Ninghai Pingdiao

01 · Historical Records

Ninghai pingdiao is one of the ancient local drama genres of Zhejiang Province. It is a branch of the Xinchang diaoqiang and originated in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties; centred on Ninghai, it circulates in Xiangshan, Huangyan, Wenling, Linhai, Xianju, Tiantai, Fenghua and elsewhere, and has a history of three to four hundred years to the present day.

02 · Core Techniques & Process

It has more than a hundred traditional plays, including Xiao Jinqian (The Little Gold Coin), Jinniu Ling (Golden Ox Ridge), Lu'an Zhou (Lu'an Isle), Tianmen Zhen (The Heaven Gate Formation), Bai Men Lou (White Gate Tower), Yu Bi Lou (The Imperial Brush Tower), Baihua Zeng Jian (A Hundred Flowers Present a Sword), Guifei Zuijiu (The Drunken Concubine), Chen Lin Jiu Zhu (Chen Lin Saves His Lord) and Tou Shi Gan Chuan (Stolen Verses and the Boat Chase); of these, Xiao Jinqian has for more than a hundred years been closely bound up with the art of displaying the tusks and has become the most characteristic representative play of Ninghai pingdiao. The vocal style of Ninghai pingdiao is high-pitched yet graceful: one voice sings and a chorus joins in support, and there is no orchestral accompaniment of strings or winds, the singing being supported by gongs and drums alone. Its choral support takes such forms as the mixed chorus, the pure chorus, the whole-line chorus, the fragmentary chorus and the single-character chorus. 'Ninghai tusk display' is a unique skill within the performance of Ninghai pingdiao, with a history of more than a hundred years. It is a technique of 'changing the mouth' that keeps its delicacy amid roughness and shows its agility amid wildness, divided mainly into the steps of biting, licking, swallowing and spitting. The performer takes the tusks from the lower jawbone of a male meat pig weighing over 200 kilograms and holds them in the mouth, using the tongue as the main driving force, with the various movements of the teeth, lips and breath assisting the performance. This performance, with its refined 'mouth-changing' technique and wild body movements set against the 'Three Great and One Small' and the tune pattern [General's Order] of pingdiao, portrays the arrogant, overbearing air of the one-horned dragon in the play, and is astonishing to behold. The tusk display in Ninghai pingdiao is distinctive and exacting in its procedure; it looks easy but is in fact a hard-won art, and every generation of inheritors must undergo an arduous course of training before mastering it. After the founding of the People's Republic of China the tusk display was improved and refined on the basis of tradition, developing from the display of six tusks to the display of ten, and won unanimous praise from audiences. Ninghai pingdiao has added a unique skill of tusk display to the art of Chinese opera performance, enriching the forms and content of facial performance in opera and attracting broad attention.

03 · Regional Records & Related Items

Apart from the clown's spoken dialogue, performance basically uses the Ninghai dialect and the literary reading pronunciation ('dushu yin').

04 · Cultural Value & Contemporary Safeguarding

At present Ninghai pingdiao, like the other local drama genres, is in a depressed state, and the exceptional art of tusk display has few inheritors. Both the genre as a whole and its eye-catching tusk-display technique urgently need to be rescued and protected. Ye Quanmin (official inheritor file of the associated inheritor): Male, Han nationality, born in October 1956, from Ninghai County, Zhejiang Province. He broke with the old rule of 'passing the art only to men', transmitting the Ninghai pingdiao tusk-display technique to female disciples and pioneering the performance of tusk display by women. He took part in collecting and sorting out materials relating to Ninghai pingdiao and helped to compile and publish the Collection of Traditional Plays of Ninghai Pingdiao. Representative inheritor of Ninghai pingdiao, fourth-batch national-level intangible cultural heritage item. In 1970 he entered the Ninghai Pingdiao Troupe and studied Ninghai pingdiao under the veteran artist Wang Wanli; in 1980 he took part in the provincial exchange performances of young actors from the theatre troupes and won first prize for his tusk-display technique. He served as an instructor at the troupe and trained students such as Xue Qiaoping.

05 · Associated Representative Bearers

Representative bearers recorded under this item, organized by national nomination batch:

• Ye Quanmin 04-1595

06 · Authoritative Sources & Bibliography

1. Ninghai Pingdiao (Ninghai, Zhejiang) · China ICH Official Project Archive
2. Ye Quanmin · National Representative Bearer Archive

Sources

China Intangible Cultural Heritage Network (ihchina.cn)

Read the official ihchina.cn record ↗