From UNESCO to the Stage: Reimagining Kunqu in Twenty-First-Century China

Presentation of a research project as part of the "Jeudis de la Maison Suger", a residents' research seminar.

This session will host Ming Yang, who will present his research on contemporary reinterpretations of Kunqu, a classical Chinese theatrical form listed as part of UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage. Through an analysis of stage practices, transmission processes, and heritage issues, he will demonstrate how this centuries-old art form continues to reinvent itself in 21st-century China.

"Since its recognition by UNESCO in 2001, Kunqu has acquired renewed visibility in Chinese cultural life. Yet its contemporary significance lies not only in its status as intangible cultural heritage, but in the ways it continues to be performed, taught, debated, and reshaped on stage. This talk examines how Kunqu has been reimagined in twenty-first-century China through the interplay of heritage discourse, artistic creation, performance training, and public reception. Drawing on selected productions, I focus on the practical and aesthetic work through which a classical form remains active in the present: the transmission of role-type techniques, the adaptation of traditional skills to new staging contexts, and the negotiation between inherited conventions and contemporary expectations. In this perspective, heritage is not a static designation attached to an already completed object, but a condition under which performance must continue to live through embodied practice. By moving between institutional frameworks and concrete stage examples, the talk considers how Kunqu is positioned today as classical theatre, cultural heritage, educational resource, and contemporary performance practice. The broader aim is to ask what it means for a historically rooted theatrical form to persist in modern cultural life without losing the technical, aesthetic, and performative logics that define it as theatre."

Ming Yang is Assistant Professor at Beijing Foreign Studies University and a research fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS), Leiden (2025–2026). Trained in Asian theatre at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, his research examines xiqu (indigenous Chinese theatre), especially Kunqu, a classical genre, at the intersections of performance analysis, cultural policy, and intangible cultural heritage.