The Influence of Daoism on the Dramatization of the Liaozhaixi of Chuanju

This study employs a collection of fresh resources of the Liaozhaixi of Chuanju (Sichuan opera) to examine the influence of Daoism upon the dramatization of Chinese theatre. In contrast to Buddhism, it has long been supposed that Daoism has exerted only a minor influence on Chinese theatre. Despite some progress after the year 2000, the research into Daoism’s influence on Chinese theatre is still in its infancy. Noting the gap in the literature, the study identifies that the Liaozhaixi of Chuanju has provided us with some exceptional insights into Daoism’s influence on Chinese theatre. Since 2012, the successive publication of 24 Liaozhaixi scripts of Chuanju allows us to more fully enter the exploration. Reinforced by these fresh resources, the study summarizes the influence of Daoism on the Liaozhaixi of Chuanju into two typical adaptation approaches, “transplantation” and “improvement”. By analyzing the two approaches, the study will manifest how Daoism has shaped the dramatization of the Liaozhaixi of Chuanju and will employ these approaches to exemplify the confluence of religions and dramas in Chinese folk culture.

Form Follows Function in Community Rituals in North China: Temples and Temple Festivals in Jiacun Village

Yingshen saishe or saishe is a general name for all types of temple festivals held to offer sacrifices to deities of local communities. With its roots traceable to ancient shamanic beliefs and practices, saishe demonstrates itself as a closely integrated form of religious ritual performance and musical/theatrical performance and proves to be instrumental in the development of Chinese theatre from ritual to drama. Based on my fieldwork on Jiacun Double-Fourth Temple Festival in May 2016, this paper offers a close examination of Jiacun temple culture and temple theatre with focus on the religious ritual performance and musical/theatrical entertainment presented during the festival. In so doing, this paper provides an enhanced understanding of the highly dynamic, interactive relationships between temple and theatre and between efficacy and entertainment.

Double Feature

A Day in Hollywood/A Night in the Ukraine was a tiny jewel box of a musical revue, with a cast of just eight versatile performers, that established Tommy Tune as a director-choreographer of the first rank when it opened in 1980. Its second act was an adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s one-act The Bear as it might have been performed by the Marx Brothers. The trio’s cheerfully anarchic spirit was conjured with balletic grace and timing in Tune’s staging. Tune expanded the show’s curtain raiser, a series of Hollywood songs, into a satiric cavalcade of music and comic musings on the movies circa 1939, set in the lobby of Hollywood’s legendary Grauman’s Chinese Theatre and performed by its ushers. Its highlight was an ingenious tap number set to the text of the 1930 Hollywood Production Code, with all its taboos duly noted in rhythm.

An Age of Transition: Restaging Brecht’s Encounter with Beijing Opera

The scene is Moscow, 1935. A who’s who of the European avant-garde has gathered to see the work of their foremost Chinese colleague: the Beijing opera master Mei Lanfang. Among them is the German playwright Bertolt Brecht, who sees in Mei’s performances the aesthetic effect he aims to develop in his own work: an effect he will soon call the ‘alienation effect.’ In 1936, Brecht pens his famous essay “On Chinese Acting,” in which he argues—approvingly—that Chinese theatre alienates the actor and audience from a play’s narrative by smashing the fourth wall and championing symbolism over realism. But did Brecht get it right? In this essay, I examine this remarkable episode in global theatre history. I argue that Brecht misunderstood Beijing opera’s theatre aesthetics, yet nonetheless meaningfully engaged with Chinese culture. A renewed encounter between Brechtian theatre and Beijing opera, I suggest, opens up intriguing possibilities in dramatic performance and theatre aesthetics.

Wang Chong and the Theatre of Immediacy: Technology, Performance, and Intimacy in Crisis

In early January 2020, when Chinese theatre director Wang Chong (b. 1982) arrived in New York to remount his production of Nick Payne's Constellations for the Public Theater's Under the Radar Festival, he couldn't have predicted that this would be the last time for months that he would watch his actors from the middle of a full house. By the time his work-in-progress solo show, Made in China 2.0, opened at the Asia TOPA Festival in Melbourne, Australia, at the end of that February, it was clear that there would be no live theatre in Wang's hometown of Beijing for some time. All of China was on lockdown as the disease now tragically familiar as COVID-19 swept the country. Then, as Wang returned to Beijing in early March, businesses around the globe were shuttering, theatres were going dark, and theatre artists were confronting an unprecedented challenge to their personal safety, livelihoods, and ability to make meaningful art. In short order, some well-resourced theatre institutions began to stream performance recordings and reconfigure their seasons for online platforms. Only a month after returning home, Wang Chong joined this mass online movement with his production of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, streamed live on 5–6 April 2020 as Dengdai Geduo.

The Characteristics of the Traditional Chinese Theather Jing Ju

The title of the paper is “Characters in Jing Ju Traditional Chinese Theatre”. In This paper, the writer wants to analyze the characters from Jing Ju Traditional theatre. This paper talks about the method of the analysis which is used by the writer is descriptive comparative method. And the theory which is used in comparing and analyzed the characters and the meanings of the analysis, the writer show and describes the character which exists in Jing Ju theatre, the meaning of the mask colors from each theatre.

Quangang Hokkien Opera

More than 80% of Chinese opera performances today are presented by privately run professional folk troupes, mostly in rural areas—Chinese theatre’s best kept secret. These performances are rarely noticed by Chinese theatre scholars. There are more than 30 such troupes in Quangang District, Fujian province, which has a population of 300,000.