Definitions and Famous Figures
- Beijing Opera FestivalThe traditional form of theatre known as Beijing Opera, or Peking Opera, is a national treasure in China. The Beijing Opera Festival is the country's most recognized event featuring this dramatic genre, which distinguishes itself from other opera styles with its elaborate costumes and martial arts displays. Scheduled every three years and always in a different city, the two-week festival is co-organized by the Ministry of Culture, local government, and the Beijing Opera Art Foundation...
- Cheng Changgeng (Ch’eng Ch’ang-keng) (1811–80)Chinese Beijing opera (*jingju) performer. A native of Anhui province, for decades Cheng led the Sanqing (Three Celebrations) troupe, one of the four Anhui troupes that had migrated to the capital in the early nineteenth century. The Anhui companies fused their local music with a number of other regional styles, from the earthy yiyang qiang to the literary *kunqu. In Beijing these regional styles were further melded with northern performance traditions to produce what would, by the twentieth century, be called jingju (‘capital opera’)...
- Chinese operaopera as it has developed in the Chinese musical and theatrical tradition, featuring a falsetto singing style, elaborate costumes, masks, and headdresses, and energetic swordplay and acrobatics
- Guo, Lanying (1929-)Guo Lanying is one of the most famous Chinese sopranos of the second half of the last century. She is well known for her folkloric and traditional Shanxi Opera (Jinju), as well as modern Chinese opera performance.
Guo was born in December 1929 in Pingyao District, Shanxi Province. When she was six years old, she started to learn to sing Shanxi Zhonglu Opera (Shanxi Bangzi) in a local Shanxi opera troupe. At the age of 7, she did her first performance at the theatre of Kaihua Temple, Taiyuan City, of Shanxi Province. When she was 11, she became a member of a local Shanxi theatrical troupe in Taiyuan City... - Jiao, Juyin (1905-1975)Jiao Juyin, a well-known Chinese dramatist and translator, made great contributions to Chinese modern theater. Jiao started his theatrical activities at an early age. In 1931, he established the Beijing Traditional Chinese Opera School, and acted as president. He helped train many Beijing opera artists. In 1935, he went to study at the University of Paris-Sorbonne. He finished his dissertation “Chinese Theater Today” and obtained a doctorate in 1938...
- Mei, Lanfang (1894-1961)Mei Lanfang was born on October 22, 1894, coming from a family of opera performers. He wasted no time in starting his career, and began studying Beijing Opera at the age of eight. His teachers found him to be an unimpressive student, but his determination and diligence in practice transformed him into a great artist. In his debut performance, Mei played a weaving girl and primed himself for the rest of his career, where he mostly performed female roles. With the Xiliancheng Theatrical Company, Mei performed locally around Shanghai and all across China to achieve national acclaim by the age of 20...
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Perspectives
Chinese Opera
Chinese opera embraces over 360 different styles of theatre that make one of the richest performance arts in the world. It combines music, speech, poetry, mime, acrobatics, stage fighting, vivid face-painting and exquisite costumes. First experiences of Chinese opera can be baffling because its vocabulary of stagecraft is familiar only to the seasoned aficionado. Chinese Opera: The Actor's Craft makes the experience more accessible for everyone. This book uses breath-taking images of Chinese opera in performance by Hong Kong photographer Siu Wang-Ngai to illustrate and explain Chinese opera stage technique. The book explores costumes, gestures, mime, acrobatics, props and stage techniques. Each explanation is accompanied by an example of its use in an opera and is illustrated by in-performance photographs. Chinese Opera: The Actor's Craft provides the reader with a basic grammar for understanding uniquely Chinese solutions to staging drama.
Alternative Chinese Opera in the Age of Globalization
Bringing the study of Chinese theatre into the 21st-century, Lei discusses ways in which traditional art can survive and thrive in the age of modernization and globalization. Building on her previous work, this new book focuses on various forms of Chinese 'opera' in locations around the Pacific Rim, including Hong Kong, Taiwan and California.
Urban Politics and Cultural Capital in China: the Case of Chinese Opera
This is the first book to take an interdisciplinary approach to the story of the Shanghai Yue Opera, bringing history, arts management, central and regional government policy, urbanisation, gender, media, and theatre artistic development in one. Through the story of the Shanghai Yue Opera House market reform this book facilitates an understanding of the complex Chinese political economic situation in post-socialist China. This book suggests that as state art institutions are key organs of the Communist party gaining legitimacy, the vigorous evolution and struggle of the Shanghai Yue Opera house in fact directly mirrors the Communist Party internal turmoil in the new millennium to gain its own legitimacy and survival.
Master Qi and the Monkey King
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This beautifully realized documentary chronicles the life and work of Qi Shu Fang, one of the preeminent masters of Chinese Opera living in the United States. It is a story of ambition, love, the creative impulse and the struggle to survive against all odds...
Websites
- Organization of Chinese American Women-Opera InternationalOpera International is a signature program of OCAW. It was founded in 1994 by Muriel (Mimi) Hom, longstanding member of the Maryland Chapter and OCAW National Vice President for Programs. Mimi is Producer-Director of the company.
- Philadelphia Chinese Opera SocietyPhiladelphia Chinese Opera Society (PCOS) was established in February 1999 as a non-profit organization with a mission to promote and preserve the cultural heritage of the Chinese community in the form of Chinese Opera through educational activities and touring engagements.
- Singapore Chinese Opera MuseumSingapore Chinese Opera Museum is located in the rustic Nanyang tourist spot in Singapore: Kampong Glam.
The exhibits in the museum revolve around the development of Chinese operas in Singapore since the time Southern Chinese set foot on this island. The exhibits span over a hundred years. Chinese operas include the Cantonese, Teochew, Qiong, Hokkien (Xiang Opera, Li Yuan Opera and Gezai Opera), Yue opera.
Women's Roles in Chinese Opera
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A student trains to be a warrior girl and learns to master martial arts. Strenuous exercises are required daily. Women’s roles include virtuous woman, coquette, young girl, warrior, and old lady.
Traditional Chinese Opera
- Films on Demand This link opens in a new windowTraditional Chinese opera has always been entertainment for the masses. Many young people compete to get into the prestigious Beijing Opera School and to participate in the its anniversary celebration. A BBC Production.
Types of Chinese Opera/Drama
- CHINESE POETIC DRAMA.Xiqu, or “drama,” literally means dramatic song, and until the advent of Western-style “spoken drama,” all Chinese drama was sung by characters who belonged to role types (e.g., male lead, female lead, clown). Traditional drama encompasses hundreds of regional forms, spanning close to a millennium, from its beginnings around the year 1100 to the present. The vast majority of those forms have left no written trace. Performers rely not on libretti but on oral transmission and improvisation...
- difangxi (ti-fang hsi)Chinese regional opera. All but two of the over 300 forms of opera constituting the Chinese music-drama tradition known as xiqu (theatre [of] song) are classified as regional opera forms. The exceptions are the well-known Kun opera (*kunqu) and Beijing opera (*jingju), which are considered national forms, although both have their roots in regional opera. The geographic origin of most regional opera can be discovered in the title of the form. In many cases the first one or two written characters of a title refer to the place of origin, while the latter part of the title is generally the word for ‘drama’ (ju or xi), or a word indicating the style of music used...
- jingju (ching chü)Beijing (or Peking) opera, an indigenous Chinese theatrical form. Its beginnings are traced to 1790 when actors and musicians from around China gathered in Beijing for the celebration of Emperor Qianlong's eightieth birthday. Troupes from Anhui province, who specialized in xipi and erhuang music, provided the basis for the new musical system. Its current name means literally ‘capital drama’, referring to Beijing. As with other genres of Chinese opera, *music gives Beijing opera its unique identity...
- kunqu (k’un-ch’ü)One of the dominant musical styles of Chinese opera of the late imperial and modern periods. Traditional Chinese theatre is essentially *opera with lyrics that can be sung in any number of musical styles. Considered particularly elegant and subtle, kunqu was most popular among the gentry from the late sixteenth to the late eighteenth centuries. It originated in the Kunshan area of Wenzhou, and is a refinement of the regional style of singing popular there during the fifteenth century...
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Credo Reference is an easy-to-use tool for starting research. Gather background information on your topic from hundreds of full-text encyclopedias, dictionaries, thesauri, quotations, and subject-specific titles, as well as 500,000+ images and audio files and over 1,000 videos.
Chinese Cracker: The Making of The Peony Pavilion
- Films on Demand This link opens in a new windowWritten by 16th-century Chinese playwright Tang Xianzu, The Peony Pavilion is a 19-hour epic opera in 57 episodes that tells a story of youth and love literally triumphing over death. This program follows director Chen Shi-Zheng and the Shanghai Kunju Opera Troupe in their monumental effort of staging the entire production, an event that had not occurred in nearly four centuries. Despite resistance by the Chinese government and the project’s inherent difficulties, the debut at the Lincoln Center was an overwhelming success. Coverage of rehearsals, set construction, and costume preparation is combined with interviews with Chen Shi-Zheng and his musical director Zhou Ming, who place this masterpiece in its historical and cultural context. (53 minutes)