Abstract:
This talk will trace the spread of Chinese ritual opera from Southeast China to Southeast Asia, focusing on a case study of the performance of Mulian Saves His Mother in 2024 at the Kew Lee Tong in Singapore. Ritual opera is performed during village temple offering sacrifices (jiao) and by Taoist ritual masters during requiem services. Specialized ritual operas (or marionette plays) tell the story of the God of Theatre Tiangong Yuanshuai during rituals to repay vows (Yuanxi) while others tell the stories of the goddess Chen Jinggu, protector of children from smallpox and measles. The Mulian plays were performed in some form already in the Song dynasty. Versions spread across China, entering many regional opera repertoires. Great performances of Mulian Saves his Mother were enacted in the Qing court on three-tiered stages. The Xinghua (Putian and Xianyou) version was transmitted to Singapore by migrants from those regions. Since 1954, the ritual opera has been performed once every ten years at the Kew Lee Tong. The talk will introduce Prof. Yung Sai-Shing’s digital archive of the 1994 performance, and discuss the significance of the continuation of these ritual opera performances in the context of contemporary local (and translocal) Chinese religion.

Speaker bio:
Prof Kenneth Dean is Kwan Im Thong Hood Cho Temple Professor in the Humanities Division at Yale-NUS College, and Professor at Department of Chinese Studies, NUS. He has been Cluster Leader of the Religion and Globalisation Cluster at ARI since January 2015, on an 8-year joint appointment as Professor with the Religion and Globalisation Cluster, Inter-Asia Engagements Cluster, and the NUS Department of Chinese Studies.

He received his PhD and MA in Chinese from Stanford University. His recent publications include Epigraphical Materials on the History of Religion in Fujian: Zhanghou Region (Fuzhou 2019), Secularism in South, East, and Southeast Asia (NY: Palgrave, 2018), co-edited with Peter van der Veer, and Chinese Epigraphy of Singapore: 1819-1911 (2 vols.) (Singapore: NUS Press, 2017), co-edited with Dr Hue Guan Thye. He also directed Bored in Heaven: A Film about Ritual Sensation (2010), on celebrations around Chinese New Year in Putian, Fujian, China. His other publications include Ritual Alliances of the Putian Plain, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 2010) (with Zheng Zhenman). His current project involves the construction of two interactive, multi-media databases, Singapore Historical GIS (SHGIS) and Singapore Biographical Database (SBDB). These projects may be viewed online at http://shgis.nus.edu.sg and http://sbdb.nus.edu.sg

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The screening will take place at the Kin-ku Cheng Lecture Theatre, Oxford China Centre.