The refined art of pingtan (storytelling and ballad singing), performed in the dialed, has successfully survived the impact of modernization. Storytelling houses were once prosperous but have undergone ups and downs in the past few decades-at the beginning of the 1980s, the impact of pop music drove many pingian performers to change jobs.
Now, most of them have returned to the art form. They have gone to considerable effort to refresh the traditional art form by creating new schools of music for voices and tones and those created by women performers are not rare: Tune of Xu Lixian, Tune of Wang Yuexiang, Tune of Zhu Xueqin and Tune of Hou Lijun, are examples.
Men used to dominate the platform, but now there are more first rate women performers and 80 percent of the students of the Suzhou Pingtan School are girls.
