CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature最新文献

{"title":"Staging Revolution: Artistry and Aesthetics in Model Beijing Opera During the Cultural Revolution","authors":"Megan Ammirati","doi":"10.1080/01937774.2019.1574699","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01937774.2019.1574699","url":null,"abstract":"English-language scholarship concerning China’s Model Revolutionary Works (geming yangbanxi 革命样板戏) has struggled with the lingering influence of the Cold War for decades. The theater that was elevated during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) has often been evaluated in terms of its association with the state and ability to disseminate the message of the Chinese Communist Party to its audiences. While this perspective is valuable in describing what was quite clearly propagandistic performance, Staging Revolution: Artistry and Aesthetics in Model Beijing Opera during the Cultural Revolution by Xing Fan makes a critical contribution by proposing that model Beijing Operas (Jingju京剧) should also be appreciated from the perspective of their aesthetic accomplishments. As Fan so adroitly points out, research that solely emphasizes the political aspects of model works","PeriodicalId":37726,"journal":{"name":"CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature","volume":"8 1","pages":"178 - 181"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76310909","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}

{"title":"In Memory of Oldřich Král","authors":"L. Olivová","doi":"10.1080/01937774.2019.1596056","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01937774.2019.1596056","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":37726,"journal":{"name":"CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature","volume":"49 1","pages":"190 - 191"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74570691","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}

{"title":"Research Note: Nordahl Grieg and Mei Lanfang: Truth of Observation or “Truth” of a Creative Memory?","authors":"Vibeke Børdahl","doi":"10.1080/01937774.2019.1592635","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01937774.2019.1592635","url":null,"abstract":"In 1927, the well-known Norwegian author Nordahl Grieg (1902–1943) traveled to China. Not long after his return he published an essay on Mei Lanfang (1894–1961). In this evocative essay he offered an enchanting description of Peking Opera and of Mei Lanfang, maybe one of the most endearing glimpses of this art in any Western language. However, it is not well known outside of Scandinavia, although it has been translated into Chinese in the 1980s and analyzed by Liu Zhen 劉禎 in 2017. In this research note I will briefly introduce Grieg’s essay, then examine the sources available to Grieg as well as information from the Norwegian archives about his activities in order to solve some puzzles about this travel sketch. Grieg’s essay “Mei=Lan=Fang” describes Peking Opera with artistic sensitivity. Yet the experience it describes was Grieg’s first time at a Chinese theater, and as Liu Zhen has pointed out, some of the details in Grieg’s report contradict what we know of Peking opera at the time. This raises two questions. First, what background did Grieg have for understanding Chinese drama? Second, how should we understand Grieg’s essay—as a realistic description of a night at the theater or an imaginative reconstruction? (fig. 1)","PeriodicalId":37726,"journal":{"name":"CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature","volume":"2 1","pages":"145 - 156"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72674736","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}

{"title":"Jingju lishi wenxian huibian: Qingdai juan: Xubian 京劇歷史文獻彙編: 清代卷, 續編","authors":"David L. Rolston","doi":"10.1080/01937774.2019.1594021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01937774.2019.1594021","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":37726,"journal":{"name":"CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature","volume":"28 1","pages":"189 - 189"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81526427","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}

{"title":"Mei Lanfang Studies in Retrospect: Shifting Perspectives in English-Language Scholarship","authors":"D. Lin","doi":"10.1080/01937774.2018.1601456","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01937774.2018.1601456","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores three waves of English-language scholarship on Mei Lanfang from the 1920s to the present. Based on an analysis of representative works from each period, the author argues that Mei Lanfang studies in English-language scholarship have undergone shifts of perspective resulting in three distinct phases. Researchers of the early period perceived Mei as a representative of Chinese theater conceived of as a system of knowledge with cultural meanings. Researchers of the second period examined Mei Lanfang from the angle of theater studies and saw him as an important artist of Asian theater whose life experience enriched an understanding of that theater in the wider world. Researchers from the third period were mainly influenced by the perspective of “area studies.” They adopted approaches standard in different disciplines to analyze Mei Lanfang’s life, social contribution, and artistic legacy as a Chinese exemplar. All three periods shared an emphasis on understanding Mei in a socio-cultural context. This cross-cultural dialogue allowed for the application of approaches from multiple disciplines to the study of Mei Lanfang. The boundary of Mei Lanfang studies, which was at one time dominated largely by Chinese-language scholarship, was thus considerably broadened during the whole period under consideration.","PeriodicalId":37726,"journal":{"name":"CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature","volume":"132 1","pages":"128 - 144"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77443127","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}

{"title":"Gezai xi In Singapore: Oral Transmission, Improvisation and Dependence on “Fixed Texts”","authors":"Caroline Chia","doi":"10.1080/01937774.2018.1529730","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01937774.2018.1529730","url":null,"abstract":"This study explores traditional Chinese oral performance in a contemporary urban environment and is based on fieldwork on gezai xi in Singapore between 2004 and 2018. Gezai xi is a genre of highly improvisational plays performed in Hokkien (Minnan 閩南) language. While the genre was quite popular in Singapore from the 1930s to 1970s, the later language policy of privileging Mandarin and English over local languages and dialects has challenged the relevance of gezai xi performance in Singapore. How do performers of recent years learn gezai xi? What is the role of oral transmission, improvisation, and dependence on “fixed texts”1 in the education of young performers and in their daily preparations for the stage? Reading and writing seem to play only a minor role in the process of putting on a play. However, how individual performers learn their art and prepare for performance depends on the performer’s degree of literacy. In the period after the 1970s, the dependency on aural and visual “fixed texts,” such as cassette-tapes, CDs, and videos, has had a great impact on education and rehearsal practices, while written or printed texts – apart from the taishu [stage outline] – seem marginal for this art.","PeriodicalId":37726,"journal":{"name":"CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature","volume":"41 1","pages":"1 - 41"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85717648","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}

{"title":"Chinatown Opera Theater in North America","authors":"L. Coderre","doi":"10.1080/01937774.2018.1524416","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01937774.2018.1524416","url":null,"abstract":"In some ways, Nancy Yunhwa Rao’s Chinatown Opera Theater in North America is the quintessential response to Yu’s call, for there is little doubt that the defining tunes of the Chinese diaspora in the nineteenth century and much of the twentieth were, in the most literal sense, those of the Cantonese opera. With her detailed study of the second “golden age” of Chinatown theaters—the 1920s—in North America, Rao adds to recent English-language work on Cantonese opera as a transnational art form and business, and she does so in a way that draws on an impressive variety of sources, many of them featuring thespians, their promoters, and their fans in their own words and voices. From Chinatown newspaper write-ups to playbills to sound recordings, the reader is afforded a glimpse of a complex web of commercial interests and theatrical rivalries at the very heart of the Chinese immigrant experience. Much of Rao’s contribution stems from her articulation of the important role of Cantonese opera in Chinatown communities in the 1920s, her aim being to “release these theaters from their repressed silence and perpetual invisibility, as well as separate them from the myths about them” (p. 9). Chief among these myths are the notions of marginality—of actors just passing through, of theaters’ questionable moral standing, of Chinese opera in the American musical imaginary—and fixity —of an unchanging repertoire and performance practice divorced from the geopolitical realities and dominant aesthetic trends of the day. By contrast, Rao “consider [s] Chinatown theaters to be dynamic, rather than timeless” (p. 12), wherein their dynamism is borne of commercial, cultural, and civic engagement, not isolation. Specifically, Rao argues that Chinatown opera theaters were influenced by five key factors:","PeriodicalId":37726,"journal":{"name":"CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature","volume":"33 1","pages":"90 - 93"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86997750","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}

{"title":"The Contemporary World in Republican-era Adaptations of Old Themes in Traditional Genres of Performative Literature: The Newest Version of the Complete Song of the Mutual Accusations of the Cat and the Mouse","authors":"W. L. Idema","doi":"10.1080/01937774.2018.1526468","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01937774.2018.1526468","url":null,"abstract":"In her recent monograph on the bannermen tales (zidishu 子弟書) of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Elena Chiu discusses how the title heroine of Pu Songling’s 蒲松齡 (1640–1715) classical tale The Girl in the Green Dress (Lüyi nü 綠衣女) is turned into a young Manchu woman in terms of dress and hairstyle when the tale was adapted as a bannermen tale by one Zhuchuang 竹窗. Such changes are of course only to be expected when a story is reworked for performance at a later date, at a different place, and for a different audience. Some of such changes will be made inadvertently, but others will have been introduced on purpose to achieve a certain humorous effect by introducing anachronistic or otherwise outof-place persons, objects, or terminology. This is perhaps even more clearly demonstrated in a rewriting of Pu Songling’s The Painted Skin (Huapi 畫皮) as a danxian paiziqu 單線牌子曲 by Ye Shuting 葉 樹亭 of the early years of the twentieth century. In this well-known tale a young man while walking outside meets an attractive young woman and takes her home with him, where he installs her in his study, unbeknownst to his wife. The young man has a passionate affair with the woman, until he discovers she actually is an ugly demon dressed in a human skin—he observes her as she has taken off her skin and is touching it up. In Ye Shuting’s version the young girl at their first meeting is described as a typical high school student of those days:","PeriodicalId":37726,"journal":{"name":"CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature","volume":"27 1","pages":"42 - 56"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87450552","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}

{"title":"Marionette Plays from Northern China","authors":"B. Clark","doi":"10.1080/01937774.2018.1524415","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01937774.2018.1524415","url":null,"abstract":"While the shadow theater has enjoyed a certain amount of prestige due to the perceived literary nature of its scripts, “wooden” puppet plays have historically been marginalized. As Dr. Chen points out, even the terms used for shadow puppetry and wooden puppetry are different, though in most languages, they appear to be grouped together with the necessary modifiers that come from either their intrinsic differences (shadow) or their method of manipulation (glove, rod, string, horizontal iron-rods). China is an especially rich source of traditional puppet theater, with examples of most forms still extant, but often in different regions. English translations of traditional Chinese puppet scripts are extremely rare. Dr. Chen has already produced two books of shadow theater plays, as well as another marionette play in her newest book, Journey of a Goddess (SUNY Press, 2017).Marionette Plays from Northern China, her first collection of string-puppet plays, contains translations of eight scripts gathered during fieldwork in Heyang City 合陽, Shaanxi. String puppets (marionettes), while quite common in the south (especially Fujian), are virtually unknown in other parts of the north. At her last count, only three troupes still perform in Heyang, down from nearly fifty before mid-century. During the Cultural Revolution, many handwritten copies of scripts (which included performance transcriptions) were destroyed. While some were published, even those books are now hard to find. Consequently, this valuable volume is the result of both dedicated field work and skilled, theatrically sensitive translation. Dr. Chen introduces the volume with a concise overview of Chinese puppet theater history, with an emphasis upon the string theater ofHeyang. (Heyang claims to be the historical origin of string puppetry, although this is notwell supported, despite puppet facial features that might sculpturally date the tradition back to the Tang.) Continuing, she introduces each play’s dominant themes, literary references, dramatic characteristics, and historical context. The eight plays include three “post-midnight skits,” three plays dealing with historical events with various degrees of accuracy, and finally two romances. One of the latter, The White Undershirt (Bai hanshan 白汗 衫), displays familiar scenes of romantic intrigue and mistaken identity. The local hero of the Heyang puppet theater is Baldy, a classic clownish everyman figure with an appropriately bald pate. He is featured in a short “midnight play,” a once highly suggestive burlesque-type comedy for adult male audiences. Dr. Chen includes the previously published Baldy’s Wedding Night (Tuzi naofang 禿子鬧 房), in which Baldy discovers his new bride’s baldness on his wedding night, much to his initial horror and the spectator’s delight. Though Dr. Chen observes that the original sexual wordplay is muted for contemporary audiences, she also notes that some suggestive visual nuances (Baldy’s pate, for example) are still ","PeriodicalId":37726,"journal":{"name":"CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature","volume":"249 1","pages":"80 - 81"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76988630","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}

{"title":"Voices of Taiwanese Women: Three Contemporary Plays","authors":"T. Chun","doi":"10.1080/01937774.2018.1524413","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01937774.2018.1524413","url":null,"abstract":"other than in Thrasher’s own contributions, there is relatively little connection between one chapter and the others. A concluding chapter tying the various threads together would also have helped to give a greater sense of unity. However, the common theme linking all of these parts together is obvious, and taken collectively they make a significant contribution to our understanding of the ways in which these melodic building blocks of Chinese music have been reshaped, transformed, and combined into the rich variety of musical styles and repertories we enjoy today. Even for someone like myself who has a long-term involvement in Chinese musical performance practice and scholarship, this book offers many new discoveries, and it is a reminder of how many genres and pieces still remain to be explored and appreciated.","PeriodicalId":37726,"journal":{"name":"CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature","volume":"55 4 1","pages":"84 - 87"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88438615","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}