Faces of Tradition in Chinese Performing Arts
Faces of Tradition in Chinese Performing Arts

Author: Levi S. Gibbs

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2020-02-11

Total Pages: 189

ISBN-13: 025304586X

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Faces of Tradition in Chinese Performing Arts examines the key role of the individual in the development of traditional Chinese performing arts such as music and dance. These artists and their artistic works–the "faces of tradition"–come to represent and reconfigure broader fields of cultural production in China today. The contributors to this volume explore the ways in which performances and recordings, including singing competitions, textual anthologies, ethnographic videos, and CD albums, serve as discursive spaces where individuals engage with and redefine larger traditions and themselves. By focusing on the performance, scholarship, collection, and teaching of instrumental music, folksong, and classical dance from a variety of disciplines–these case studies highlight the importance of the individual in determining how traditions have been and are represented, maintained, and cultivated.

Oral Traditions in Contemporary China
Oral Traditions in Contemporary China

Author: Juwen Zhang

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2021-11-08

Total Pages: 263

ISBN-13: 1793645140

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In Oral Traditions in Contemporary China: Healing a Nation, Juwen Zhang provides a systematic survey of such oral traditions as folk and fairy tales, proverbs, ballads, and folksongs that are vibrantly practiced today. Zhang establishes a theoretical framework for understanding how Chinese culture has continued for thousands of years with vitality and validity, core and arbitrary identity markers, and folkloric identity. This framework, which describes a cultural self-healing mechanism, is equally applicable to the exploration of other traditions and cultures in the world. Through topics from Chinese Cinderella to the Grimms of China, from proverbs like “older ginger is spicier” to the life-views held by the Chinese, and from mountain songs and ballads to the musical instruments like the clay-vessel-flute, the author weaves these oral traditions across time and space into a mesmerizing intellectual journey. Focusing on contemporary practice, this book serves as a bridge between Chinese and international folklore scholarship and other related disciplines as well. Those interested in Chinese culture in general and Chinese folklore, literature, and oral tradition in particular will certainly delight in perusing this book.

When Words Are Inadequate
When Words Are Inadequate

Author: Nan Ma

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2023

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 0197575307

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When Words are Inadequate is a transnational history of modern dance written from and beyond the perspective of China. Author Nan Ma extends the horizon of China studies by rewriting the cultural history of modern China from a bodily movement-based perspective through the lens of dance modernism. The book examines the careers and choreographies of four Chinese modern dance pioneers-Yu Rongling, Wu Xiaobang, Dai Ailian, and Guo Mingda-and their connections to canonical Western counterparts, including Isadora Duncan, Mary Wigman, Rudolf von Laban, and Alwin Nikolais. Tracing these Chinese pioneers' varied experiences in Paris, Tokyo, Trinidad, London, New York, and China's metropolises and borderlands, the book shows how their contributions adapted and reimagined the legacies of early Euro-American modern dance. In doing so, When Words are Inadequate reinserts China into the multi-centered, transnational network of artistic exchange that fostered the global rise of modern dance, further complicating the binary conceptions of center and periphery and East and West. By exploring the relationships between performance and representation, choreography and politics, and nation-building and global modernism, it situates modern dance within an intermedial circuit of literary and artistic forms, demonstrating how modern dance provided a kinesthetic alternative and complements to other sibling arts in participating in China's successive revolutions, reforms, wars, and political movements.

Chinese Folklore Studies Today
Chinese Folklore Studies Today

Author: Lijun Zhang

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2019-09-13

Total Pages: 179

ISBN-13: 0253044138

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Chinese folklorists are well acquainted with the work of their English-language colleagues, but until recently the same could not be said about American scholars' knowledge of Chinese folkloristics. Chinese Folklore Studies Today aims to address this knowledge gap by illustrating the dynamics of contemporary folklore studies in China as seen through the eyes of the up-and-coming generation of scholars. Contributors to this volume focuses on topics that have long been the dominant areas of folklore studies in China, including myth, folk song, and cultural heritage, as well as topics that are new to the field, such as urban folklore and women's folklore. The ethnographic case studies presented here represent a broad range of geographic areas within mainland China and also introduce English-language readers to relevant Chinese literature on each topic, creating the foundation for further cross-cultural collaborations between English-language and Chinese folkloristics.

Body and Face in Chinese Visual Culture
Body and Face in Chinese Visual Culture

Author: Hung Wu

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2020-03-17

Total Pages: 476

ISBN-13: 1684174031

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Traditionally the "Chinese body" was approached as a totality and explained by sweeping comparisons of the differences that distinguished Chinese examples from their Western counterparts. Recently, scholars have argued that we must look at particular examples of Chinese images of the body and explore their intrinsic conceptual complexity and historical specificity. The twelve contributors to this volume adopt a middle position. They agree that Chinese images are conditioned by indigenous traditions and dynamics of social interaction, but they seek to explain a general Chinese body and face by charting multiple, specific bodies and faces. All of the chapters are historical case studies and investigate particular images, such as Han dynasty tomb figurines; Buddhist texts and illustrations; pictures of deprivation, illness, deformity, and ghosts; clothing; formal portraiture; and modern photographs and films. From the diversity of art forms and historical periods studied, there emerges a more complex picture of ways that the visual culture of the body and face in China has served to depict the living, memorialize the dead, and present the unrepresentable in art.

Chinese Theatre
Chinese Theatre

Author: Jin Fu

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2012-03-09

Total Pages: 145

ISBN-13: 0521186668

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Chinese opera has a history of over 800 years. However, since the early twentieth century, following increased contact with the West, drama without music has also become popular in China. The development and prosperity of modern drama has created a new landscape for Chinese theater, which, as a whole, has become more diverse.

The Deified Human Face Petroglyphs of Prehistoric China
The Deified Human Face Petroglyphs of Prehistoric China

Author:

Publisher: World Scientific

Published: 2015-07-23

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 1938368339

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"China's cultural heritage is so ancient, mysterious and multifarious as if it came together like several rivers. Where is the origin of this remarkable Eastern culture? The human face petroglyphs are one of the original resources of Chinese cultural heritage. The traditional Chinese concept of "Heaven and Man are one," and the practice of ancestor veneration, both spring from concepts first embodied in the prehistoric human faces. This book offers the analyses of petroglyphic features, fabrication methods, and their spatial and temporal evolution. It also discussed how they influenced prehistoric pottery patterns, the development of the first Chinese writing system, the bronze vessel patterns of the Shang and Zhou dynasties, and the formation of ancient Chinese mythology and religious practices. Published by SCPG Publishing Corporation and distributed by World Scientific for all markets except China"--

Traditional Chinese Culture
Traditional Chinese Culture

Author: Qizhi Zhang

Publisher:

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13:

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Written by esteemed academic and professor Zhang Qizhi, this book details the fundamentals of Chinese tradition, ranging from philosophy, ethics and humanities, dominant religions, historical relics, calligraphy, painting, medicine, science, health preservation, Chinese food, ancient architecture, and more.

Rethinking Chinese Socialist Theaters of Reform
Rethinking Chinese Socialist Theaters of Reform

Author: Xiaomei Chen

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 2021-03-01

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 047207475X

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The profound political, economic, and social changes in China in the second half of the twentieth century have produced a wealth of scholarship; less studied however is how cultural events, and theater reforms in particular, contributed to the dynamic landscape of contemporary Chinese society. Rethinking Chinese Socialist Theaters of Reform fills this gap by investigating the theories and practice of socialist theater and their effects on a diverse range of genres, including Western-style spoken drama, Chinese folk opera, dance drama, Shanghai opera, Beijing opera, and rural theater. Focusing on the 1950s and ’60s, when theater art occupied a prominent political and cultural role in Maoist China, this book examines the efforts to remake theater in a socialist image. It explores the unique dynamics between official discourse, local politics, performance practice, and audience reception that emerged under the pressures of highly politicized cultural reform as well as the off-stage, lived impact of rapid policy change on individuals and troupes obscured by the public record. This multidisciplinary collection by leading scholars covers a wide range of perspectives, geographical locations, specific research methods, genres of performance, and individual knowledge and experience. The richly diverse approach leads readers through a nuanced and complex cultural landscape as it contributes significantly to our understanding of a crucial period in the development of modern Chinese theater and performance.