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  • Hey there!

  • I'm Mike Rugnetta, this is Crash Course Theater, and today our coverage of elaborate

  • stage makeup and costuming continues as we cover Beijing OperaVery nice Slim!

  • I like all this effort you've been putting in lately.

  • Though the Yin and Yang is a little on the nose.

  • As Yorick is demonstrating, today we're heading to China to explore the origins of

  • Chinese performance and enjoy some Beijing opera—a music theater style with its origins

  • in classical Chinese drama that went through a bumpy patch during the Cultural Revolution,

  • but is still performed today.

  • It has gods and demons, strict color coding, and about a million different ways to use

  • a chair.

  • Let's go!

  • INTRO Performance in China starts early.

  • How early?

  • Well wouldja look at that: we don't know.

  • But the very earliest performances seem to have been associated with religious ritual:

  • songs and dances petitioning the gods for fertility, for a good harvest, success in

  • warthe usual.

  • Later on, when Daoism gets going, wu priests–a kind of shaman or WIZARD; yeah, that's right

  • my nerds, WIZARDswould stage elaborate seances, and some of these get co-opted as

  • court performances where priests zhuzh up the ritual with jokes and special effects.

  • Those priests.

  • Such hams.

  • Religion and theater remain intertwined, and by the eighth century BCE, certain temples

  • become famous for their performers.

  • During the Han Dynasty, which begins in 206 BCE, performance becomes more widespread and

  • more secular.

  • Performers practice disciplines like tightrope-walking, pole-climbing, sword-swallowing, fire-eating,

  • and occasionally slightly less dangerous stuff like juggling.

  • There's also mime, but probably not lewd mime, unfortunately.

  • Around this time, shadow plays also begin appearing in China.

  • Things cool down for a few centuries after the Han lose power, because war does that

  • to a performance culture.

  • But then it's 600 CE, and the Sui Dynasty is ascendant.

  • The emperor Yang-Ti loves performance so much that he actually opens his own training school

  • and hosts a festival featuring ten of thousands of performers.

  • Take that, minimalism!

  • During the Tang Dynasty, performers start to combine music, dance, and acrobatics in

  • innovative ways, and the Emperor Xuanzong opens the Pear Garden, another training School

  • supposed to help further that innovation.

  • Also apparently a way for him to recruit for his personal harem.

  • Now maybe you're getting the idea that theater in China was a performance tradition rather

  • than a literary one, and that idea is correct.

  • But around 1000 CE, a lot of poetry starts to develop, and then the novel comes to China.

  • Novels are a huge hit, and storytellers start going around to teahouses, reciting portions

  • of them while audiences drink tea and eat pumpkin seeds.

  • Performances like this are narrative rather than dialogic or mimetic, meaning they aren't

  • really acted out.

  • But it's a start!

  • As the Song Dynasty continues, people actually start writing plays, which usually begin with

  • a spoken prologue and then continue with a mix of dialogue and song.

  • We have fragments of about one hundred and fifty of these plays.

  • Several actors become famous during this time, and they're known by nicknames likeOrange

  • PeelandDimples.”

  • [[YORICK DROPS IN.]]

  • What do you think my nickname would be, Yorick?

  • [[WORD BUBBLE: “BALD SPOT.”]]

  • Very funny.

  • But then, in the late thirteenth century, the invading hordes come, and maybe you're

  • thinking, Ugh!

  • Invading hordes!?

  • This is why we can't have nice things!

  • But if there's one thing we know here on Crash Course, Mongols are the exception!

  • When the Mongols invade China, forming the Yuan Dynasty, it pretty much ushers in a golden

  • age of literature.

  • Why?

  • Well, one theory goes that since the Mongols preferred to handle stuff in-house, lots of

  • highly educated bureaucrats suddenly were out of work.

  • So to fill the time, they wrote stuff.

  • Hey - I'll take it!

  • I would have settled for wizards!

  • Drama of the period drew from history, legend, and those newfangled novel things.

  • Characters emerged from all classes and types, and plays often ranged over months or years.

  • And maybe you're thinking, Hey, this sounds a little like Elizabethan drama.

  • And you're rightit does.

  • Nice catch!

  • But unlike Elizabethan drama, every play conveyed a strong moral message, usually emphasizing

  • family and duty.

  • Some of these plays might also have offered subtle critiques of the political situation,

  • where good characters suffer through all sorts of terrible trials, like you know, being conquered

  • by invading hordes, before winning out in the end.

  • Two distinct styles of drama developed.

  • One in the north, called zaju, and one in the south, called chuan-qi.

  • Zaju dramas were four acts long, except for the most famous one, the twenty-actRomance

  • of the Western Chamber,” whichgot away with it by claiming it was in five parts.

  • These four acts contained ten to twenty songs, and those songs were selected from five hundred

  • pre-existing melodies and accompanied by gong, drum, clapper, flute, and lute.

  • But here's where it gets tricky: only the protagonist sings, and each of the four acts

  • demands its own vocal timbre and rhyme scheme.

  • These dramas were performed by companies of both male and female actors, some of whom

  • were also probably prostitutes.

  • We have one hundred and seventy zaju plays, including a couple you may have heard of:

  • The Orphan of Zhao,” which is still performed, andThe Circle of Chalk,” which Bertolt

  • Brecht borrowed forThe Caucasian Chalk Circle.”

  • Meanwhile, down south, chuan-qi plays are developing.

  • Chuan-qi plays have fifty actswell, thirty to fifty.

  • But still.

  • They don't have a fixed rhyme scheme per act.

  • Which is a good thing, because can you imagine changing the rhyme schemes FIFTY TIMES?

  • Unlike zaju songs, which were written for a seven-note musical scale, chuan-qi plays

  • are written for a pentatonic scale.

  • The main accompaniment was the bamboo flute.

  • The most famous chuan-qi play isThe Peony Pavilion,” a fifty five-act play about a

  • girl who falls in love with a man she's only seen in her dreams.

  • She dies, but the real man comes to her grave and somehow resurrects her.

  • Chuan-qi plays are lively and eventful, but eventually they got so long and so elaborate,

  • and the language becomes so formal, that they can't be performed anymore.

  • Let's fast-forward a few centuries to the origin story of Jingxi or Beijing opera.

  • By this time, all kinds of different theatrical styles were practiced around the country,

  • though none predominated in the way the zaju and chuangi had.

  • In 1790, a bunch of different troupes came to Beijing to celebrate the eightieth birthday

  • of Emperor Qian Long.

  • They liked it there.

  • They liked each other.

  • Eventually, they combined their regional forms into one awesome new style that was even more

  • powerful, jingxi.

  • Sorta like The Avengers of Classical Chinese Theater.

  • Which is a film franchise I'd definitely watch.

  • Officially, there are two kinds of stories in Beijing opera: civil and military.

  • But there's a lot of overlap.

  • Like the earlier dramas, the stories borrow from history, legend, and other works of literature,

  • and they all end happily.

  • The scripts aren't really set texts, but more like bullet points.

  • Great actors are encouraged to make each role their own, and the focus is on acting, singing,

  • and dancing rather than the literary elements.

  • Instead of presenting a full story from start to finish, most evenings consisted of just

  • the high points with enough narrative and acrobatic interludes to help it all hang together.

  • The stories are elaborate, but the physical staging is minimal.

  • Theaters usually consisted of a raised, roofed platform with a two-foot high wall extending

  • around three of the sides and the only set pieces are a table and two chairs.

  • But that table and chairs are versatile.

  • Depending upon the way they're arranged, they can represent a wall, a bridge, a tree,

  • a door, a hill, a banquet, a court, whatever you need!

  • There are all kinds of symbolic and codified set and prop elements in Beijing opera.

  • A silver banner represents water; black silk suggests a storm.

  • A whip means you're riding horseback; black gauze means you're having a dream; a couple

  • of yellow silk flags mean you're in a chariot.

  • A bunch of stagehands run around manipulating all of these chairs and banners, but an audience

  • learns not to see them.

  • As Yorick here has indicated, Beijing Opera depends on extravagant makeup and costuming.

  • For a closer look, let's go to the ThoughtBubble: Chinese opera characters are divided into

  • four types: sheng (men), dan (women), jing (painted face roles), and chou (clowns).

  • But that's not all.

  • There are seven types of sheng roles, and six types of dan roles.

  • Until the twentieth century, dan roles were played by men in tiny, awkward shoes, and

  • when women took over, they had to learn from the men how to play them.

  • Jing characters, with all the makeup, are gods, demons, courtiers, and thieves.

  • And Chou are clowns who are expected to improvise jokes.

  • Each role had its own pitch and rhythm, and kind of like Sanskrit theater and kabuki theater,

  • each had a bunch movements associated with characters and moods.

  • There are twenty ways just to point at something!

  • But a lot of the character work is done by costume and makeup.

  • There are three hundred types of dress associated with Beijing opera, including forty six headdresses,

  • forty seven dresses, six types of girdle, and six types of shoe.

  • That actually seems like a pretty low number for shoes, TBH.

  • These costumes are color-coded.

  • Red costumes are for brides and loyal characters; yellow for royal ones; white for old ones

  • and people in mourning.

  • Makeup was color-coded, too.

  • Most sheng and dan characters started with a white base, made with flour, that offset

  • darkened brows, reddened lips, and eyes outlined in red.

  • There are more than two hundred and fifty types of makeup, and the most complex designs

  • are for the jing characters.

  • Jing faces are pattern-coded and color-coded.

  • Only good characters wear mustaches, and the more white around the eyes, the worse the

  • character.

  • A lot of black, good guy; a lot of purple, outlaw.

  • Lots of green: YOUSE A DEMON.

  • Thanks, ThoughtBubble.

  • [[[Yorick flies back in covered in green makeup.]]]

  • YOUSE A DEMON!

  • Beijing opera flourishes for about one hundred and fifty years, and then communism happens.

  • Communist leaders go through the repertory, tweaking some plays, removing others, and

  • opera stumbles on until the Cultural Revolution, when pretty much all of it is seen as anti-communist

  • and is replaced with new Mao-friendly works likeThe White-Haired Girl,” an opera

  • about a peasant girl who is raped and abducted by a landlord.

  • She escapes, her hair turns white, and then she and her former fiancé are reunited.

  • Like good communists, they redistribute the landlord's farms.

  • An equally distributed happy ending!

  • Come see us next time for English Sentimentality, which is like normal sentimentality, but English.

  • That's right, it's romanticism.

  • Until thencurtain!

Hey there!

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