Faces of Tradition in Chinese Performing Arts (Encounters: Explorations in Folklore and Ethnomusicology)

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.

Levi S. Gibbs is Assistant Professor of Chinese Language and Literature in the Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages Program at Dartmouth College. His research focuses on the social roles of singers and songs in contemporary China and the cultural politics of regional identity. He is author of Song King: Connecting People, Places, and Past in Contemporary China.

Charlotte D'Evelyn is Visiting Professor of Music at Pomona College in Claremont, CA. Her research focuses on fiddles, regional folk song, and the politics of heritage in Inner Mongolia, and she is a performer of the Chinese erhu (two-string fiddle) and an active student of the morin huur (Mongolian horse-head fiddle), tovshur (plucked lute), and höömii (throat singing).

Levi S. Gibbs is Assistant Professor of Chinese Language and Literature in the Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages Program at Dartmouth College. His research focuses on the social roles of singers and songs in contemporary China and the cultural politics of regional identity. He is author of Song King: Connecting People, Places, and Past in Contemporary China.

Helen Rees is Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Since the late 1980s her field and archival research has focused on ritual and other traditional musical genres of southwest China and Shanghai. She also interprets and presents for Chinese artists at major European and US arts festivals. She is author of Echoes of History: Naxi Music in Modern China and editor of Lives in Chinese Music.

Sue Tuohy is a faculty member in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology and adjunct faculty in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Indiana University. She has conducted research on and in China for over three decades on music and society in northwest China, cultural heritage programs, music in social movements, and environmentalism.

Emily E. Wilcox is Assistant Professor of Modern Chinese Studies in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Michigan–Ann Arbor. She is a specialist in Chinese dance and performance culture, with broader interests in twentieth-century global history, transnationalism, gender, and social movements, and is author of Revolutionary Bodies: Chinese Dance and the Socialist Legacy.

Levi S. Gibbs is Assistant Professor of Chinese Language and Literature in the Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages Program at Dartmouth College. His research focuses on the social roles of singers and songs in contemporary China and the cultural politics of regional identity. He is author of Song King: Connecting People, Places, and Past in Contemporary China.