Related Papers
Suzhous tanci storytelling in China : contexts of performance
1998 •
mark bender
This paper is a survey of the contexts in which Suzhou tanci is presently performed and re-formed throughout the lower Yangzi delta.3 In emphasizing shifting performance contexts, emergent aspects of form, performance, and reception will be made apparent (cf. Bauman 1977:37), suggesting ways in which Suzhou tanci is in several senses a continuing source of meaning for local audiences and an index of social, economic, and political change. Beginning with a survey of the conventions of Suzhou tanci, the focus of the paper will shift to form, presentation, patronage, repertoire, performers, loci of performance, and audiences. These sections provide several layers of context for the final section, which describes the process of a representative tanci performance in one of Suzhou's most popular story houses.
Oral Tradition
Suzhou Tanci Storytelling in China: Contexts of Performance
1998 •
mark bender
Suzhou tanci, or Suzhou chantefable, is a style of Chinese professional storytelling that combines singing, instrumental music, and a complex mixture of narrative registers and dialogue.1 Popular in towns and cities in Wu-dialect-speaking regions of the prosperous lower Yangzi (Yang- ...
thesisx.pdf
Cathryn Fairlee
A thesis for a Masters Degree in History. It covers the history of professional Chinese storytelling and a specific epic, Pi Wu Lazi, told only in Yangzhou.
Between Accommodation and Resistance: Pingtan Storytelling in 1960s Shanghai
Qiliang He
High Ranking CCP Bureaucrats and Oral Performing Literature: the Case of Chen Yun and Pingtan in the People’s Republic of China
2011 •
Qiliang He
Strengthening Education and Literacy through the Transmission Process of Suzhou Pingtan Chinese Opera in Jiangsu, China
2024 •
IJELS AIAC
Suzhou Pingtan is a traditional Chinese opera originating from Suzhou, Jiangsu Province, known for its melodic tunes, storytelling, and expressive performances. The objective of this study was to explore the transmission process of Suzhou Pingtan Chinese Opera in Jiangsu, China, and its impact on education and literacy. This study utilizes a combination of fieldwork, interviews, and questionnaires as research tools were used to gather data from three key informants, two main informants, and three general informants. The data collected are analyzed through qualitative methods, including content analysis and thematic analysis. The research findings reveal ten main modes of transmission, including the inclusion of Suzhou Pingtan in the national intangible cultural heritage list, the establishment of inheritors, the Suzhou Pingtan Art Festival, the enhancement of performance level and frequency, the development of Suzhou Pingtan School, the establishment of Suzhou Pingtan Museum, the expansion of performance venues, the integration into primary and secondary schools and universities, international transmission, and strong government support. The study suggests the importance of continued support for educational initiatives, the preservation of performance venues, and the cultivation of young audiences to ensure the sustainability and wider appreciation of Suzhou Pingtan.
Music and Letters
Place and Music: Institutions and Cosmopolitanism in 'Shenqu', Shanghai Traditional Local Opera, 19121949
2002 •
Jonathan Stock
Between Business and Bureaucrats: Pingtan Storytelling in Maoist and Post-Maoist China
2010 •
Qiliang He
Contemporary Kunqu Composition
Juliane Jones
Kunqu is an operatic singing style that developed in the town of Kunshan near Suzhou, China in the sixteenth century. Kunqu is currently experiencing a revival in China, but only five professional musicians are actively composing, continuing the tradition of creating kunqu melodies with qupai (preexisting tune structures) for the singing of literary lyrics. This dissertation investigates current practices of kunqu composition with an ethnographic approach that employs a variety of research techniques including: translations of historical and contemporary compositional treatises, participant-observation in composition lessons, formal and informal interviews, as well as analysis of musical scores, sound recordings, and live performances. I theorize kunqu composition as a process of composers’ translating personal and intellectual knowledge of historical Chinese and Western music as well as collective knowledge of the key branches of kunqu theory into performable and audible musical works (introduction). To explain the genre’s musical vocabulary, I describe traditional and contemporary features such as: relationships between linguistic and musical tones, musical modes, qupai, rhythm and meter schemes, and use of musical instruments. I then describe the process of composing an aria from qupai according to contemporary practice (chapter 2). To contextualize kunqu composition, I trace the history of the genre (chapter 3). Then I analyze how two contemporary kunqu composers engage in methods of kunqu composition in their own creative and theoretical ways (chapters 4 and 5). Finally, I explore a musical dialogue between Western and Chinese musical cultures through examining Tan Dun’s version of the kun opera The Peony Pavilion performed at the Metropolitan Museum in 2012 (chapter 6).
CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature 38.2
Storytellers, Sermons, Sales Pitches, and other Deceptive Features of City Life: A Cognitive Approach to Point of View in Chinese Plays
2019 •
Casey Schoenberger
This paper draws on scholarship in performance history, art history, cognitive humanities, and the anthropology of urbanization and markets to argue that theatrical conventions like “fourth wall” illusion and asides first developed in China’s Song-Yuan period and matured in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries under the special influence of new demands of city life, commerce, and print culture. As anthropologists argue that participation in markets requires temporary, imaginative suspension of other roles and identities, so suspension of disbelief in mimetic portrayals (as opposed to storytelling evocations) of fictional characters with fictional minds requires “leaving one’s identity at the theater door.” Song-Yuan Chinese theater, like Japanese Noh of the Muromachi and later periods, accomplished this in a mediated fashion by including star characters to focus on and “spectators’ representative” characters to identify with. Drawing inspiration from the protean, promiscuous space and punning humor of printed miscellanies and annotated vernacular fiction, the late Ming comedy Ge dai xiao 歌代嘯 (A song for a laugh) “flattens” the “asymmetric” (mediated) structure of the traditional Yuan form it takes for its model by stringing together a series of loosely related vignettes featuring buffoonish “side” characters in a generic town setting.
