Experimental China-Realizing Tradition by Danny Yung, Artistic Director of Zuni Icosahedron, Hong Kong

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Placing the traditional performing arts in a museum is not the best way to preserve them, unless the definition and role of museums and similar cultural organizations are given a complete makeover. The traditional performing arts are living arts, which can only be preserved and fully developed through the creativity of their practitioners. This is the true form of transmission. Currently, the roles and definitions of most museums are too old fashioned, and cannot keep up with the times. What we need are dialectical cultural organizations, which must have an all-encompassing cultural view and a strong sense of purpose.

As an arts worker on the front lines, I started, in the 1990's, noticing and thinking about the relationship between an organization's culture and cultural development, the relationship between a cultural organization and its cultural mission, and of course, the relationship between cultural transmission and hereditary culture. In the more than ten years since, I have started dialogues with individual traditional Chinese opera performance artists, exploring how to transmit and develop the traditional performing arts, to return life to a living art, to renew our understanding of the source and direction of indigenous culture, and how the indigenous cultural establishment molds and recognizes cultural development without self consciousness, while recognizing at the same time, the inherent limitation on the role of the cultural unit in transmitting culture. Given the premise that without exchange there can be no development, we are all seeking to establish a foundation and a method for cultural exchange and creation. Real transmission takes place upon a foundation of wisdom and knowledge, but more importantly, it must allow one generation to connect, communicate and interact with the next generation, so as to provide it with cultural nourishment. Furthermore, real transmission must start with a critique of the system for transmitting culture.

In the mid 1990's, my theatrical group, Zuni Icosahedron, and I began to work with various traditional opera performers, and hold creative workshops. The first participant was the Sichuan Opera performer Tian Mansha. Beginning in 2002, Zuni Icosahedron formally started the "Experimental Tradition" Research and Development Program. Each year a series of stage performances, workshops, discussion groups and seminars were planned, centered on the theme of Chinese traditional opera. We have held activities in Hong Kong, Taipei, Tokyo, Singapore, and Norway. The participants included famous actors from all the eight major schools of Chinese opera, scholars, theater critics, researchers, and organizers from related agencies. As for the schools of opera and the actors, they included Kun Opera's Shi Xiaomei and Ke Jun, Peking Opera's Zhou Long and Wu Xinguo, Sichuan Opera's Tian Man Sha, Yue Opera's Zhao Zhi Hong, Huang Mei Opera's Ma Lan, Qinqiang's Lee Xiaofeng and Zhang Ning, Cantonese Opera's Leung Hon-wai and Hung Hung, and Hebei Bangzi's Peng Huiheng.

The primary purpose of the "Experimental Tradition" Research and Development Program is to provide the conditions for interactive creativeness, allowing our outstanding traditional opera performance artists to first have a deep understanding of the established conventions of each school, then proceeding to bold, dialectic creations that transcend boundaries, while keeping up with the times, keeping pace with society, and becoming pioneers of cultural development and creativity. But one of the ultimate goals of the program is to educate the masses and the next generation to recognize the importance of their "Intangible Cultural Heritage" to modern cultural development, to engender conditions favorable for the transmission of the "Intangible Cultural Heritage", conditions that will further allow the "Intangible Cultural Heritage" to become part of the cultural development of the community.

The "Experimental Tradition" Research and Development Program encourages traditional performance arts practitioners to interact with other frontline cultural workers, and promotes cooperation through interdisciplinary exchange, continuously creating anew a "living cultural" heritage. Zuni Icosahedron has inherited more than a decade of work involving experimenting with and developing Chinese traditional opera, and we plan in the next five years to develop and extend this plan in a more systematic way, organizing a center for "Intangible Cultural Heritage", and expanding the work of the "Experimental Tradition" Program to the traditional arts of other Asia Pacific regions.