M. A. Aldrich
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9789622097773
- eISBN:
- 9789882207585
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Hong Kong University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5790/hongkong/9789622097773.003.0060
- Subject:
- History, Asian History
This chapter considers the Peking Opera. It takes preparation in advance to enjoy a Peking Opera, as it requires concentration that's a few notches above the standard Mel Gibson action thriller. In ...
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This chapter considers the Peking Opera. It takes preparation in advance to enjoy a Peking Opera, as it requires concentration that's a few notches above the standard Mel Gibson action thriller. In the nineteenth century, Peking Opera troupes were hard pressed to find rehearsal studios. Some people think of Peking Opera as a never changing element in Chinese culture. There were two influences in the aesthetic of Peking Opera. The first was minimalism and the second was the primacy of suggestion over detail. Until the 1930s, all Peking Opera performers were men on account of Confucian sentiments against women performing in public. Peking Opera drew a distinction between wen and wu. The former tend to be poetic and, truthfully, tougher sledding for a foreign audience. The latter usually entails a dazzling display of acrobatics that can hold the attention of the most devoted Mel Gibson fan.Less
This chapter considers the Peking Opera. It takes preparation in advance to enjoy a Peking Opera, as it requires concentration that's a few notches above the standard Mel Gibson action thriller. In the nineteenth century, Peking Opera troupes were hard pressed to find rehearsal studios. Some people think of Peking Opera as a never changing element in Chinese culture. There were two influences in the aesthetic of Peking Opera. The first was minimalism and the second was the primacy of suggestion over detail. Until the 1930s, all Peking Opera performers were men on account of Confucian sentiments against women performing in public. Peking Opera drew a distinction between wen and wu. The former tend to be poetic and, truthfully, tougher sledding for a foreign audience. The latter usually entails a dazzling display of acrobatics that can hold the attention of the most devoted Mel Gibson fan.
Ruru Li
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9789622099944
- eISBN:
- 9789882207394
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Hong Kong University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5790/hongkong/9789622099944.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Asian Studies
Any traditional theatre has to engage the changing world to avoid becoming a living fossil. How has Beijing Opera — a highly stylized theatre with breath-taking acrobatics and martial arts, fabulous ...
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Any traditional theatre has to engage the changing world to avoid becoming a living fossil. How has Beijing Opera — a highly stylized theatre with breath-taking acrobatics and martial arts, fabulous costumes and striking makeup — survived into the new millennium while coping with a century of great upheavals and competition from new entertainment forms? This book answers that question, looking at the evolution of singing and performance styles, make-up and costume, audience demands, as well as stage and street presentation modes amid tumultuous social and political changes. The author's study follows a number of major artists' careers in mainland China and Taiwan, drawing on primary print sources as well as personal interviews with performers and their cultural peers. One chapter focuses on the career of the author's own mother and how she adapted to changes in Communist ideology. In addition, the book explores how performers as social beings have responded to conflicts between tradition and modernity, and between convention and innovation. Through performers' negotiation and compromises, Beijing Opera has undergone constant re-examination of its inner artistic logic and adjusted to the demands of the external world.Less
Any traditional theatre has to engage the changing world to avoid becoming a living fossil. How has Beijing Opera — a highly stylized theatre with breath-taking acrobatics and martial arts, fabulous costumes and striking makeup — survived into the new millennium while coping with a century of great upheavals and competition from new entertainment forms? This book answers that question, looking at the evolution of singing and performance styles, make-up and costume, audience demands, as well as stage and street presentation modes amid tumultuous social and political changes. The author's study follows a number of major artists' careers in mainland China and Taiwan, drawing on primary print sources as well as personal interviews with performers and their cultural peers. One chapter focuses on the career of the author's own mother and how she adapted to changes in Communist ideology. In addition, the book explores how performers as social beings have responded to conflicts between tradition and modernity, and between convention and innovation. Through performers' negotiation and compromises, Beijing Opera has undergone constant re-examination of its inner artistic logic and adjusted to the demands of the external world.
Wenqing Kang
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9789622099807
- eISBN:
- 9789882207233
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Hong Kong University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5790/hongkong/9789622099807.003.0006
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Asian Studies
The announcement released by the Central Police Office of the Beijing Outer City on April 20, 1912, signified a shift in the meaning of male same-sex relations between Peking Opera actors and ...
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The announcement released by the Central Police Office of the Beijing Outer City on April 20, 1912, signified a shift in the meaning of male same-sex relations between Peking Opera actors and literati. Prior to the shift, men who patronized these male actors were initially regarded to be of high-class and have refined taste. After the shift, however, the practice was perceived to be unacceptable for the new republic. This literati-actor sexual relations practice had to be stopped because it represented a threat to contaminate the nation's body politic, as well as provide a reason for foreigners to express contempt. Eradicating the practice is believed to have contributed in building China's subsequent strong image. This chapter illustrates the rise and fall of the popularity of xianggong as forms of entertainment.Less
The announcement released by the Central Police Office of the Beijing Outer City on April 20, 1912, signified a shift in the meaning of male same-sex relations between Peking Opera actors and literati. Prior to the shift, men who patronized these male actors were initially regarded to be of high-class and have refined taste. After the shift, however, the practice was perceived to be unacceptable for the new republic. This literati-actor sexual relations practice had to be stopped because it represented a threat to contaminate the nation's body politic, as well as provide a reason for foreigners to express contempt. Eradicating the practice is believed to have contributed in building China's subsequent strong image. This chapter illustrates the rise and fall of the popularity of xianggong as forms of entertainment.
Tan See Kam
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9789888208852
- eISBN:
- 9789888313518
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Hong Kong University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5790/hongkong/9789888208852.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Tsui Hark’s Hong Kong New Wave film Peking Opera Blues (1986) is set in a China marked by contestations between Republican democrats and monarchist revivalists (circa 1913). Through various acts of ...
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Tsui Hark’s Hong Kong New Wave film Peking Opera Blues (1986) is set in a China marked by contestations between Republican democrats and monarchist revivalists (circa 1913). Through various acts of reading film in different (though intertextually connected) ways along a formalist-historical-postmodernist continuum this book offers various reading strategies which reveal the film’s richness in terms of textual contours, textual affects, and ideological influences. Five acts of reading are explored which variously and collectively deconstruct the film’s playful intertextual and hypertextual configurations. Tsui Hark’s filmmaking career is summarized, and a polysemous analysis of the film’s story and form; its historical background; a companion film Shanghai Blues; Peking opera; Canto-pop and Mandarin songs; mandarin ducks and butterfly fiction; and the “three-women” film in Chinese-language cinema, are all explored within the general context of Hong Kong New Wave filmmaking and the issues of Chinese identity, culture, power in the contemporary politics of Hong Kong as they pertain to the Sinophone realms of articulations. Overall, the book asks a central question for film studies: does the film as a cultural and social artifact merely tell stories about the past or does it seek to reclaim lost territory in metafictional ways, with significant resonance for reading contemporary situations?Less
Tsui Hark’s Hong Kong New Wave film Peking Opera Blues (1986) is set in a China marked by contestations between Republican democrats and monarchist revivalists (circa 1913). Through various acts of reading film in different (though intertextually connected) ways along a formalist-historical-postmodernist continuum this book offers various reading strategies which reveal the film’s richness in terms of textual contours, textual affects, and ideological influences. Five acts of reading are explored which variously and collectively deconstruct the film’s playful intertextual and hypertextual configurations. Tsui Hark’s filmmaking career is summarized, and a polysemous analysis of the film’s story and form; its historical background; a companion film Shanghai Blues; Peking opera; Canto-pop and Mandarin songs; mandarin ducks and butterfly fiction; and the “three-women” film in Chinese-language cinema, are all explored within the general context of Hong Kong New Wave filmmaking and the issues of Chinese identity, culture, power in the contemporary politics of Hong Kong as they pertain to the Sinophone realms of articulations. Overall, the book asks a central question for film studies: does the film as a cultural and social artifact merely tell stories about the past or does it seek to reclaim lost territory in metafictional ways, with significant resonance for reading contemporary situations?
Tan See Kam
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9789888208852
- eISBN:
- 9789888313518
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Hong Kong University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5790/hongkong/9789888208852.003.0005
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
The two Blues films manifest a strong postmodern tendency by establishing an intertextual relationship between the “present” of the film and the “past” embodied, for example, in the cultural ...
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The two Blues films manifest a strong postmodern tendency by establishing an intertextual relationship between the “present” of the film and the “past” embodied, for example, in the cultural phenomenon of Peking Opera, which heavily informs Peking Opera Blues. As such, both films, with their blending of the cinematic, the theatrical and the dramatic conjuring up amazing spectacles that emphasize visuality, performance and movement, may both be read as a postmodern shadowplay of attractions (dianguang yingxi) which has the characteristics of an on-screen vaudeville show. This dianying (electric shadowplay) has parodic invocations that, through strategies of disruption and postmodern bricolage often involve a playful mixing of history, fiction, time, place, and language. This creates postmodern pastiches, most especially with ways of reading history, by incorporating the filmic and the operatic and thereby creating meta-cinematic structures where the resultant aural and visual excessiveness calls into question illusions of fixed systems of representation.Less
The two Blues films manifest a strong postmodern tendency by establishing an intertextual relationship between the “present” of the film and the “past” embodied, for example, in the cultural phenomenon of Peking Opera, which heavily informs Peking Opera Blues. As such, both films, with their blending of the cinematic, the theatrical and the dramatic conjuring up amazing spectacles that emphasize visuality, performance and movement, may both be read as a postmodern shadowplay of attractions (dianguang yingxi) which has the characteristics of an on-screen vaudeville show. This dianying (electric shadowplay) has parodic invocations that, through strategies of disruption and postmodern bricolage often involve a playful mixing of history, fiction, time, place, and language. This creates postmodern pastiches, most especially with ways of reading history, by incorporating the filmic and the operatic and thereby creating meta-cinematic structures where the resultant aural and visual excessiveness calls into question illusions of fixed systems of representation.
Eugenio Barba
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9789622099944
- eISBN:
- 9789882207394
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Hong Kong University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5790/hongkong/9789622099944.003.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Asian Studies
This section discusses Jingju, which literally means “Beijing drama”, and is the Chinese word for the theatrical genre known in the West as “Peking/Beijing Opera”. It defines jingju as a total ...
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This section discusses Jingju, which literally means “Beijing drama”, and is the Chinese word for the theatrical genre known in the West as “Peking/Beijing Opera”. It defines jingju as a total theatre which emphasizes stylization over realism. It includes the Chinese terms for jingju's four basic skills, translated by Elizabeth Wichman as “singing, speaking, dance-acting, and combat”. It elucidates that “dance-acting” includes pure dance and pantomime as well as the visible results of “acting” in the Western sense, while “combat” in this non-mimetic theatre encompasses stylized fighting with swords and spears, martial arts, and acrobatics. It further elucidates how performers and spectators approach jingju, what it meant to people at different times, and how it managed to evolve and survive throughout the twentieth century.Less
This section discusses Jingju, which literally means “Beijing drama”, and is the Chinese word for the theatrical genre known in the West as “Peking/Beijing Opera”. It defines jingju as a total theatre which emphasizes stylization over realism. It includes the Chinese terms for jingju's four basic skills, translated by Elizabeth Wichman as “singing, speaking, dance-acting, and combat”. It elucidates that “dance-acting” includes pure dance and pantomime as well as the visible results of “acting” in the Western sense, while “combat” in this non-mimetic theatre encompasses stylized fighting with swords and spears, martial arts, and acrobatics. It further elucidates how performers and spectators approach jingju, what it meant to people at different times, and how it managed to evolve and survive throughout the twentieth century.
Tan See Kam
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9789888208852
- eISBN:
- 9789888313518
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Hong Kong University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5790/hongkong/9789888208852.003.0007
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Peking Opera Blues presents a jiegu fengjin metafiction to the 1980s Hong Kong of the film’s making and release. This is done by Tsui Hark evoking a past (Republican China), that draws on historical ...
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Peking Opera Blues presents a jiegu fengjin metafiction to the 1980s Hong Kong of the film’s making and release. This is done by Tsui Hark evoking a past (Republican China), that draws on historical hindsights for allegorizing lessons of history with respect to colonial Hong Kong’s post-1997 future under the “one country, two systems” provision. While Peking Opera Blues does not have an explicit agenda for exerting pressure on the powers that be and for swaying public opinion in favor of democracy as an alternative to political China’s authoritarianism, it is nevertheless a commentary on the long, unsuccessful, march to Chinese democracy and its impact on contemporary society, most especially Hong Kong. Tsui Hark achieves this by particular forms of editing and mise en scène, and also by referencing Chinese cultural forms such as Peking opera, mandarin duck and butterfly fiction, the “three-women” films, and Canto-pop and Mandarin songs.Less
Peking Opera Blues presents a jiegu fengjin metafiction to the 1980s Hong Kong of the film’s making and release. This is done by Tsui Hark evoking a past (Republican China), that draws on historical hindsights for allegorizing lessons of history with respect to colonial Hong Kong’s post-1997 future under the “one country, two systems” provision. While Peking Opera Blues does not have an explicit agenda for exerting pressure on the powers that be and for swaying public opinion in favor of democracy as an alternative to political China’s authoritarianism, it is nevertheless a commentary on the long, unsuccessful, march to Chinese democracy and its impact on contemporary society, most especially Hong Kong. Tsui Hark achieves this by particular forms of editing and mise en scène, and also by referencing Chinese cultural forms such as Peking opera, mandarin duck and butterfly fiction, the “three-women” films, and Canto-pop and Mandarin songs.
Anne Witchard
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- January 2013
- ISBN:
- 9789888139606
- eISBN:
- 9789882208643
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Hong Kong University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5790/hongkong/9789888139606.003.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Asian Studies
The introduction situates Lao She in relation to China's New Culture movement and the protest movements of May Fourth. It is 1928 and during the four years that Lao She has spent in London he has ...
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The introduction situates Lao She in relation to China's New Culture movement and the protest movements of May Fourth. It is 1928 and during the four years that Lao She has spent in London he has published two novels in China's prestigious Fiction Monthly (Xiaoshuo yuebao) and is working on a third, Mr Ma and Son: Two Chinese in London (Er Ma, 1929). Unlike the first two, with their nostalgically detailed evocations of life in Peking, this novel will be an indictment of British imperialist ideology and a Chinese wake-up call. Lao She came to work in London through the auspices of the London Missionary Society (LMS). This was the period seen as the apex of high modernism in Britain and Lao She's early fiction registers this interaction in ways that suggest we rethink his reputation beyond that of his proletarian classic, Rickshaw Boy (Luotuo Xiangzi, 1937). ReadingLao She as an incipient modernist, initiating in China new subject matter and new styles of writing in the endeavour to remake the sensibility of the Chinese people, serves to unsettle Eurocentric considerations of literary modernism as exclusively Western, its place of origin unquestionably the metropolitan West.Less
The introduction situates Lao She in relation to China's New Culture movement and the protest movements of May Fourth. It is 1928 and during the four years that Lao She has spent in London he has published two novels in China's prestigious Fiction Monthly (Xiaoshuo yuebao) and is working on a third, Mr Ma and Son: Two Chinese in London (Er Ma, 1929). Unlike the first two, with their nostalgically detailed evocations of life in Peking, this novel will be an indictment of British imperialist ideology and a Chinese wake-up call. Lao She came to work in London through the auspices of the London Missionary Society (LMS). This was the period seen as the apex of high modernism in Britain and Lao She's early fiction registers this interaction in ways that suggest we rethink his reputation beyond that of his proletarian classic, Rickshaw Boy (Luotuo Xiangzi, 1937). ReadingLao She as an incipient modernist, initiating in China new subject matter and new styles of writing in the endeavour to remake the sensibility of the Chinese people, serves to unsettle Eurocentric considerations of literary modernism as exclusively Western, its place of origin unquestionably the metropolitan West.
Diana Yeh
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- September 2014
- ISBN:
- 9789888208173
- eISBN:
- 9789888268597
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Hong Kong University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5790/hongkong/9789888208173.003.0003
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Asian Studies
This chapter considers how ideas of the ‘foreign’ and discourses on China and ‘Chineseness’, shaped by racial, colonial and national ideologies, determines the cultural productions of racialised ...
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This chapter considers how ideas of the ‘foreign’ and discourses on China and ‘Chineseness’, shaped by racial, colonial and national ideologies, determines the cultural productions of racialised migrants. Tracing Hsiung's early days as a student in London up to the production of his play Lady Precious Stream, it shows how his translation work in China helped him to penetrate London's elite literary circles and befriend, among others, James Barrie, George Bernard Shaw, Sir James Stewart Lockhart, Allardyce Nicoll, Sir Barry Jackson, Lascelles Abercrombie and Catherine Amy Dawson Scott, co-founder of the PEN society. While Hsiung had arrived in Britain seeking to stage a modern realist play however, his new associates advised him to ‘try something really Chinese and traditional’. This chapter thus explores how Hsiung sought to negotiate Orientalist stereotypes circulating in wider British society in the writing of his play and highlights the role of the British in shaping the work that shot him to fame and came to represent ‘Chineseness’ worldwide.Less
This chapter considers how ideas of the ‘foreign’ and discourses on China and ‘Chineseness’, shaped by racial, colonial and national ideologies, determines the cultural productions of racialised migrants. Tracing Hsiung's early days as a student in London up to the production of his play Lady Precious Stream, it shows how his translation work in China helped him to penetrate London's elite literary circles and befriend, among others, James Barrie, George Bernard Shaw, Sir James Stewart Lockhart, Allardyce Nicoll, Sir Barry Jackson, Lascelles Abercrombie and Catherine Amy Dawson Scott, co-founder of the PEN society. While Hsiung had arrived in Britain seeking to stage a modern realist play however, his new associates advised him to ‘try something really Chinese and traditional’. This chapter thus explores how Hsiung sought to negotiate Orientalist stereotypes circulating in wider British society in the writing of his play and highlights the role of the British in shaping the work that shot him to fame and came to represent ‘Chineseness’ worldwide.
