Roundtable on Oral Tradition in a Digital Age: Open Forum

ROUNDTABLE ON ORAL TRADITION IN A DIGITAL AGE: OPEN FORUM Following the three presentations, there was an open/Drum/or discussion, .moderated by Professor Rulan Chao Pian. The editors have summarized the discussion and introduce headings to highlight the broad issues touched upon. Recording and its effects on the performance context Lindy Li Mark: When you were filming in the market, I wonder what were the reactions of people being filmed? Bender: I have a built in crane, because of my height, and hold the camera at chest height, rather than in front of my face, and so I could just relax and film. Kate Swatek: I attended a conference in Qinghai Province on the Nuoxi, which is a religious-based ritual,.and found there was no boundary between what was being performed and people filming it. One solution is to find a good spot and just shoot without trying to make that distinction, but stay outside the performance·area and avoid jamming the camera into someone's face ...The question is not just is it . okay to film or photograph, but a situational thing. If what you are filming is a ,ritual, does filming interfere with what is happening? Mark Bender: This problem came up in a shamanistic convention, when many of the invited participants (not themselves shamans) positioned themselves and their cameras directly in front of the shaman. Authentic performance, editing, and ethnographic authority Bell Yung: Going back to the issue of digital technology, now. You gave us excellent advice on video ethnography. You had a great deal to say about the advantages of long takes for capturing the context and CHINOPERL Papers No. 24 (2002)© 2002 by the Conference on Chinese Oral and Performing Literature, Inc. CHINOPERL Papers No. 24 things you might not notice at the time you are filming. But how does that jibe with the limited capacity of the computer? Mark Benq~r: That is a problem. One solution to the ,problem is to code the tape so that you.can tell where you are in the tape, and locate that segment later on when you want to edit. Bell Yung: One great advantage of digital technology is the editing capability. Another advantage is the resolution and the fact that it does not deteriorate. There is another concern with preserving the raw footage,. Mark Bender: For our purposes, we want the complete tape as raw data., 'I very much disagree that there is a danger here that you will be presented with an edited piece of material and told that this is the real thing. That offers a possible advantage, and the danger depends on who is constructing the edited version. Fred Lau: There is recent interest in ethnographic authority and narrative. This is a particular problem in sound recording, but the camera introduces framing of the information and that seems to remedy the p~oblem. As John Berger says in Ways of Seeing, [the narrative is Sl1apedby the viewer]. Lindy Li Mark: I once attended a conference where we all went into town for a walk in the evening, and the people living in that town were dancing right there in the street. It was an interesting situation, where the people were definitely performing, although the performan~e was not organized by someone from the outside. Now, is that auth~ntic? Rulan Chao Pian: That's what makes it real, because it is not professional. The promise'and pitfalls of digital technology C.J. Liu: we are going to be all digital in the twenty-first century. We are able to scan tapes and put them on the web where they are 130 Roundtable Forumon Oral Tradition in the Digital Age ,accessible to anyone who wants to view them .. The Digital Media Center of the University of Minnesota has done a pilot project, starting with 250 slides of oral performing arts recorded in China, of a projected database of 1200 slides. [Note: the first group of slides of Peking Opera (jingju) can be found at http://digital.lib.umn.edu/IMAGES/refemce/lrc/. The slides have been compiled with a synopsis and analysis of the plays by Dr. Wenying Zhang, coordinated with Dan...