Stage look

Stage look (banxiang 扮相) refers to how an actor appears onstage in costume and with makeup or face patterns. In one scholar's summary of Mei Lanfang's [Appendix H] account, stage look “conveys a spiritual likeness of nature, life, and emotion, which stimulates the viewer's imagination, not just a formal, or physical, resemblance to them” and is analogous to the image in a painting (Min Tian 1999, 256). The relative independence of xiqu roles from an actor's age and gender is due in part to the fact that stage look is regarded as quite separate from offstage looks. This goes some way to explaining the relative longevity of xiqu careers, since stage youth is not closely tied to performer age.

Body and movement

As numerous performers note in these lectures, movement is often accounted as one of the genre's defining features, partly because kunqu performers are seldom immobile while singing. Student actors first execute movements for years under the supervision of their teachers. Even for mature actors, correct execution relies on sound foundations established in their years of apprenticeship. Basic physical training ( jiben gong 基本功) denotes techniques obtained in early education and training. At a slightly later stage in education, these movements become clearly differentiated by role type.

These movements can be conceived as a series, commonly translated as conventions (chengshi 程式) that “prescribe ways of standing, walking, pointing, looking, as well as a whole battery of physical and facial gestures, combinations and encoded signals” (Hunter Gordon 2016a, 16). Body conventions can be expressed in fixed movements (shenduan 身段), a term that covers “what and how performers act and dance on stage” and is rendered by one scholar as “acting-dancing,” an indication of the absence of any hard line between acting and dancing in the genre ( Joseph Lam 2017, 86). Such conventions serve to accompany, illustrate, or interpret the words being sung. Movements large and small are often summed up as the four skills (chang nian zuo da 唱念做打)—singing, stage speech [Appendix C], gesture, acrobatics—and the five channels (shou yan shen fa bu 手眼身法步)—movements and execution ( fa 法) of hands (shou 手), eyes ( yan 眼), body or torso (shen 身), and gait (bu 步).