Early Chinese Performance

Question 1

Baixi Festivals

Answer 1

Variety shows featuring mimes, jugglers, magicians, acrobats, song, musical recitals, and martial art demonstrations, dancing girls wearing dresses with long, fluttering silk sleeves. The dances may have been predecessors of later opera scenes, in which female characters elegantly operate their extra long white silk sleeves, the so-called “water sleeves”.

Question 2

Daimian

Answer 2

An early Chinese play, possibly appearing as early as the 6th century, about a prince whose features were so delicate that he was forced to wear a mask during battle in order to scare opponents.

Question 3

Zaju

Answer 3

A form of theatre around the song period (10-13th century) involving acting, dancing and song. characters include ghost or heroes and villains of ancient times. Stories were considered to have influenced later Chinese operas.

Question 4

Kunqu

Answer 4

A more subtle form of opera with plaintive music that replaced the faster and more dynamic northern Zaju forms furing the early Ming dynasty (14th century). Kunqu is the oldest form of Chinese Opera still in existence.

Question 5

Yuan Dynasty

Answer 5

The Yuan Dynasty began when the Mongols who had ruled northern China since the mid-13th century, expanded by capturing all of China. This period was marked by a severe oppression of Chinese in their own country. The loss of their own cultural leadership led Chinese scholars to create more distinctly Chinese forms, such as Zaju, that would influence performance in China for several hundred years.

Question 6

Patronage

Answer 6

Support, financial or logistical, of the arts by wealth individuals. In the Yuan Dynasty, the Mongols were large patrons of the arts. So the scholars flocked to the arts in order to make a living.