The Institute for Chinese Studies presents the "China in Transition" Lecture Series.
"Actor, Role and Character in Chinese Theater"
Regina Llamas
Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures
Stanford University
Flyer: 
Regina Llamas Flyer.pdf
Abstract: Early Chinese theater is often called a ‘theater of actors’ and traced to the Adjutant Play, a remonstrative comic farce between a straight man and a fool that developed in the Tang dynasty. This historical tradition places comedy at the source of the Chinese dramatic tradition and establishes the origin of the role system in the comic and the fool. We now take the role system – that is, the division of characters according to an actor’s specialized skill of performance – as the most basic structural unit of Chinese theater and one crucial part of play composition. While we take for granted the division of roles, we know surprisingly little about them. In this paper I will discuss the different theories on the origins of roles; the need for a role system (when the different characters would have been enough for the audience to understand the plot); and what is the relationship between the actor, the role and the character in a play.
Bio: Regina Llamas is working on a monograph on the historiography of Chinese drama and how this discipline was formed. Her earlier work, both in English and Spanish focused on southern Nanxi drama, dramatic historiography, modern ethnography and dramatic performance, and the later Qing commentarial dramatic tradition. Her latest work is El licenciado número uno Zhang Xie, in Spanish. She is currently a lecturer at the Center for East Asian Languages and Cultures at Stanford University.
