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chinese opera

• Cantonese Opera - History, artists, events, instruments, radio station and links.
• Dance Beijing - Performing artists in Chinese classical dance, folk dance, traditional music and Peking opera.
• The Society of Kunqu Arts, Inc. - Information about the 500-year-old Chinese performing art of Kunqu, blending dancing, singing and acting. Includes synopses, pictures and news plus information about events and the artists.
• Wong Wai Kuan - Images of the Cantonese Opera singer, plus synopses of a number of works.
• Beijing Opera - Information on Peking Opera, roles, arias, dialogues, speeches, actors and actresses, and common stories. By Xu-Ming Wang.
• Beijing Trip - Peking opera with photographs.
• The Chinese Opera - Five-part article from The Illuminated Lantern describing the history, features and contemporary influence of Peking Opera.
• Chinese Theatre Circle Ltd - Preserving and promoting Chinese Opera, drama, dance, and music.
• Development of Beijing Opera - Excerpts from the thesis by Wendy A. Levine: Development of Beijing Opera During the Cultural Revolution in China. With images and online purchase.
• Peking Opera - Covers stage costume, music, and schools. By ChinaPages.
• Peking Opera - A short introduction to Peking (Beijing) opera.
• Qian Yi' - Homepage of one of leading performers of the Kunju style of Chinese opera.

Chinese opera is a popular form of drama in China. In general, it dates back to the Tang Dynasty with Emperor Xuanzong (712-755), who founded the "Pear Garden" (??), the first known opera troupe in China. The troupe mostly performed for the emperors' personal pleasure. To this day operatic professionals are still referred to as "Disciples of the Pear Garden". In the Yuan dynasty (1279-1368), forms like the Zaju (??, variety plays), which acts based on rhyming schemes plus the innovation of having specialized roles like "Dan" (?, female), "Sheng" (?, male), "Hua" (?, painted-face) and "Chou" (?, clown) were introduced into the opera. The dominant form of the Ming and early Qing dynasties was Kunqu, which came from the Wu cultural area, and evolved a longer form of play called chuanqi. Chinese operas continue to exist in 368 different forms now, the best known of which is Beijing opera, which assumed its present form in the mid-19th century and was extremely popular in the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911).

In Beijing opera, traditional Chinese string and percussion instruments provide a strong rhythmic accompaniment to the acting. The acting is based on allusion: gestures, footwork, and other body movements express such actions as riding a horse, rowing a boat, or opening a door. Spoken dialogue is divided into recitative and Beijing colloquial speech, the former employed by serious characters and the latter by young females and clowns. Character roles are strictly defined. Elaborate make-up designs portray which character is acting. The traditional repertoire of Beijing opera includes more than 1,000 works, mostly taken from historical novels about political and military struggles.

In traditional Chinese theater, no plays were performed in the vernacular Chinese or without singing. But at the turn of the 20th century, Chinese students returning from abroad began to experiment with Western plays. Following the May Fourth Movement of 1919, a number of Western plays were staged in China, and Chinese playwrights began to imitate this form. The most notable of the new-style playwrights was Cao Yu (b. 1910). His major works — "Thunderstorm," "Sunrise," "Wilderness," and "Peking Man" — written between 1934 and 1940, have been widely read in China.

In the 1930s, theatrical productions performed by traveling Red Army cultural troupes in Communist - controlled areas were consciously used to promote party goals and political philosophy. By the 1940s theater was well-established in the Communist controlled areas.

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