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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.
Writing in the early nineteenth century, the French traveler and cleric Abbé Huc exclaimed: "There is, perhaps, not a people in the world who carry so far their taste and passion for theatrical entertainments as the Chinese.” This taste and passion for the theater was not restricted to the stage, but permeated the visual and material world of everyday life from the village to the court. The visual spectacle of this theater is well known, displayed primarily through colorful costumes, props, and face painting. What is less known is the extent to which operatic characters and stories were favored as pictorial and decorative motifs across the full spectrum of visual mediums, from courtly scroll paintings, popular New Year prints, illustrated woodblock books and painted fans to carved utensils, ceramics, textiles, and dioramas.
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.
The Routledge Handbook of Asian Music: Cultural Intersections introduces Asian music as a way to ask questions about what happens when cultures converge and how readers may evaluate cultural junctures through expressive forms. The volume’s thirteen original chapters cover musical practices in historical and modern contexts from Central Asia, East Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia, including art music traditions, folk music and composition, religious and ritual music, as well as popular music. These chapters showcase the diversity of Asian music, requiring readers to constantly reconsider their understanding of this vibrant and complex area. The book is divided into three sections: Locating meanings Boundaries and difference Cultural flows Contributors to the book offer a multidisciplinary portfolio of methods, ranging from archival research and field ethnography to biographical studies and music analysis. In addition to rich illustrations, numerous samples of notation and sheet music are featured as insightful study resources. Readers are invited to study individuals, music-makers, listeners, and viewers to learn about their concerns, their musical choices, and their lives through a combination of humanistic and social-scientific approaches. Demonstrating how transformative cultural differences can become in intercultural encounters, this book will appeal to students and scholars of musicology, ethnomusicology, and anthropology.
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.
Women in Traditional Chinese Theatre seeks to introduce Western readers to Chinese classical drama as well as investigate how women have traditionally been portrayed on stage by presenting original translations of six plays from the fourteenth to twentieth centuries. Framed with a comprehensive introduction to the Chinese theatre and its representation of women, each play is preceded by an interpretative summary of the plot, and an analysis of each play's theme and significance. The selections in this volume feature women representing the most popular female archetypes in Chinese literature: the paragon of virtue, the stoic sufferer, the faithful wife, the femme fatal, and others. Appealing to both scholars and general enthusiasts of theatre, literature, and women's studies, this book reveals how the cultural constructs of Chinese women are represented in dramatic literature, and how the theatre, in turn, shapes this representation into the cultural perception of women.
AI-Generated Content (AIGC) is a revolutionary engine for digital content generation. In the area of art, AI has achieved remarkable advancements. AI is capable of not only creating paintings or music comparable to human masterpieces, but it also understands and appreciates artwork. For professionals and amateurs, AI is an enabling tool and an opportunity to enjoy a new world of art. This book aims to present the state-of-the-art AI technologies for art creation, understanding, and evaluation. The contents include a survey on cross-modal generation of visual and auditory content, explainable AI and music, AI-enabled robotic theater for Chinese folk art, AI for ancient Chinese music restoration and reproduction, AI for brainwave opera, artistic text style transfer, data-driven automatic choreography, Human-AI collaborative sketching, personalized music recommendation and generation based on emotion and memory (MemoMusic), understanding music and emotion from the brain, music question answering, emotional quality evaluation for generated music, and AI for image aesthetic evaluation. The key features of the book are as follows: AI for Art is a fascinating cross-disciplinary field for the academic community as well as the public. Each chapter is an independent interesting topic, which provides an entry for corresponding readers. It presents SOTA AI technologies for art creation and understanding. The artistry and appreciation of the book is wide-ranging – for example, the combination of AI with traditional Chinese art. This book is dedicated to the international cross-disciplinary AI Art community: professors, students, researchers, and engineers from AI (machine learning, computer vision, multimedia computing, affective computing, robotics, etc.), art (painting, music, dance, fashion, design, etc.), cognitive science, and psychology. General audiences can also benefit from this book.
Often called the most breathtaking city in the world, Hong Kong has something for every traveler. Time Out Hong Kong is the perfect companion for navigating this overwhelming metropolis that expects over 20 million travelers to visit the duty-free port this year. The experts at Time Out help travelers navigate through this shopper's fantasy, from the old-world markets and bazaars to designer boutiques including how to buy jade. Time Out food mavens helps travelers sort through the offerings of over 9,000 restaurants and the art of "yum cha"(drinking tea). The guide includes suggested itineraries for visits anywhere between one and five days, as well as side-trips to Macau, the buzzing boomtown of Guangzhou, and beaches and museums that are an hour by ferry.
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.