Chinese Shadows - Part 2
Bringing unknown traditions of Chinese musical folklore closer to the western public
Concerts by local village ensembles from North and South China, and shadow puppetry straight from the desert of East Gansu.
For Chinese villagers, shadow theatre is not merely a form of entertainment. It is also an important ritual. In addition to this, it is a magnificent art form, and the rough and passionate music is locally very popular. The beautiful stories stem from the great Chinese oral and classical tradition, and the narrative figures, cut from animal skin, are hardly any less fantastic or capricious than the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch or Hokusai.
The CHIME Foundation paid attention to Chinese shadow theatre in a documentary, an exhibition, and a series of live concerts, lectures and workshops in the Netherlands.
The exhibition in the Sinological Institute, offered a fine selection of puppets and scenery from the 43 extant itinerant shadow puppet theatre groups active in Huanxian, a barren desert region in Northwest China. Most of the material stems from the collection of puppet maker and collector Bai XuemingBai Xueming. The two oldest puppets that were shown, date from the Ming period. Furthermore, some musical instrument wre on display, as well as many photos of puppetry, opera and other (ritual) musical genres, and portraits of villagers. The compilers, Frank Kouwenhoven and Antoinet Schimmelpenninck have researcher local folk music in China for more than twenty years. For the exhibition, they cooperated with curators in Huanxian. Collector Christoph Fuhnin Heidelberg (Germany) kindly contributed some fine Chinese marionettes from his own collection.
Shadow theatre of Huanxian
Shadow theatre is a living and vivid art. To this purpose, CHIME organised a series of workshops for children of elementary schools in Leiden, with support from the Leiden municipal government. The foundation has also invited a shadow theatre group from Huanxian for a tour in Holland in may 2008 as a follow-up of a succesful tour by the same group in Holland in October 2007.
Ensemble music from Chaozhou
Chinese village music was performed in the framework of the ‘Chinese shadows’ project. The Chaozhou Ensemble of Li Xianlie from South China has performed a small tour in The Netherlands.
