Carl Weber 
 
 
     As a special gift to the symposium, Jiang Yunxian had prepared a 
 new, full length performance (though certainly short for Pingtan 
 standards) of the classical Chinese Chalk Circle, the piece which first

 Klabund and later Brecht based their versions on, more or less closely.

 Again the performer's ability to create convincing characterizations of

 the two mothers, the judge, the servants, the dying husband and 
 father, and many others, was remarkable in its combining of mimesis 
 with distancing. The switch from speech to singing, from acting to 
 narrating, from involvement to commenting, was done with such ease 
 and humor that the sheer execution itself provided constant 
 entertainment. And it was especially fascinating to watch how certain 
 codified gestures, like the raising of a folding fan (a threat of great

 weight), the spreading of a handkerchief (presentation of a letter), a 
 lifted palm facing up (serving a meal on a plate),. supported the delicate

 balance between quasi realistic vocal and facial expression of 
 characters, often emphatic delivery of the narration, and distanced, 
 evaluating comment. 
     As Li Jiayao pointed out, if Brecht had seen a Pingtan 
performance, he might have discovered a theatrical model that was 
even closer to his own ideas of an epic-dialectic theatre than Mei Lan- 
fang's demonstration of Peking Opera which he saw in 1935 and 
embraced so warmly in his essay on Chinese theatre. 
 
     Hong Kong is a city with an amazing number of newly built 
playhouses, some of them representing the state of the art in modern 
theatre construction, like the recently completed  Academy for 
Performing Arts (itself a very young institution), combining a theatre of

opera-like proportions and a 500-seat house with a remarkably well 
structured stage/audience relation. And when, after a day of sessions 
and discussions, the conference participants went upstairs from the 
Recital Hall of the Hong Kong Arts Center where the symposium 
convened - the center also has a theatre, plus a small studio stage, on 
its premises - and looked across the harbor, they could see another 
enormous theatre-building going up in Kowloon. One cannot help but 
wonder what all these theatres are for: Hong Kong, a city/country of 
more than 5 million people today, subsidizes only two small 
professional companies and, for two years, the Academy. There is, of 
course, a thriving film industry but indigenous theatre at this time is 
mainly a venue for amateurs, aside from the few traditional Cantonese 
opera companies left which are said to be inferior. When I asked Hong 
Kong theatre people about this phenomenon, the answers boiled down 
to: Hong Kong is interested in profits and how to maximize them; 
buildings have tangible value, a company or a performance do not. On 
the other hand, the administration of the crown colony and local big 
business obviously want to encourage the arts, but they seem to 
believe that production facilities rather than people will bring forth 
creativity. 
     At City Hall Theatre, one of two stages in another fairly recent 
edifice, Hong Kong Repertory Theatre, a company established ten 
years ago by the Urban Council, presented The Resistible Rise of 
 
 
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