Xuzhou Story-telling Drama

Xuzhou story-telling drama is a traditional drama popular in the local place and was collected into the national non-material cultural heritage list in 2008.

Originally named as silk string opera, Xuzhou story-telling drama has been developed from it and was also named as dulcimer drama as it was accompanied by dulcimer in the Qing Dynasty. In the beginning, it was the self-entertainment for fun by people in Xuzhou area during their slack farming season, and was the drama that people played small plates on the village threshing ground, sat around and performed together.

After 1949 Xuzhou people renamed the drama as Xuzhou story-telling, which has been gradually developed into Chinese folk art form of music composition system and joint music based on the ditty in the Ming and Qing dynasties.

Xuzhou story-telling drama has particular lingering charm at singing, flexible and diversified application of localism, is divided into the upper path and under path, and for the former it is profound, primitive and dignified, for the latter it is clear and refined, resplendent and smooth. At performance, the performers sit in the middle and beat the board, musical instrument and the accompanists sit around. The words of ballad are sourced from common people’s daily life, and are mostly small household affairs, so the story-telling is also called as “singing needle and thread basket”.

The performance manners are multiple for Xuzhou story-telling, including solo singing, musical dialogue in antiphonal style, singing by sitting of three and linked singing by many etc. The voices are also very rich, besides for “four-word tone” and “cutting the sheet tone” etc., there are dozens of tunes including Overlaid Broken Bridge, Red River All Over, Upper and Under River Tone, Ya’eryou and Silver Twisting Thread etc.