The Recent Shadow Puppet Theater of Pingjiang, Hunan, China

Presented by Shengkai Zhang and Xilin Li at the Language Documentation and Archiving Conference, Berlin & Online, 4-6 Sept, 2024 

In Pingjiang, shadow puppet theater is a famous traditional opera. Many people know it. It was popular until the end of the last century. The Pingjiang shadow puppet theater has unique dialogue and vocal styles, which makes its lyrics difficult to understand, even for people over the age of 50 who are familiar with the local dialect and customs, and of course, for young people. Therefore, in recent years, shadow puppet theater has gradually declined. Pingjiang shadow puppetry is very complicated. It employs three speech styles and two singing styles. The first speech style mirrors the ordinary dialect spoken by the common person. The second speech style comes from written language, a speech style used by people of high class. The third speech style is a mixture of the first two styles. It is one that a common person might use when trying to talk to a high-class person. The first singing style uses the written language of the Pingjiang dialect. The singing is accompanied by a suona, a local instrument. This style of singing is called the suona style. It is unique to the Pingjiang Theater. The second singing style uses the written language of the Yueyang dialect and is accompanied by the erhu. This style is commonly known as qin opera. To understand the contents of the story, you must understand the historical background. Nowadays, most people invite Pingjiang shadow puppetry artists to perform in order to fulfill the wishes of the gods, and shadow puppetry shows are most commonly performed for the gods in temples with no human audience. People who put on the theater are usually only wanting to satisfy the gods. Their goal is not usually to enjoy the artistic nature of the performances. They believe the gods can help them become healthy, get into a university, get richer, etc. Currently, there is almost no one who wants to become a shadow puppet performer. The youngest performer was born in 1979, and is now 45 years old. Some females have been studying the art recently, but they cannot perform very well. as they began to learn shadow puppetry in adulthood. A good shadow puppet artist must begin learning puppetry skill from childhood. Traditionally, a novice had to eat and live together with the teacher. An adult cannot master the skill very well. So, shadow puppetry is becoming simplified, and as a result may vanish in the not-too-distant future. I started recording and archiving shadow puppetry theater in 2017. Now, I have a large library of recordings and scripts, as below. Each theater performance is comprised of three parts. 􀀀 Hexi (congratulations drama, short story) 40 (8 hours); 􀀀 Zhengxi (long story, main drama)40 (80 hours); 􀀀 Shuaxi(final drama)40 (7 hours); 􀀀 scripts (the abstracts of each complete performance) 100,000 character. I will continue to archive the shadow puppet theater and will publish the materials on the internet. I also want to build a shadow puppet museum to display shadow puppet props, with subtitles to videos and audios, and I want to help train young artists. Some shadow puppetry artists have agreed to work with me. They will join me in my archiving efforts. We started working together in Aug. 2023. The artists are currently recording the dialogue, sound, and video for me, and after they do, I transcribe the spoken word and make the scripts available for the artists and other interested people. In this way, ordinary people can have an opportunity to understand and enjoy this art form. As a team, our goal is to increase the influence of Pingjiang shadow puppetry and increase the size of the audience, in the hopes of encouraging young people to want to take up the art form. Close cooperation between researchers and new artists can promote and protect Pingjiang shadow puppetry, and our work and cooperation can become a model for localities across China, localities which have their own culture to promote and protect.