice. By destroying these historical connections, touristic performances seek to create street opera as a dying traditional form that is preserved by elite amateurs strictly for the purposes of its inherent artistic value as well as its cultural value as a plank in the secular, multicultural platform of Singaporean nationalism.
In his final chapter, Lee summarizes his line of argumentation throughout the book and draws some further connections to anthropological and sociological theory that is relevant, but that does not provide much more insight than his previous chapters. As a capstone, this is perhaps the weakest chapter in the book, but it does not go terribly awry.
For folklorists, this work presents a valuable case study in the historical fluctuation of cultural categories that challenges the notion of inherent artistic value in the same way that Lawrence Levine’s Highbrow/Lowbrow (1988) did for American popular culture. Further, however, Lee’s thorough account of not only the performances themselves but also their production and reception demonstrates, at many points, the continuous interactions of text and performance as well as the permeable boundaries between formal and informal performances. In a sense, this strength of the work stems from what, for folklorists, may also be its greatest weakness: its general disengagement from folklore scholarship. Although the book seems open to an array of work by folklorists, Lee appears to have consulted little folkloristic work on the subject. While this perhaps allows him to avoid some of the pitfalls of the modernist legacy in folkloristics, it certainly seems to be a major omission for a study concerned with cultural expression, not to mention issues of tradition, performance, heritage, authenticity, and nationalism, which have all received extensive treatment in the work of folklorists.
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[Review length: 1035 words • Review posted on August 20, 2009]