Acrobatics and fighting scenes were rarely included in them in older times. Fighting scenes and acrobatics are now also sometimes adopted from the Peking opera practices. On the modern yue stage sets with sugary-sweet painted backdrops are often used, and the costuming tends to represent a kind of semi-historical fantasy style in pastel colours.
It is a kind of Romeo and Julia story about young love, which cannot find fulfilment. An early movie based on a yue version of this story was the first opera film produced in China.
The Chinese name of this style is, when written in Latin script, the same as the name of the all-female yue opera , i. In Chinese, these names are, however, written differently. A crucial impetus was received when an actor exiled from Peking, called Zhang Wu Chang Wu , founded a guild for actors near Canton.
It is still regarded as a kind of shrine of the Canton opera. Canton opera was further enriched by a musical style called pihuang. By the end of the Qing dynasty — the Canton opera, a style of a cosmopolitan commercial centre, received even more external influences. New plays were written and the costuming was partly modernised. One reason for these many innovations may be the fact that, in a big, international city like Canton, opera was forced to struggle for its survival with new forms of entertainment, including movies.
New stories, both Chinese and western, were adapted to the opera stage. Realistic stage sets, lighting effects and modern costumes were common, and the orchestra was expanded with western instruments, such as violins, guitars and even saxophones.
Canton is the city in China that had the earliest contacts with the western world. It was also the place from where many Chinese immigrants moved to other parts of the world, to Hong Kong, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand. Thus it is no wonder that Canton was also greatly influenced from outside China.
According to one estimation, some one thousand new Canton operas were created during the early 20 th century. Their stories were based on older plays, traditional Chinese literature, western literature, and on movies, both Chinese and western.
They were the Ming-period yiyang and the local musical tradition. Later, the pihuang musical system was also added to this style, which evolved into an independent opera style at the beginning of the 20 th century. What is exceptional in the history of Chinese opera is that even at the beginning of the 20 th century, when actors in China were regarded as low-class citizens, the training of the chuan actors also included general education and, furthermore, physical punishment of the students was forbidden.
These early attitudes may be reflected even today in the sophisticated artistry of chuan acting. The vocal technique of chuan opera sounds more natural, compared, for example, with the singing in Peking Opera. In the Ming dynasty wealthy families supported their own theatrical troupe for their entertainment of themselves and their extended families.
A division into two major cultural regions, the northern and the southern, occurred around AD, which led to a kind of competition between the northern and the southern operatic styles. As a popular art form, opera has usually been the first of the arts to reflect changes in Chinese policy. In the mids, for example, it was the first to benefit under the Hundred Flowers Campaign. During the Cultural Revolution — all traditional arts were banned and a new form of theater was created and propagated by the Communist Party.
It was the Revolutionary Model Opera. During the Cultural Revolution, most opera troupes were disbanded, performers and scriptwriters were persecuted, and all operas except the eight "model operas" approved by Jiang Qing and her associates were banned. After the fall of the Gang of Four in , Beijing Opera enjoyed a revival and continued to be a very popular form of entertainment both in theaters and on television.
After the Cultural Revolution traditional theater forms were revived and now China has an abundance of theatrical forms, starting from Kun and Peking Operas to hundreds of local opera forms, to spoken theater and to western-style opera and ballet groups, as well as, more recently, to experimental theater and dance.
Peking Opera and other forms of Chinese opera merge singing, dialogue, acrobatics and pantomime into one art form performed by actors in garish make up or masks in a way that is not unlike Greek drama, which incorporated a chorus and also used masks extensively. Peking Opera also features acrobatics, martial arts, and poetic, stylized singing and dancing.
Westerners usually find that about an hour of Chinese Opera is enough. The costumes, the acrobatics and the atmosphere are interesting but the music and singing is often sheer torture.
The Chinese in the audience often eat meals, breast feed their children, spit and hack, and listen the radio while observing the opera. The younger generation in China has little interest in Chinese opera, which these days is performed mainly in a shortened form for old people and yawning tourists. Few young people are familiar with the symbols and stories that are essential to understanding operas and most young people don't like the strange falsetto singing style.
Many regions and cities have their own style of opera. According to one count there are different operas forms still practiced. Some are known throughout China or across large regions. Many are known only in small districts. Peking Opera is the most well known and generally regarded as the best.
Also well-known is Shanghai-based Kunqu Opera. Sichuan Opera has a year history and famous for slapstick. Anhui opera is one of the oldest and most refined forms of opera. Kunju, the oldest extant form, has such a small following theaters that houses can't even tickets away. Miettinen of the Theater Academy Helsinki wrote: Around China there is a plenitude of different styles of regional operas. These regional or local operas are called difangxi ti-fang-hsi. According to different estimations and ways of classification, their number varies from approximately to They differ mainly in their dialects and in music and in their accompanying orchestras.
Differences can also be found in their repertoire, character categories, costuming and make-up conventions etc. Although kunqu was originally a southern opera style and Peking opera at the beginning a predominantly northern style, they both gradually spread around the country.
Local operas, however, bear characteristics of the dialects and melodies of certain provinces, and although they can occasionally be seen elsewhere as well, they are mainly performed in the areas where they were created and developed. In this connection only a handful of regional styles can be discussed. The old forms of shamanistic mask theater performed in remote villages and rural areas compose their own archaic group among the styles of Chinese opera.
One of them is called nuo opera Nuoxi, No-hsi. It is still performed in faraway villages in the province of Anhui. During the Chinese New Year celebrations the villagers take their robust masks out of the trunks and perform mask plays in order to drive away evil spirits.
Nuo performances combine singing, dialogue, dance, and a simple musical accompaniment. Yue Je, the traditionally Cantonese-style of opera, is similar to operas performed in northern China except that it draws on local folklore and history and is performed in Cantonese rather than Mandarin. These days classes in Yue Le are popular. Some people are enrolled in classes with hopes of becoming professional actors.
Other do it to learn dance steps to keep fit. Traveling folk opera troupes still travel from town to town in te countryside. The head of one such group, that performed on flat bed of an old jury-rigged trucks with loudspeakers, told National Geographic that 80 percent of their business was at funerals.
Kunqu is regarded as the mother of Chinese opera and is the oldest form of Chinese opera still being performed. It has years of history. By contrast Peking Opera has only been around years or so. Kunqu is an art form governed by strict rules: The rehearsal of most plays takes at least six months, while some can take three years just to rehearse. Kunqu is considered China's oldest opera and one of its most influential theatrical traditions, but it was once on the verge of extinction.
With donations from a Hong Kong billionaire, the Shanghai opera house was refurbished, and in the Kunqu opera gave performances, 80 of which were to full houses. With its flowing melodies and soft and supple note of the bamboo flute, it is a typically southern style of opera.
Its singing is characterized by its long notes and elaborated ornamentation. During the Ming dynasty kunqu emerged as the most popular and most patronised of the many theatrical forms and it retained its national dominance until the 19th century.
It was patronised particularly by the educated elite, the scholar-officials and the literati. The acting technique is most demanding, since the delicate singing is combined with constant dance-like movements. Because of the complexity of both its language and acting technique, the educated courtesan actresses, trained in several arts, dominated the kunqu stage for a long time. The complex imagery of classical poetry and the need for increasingly ornate language and music led to longer plays.
The appreciation of this kind of art form naturally demanded a great deal from the audience, too. The dialect used was the Suzhou dialect, a local dialect of Chinese, which was not understood universally in China. The increasing sophistication and the use of local dialect were the factors that led to the gradual unpopularity of kunqu in the early 19th century, when a new and more popular form of opera, the Peking Opera, gained a wider audience in northern China.
The kunqu, already in decline, never regained its former status while the northern Peking Opera replaced it in popularity. The pattern of dramatic construction and expression developed through the kunqu were carried over into the Peking Opera, although this new style was devised for different, less sophisticated audiences.
In the s and s the famous Peking Opera actor Mei Lanfang, together with a kunqu scholar, established a society to revive the kunqu. Different attempts had been made in this direction for decades. In connection with this revival a northern kunqu troupe was founded, and its style was called beikun. At the time of writing this material, the beikun theater has declined to some kind of semi-kunqu, semi-Peking Opera style, struggling to survive among other theater forms in Beijing.
The southern kunqu style was called nankun. South Chinese nankun groups can be found, for example, in Shanghai and in Nanking, the latter one probably representing the most authentic kunqu style at the moment. For generations many have been afraid that this unique opera form will completely decline and disappear. The birth of kunqu was due to the close co-operation of musicians, such as Wei Liangfu, with talented play writers.
Chinese is a tonal language, and thus when it is sung, its relationship with accompanying music is close and specific, an important phenomenon to be further discussed later. The tones, according to whether they are level, ascending, or first descending and then ascending, or descending in pitch, affect the actual meaning of the word and consequently create a kind of musical basis within the language itself.
His works are regarded as the epitome of the dramatic literature of the Ming period. His plays are still praised for their harmonious structure, deep emotions and sophisticated style. This is because of the so-called dream scenes, which were both his innovation and his trademark. In the play, a young lady falls asleep in a peony garden. In her dream she meets a young, handsome scholar and falls deeply in love with him.
When she awakes and understands that everything was only a dream, she mourns herself to death. Kunqu dramas are of a high literary standard and their poetic language is complex and not easy to understand for modern audiences.
They employ the full scale of role categories developed in the earlier theatrical styles. They include the sheng or the male roles, the dan or the female roles, the chou or the comic roles, and the jing or the painted-face categories with their numerous sub-categories, to be discussed in connection with the Peking Opera.
Thus the leading characters in kunqu plays are often a young lady and a young scholar. This is not always the case. One landmark in the revival process of kunqu was the performance of a play called Fifteen Strings of Cash, Shiwu guan Shih-wu kuan in Suzhou in The play had been seen performed as Peking opera, but in Suzhou it was again produced in the original kunqu style.
Kunqu plays were very commonly adapted to the Peking Opera style, which had inherited so many elements from the earlier kunqu. A kunqu play that is also popular as Peking opera is Longing for Worldly Pleasures, which, in fact, had been adapted to the kunqu repertory from an even older southern style. It is a kind of monodrama for a virtuoso huadan actress who interprets the romantic longing of a young Buddhist nun. In the play, the spirit of a white snake turns into a young woman and marries a young pharmacist.
A monk is determined to destroy the snake and her marriage. The white snake goes through numerous hardships and ends up by being locked up in the dungeon of a pagoda. The White Snake is exceptional as a kunqu, since it includes fighting scenes that employ movements from the martial arts.
That was not common in the southern kunqu tradition, whereas the later Peking Opera makes full use of them. Before turning to the birth of northern Peking Opera, which gained the status of the national style after the kunqu, it is time to look at what kinds of operas were and still are performed in other regions of China.
The play was created from an old story by Tian Han in the beginning of the 20th century. Written more than years ago by the Ming dynasty playwright Tang Xiazu, it is a love story that takes place within a dream: a woman falls asleep by a peony pavilion and dreams of a handsome scholar she has never met.
Unable to find him in the real world she dies of a broken heart and ends up in the Underworld, where the strength of her desire convince the Infernal Judge to release her ghost back into the land of the living to marry the man of her dreams. People can understand how strongly the heroine fights to find love. Drama and novels developed from the same story-telling tradition in which the use of vernacular language is a prominent feature. In Mei Lanfang played the aristocratic lady Du Liniang in the opera who, in a dream, falls in love with Liu Mengmei, a scholar.
While Mei was considered the most famous Peking Opera artist in China, he was also good at Kunqu opera. In , Mei and his team visited the United States and dazzled audiences with the same work.
But the opera didn't happen because an ultra-conservative Communist bureaucratic named Ma Bomin refused to allow the opera to leave the country on the ground that the director's interpretation of the Peony Pavilion was "feudal," "pornographic," and "superstitious" and contained "unhealthy elements. Ma had previously approved the opera but just as the actors were getting ready to leave for New York she blocked the shipment of six tons of important costumes, sets and props.
After representatives from Lincoln Center flew to Shanghai to try to work out a compromise, she agreed to let the sets and costumes go. When someone asked her if the actors would be allowed to go, she answered no. The opera was well received in China and the director said his aim was to be true to original version of the play.
But in the end he was unwilling to make changed demanded by Ma and the entire opera was scuttled. The whole episodes was covered in the New York Times and on 60 Minutes. Some member of the Shanghai Opera have emigrated to New York. Unable to get enough work as performers, some work in video rental shops or take-out Chinese restaurants.
Shaoxing Opera is very popular. Theaters in Shanghai that feature it often sell out. One thing that sets it apart from other operas is that all the performers are female. Shaoxing Opera was founded in the early s. It began as an all-male school. In , it opened a training school for girls. The school was so successful that by the s all the members of the opera were female. It was initially popular on its home turf in Zhejiang province. Later it expanded along the Yangtze to Shanghai. Today, there are about Shaoxing opera companies around the world.
Most of the stories of the operas are based on famous novels and old legends and focus on mistreated lovers and unrequited love.
There are acrobatic moves and super brightly-colored costumes as there are in other forms of opera. One of the most popular shows is Red Mansion, on an old story of which most Chinese are familiar. The story is about two cousin, who are lovers.
Fans follow some of the companies like Dead heads. We go to watch her wherever she performs. The reason they like us is because our operas are about personal relationshipsvery romantic. We pay great attention to beautythe costumes are pretty, the scenery is pretty, the music is pretty.
Theaters that host Shaoxing opera rack up high sales in merchandise, selling things like key chains, video discs, post cards.
There have been near riots when supplies have ran low. Currently Chinese operas continue to exist in different forms, the best known being Beijing opera, which assumed its present form in the midth century and was extremely popular in the latter part of the Qing dynasty — The costumes of Beijing Opera have strong Chinese characteristics, and from the styles, audiences can identify the characters.
The first and oldest form of prehistoric art are petroglyphs cupules , which appeared throughout the world during the Lower Paleolithic. It refers to a Chinese painting that involves natural landscapes. The landscape is spiritual and inner one. It represents the two complementary poles yin and yang reflecting the Daoist view of the universe.
Explanation:A classiccal Chinese landscape is not meant to reproduce an actual view, as a Western painting. A Chinese painter does not choose a single viewpoint. Begin typing your search term above and press enter to search. Press ESC to cancel. Ben Davis January 30, What opera school did Jackie Chan go to? Where was Jackie Chan trained?
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