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CHINESE opera has a centuries old history as well as a complete aesthetical tradition. With a history spanning over a thousand years, it already possesses an important place in the daily lives of Chinese people. No matter whether it is performed in the city or countryside, opera is the people’s most loved form of entertainment and spiritual enjoyment, and has also generated many related creations. Because of the common existence of opera as a leisure pursuit in people’s daily lives, no matter what region of the country, the stories and characters from operas have become some of the most well accepted and universalized subjects. As a result, they have entered into all realms of art, such as decorative designs, paintings and paper cuttings, speaking volumes as to the fact that traditional operas have become deeply entrenched in people’s hearts and minds.
Nevertheless, since the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century, Chinese traditional theatre has continuously been under siege by foreign culture. Within the past hundred years or more, China, Asia, Africa and the Middle East as well as other developing countries, all fell under the heavy influences of Western culture, with China’s experience having special characteristics. In the past century, Chinese theatre has successively been affected by three major waves of assault by Western influence. The first wave occurred between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, and came mainly from both Western and Northern European theatre culture. While the main part of the first wave was from Europe, it actually transited to China from Japan, also leaving a profound Japanese influence. Through this process, the on stage theatrics of dramas and the societal problems presented in Ibsenian plays began to take hold in China and were embraced by the newly emerging intellectual class of the cities. In the second wave, beginning around the year 1943, Yan’an became the centre of the red district creating a substantive influence, and after 1949, Soviet style opera began to rapidly spread throughout the entire country. The result of this assault was that Soviet Union style techniques in “realism” with the Stanislavski system gained supremacy in China. The result was that the Chinese government began to use the strength of the country’s political system to promote and implement these two Soviet styles throughout the country’s performing opera groups. At the same time the Soviet Union’s grand theatre system began to completely replace the original Chinese theatre group structure. The third wave of assault was after 1978, when China’s reform and opening up process held America as the representative of Western theatrical culture, and thus Western culture regained its followers, particularly giving the modern Western school of theatrics more prominence. Two of these followers were Gao Xingjian and Lin Zhaohua, who for the first time co-authored a small theatrical play entitled Signal Alarm which became the signature piece of modern Chinese theatre, and its influence can still be felt today. Many people, especially intellectuals, formed a fervent passion, desire and support for the modern Western school of theatre, as they felt disgusted by and were critical of the system that a decade before had led hundreds of millions of people to live in frightening conditions and extreme poverty.
What needs to be explained is that these three waves of assault on Chinese opera all originated from the West; that is to say they all have appeared to advocate Western civilization, furthermore fiercely casting doubt on the form of the core values of Chinese traditional culture, all trying with the Western opera to transform, indeed to replace the ancient culture of Chinese opera. Even more significant is that these three Western waves of assault have behind them intellectuals, with rational aspects of political and social history that support them, who pressingly demand and advocate China’s ...
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Fu Jin is a professor and the head of the academic committee at The National Academy of Chinese Theatre Arts. |
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| Issue 7.2 |
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Priceless Friendship
—Matteo Ricci’s Legacy
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