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Storytelling and Chinese Popular Prints (Nianhua)

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Storytelling and Chinese Popular Prints (Nianhua) Chinese performed arts and the popular prints Quyi yu nianhua ABSTRACT Boris Riftin Russian Academy of Sciences Folklore may be divided into actively collective and passively collective forms (P. Bogatyrev, R. Jakobson). The first group includes creative activities requiring neither special training nor professional skills, and the second group consists of professional creative activity requiring special training. Both Chinese performed art (quyi, shuochang wenxue 曲艺，说唱文学) and popular prints (nianhua 年画) belong to the second group, because both the storytellers and the artists are professionals, and they are usually literate. Popular woodcut prints and professional storytelling both emerged in the Tang Dynasty, the first as bianwen storytelling originally connected with Buddhism, and the second as the first woodcut prints with saints’ images. Bianwen storytelling was later enriched with folklore plots (for example, Meng Jiangnü bianwen 孟姜女变文). It is difficult to say how much time it took for the folk plots to appear in nianhua, but the earliest preserved samples of secular nianhua refer to the twelfth century. Folk storytelling in later centuries was frequently a creative revision of oral variants of the novels. Nianhua were often just original illustrations to the same ancient novels, which were performed by storytellers. However the relations between nianhua and novels were probably more complex than those reflected in storytelling. Popular prints include two types of pictures: those of the first type gave visual presentation of an episode from the novel, and those of the second type may depict the same episode, the same scene from the play based on the novel (so-called theater popular prints xichu 戏出 nianhua). In a few cases the popular prints also may depict performance of a story by a storyteller. The relations between storytelling tradition and popular prints have not been studied in China or elsewhere. The only brief article on storytelling in popular prints was published by St. Petersburg’s researcher T. Vinogradova in Materials of XXIX scientific conference “Society and State in China” (Moscow, 1999, pp. 251-254) and is not widely available. The present report is intended to continue and develop this subject. We know of two pictures dating to the end of the nineteenth or the beginning of the twentieth century depicting storytelling performance. It is a picture created in Suzhou or in Shanghai (the print- houses were closely connected) showing a tanci story performance. The picture was created as an advertisement of a Shanghai storytellers’ house (Xiao guanghan shuchang 小广寒书场), listing the names of the performers and the repertoire of that day’s program. The other picture was created in Yangliuqing near Tianjin. It depicts a shuanghuang 双簧 story performance by a storyteller in a rich house with five generations of family members watching. Some popular prints were created on motives of various folk literature (suwenxue 俗文学), which were in turn created on the basis of oral stories or from oral stories. Examples include Suzhou popular prints San xiao yinyuan «三笑姻缘» (Three smiles romance) on the tanci 弹词 oral story «San xiao» (Three smiles 三 笑), Yangliuqing popular prints on the plot of the drum-accompanied stories (guci 鼓词), for example Da po Mengzhou «大破孟州» (The Ruin of Mengzhou) and on plots of other kinds of stories, such as Peking danxian 单弦 or works in the baojuan 宝卷 genre. Situations when the same oral story became the source of a popular print and simultaneously the basis of a popular play (e.g. Qin Xianlian «秦香莲», a play based on a guci ) require special attention. It is possible to define whether the popular print was created based on the oral story (and not the play) only if you have the storyteller’s text and may compare it with the popular print. Besides, only detailed comparison of the popular print with the novel and the oral story allows one to discover scenes that are drawn according to the oral story which are absent in the novel (for example, in Suzhou popular prints Wu Song shi hui «武松十回» (Ten chapters on Wu Song)..
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