When the Gong’s Sound Has Fully Faded

A piece of entrance training for Nü Qijie states the requirement in detail: when the actor stops walking, if the resonance of the final gong has not yet fully died away, he must not rush into the next movement. He has to hold the pose, sink the breath, and let the face and expression remain before the audience for a moment; only when the resonance has fully faded does he continue with the next passage of music. No additional conspicuous gesture is added here to remind the audience to wait. The footsteps stop first, the gong sound subsides afterward, and the continuation comes later still. The three moments are very close together, yet they do not collapse into a single point.

The ear prefers a clean timeline. The gongs and drums seem like commands, the actor like a body receiving them: once the sound falls, the movement is complete. But there is also a pair of eyes at the side of the stage. A study written from the performer’s perspective notes that the drummer-in-charge needs to keep his eyes on the actor, and that the speed and pauses of the actor’s movements also become cues for the ensemble. The actor walks toward the place where he will stop, his steps gradually slowing; the drummer-in-charge first watches this deceleration, then watches him stop in place. The feet are no longer moving, but the act of watching has not thereby shifted elsewhere.

The same entrance training also makes another direction very clear: some gong-and-drum patterns should be initiated by the situation of the role; the actor cannot wait for the drummer to set the beat first and then passively add the movement afterward. Sound does not always stand in front of the body. Near the final gong, the relation changes shape again: the actor has already stopped walking, the gong sound is still present, and he maintains the current posture, not snatching his way into the next passage. The before-and-after relation changes with the movement; it does not form a line that can be drawn from beginning to end.

This may very well be nothing more than the accurate execution of a practiced convention. The movements and the gong-and-drum points have long since been rehearsed; perhaps the drummer-in-charge watches the actor only to prevent a familiar sequence from falling out of alignment. The actor does not reinvent this pause every night, and the ensemble is not guessing everything on the spot. This has to be acknowledged, otherwise ordinary and difficult professional mastery is quickly praised once again as improvisatory rapport; we have merely given convention a more pleasing name.

“To follow the convention” is also often imagined as a soundtrack running by itself: one side strikes in sequence, the other side stops in sequence. The real convention is not so effortless. Practice has arranged the place to stop, but it has not slowed the steps of this particular iteration in advance; the gong-and-drum points are already familiar, but there is no pair of pre-rehearsed eyes to finish the looking on behalf of the drummer-in-charge. The rules have not been overturned by the scene, and the scene has not acquired a higher truth. They remain within the same stretch of performance in different forms: one is the already familiar sequence, the other is the body presently slowing before the eyes.

To ask whether the gongs and drums are accompanying, forecasting, or producing the movement is to demand that the stage always provide the same direction. This scene does not. As the actor slows, the drummer-in-charge is watching; when the actor stops, the gong sound is still there; as the gong sound gradually weakens, the body maintains its current posture. The sequence is not confused; it simply has not been compressed into a single point of arrival.

The resonance gradually weakens. It would be very easy here to write an aphorism about stopping, completion, or shared time, but that would once again compress a few seconds into a tidy answer. Onstage, no one stops to explain itself. Once the final gong has fully faded, the actor enters the next passage, and the ensemble continues to play.