Friday, April 25, 2008

Getai and the fashioning of Cultural Aesthetics

So after ditching my last paper proposal, it took me a long time to find a new topic that may be viable. I've done some research, and became interested in the phenomenon of Chinese Opera in Singapore, and its close relationship to the making of shared cultural identity. Chinese Opera - essentially a diasporic form of ritual performance - has existed in Singapore since the prewar years. In the postwar years, however, a strong government-led impulse towards the construction of multicultural identity led to the privileging of amatuer opera troupes over professional ones, in a phenomenon described as the "secularization" (or, in my view, the museumification) of Chinese Street Opera as cultural heritage. The privileging of 'amateur' opera groups can be linked to the cultivation of National Cultural aesthetic that emphasizes the 'indoor' performance over 'outdoor', and the 'secular' "distanced" aesthetic over the religious/ritualistic one. But in the recent years, Chinese Opera has seen a marked decay, in preferance of a "modernized" version of Opera known as "Getai", which translates literally into song-stage. This paper will attempt to discuss the rise of Getai and the relative unpopularity of Chinese Opera as not 'surface' events bearing directly upon each other, but symptoms of a continuosly evolving National cultural aesthetic that can be characterized as moving towards the performance of simulacrum and form as heritage.

Sounds good?

2 comments:

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