The Folk And The Nation During The Seventeen-year Opera Reform

During the process of pursuing the modernity, the seventeen-year opera reform has been the greatest impacted and most in-depth cultural practice in China. This paper aims to explore the seventeen-year opera reform by focusing on the relationship between the folk and the nation. With Fujian folk operas as object of investigation, the research further studies in people in the reform, theatre organization and construction of local markets for traditional operas. Through analyzing the complicated relationship among various discourse resources, the study probes into the reasons that the nation went through hesitating, conflicting and finally complete radicalizing when intervening in the traditional operas. The nation discourse came into the folk and replaced folk character with national character, though the adaptation of historical dramas, family dramas and Ghost Operas shows the cracking of the nation discourse and complicated relationships among revolutionary discourse, personal enlightenment discourse and folk discourse. During the seventeen-year opera reform, revolutionary literature and art theory, represented by realism, not only modernize and revolutionize the traditional opera, but also made it a modern and independent category of art—dramatic arts. From traditional opera to dramatic arts, it’s not only about adding some modern elements but restructuring interpersonal relationships in art, concepts and texts concerned. In addition, the-seventeen-year’s opera reform is regarded as the competition between nation-state discourse and folk discourse. However, it doesn’t mean nation-state discourse clarifies the discipline of folk components in one way. Folk components seek their existing forms in a wide range of varieties. Fujian folk operas are complex and diverse, particularly in terms of self-protecting social cultural components of traditional folk operas."Human Transformation" is a systematic process in the-seventeen-year’s opera reform. It swings between the nation and the folk continuously, compromises between folk components and components represented the national will, and finds its place gradually. There are many compromises in the reform between nation components and folk components. However, folk components always have an invisible impact on the constitution and the existence of operas. The revolutionary ideology confronts many difficulties in the process of rebuilding the opera market. To make sure implementing social and cultural ideality into the opera, the existence of strong administrative means and model operas ensures the logic extend of elite discourse to the folks, which is a matter of necessity in the procedure of constructing modern national narrative rather than an exception of the Cultural Revolution.