Beijing Opera

     Beijing Opera arose in the late 18th century as a form of story telling. Opera combines different Chinese traditions including dancing, signing, music, and acrobatics. Beijing Opera plots focus on the roll between civil and marshall, focusing on historic and traditional stories with a mixture of serious and comic aspects. Sets are simple and focus on highlighting the performer. Spare staging calls for small and few props and specific music helps highlight the setting of the scene. Characters include; dan, the main female character usually a male acting in falsetto; sheng, the main male; Jing, the painted face character where paint colors indicate the characters moral; Chou, the male clown.
     As any western/european opera, music and singing is the focus of the tradition. Because Chinese is an atonal language, passages are recomposed and involve only six different pitches. Pieces are written similar to arias in a rhymed couplet form. The orchestra is not typically conducted in a western sense but conducted by a musician playing the ban, wooden clapper, and a small single sided drum. The sections of the orchestra also represent different characters. The percussion section represents the marshall characters, while the civil characters are represented by the strings.

This is a basic intro to what the characters and orchestra look like. 

This video takes you in depth into what each character does and explains the symbolism of some of their movements. 

In this video we see what a typical opera orchestra would look like. Strings and percussion are segregated sectionally and the man in the middle is playing the most melodic of the orchestral instruments, the jingju. 

This is a scene from a typical Beijing Opera. Notice the lack of large props and difference in characters. 

This is what modern Chinese opera looks like. This video was filmed during the 2016 Chinese New Year celebration. 

Li, S. (2003). Cross-dressing in Chinese Opera. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.