Pub Date : 2024-07-01DOI: 10.1353/cop.2024.a932321
Vibeke Børdahl
{"title":"In Memory of Fei Li (1931–2022): A Yangzhou Storyteller and Scholar of Yangzhou Pinghua","authors":"Vibeke Børdahl","doi":"10.1353/cop.2024.a932321","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cop.2024.a932321","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":502367,"journal":{"name":"CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature","volume":"5 8","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141698423","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-07-01DOI: 10.1353/cop.2024.a932319
Hanyang Jiang
Abstract: This paper tracks the formation of a voice training program at the Central Academy of Drama (CAD) in Beijing. Informed by the rules of acoustic decorum and Mao Zedong’s “national, scientific, and popular” formulation of socialist culture, phoneticians, repetiteurs, spoken drama ( huaju ) celebrities, and folk artists made common cause to explore vocal pedagogy. The program was embedded in the evolving intellectual landscape of modern China, in which a premium was put on a unified spoken standard and the folk tradition of oral performance was transvalued through scientific lenses. My paper begins with an in-depth study of a 1954 pronouncement made by the CAD president, Ouyang Yuqian, the architect of the program who enjoined huaju actors to learn rhyming and singing. I then proceed to examine a 1957 Symposium on Voice Pedagogy ( Taicike jiaoxue zuotanhui ) convened at the CAD. As a consequence, a four-year curriculum was drawn up, while a twin-track approach to training that combined the domains of diction and vocal production was settled on. After limning the given circumstances, I offer close readings of two mimeographed textbooks tailor-made for the CAD student actors, which address orthoepy (zhengyin) and vocal production (fasheng), respectively. Through musical and phonological analyses, I demonstrate how the voice of a student actor could be instrumentalized after training. Such an instrumentalized voice could in turn serve the theatrical purposes of experiencing and embodying dramatic characters.
{"title":"Acoustic Decorum and the Materiality of Stage Speech: Voice Training at the Central Academy of Drama in Beijing, 1953–1961","authors":"Hanyang Jiang","doi":"10.1353/cop.2024.a932319","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cop.2024.a932319","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: This paper tracks the formation of a voice training program at the Central Academy of Drama (CAD) in Beijing. Informed by the rules of acoustic decorum and Mao Zedong’s “national, scientific, and popular” formulation of socialist culture, phoneticians, repetiteurs, spoken drama ( huaju ) celebrities, and folk artists made common cause to explore vocal pedagogy. The program was embedded in the evolving intellectual landscape of modern China, in which a premium was put on a unified spoken standard and the folk tradition of oral performance was transvalued through scientific lenses. My paper begins with an in-depth study of a 1954 pronouncement made by the CAD president, Ouyang Yuqian, the architect of the program who enjoined huaju actors to learn rhyming and singing. I then proceed to examine a 1957 Symposium on Voice Pedagogy ( Taicike jiaoxue zuotanhui ) convened at the CAD. As a consequence, a four-year curriculum was drawn up, while a twin-track approach to training that combined the domains of diction and vocal production was settled on. After limning the given circumstances, I offer close readings of two mimeographed textbooks tailor-made for the CAD student actors, which address orthoepy (zhengyin) and vocal production (fasheng), respectively. Through musical and phonological analyses, I demonstrate how the voice of a student actor could be instrumentalized after training. Such an instrumentalized voice could in turn serve the theatrical purposes of experiencing and embodying dramatic characters.","PeriodicalId":502367,"journal":{"name":"CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature","volume":"38 6","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141716069","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-07-01DOI: 10.1353/cop.2024.a932320
Canaan Morse
Abstract: This paper documents a recently published, six-volume series of books entitled Pingshu Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Pingshu Sanguo yanyi 評書三國演義), an edited transcription of pingshu storyteller Lian Liru’s 連麗如ongoing performance of the traditional tale, adapted for the page by her senior disciple, pingshu performer and editor Liang Yan 梁彥. The text of the series merges the narrative worlds of traditional oral storytelling and print media in several fascinating ways, including by attaching a QR code to every chapter that allows users to read while listening to the original performance while they read. Textual analysis supplemented by interviews reveals how the creators used print narrative techniques to recreate the receptive context of oral performance and enable a mode of reading I term “reading as reliving.” A further discovery, that they modeled the project after a precedent—serialized pingshu publication in Republican-era periodicals—demonstrates how written text and oral performance in China have continued to exist symbiotically and how even a badge of hyper-modernity like a QR code can be seen as part of a tradition of oral performers utilizing media revolutions to their art’s advantage.
{"title":"Reading as Reliving: The Multimedia Pingshu Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Its Republican-Era Ancestors","authors":"Canaan Morse","doi":"10.1353/cop.2024.a932320","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cop.2024.a932320","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: This paper documents a recently published, six-volume series of books entitled Pingshu Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Pingshu Sanguo yanyi 評書三國演義), an edited transcription of pingshu storyteller Lian Liru’s 連麗如ongoing performance of the traditional tale, adapted for the page by her senior disciple, pingshu performer and editor Liang Yan 梁彥. The text of the series merges the narrative worlds of traditional oral storytelling and print media in several fascinating ways, including by attaching a QR code to every chapter that allows users to read while listening to the original performance while they read. Textual analysis supplemented by interviews reveals how the creators used print narrative techniques to recreate the receptive context of oral performance and enable a mode of reading I term “reading as reliving.” A further discovery, that they modeled the project after a precedent—serialized pingshu publication in Republican-era periodicals—demonstrates how written text and oral performance in China have continued to exist symbiotically and how even a badge of hyper-modernity like a QR code can be seen as part of a tradition of oral performers utilizing media revolutions to their art’s advantage.","PeriodicalId":502367,"journal":{"name":"CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature","volume":"86 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141699313","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-07-01DOI: 10.1353/cop.2024.a932318
Qiliang He, Lily Xiangxiang Jiang
Abstract: In the first two decades of the People’s Republic of China (PRC; 1949–present), the filmmakers were caught in a dilemma between a fast-growing film industry and Chinese moviegoers’ pervasive lack of cinematic literacy, that is, a proper understanding of cinematic techniques, such as the use of shots in films. To make motion pictures a mass culture by enhancing cinematic literacy among Chinese viewers, filmmakers produced over one hundred opera films—a filmic genre that resorts to cinematic techniques to represent Chinese theater on the silver screen. Considering Chinese audiences’ familiarity with China’s operatic arts, such as singing and music, filmmakers in post1949 China deftly synchronized close-up shots with operatic music/singing in opera films to highlight characters’ heightened emotions and thereby popularize a filmic mode of narration and presentation. This paper argues that close and close-up shots provided an avenue for a transition from stage to screen as a chief means of entertainment and a widely accepted mode of representation in the early years of the PRC.
{"title":"The Aural/Visual Synchrony: Opera Film, Close-up, and Cinematic Literacy in Mao-era China (1949–1966)","authors":"Qiliang He, Lily Xiangxiang Jiang","doi":"10.1353/cop.2024.a932318","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cop.2024.a932318","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: In the first two decades of the People’s Republic of China (PRC; 1949–present), the filmmakers were caught in a dilemma between a fast-growing film industry and Chinese moviegoers’ pervasive lack of cinematic literacy, that is, a proper understanding of cinematic techniques, such as the use of shots in films. To make motion pictures a mass culture by enhancing cinematic literacy among Chinese viewers, filmmakers produced over one hundred opera films—a filmic genre that resorts to cinematic techniques to represent Chinese theater on the silver screen. Considering Chinese audiences’ familiarity with China’s operatic arts, such as singing and music, filmmakers in post1949 China deftly synchronized close-up shots with operatic music/singing in opera films to highlight characters’ heightened emotions and thereby popularize a filmic mode of narration and presentation. This paper argues that close and close-up shots provided an avenue for a transition from stage to screen as a chief means of entertainment and a widely accepted mode of representation in the early years of the PRC.","PeriodicalId":502367,"journal":{"name":"CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature","volume":"5 11","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141701298","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-07-01DOI: 10.1353/cop.2024.a932322
Fan Pen Chen
{"title":"The Stage in the Temple: Ritual Opera in Village Shanxi by David Johnson (review)","authors":"Fan Pen Chen","doi":"10.1353/cop.2024.a932322","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cop.2024.a932322","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":502367,"journal":{"name":"CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature","volume":"7 5","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141689189","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-11-02DOI: 10.1353/cop.2023.a910841
Jingyi Zhang
Abstract:Bright Sheng’s opera Dream of the Red Chamber, based on the eighteenth-century novel Honglou meng, premiered at the San Francisco Opera (SF Opera) in September 2016 and, by the end of 2017, had been performed in Hong Kong, Beijing, Changsha, and Wuhan. Ticket sales and reviews were so strong that in 2022, the production was revived—a first for a piece commissioned by the SF Opera. This phenomenal success occurred despite the difficulty of condensing a 120-chapter novel that most Americans have probably never heard of into a three-hour Western opera. In San Francisco, the production had to be both accessible to newcomers to the novel and not offend die-hard fans of this famous Chinese work. After introducing the opera, I discuss how Sheng created cross-cultural music by putting Western and Chinese elements in confluence with each other, evident in his use of both Béla Bartók’s The Miraculous Mandarin and Chinese folk and literati music. Regarding the latter, Sheng and his creative team further rethought the role of the musical instrument most closely associated with the literati, the qin-zither, in the story. I hope to give readers critical insight into some representative challenges and opportunities faced by the production, and provide a better basis for evaluating its accomplishments.
{"title":"Creating A Honglou Meng for Twenty-First-Century San Francisco: Musical Confluence in Bright Sheng’s Opera, Dream of the Red Chamber(2016–2022)","authors":"Jingyi Zhang","doi":"10.1353/cop.2023.a910841","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cop.2023.a910841","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Bright Sheng’s opera Dream of the Red Chamber, based on the eighteenth-century novel Honglou meng, premiered at the San Francisco Opera (SF Opera) in September 2016 and, by the end of 2017, had been performed in Hong Kong, Beijing, Changsha, and Wuhan. Ticket sales and reviews were so strong that in 2022, the production was revived—a first for a piece commissioned by the SF Opera. This phenomenal success occurred despite the difficulty of condensing a 120-chapter novel that most Americans have probably never heard of into a three-hour Western opera. In San Francisco, the production had to be both accessible to newcomers to the novel and not offend die-hard fans of this famous Chinese work. After introducing the opera, I discuss how Sheng created cross-cultural music by putting Western and Chinese elements in confluence with each other, evident in his use of both Béla Bartók’s The Miraculous Mandarin and Chinese folk and literati music. Regarding the latter, Sheng and his creative team further rethought the role of the musical instrument most closely associated with the literati, the qin-zither, in the story. I hope to give readers critical insight into some representative challenges and opportunities faced by the production, and provide a better basis for evaluating its accomplishments.","PeriodicalId":502367,"journal":{"name":"CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature","volume":"1 1","pages":"165 - 191"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139290787","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-11-02DOI: 10.1353/cop.2023.a910842
Shu-Chu Wei, C. Swatek
{"title":"Baihua Ting 百花亭(The Pavilion of One Hundred Flowers), An Anonymous Zaju Play, Part Ii","authors":"Shu-Chu Wei, C. Swatek","doi":"10.1353/cop.2023.a910842","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cop.2023.a910842","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":502367,"journal":{"name":"CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature","volume":"20 1","pages":"192 - 214"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139290669","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-11-02DOI: 10.1353/cop.2023.a910839
Tianjun Chen
Abstract:This paper explores the circulation, recension, and reception of the story of Shuang Jian and Su Xiaoqing. This understudied story is one of the three most popular stories of the Song, Jin, and Yuan periods, appearing in zhugongdiao, zaju, and sanqu. The variations in how Yuan sanqu writers narrated, appropriated, and interpreted the story reveal three ways of portraying Su Xiaoqing: as a virtuous, victimized courtesan who mirrors her scholarly lover; as a gold digger who chooses wealth over talent; or as the primary agent who dominates all of her relationships. The juxtaposition and interconnectedness of these narrative systems manifest the flexibility and inclusiveness of the textual space of the Yuan and the distinctiveness of sanqu as an independent literary genre.
{"title":"Emotion, Money, and Beauty: Variation and Innovation in the Story of Shuang Jian and Su Xiaoqing","authors":"Tianjun Chen","doi":"10.1353/cop.2023.a910839","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cop.2023.a910839","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This paper explores the circulation, recension, and reception of the story of Shuang Jian and Su Xiaoqing. This understudied story is one of the three most popular stories of the Song, Jin, and Yuan periods, appearing in zhugongdiao, zaju, and sanqu. The variations in how Yuan sanqu writers narrated, appropriated, and interpreted the story reveal three ways of portraying Su Xiaoqing: as a virtuous, victimized courtesan who mirrors her scholarly lover; as a gold digger who chooses wealth over talent; or as the primary agent who dominates all of her relationships. The juxtaposition and interconnectedness of these narrative systems manifest the flexibility and inclusiveness of the textual space of the Yuan and the distinctiveness of sanqu as an independent literary genre.","PeriodicalId":502367,"journal":{"name":"CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature","volume":"15 1","pages":"129 - 99"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139290580","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-11-02DOI: 10.1353/cop.2023.a910840
Susanna Sun
Abstract:A major work of the renowned director Xie Jin, the 1964 film Two Stage Sisters (Wutai jiemei 舞台姐妹) has received popular reception and critical acclaim both domestically and internationally. Existing scholarship has interpreted Two Stage Sisters primarily through the film analysis methodology, which overlooks the critical component of the film’s aesthetics—the Chinese Yue opera performance. My analysis will shed new light on the film’s depiction of Yue opera actresses by examining details of Yue opera performances and their intermedial interactions with the film. Examination of the “drama-within-drama” device in Two Stage Sisters—in which several excerpted opera segments are inserted into the film’s narrative—reveals that it serves both political and humanistic purposes. Drawing on my fifteen years of personal experience with Yue opera theater, I analyze the film through a new methodological approach that takes into account the film’s transmedial and multimedia connections with the operatic lyrics, singing, music, costume, and movement. This paper invites a rereading of Two Stage Sisters by presenting an original decoding of four Yue opera segments, particularly regarding the parallels and tensions between the onstage opera world and the off-stage film narrative. I demonstrate that each opera segment directly matches one step in the four-step framework of “escape → anger → half-awakened → awakened” identified by Wang Hui as the construction trajectory of female protagonist Zhu Chunhua’s revolutionary subjectivity. In this, I hold that all the Yue opera segments are carefully chosen and crafted into the film holistically to bear meaning and purpose, both in relationship with each other and in relationship to the overall film narrative. I will argue that the selected opera segments serve three central purposes in Two Stage Sisters. First, they externalize Chunhua’s interiority in her becoming a revolutionary subject. Second, they showcase the historical transformation of Yue opera theater. Third, rather than posing a stark disconnect, the premodern opera segments speak to and connect with the historicity and sufferings of women depicted in the last two modern segments, thus integrating gender and collective consciousness into the overarching revolutionary discourse. Overall, this paper uncovers the unacknowledged subtleties and richness of the film owing to the Yue opera segments.
{"title":"Becoming Awakened: Four Yue Opera Segments in Xie Jin’s Two Stage Sisters","authors":"Susanna Sun","doi":"10.1353/cop.2023.a910840","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cop.2023.a910840","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:A major work of the renowned director Xie Jin, the 1964 film Two Stage Sisters (Wutai jiemei 舞台姐妹) has received popular reception and critical acclaim both domestically and internationally. Existing scholarship has interpreted Two Stage Sisters primarily through the film analysis methodology, which overlooks the critical component of the film’s aesthetics—the Chinese Yue opera performance. My analysis will shed new light on the film’s depiction of Yue opera actresses by examining details of Yue opera performances and their intermedial interactions with the film. Examination of the “drama-within-drama” device in Two Stage Sisters—in which several excerpted opera segments are inserted into the film’s narrative—reveals that it serves both political and humanistic purposes. Drawing on my fifteen years of personal experience with Yue opera theater, I analyze the film through a new methodological approach that takes into account the film’s transmedial and multimedia connections with the operatic lyrics, singing, music, costume, and movement. This paper invites a rereading of Two Stage Sisters by presenting an original decoding of four Yue opera segments, particularly regarding the parallels and tensions between the onstage opera world and the off-stage film narrative. I demonstrate that each opera segment directly matches one step in the four-step framework of “escape → anger → half-awakened → awakened” identified by Wang Hui as the construction trajectory of female protagonist Zhu Chunhua’s revolutionary subjectivity. In this, I hold that all the Yue opera segments are carefully chosen and crafted into the film holistically to bear meaning and purpose, both in relationship with each other and in relationship to the overall film narrative. I will argue that the selected opera segments serve three central purposes in Two Stage Sisters. First, they externalize Chunhua’s interiority in her becoming a revolutionary subject. Second, they showcase the historical transformation of Yue opera theater. Third, rather than posing a stark disconnect, the premodern opera segments speak to and connect with the historicity and sufferings of women depicted in the last two modern segments, thus integrating gender and collective consciousness into the overarching revolutionary discourse. Overall, this paper uncovers the unacknowledged subtleties and richness of the film owing to the Yue opera segments.","PeriodicalId":502367,"journal":{"name":"CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature","volume":"27 1","pages":"130 - 164"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139290840","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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