The Performance Of The Relationship Between Human And God

As a traditional drama,Baxian Opera has been widely integrated into the activities of the god's festival,existing in various folk operas and is an intangible cultural heritage of Zhejiang.The thesis aims to present a performance of Baxian Opera which differs from the historical records or the performance as an intangible cultural heritage by taking the background of religion activities into account.What's more,by taking Baxian Opera as an entry point,this paper is trying to probe the local communities' understanding of the holy-mortal relationship in this field.The whole research is mainly based on the fieldwork in two temples in Wenling,Taizhou,Zhejiang Province.The thesis is divided into five parts.The first chapter is the preface part,introducing the research subject,related theories and the fieldwork.The second chapter is an overall introduction of a unique believing in Taizhou named “the believing of Baojie”,which enables the continuous performance of Baxian opera.Moreover,this chapter is trying to present the believing environment of Baxian Opera by focusing on the god's festival of a village temple in Wenling.The third chapter shows a real performance of Baxian opera which contains five stereotyped traditional contents in the modern society.The major patron god and the numerous assisting patron gods reflect the diverse needs in real life,which are also internalized in the role of Baxian Opera and the specific librettos which are named ‘Zanci'.And performers would adjust the “Zanci” according to the performance context to enable the traditional contents always meet the modernized secular needs.The forth chapter is a systematic interpretation for the ritual characters of Baxian Operaa s a ritual drama,which can be seen in two aspects,the first is the intermingle of the stage and the altar,and the second is the ritual behavior of performers when they are performing and stimulating the gods.Actually,according to these behaviors,performer not only becomes a witch to communicating gods and men,but also to be a true god to bless the men.The fifth chapter is a compare between the folk and the official performance of Baxian opera,which prominently reflects Baxian opera's rich ritual meaning in folk performance and the importance of the god's festival to maintain it.The last chapter is a summary of the thesis.Above all,the sacrifice ritual and the dinner in the god's festival make the village temple showing the holy-mortal relationship intensively,in which Baxian opera being performed as a gift to intense the holy-moral relationship.On the other hand,the understandings of the holy-moral relationship are internalized in the contents and used to explain it.While if the performance of Baxian Opera was separated from the religion sacrifice activity,and become a program of intangible cultural heritage stage,the meaning of it would be damaged inevitably.By contract,with the existing of annual god's festival,it will always perform the understandings of the holy-moral relationship.