Shuoguzi · Chinese Craft Stories

01 · Historical Records

It belongs to the same lineage as guzici, the folk art of narrative singing that flourished in the Song dynasty, and has a history of several hundred years to the present day. Over the course of its transmission after the Song dynasty, guzici went through several changes and gradually developed into shuoguzi in the late Ming and early Qing periods.

02 · Core Techniques & Process

Shuoguzi is also called shuogu, changguzi or Gong'an shuoguzi, and is transmitted in Gong'an County and Songzi City of Hubei Province and the areas around them. Shuoguzi takes spoken narration as its main form, with singing woven into the speech and gestural performance used as an accompaniment. In every passage, the last three characters of the closing line are sung in a drawn-out melody, answered by a suona; performers often drop their comic payoff at this point, which supplies the finishing touch and raises a small climax. Performers may adjust their identity as the occasion requires, moving freely between character and performer: at one moment they speak in the first person in imitation of the figure, at another they stand on an objective footing and narrate in the third person. Traditional forms of narrative singing fall into three types. The first is the solo form, in which a single performer speaks and sings and accompanies himself. The second is the upper-and-lower-hand form, in which one person beats the drum and tells the story and is called the upper hand, while another accompanies on the suona from the side and is called the lower hand. The third is the one-singer-two-accompanists form, in which one person beats the drum and tells the story while two people provide accompaniment, one on each side. In ordinary performance, the second of these forms is the most widely used. The language of shuoguzi is plain and easy to understand, vivid and graphic, witty and humorous, and rich in the flavour of local village life. Its sung text may be in rhymed verse, in prose, or may alternate between the two; it is most often in seven-syllable lines, and sometimes uses five-syllable lines or roughly balanced long and short lines. The traditional repertoire of shuoguzi is rich in content and can be divided into several large groups: first, stories drawn from street gossip, jokes and amusing anecdotes; second, folk legends; third, historical romances and tales of chivalry and criminal cases. Its representative works include Peach Blossom Hollow, Picture of the Landlord, The Generals of the Yang Family, The Carved Dragon Fan, The Eight Beauties and The Twin Flower Story, and beyond these there is also a body of witty and humorous short shumao passages.