Dapingdiao
01 · Historical Records
Xunxian in Henan is a principal distribution area of western-road Dapingdiao, whose performing art is broad and plain, its poses closely resembling those of shehuo processions, lantern paintings and temple murals, presenting a magnificent spectacle. Among its traditional martial plays there is no lack of real weapons, and its facial designs, coloured effects, fire-blowing and tusks are especially distinctive. Xunxian Dapingdiao's vocal music is a school of its own, with more than four hundred drum-and-gong qupai and more than eighty vocal ban styles; in more than a dozen traditional plays such as Da Dengzhou and Yuhe Guan there appear qupai-structured musical passages of varying degree (some whole plays), offering scholarship new subjects for cultural research. Drawing on the Henan volume of the Annals of Chinese Xiqu and Xunxian cultural materials, western-road Dapingdiao is found in northern Henan, with Xunxian its main area of distribution; it formed professional troupes in the temple-fair and shehuo performances of the late Qing and early Republic, with a singing and acting style of its own.
02 · Core Techniques & Process
Xunxian in Henan is a principal distribution area of western-road Dapingdiao, whose performing art is broad and plain, its poses closely resembling those of shehuo processions, lantern paintings and temple murals, presenting a magnificent spectacle. Among its traditional martial plays there is no lack of real weapons, and its facial designs, coloured effects, fire-blowing and tusks are especially distinctive. Xunxian Dapingdiao's vocal music is a school of its own, with more than four hundred drum-and-gong qupai and more than eighty vocal ban styles; in more than a dozen traditional plays such as Da Dengzhou and Yuhe Guan there appear qupai-structured musical passages of varying degree (some whole plays), offering scholarship new subjects for cultural research. Its singing is mainly in the banqiang system with a qupai structure as well, low in register and vigorous, and together with its shehuo-style bearing and coloured effects it forms a striking north-Henan local character.
Da Dengzhou (Attacking Dengzhou)
A traditional western-road Dapingdiao martial play that preserves qupai-structured music and employs real weapons on stage.
Yuhe Guan (Yuhe Pass)
A traditional western-road Dapingdiao play containing qupai-structured passages of varying degree, offering an example for operatic music research.
Zha Mei An (The Case of Beheading the Unfaithful Husband)
A Judge Bao piece for the black-jing role and one of the representative works of the inheritor Li Deping.
Xia Gaoping (Descending on Gaoping)
A major black-jing play and one of Li Deping's representative works, issued by an audio-visual publisher.
03 · Regional Records & Related Items
Dapingdiao is broadly divided into three branches—Hedong ping, eastern-road ping and western-road ping—the western-road ping centring on the Xunxian and Huaxian area of northern Henan, with more than four hundred drum-and-gong qupai and more than eighty vocal ban styles, differing from the eastern-road and Hedong branches in ban patterns and qupai structure.
Other submitting regions for the same item: Dapingdiao · Dapingdiao · Dapingdiao · Dapingdiao · Dapingdiao · Dapingdiao.
04 · Cultural Value & Contemporary Safeguarding
At present, as the social basis for western-road Dapingdiao's survival and development changes, actors are in short supply between generations, competitiveness in the market is weak, performance equipment cannot be renewed and performance income is falling, so it struggles to keep going and is hard to sustain. Its preservation of qupai-structured music in traditional plays such as Da Dengzhou and Yuhe Guan offers new subjects for operatic music research, and the Xunxian Dapingdiao Heritage and Safeguarding Centre sustains the genre through troupe performance and teaching. Li Deping (as recorded in the official dossier of an associated inheritor): male, Han, born in August 1938 in Huaxian, Henan. A national third-grade actor. In the spring of 1953 he took the veteran artist Wang Xixing as his master and performed on stage that autumn; he later studied under such senior artists as Xu Taihe, Wang Daoxiu and Zhang Fawang, learning the western-road Dapingdiao style. He specialises in the black-jing role and is noted for Judge Bao plays. His voice is resonant and his singing bold and unrestrained, each line like a bell and each word like a drum; his movements are large in amplitude, attending to the unity of expression and plot, rough yet never coarse, appearing grand and heroic, and he is good at shaping characters of different eras and temperaments through varied singing and acting. He has appeared in more than a hundred plays, and his representative works such as Zha Mei An, Sima Mao Gaozhuang, Shou Wu Han and Xia Gaoping have been published by several domestic audio-visual publishers. He is a representative inheritor of Dapingdiao in the fourth batch of national intangible cultural heritage projects, and many of the disciples he has trained are leading actors of the troupe, while their own disciples have grown into rising stars of western-road Dapingdiao.
05 · Associated Representative Bearers
Representative bearers recorded under this item, organized by national nomination batch:
- Zhang Xiangbin 02-0489
- Wei Shouxian 02-0490
- Du Xuezhou 02-0491
- Cao Xiuzhi 02-0492
- He Xiliang 03-1000
- Li Deping 04-1612
- Wu Congyin 05-2323
- Zhoukuisheng
- Han Xuerong
06 · Authoritative Sources & Bibliography
Sources
China Intangible Cultural Heritage Network (ihchina.cn)
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