ABSTRACT

Jingju, often known as Peking Opera or Beijing Opera in the West, is one of the most important genres in the classical Chinese song-dance theatre (or xiqu in Chinese), which consists of 348 regional theatres (Ministry of Culture and Tourism 2017: 16). Within the big family of the classical theatre, the oldest genres can be traced back to the fourteenth century when they first appeared while some did not emerge until the mid-twentieth century. As a result, the artistic features of these theatres form a wide spectrum: some such as puxian xi (popular in the eastern area along the coast of Fujian province), kunju and jingju are all stylized containing a specific and rich acting vocabulary, while others are similar to the straight theatre in the West. Yet, they all share the same essence whereby “stories are uttered in the form of song and dance” (Wang 1984: 161). Jingju enjoys a special position in the big family, because, as a highly developed urban theatre, it was not formed until the beginning of the nineteenth century and thus its formation was more sophisticated on a large scale, absorbing all the nutrients from the well-established theatres all over China that had come to Beijing during the previous 200 years.