ABSTRACT
Suzhou Tanci In the early 1990s, I did fieldwork on a local style of Chinese professional storytelling known as Suzhou tanci - which can be translated as Suzhou 'chantefable' (Hanan 1973: 209), 'Suzhou story-singing' (Hodes 1991 ; Stevens 1974), 'southern singing narrative' (Tsao Pen-yeh 1988), and other equivalents. Throughout the Suzhou-Shanghai area, tanci performances usually take place in storyhouses where audiences of older people, largely male, gather to sip tea as they listen to the two-hour daily performances. Stories usually concern some variation on the 'gifted scholar/talented beauty' [caizi jiaren] theme and are typically performed by a pair of performers, usually a male lead and a female assistant .l Some storytellers, however, perform alone, and some occasionally in trios. Music is a very prominent part of most performances and the usual instruments employed are a sanxian ['three-stringed chordophone,' Tsao Pen-yeh 1988], played by the lead, and the pipa-Iute, used by the assistant .s Suzhou pinghua, a related style of narrative performance, is featured in the same storyhouses as tanci.i The two arts share many formal aspects, but pinghua includes no regular instrumental accompaniment; it almost exclusively features one performer and has a different repertoire of stories. Since the late 1940s, the pinghua and tanci forms of the Suzhou tradition have collectively been known as pingtan (Wu Zongxi 1996:1).
