Tracing the reconfiguration of performance ecology in Quanfeng Huadeng: an ethnographic study of heritage governance, agency, and participation.

INTRODUCTION: Quanfeng Huadeng, a small-scale folk opera from Xiushui County, Jiangxi Province, has historically been embedded in rural festival life through singing, dance, lantern display, comic narration, local dialect, and close audience-performer interaction. Since its inscription on China's National Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2006, Huadeng has increasingly moved from flexible village-based performance contexts toward curated, staged, and institutionally organized forms of cultural presentation. This study examines how this transition has reconfigured its performance ecology, understood as the interdependent system of temporal rhythm, spatial arrangement, performer composition, aesthetic orientation, and participatory relations through which performance becomes socially meaningful. METHODS: The study drew on phased ethnographic engagement in Quanfeng Township between 2021 and 2026, with principal evidence obtained through formal doctoral fieldwork conducted in 2025. Data included participant observation, semi-structured interviews with 21 core participants, approximately 30 brief audience interviews, group conversations and immediate audience feedback records, documentary materials, visual evidence, and audio-visual records. Analysis involved iterative thematic coding and triangulation across interviews, field notes, policy and archival materials, photographs, and performance recordings. RESULTS: Findings were organized around four interrelated dimensions: rhythm, spatial form, performer composition, and aesthetic orientation. Heritage governance brought visibility, resources, and new transmission opportunities, but also introduced fixed performance durations, staged spatial separation, managed performer organization, and visually oriented aesthetic criteria. These transformations reorganized the conditions through which improvisation, community knowledge, audience interaction, situated engagement, and practitioner agency were enacted. DISCUSSION: By bringing structuration theory into dialogue with cultural and ecological psychology, the study conceptualizes performance ecology transformation as a case-based analytical tool for examining how institutional rules and resources are negotiated within lived performance practice. Sustainable safeguarding should protect not only repertoire and visible form, but also the social, spatial, temporal, and participatory conditions that allow living heritage to remain locally meaningful.