Catherine “Kate” Stevens passed away on April 30, 2016. She was a founding member of CHINOPERL. Kate was a seminal researcher, a trained storyteller, and a cultural ambassador promoting exchange among Chinese, North American, and European storytellers and scholars.
Kate Stevens originally studied physics. However, inspired by Ezra Pound's translation of Confucian classics, Kate's interest in Chinese grew and she started teaching herself Chinese in her spare time. Her obituary in The Globe and Mail notes,
In the course of her academic career she attended Smith College, University of Minnesota, Columbia University, and Yale University, where she received the two Ford Foundation Grants which enabled her to go to Taiwan to study traditional Chinese performance art and storytelling, becoming fluent in Chinese. She received her Ph.D. in Chinese Studies at Harvard and became a professor of Chinese Literature at the University of Toronto in 1966. There she taught and inspired many students.Footnote1
Kate Stevens advocated teaching by example. She said, “For me, language learning and performing arts are so intertwined that one was inconceivable without the other.” As the editors of the special issue of CHINOPERL dedicated to Kate Stevens in 2007 note,
That she matured as a researcher and taught generations of students in the field of storytelling, while continuing to perform Chinese narratives for a Western audience, shows a way of life that embodies her personal philosophy and professional goals. Her respect and love for Chinese oral narrative art and artists have guided her life's work. For Kate Stevens, scholarly research could never be enough: Only by learning to perform, to sing, and to narrate can true understanding and appreciation of the art be achieved.Footnote2
Another important contribution by Kate grew out of this philosophy: her recordings of numerous folk traditions made in Taiwan in 1960.Footnote3 Originally intended as materials for teaching Chinese language, this large collection (117 reels) was once held by quite a number of major research institutions. Kate Steven's mentor, Rulan Chao Pian, used it as teaching materials in her graduate seminars, and other scholars remember using it in institutions including the Stanford Center in Taiwan. Sadly, the collection now seems to be only partially available to the public in the Ethnomusicology Archives at UCLA, where the 27 reels they have await preservation and digitization.
Kate Stevens set an example of an “insider's approach” to Chinese oral narrative arts. She played an important role in advocating the use of fieldwork to understand performed literature. Both aspects are apparent in her studies of Beijing drum song (Jingyun dagu 京韻大鼓).Footnote4
As noted above, a special issue of CHINOPERL was dedicated to Kate Stevens in 2007. Edited by Vibeke Børdahl and Kathryn Lowry on the occasion of Kate's eightieth birthday, that volume pays tribute to the many facets of Kate's life and work through a bibliography of her published works,Footnote5 reminiscences by friends and colleagues, articles inspired by her example, and a review of her storytelling CDs. The scope of the volume and the breadth of its contributors attest to the international importance of Kate Stevens’ work.
Notes
1 Kate Stevens, The Globe and Mail, May 21, 2016.
2 Vibeke Børdahl and Kathryn Lowry, “Letter from the Editors,” CHINOPERL Papers 27 (2007): vi.
3 The collection is documented in “Chinese Folk Entertainment: A Collection of Tapes with Matching Texts,” CHINOPERL Papers 4.1 (1974). The texts seem to survive in the Harvard University library system, but not the tapes.
4 Her dissertation, “Peking Drumsinging,” Harvard University, 1972, is still required reading for research on drum song performance.
5 Since the special issue in 2007, Kate Stevens published the annotated translation “An Excerpt from Journey to the West in Fast Bamboo Clapper-Style Tale,” in The Columbia Anthology of Chinese Folk and Popular Literature, eds. Victor Mair and Mark Bender (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), pp. 420–28.