The younger generation in China has little interest in Chinese opera, which these days is performed mainly in a shortened form for old people and yawning tourists. The Chinese in the audience often eat meals, breast feed their children, spit and hack, and listen the radio while observing the opera.

The costumes, the acrobatics and the atmosphere are interesting but the music and singing becomes tedious and irksome after a short while. Westerners usually find that about an hour of Chinese Opera is enough.

Kunqu, Yueju and Peking opera have been selected as a UNESCO intangible cultural asset. So in the West it is usually called Chinese “opera”. It was characterised by a tendency to combine dance-like movements and also sometimes movements from the martial arts with sung text. 1000 these early genres intermingled with each other and evolved towards a sung theater form with fixed role categories.

poetry, music, dance, and martial arts, are known to have flourished already during the first Millennium B.C. Many of the basic elements of Chinese theater, i.e. Miettinen of the Theater Academy Helsinki wrote:“In a giant country like China with its cultural continuity of several Millennia, there have understandably been and still are countless different forms of the performing arts. Traditional drama, often called 'Chinese opera,' grew out of the zaju (variety plays) of the Yuan dynasty (1279-1368) and continues to exist in 368 different forms, 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) court.ĭr. Over time it incorporated art and literature and became a form of stage performance. Opera and drama in China evolved from ancient folk songs, dances, and especially local dialectical music. have included the Tangshan Shadow Puppet Theatre, the improv comedy of the National Theatre of China’s “Two Dogs: Opinions on Life” and the Beijing Dance Theater's performance of Haze, a celebration of Chinese symphony and opera. Examples of China theater performed at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. There is quite a variety of forms and adaptions. Because music is such an important element of Chinese drama and story is such an integral part of Chinese Opera, Chinese opera and drama are considered one in the same. Styles of Chinese theater and opera include Peking Opera, other kinds of regional opera, “xiangsheng” (comic opera-like dialogues), storytelling, shadow plays, puppetry, glove puppetry, and puppet opera.

Opera is a popular traditional art form in China.

Chinese opera history