Name: 中國、扎菊、國劇。戲曲速成班#25 (China, Zaju, and Beijing Opera: Crash Course Theater #25)
Uploaded: 2021-01-14T07:51:02.000Z
Duration: 11 min 44 s
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I'm Mike Rugnetta, this is Crash Course
Theater, and today our coverage of elaborate

程度副詞

stage makeup and costuming continues as we
cover Beijing Opera— Very 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,

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

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

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

my nerds, WIZARDs–would stage elaborate
seances, and some of these get co-opted as

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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 like “Orange

What do you think my nickname would be, Yorick?

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

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

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

highly educated bureaucrats suddenly were
out of work.

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.

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

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.

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-act “Romance

of the Western Chamber,” which… got 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

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

“The Orphan of Zhao,” which is still performed,
and “The Circle of Chalk,” which Bertolt

Brecht borrowed for “The Caucasian Chalk
Circle.”

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

Chuan-qi plays have fifty acts—well, thirty
to fifty.

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

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中國、扎菊、國劇。戲曲速成班#25 (China, Zaju, and Beijing Opera: Crash Course Theater #25)

stuff

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elaborate