Chinese Folk Entertainment: A Collection of Tapes with Matching Texts

r-(H 4v?'85 CHINESE FOLK ENTERTAINMENT A COLLECTION OF TAPESWITHMATCHING TEXTS Collected by Catherine Stevens Done on Taiwan in 1960 for the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, under government contract SAE-8944. Copyright 1960 by Catherine Stevens Boston, Mass. -1 , , 4- }o.~--:,er/ ,e,~_,._,t y,--.t .,.._ ,tL &;...+.,'I'\ , ' --~ ~1 ,, ·•.._.-'l,"'V'--.C,~ ,A v; ~,r;;u.,,d, ~t;, ' lA,- /l::'A ).A.., li7l/t- 86 INTRODUCTION This collection is an anthology of traditional Chinese entertainment to be used in teaching present-day Western students Chinese. It includes a number of different comic, narrative, and dramatic performances recorded in their entirety and accompanied by a Chinese character text transcribed from the tape itself. The bulk of the collection is folk entertainment ; to this base dramas, a Buddhist service, and chanted T'ang and Sung poetry have been added. Some selections have a musical accompaniment, others do not. Some use a near-conversational style of delivery exclusively; most also employ recitation , chant, and song, or a combination of all of these. All of them involve the exploitation of the uses of speech as the central element of a performance designed to hold the attention of a popular, listening audience. It is because of this unique combination of oral, folk, and entertainment elements that it was felt the material would be a useful teaching aid. Since most students are concerned with the standard dialect, it was decided, in making the collection, to concentrate on material indigenous to North China. Such material can be found on Taiwan (the only part of China accessible to Americans) because it was brought over by the large numbers of mainland Chinese who arrived after 1945; although limited, it is still viable. Ultimately it proved possible to find and record eleven different kinds of folk entertainments and drama which were traditional as to technique and repertoire and competent as to performance. The tapes themselves were made in a recording studio. This is not the ideal situation, particularly for a folk artist, since it separates him from his audience. However, most of the folk entertainers were already performing as often on the radio as in the theater and so did not feel strange in studio surroundings . The opera singers felt hampered - for them music and movement are a unity and a live audience the rule - but seemed able to adjust satisfactorily. The result is tapes free from the distraction of background noise which normally overwhelms recordings made in a theater. For students, this seemed essential , even at the cost of sacrificing some degree of spontaneity. The texts have been transcribed directly from the tapes themselves. We have tried to write down in the text everything that occurred on the tape. More important, we have tried to write nothing down that did not occur on it, and have resisted the temptation to create written elegance, grammar, or sense where they had no spoken counterpart. The result is a precise record of one particular performance by one particular artist who would, as a matter of course, do it all slightly differently next time round. While such a record has none of the generality of a prompt book or smoothness of a written (or dictated) reconstruction , it is the most useful form of reference for the listener , for whose benefit it is primarily intended. 87 SEQUENCE OF CATEGORY NUMBERS 1. COMEDIANS 2. SOUTHERN HUMOR 3. STORY-TELLING 4. SOUTHERN STORY-TELLING 6. SHI-HE STORY-TELLING 8. CHANTED POETRY 9. PEKING DRUMSINGING 10. OPERA 11. SHANTUNG STORIES 12. BUDDHISTCHANTING Each individual reel is identified by a number preceded by R. Rl-94 for 30 minute reels; Rl00-145 for 15 minute reels. Each individual piece is identified by one of the category numbers (see above), a number representing sequence within the category, and sometimes a number after a hyphen indicating continuation on more than one reel. Copies of tapes can be obtained at cost from the National Center for Audio Tapes, Bureau of Audio Visual Instruction, University of Colorado Extension Division, Boulder, Colorado, 80302, U.S.A. or from CHINOPERL, China-Japan Program, 140 Uris Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14850, U.S.A. Microfilms...