BICC Position

British Inter-University China Centre Career Development Fellow/Lecturer in Chinese Language and Literature.

Home Institution

University of Bristol

Contact Information

Centre for East Asian Studies, 8 Woodland Road, Bristol, BS8 1 TN

Current Projects

Dr. Llamas is currently working on a critical history of early southern Chinese drama (nanxi), beginning with the question of the origins of Chinese theater.

Research interests

My field is Chinese theatre, in particular the history of Southern Chinese theatre (Nanxi).

My previous work looked at the earliest known dramatic text in China, Top Graduate Zhang Xie ( Zhang Xie zhuangyuan), a fourteenth-century play about an ungrateful scholar. My present work focusses on the history of Southern Chinese theater. It begins with an overview of the theories of the origins of Chinese theater and how the search for the roots of theater – from ritual to entertainment – have helped define the constituent elements of Chinese theater, that is, what lies at the heart of Chinese theater. It then explores the various theories formulated in the Ming (1368-1644) on the origins of Southern Drama, examiningthe way these theories, articulated against a fabricated ‘classical’ theater, have shaped our historical understanding of the origins of Southern theater. Finally, I look at how the structure and music of this style of theater is established, and how, in the early twentieth century, the fundamentally prosodic understanding of drama and drama composition underwent an important shift to an analytical narrative approach to dramatic history.

I am working on a series of papers teasing out some of the themes of this current project, namely: how the narrative of the history of drama changed in the early twentieth century; the Ming literati’s need to establish a classical (northern) dramatic tradition; and the role comedy played in the formation of Chinese drama.

Other research interests include the revival, adaptation and interpretation of classical theater in contemporary China, and its influence in modern spoken theater; the social aspects of theater, in particular, the fate of thousands of amateur and professional troupes that disappeared during the Cultural Revolution; and the rise of new troupes of roving performers in the provinces in contemporary China.  

I hope that future research will enable me to explore in greater depth the history of ‘entertainment’ in early Chinese society, an area that has long attracted me.