Film screening
Seated at the Altar: New Year in Rural North China
- Date
- Thursday 20 March 2025
- Time
- Address
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 1.48
This intimate new film portrays the 1995 New Year’s rituals of devotional associations in the village of Gaoluo just south of Beijing, using footage taken during a three-week stay there.
After domestic offerings to the ancestors on New Year’s Day, and a grand funeral, the film focuses on the busy four-day period “Seated at the Altar”, with daily rituals before the gods inside the Lantern Tent and mutual visits of the village’s four associations. All are punctuated by vocal liturgy (notably the powerful exorcistic Incantation of Pu’an and the Precious Scroll to the Goddess Houtu), suites for shengguan melodic ensemble, and the majestic percussion suite Fendiezi.
With historical interludes told largely through photos and voiceovers, this precious footage is all the more significant since the later reification of such ritual groups under the Intangible Cultural Heritage project. The film complements Jones’s book Plucking the Winds (2004), a detailed diachronic ethnography of Gaoluo, and many related articles on my blog.
https://stephenjones.blog/gaoluo/
The moving percussion suite is further explored in a bonus section following the final credits, offering clues to its workings by demonstrating the patterns of the bo cymbals with oral mnemonics.
Bio
Stephen Jones is an independent scholar based in London. Having studied Tang history at Cambridge from 1972 to 1976, from 1986 he began regular fieldwork projects on ritual life and soundscapes in the north Chinese countryside, working closely with colleagues from the Music Research Institute in Beijing. Among his six books (some with DVDs) are Plucking the Winds (2004) and Daoist Priests of the Li Family (2016), the latter accompanying his moving portrait film Li Manshan. While holding research fellowships at SOAS, as well as performing as violinist in London early music ensembles, he has also published many articles, and invited Chinese folk groups to perform around Europe. Since 2016 he has focused on his blog (“Daoism—lives—language—performance. And jokes”), which has become a vast compendium of fieldnotes and a miscellany of posts on Chinese culture and politics, as well as “world music”, jazz, Western Art Music, European history, and film.