Tao Wanxia

01 · Lineage & Regional School

Born into a family of opera performers, she learned the craft from her parents from childhood and performed with their troupe. Within the regional tradition and school record of Si Opera in Suzhou, Anhui: There are differing accounts of the formation of Sizhou opera. Many hold that it originated in the Haizhou area of northern Jiangsu, where it began as a small play improvised by local farmers to folk tunes such as the “liehu qiang” (hunter tune) and “taipingge” (peace song); it was later carried into Sizhou, where it absorbed the local folk singing art and became the “lahun qiang” Sizhou opera of Anhui. Sizhou opera is closely bound to the life and customs of the people of northern Anhui and shows strong regional cultural characteristics. Sizhou opera is one of the four great genres of Anhui Province; it was originally called lahun qiang and is current on both banks of the Huai River in Anhui, with a history of more than two hundred years. Only around 1920 did Sizhou opera acquire fixed troupes to perform it, and only then did it begin to enter the cities.

02 · Mastery & Signature Works

A woman of Han ethnicity, she was born in July 1964 in Suzhou, Anhui Province. She is a National First-Class Actor. In 1989 she was admitted to the Suzhou Sizhou Opera Troupe. She specializes in the huadan (young female) and caidan (comic female) roles, also plays laodan (old woman) and takes xiaosheng and laosheng male roles in cross-gender performance; her range is wide and she covers the full set of role types. Her voice is round and smooth, combining strength and gentleness, and her acting is humorous, bold and unrestrained. While keeping the fundamental idiom of Sizhou opera, she has boldly absorbed the finest qualities of sister genres, so that the plays she performs remain fresh however often they are staged. Within the documented technical tradition of Si Opera in Suzhou, Anhui: It and Liuqin opera of Shandong and Huaihai opera of Jiangsu all developed out of “lahun qiang”, so that a certain blood relationship exists between them. Sizhou opera has more than eighty traditional grand plays and over sixty small plays and abbreviated plays; its representative works include Three Curled upon the Cold Bridge, The Eighth Sister Yang Rescuing Her Brother, Fan Lihua Mustering the Troops, Pi Xiuying's Four Complaints, The Great Garden, Chronicle of the Woven Shoes, Chronicle of the Velvet Flower, Running from the Kiln and Picking Cotton. The vocal style of Sizhou opera is highly improvisatory, for the actors may give free rein to the full range of their abilities according to the condition of their own voices; hence its name as the “yixin diao” (pleasing-the-mind tune). The male voice is rough and uninhibited, high-pitched and clear; the female voice is supple and lingering, and at its close it often leaps up an octave in a long drawn-out cadence, bright and fiery, moving the heart. Its principal accompanying instrument is the tu pipa, supplemented by the sanxian, sheng, erhu, gaohu, dizi and the like, together with the four percussion pieces ban drum, large gong, nao and small gong. The role types of Sizhou opera are divided mainly into dasheng, laosheng, er tou, xiao tou, chou and the like; its performance, built on speech and song, absorbs a large number of folk dance forms such as “yahuachang” (compressing the flowery field), “xiaochewu” (little cart dance), “hanchuanwu” (dry boat dance), “huadengwu” (flower lantern dance) and “paolv” (running the donkey); it is little constrained by operatic convention and is bright and lively, plain and frank, vigorous and fiery, full of the rich local flavour of northern Anhui. In performance there are many distinctive movements and step patterns, such as sitaijiao (four platforms), xuanfengshi (whirlwind), jianzigu (scissor gait), xianhezou (immortal crane walk), baimadaguan (a hundred horses in battle), chouliang huanzhu (pulling the beam and substituting the pillar), yanziboni (the swallow skimming the mud), huai zhong baoyue (holding the moon in the bosom) and fenghuang shuang zhan chi (the phoenix spreading both wings); the actors must attend to the coordination and interplay of the hands, eyes, waist, legs and steps. Representative repertoire, works and technical entries recorded for the project include: "Three Curled upon the Cold Bridge": Sizhou opera has more than eighty traditional grand plays and over sixty small plays and abbreviated plays; its representative works include Three Curled upon the Cold Bridge, The Eighth Sister Yang Rescuing Her Brother, Fan Lihua Mustering the Troops, Pi Xiuying's Four Complaints, The Great Garden, Chronicle of the Woven Shoes, Chronicle of the Velvet Flower, Running from the Kiln and Picking Cotton. "The Eighth Sister Yang Rescuing Her Brother": Sizhou opera has more than eighty traditional grand plays and over sixty small plays and abbreviated plays; its representative works include Three Curled upon the Cold Bridge, The Eighth Sister Yang Rescuing Her Brother, Fan Lihua Mustering the Troops, Pi Xiuying's Four Complaints, The Great Garden, Chronicle of the Woven Shoes, Chronicle of the Velvet Flower, Running from the Kiln and Picking Cotton. "Fan Lihua Mustering the Troops": Sizhou opera has more than eighty traditional grand plays and over sixty small plays and abbreviated plays; its representative works include Three Curled upon the Cold Bridge, The Eighth Sister Yang Rescuing Her Brother, Fan Lihua Mustering the Troops, Pi Xiuying's Four Complaints, The Great Garden, Chronicle of the Woven Shoes, Chronicle of the Velvet Flower, Running from the Kiln and Picking Cotton. "Pi Xiuying's Four Complaints": Sizhou opera has more than eighty traditional grand plays and over sixty small plays and abbreviated plays; its representative works include Three Curled upon the Cold Bridge, The Eighth Sister Yang Rescuing Her Brother, Fan Lihua Mustering the Troops, Pi Xiuying's Four Complaints, The Great Garden, Chronicle of the Woven Shoes, Chronicle of the Velvet Flower, Running from the Kiln and Picking Cotton.

03 · Transmission & Safeguarding Status

She is a representative bearer of Sizhou opera, a fifth-batch national intangible cultural heritage project. She has appeared in numerous plays, including Four Wives Exchanged, Third Sister Yearns for Spring, Clumsy Elder Sister, Love Like a Rainbow, Sister-in-Law Stops the Cart, Brilliant Autumn Moon and A Mother's Behest, and has won many honours. Among the young actors she has trained, several have won national and provincial awards.

04 · Associated Heritage Item Dossier

05 · Fellow National Bearers Lineage

National representative bearers recorded under the same item code, ordered from the first to the sixth batch. Batch order is not a teacher–student relationship.

06 · Archival Sources & Bibliography

1. Tao Wanxia · National Representative Bearer Archive