Beijing Opera: Audience Engagement (Essay Sample)

Name
Instructor
Grade
Date
Beijing Opera: Audience Engagement
Introduction
Any traditional theatre can survive only on the basis of being receptive to a changing world of entertainment and overlapping cultures. Beijing opera is a highly styled theatre with traditional martial arts, magnificent costumes and striking make-up. There are breath taking acrobatics and a wide array of musical performances tracing back to the old dynasties and blending gradually with new forms of performances. The steady progress of the opera is attributed to its ability to survive great leaps of cultural transformations and the onslaught of new forms of entertainment in a world that is intensely intertwined with tremendous emerging global cultural civilities (Lu & Xiaoyu 223). Beijing Opera characteristically attracts a wide variety of audiences and the performers on the stage have a wide variety of ways of engaging the audiences which keeps the performances live and engaging. Whereas the audiences have a wide range of social and demographic characteristics, the main motivation among them is usually to blend the old and the new, to sample tastes and experience China at its best of cultural diversity and miscellany. Beijing opera is a mix of many traditions and the actors struggle to keep a balance between tradition and modernity, and between the need to maintain the tradition or invent new forms of engagement and performances. Today, the best of traditional Chinese culture can be said to be so perfectly adjusted to the international encounter of cultures.
Historical perspective of the Beijing Opera
The Peking or Beijing opera combines a wide variety of musical, mime, acrobatics and vocal performances. The opera arose somewhere in the late 18th century and gained prominence in the 19th century. Nonetheless, its peculiar popularity during the Quing Dynasty still echoes through the time and has made the opera regarded as a cultural treasure of the people of China. Over the years, there are many generations of artists that have been trained in the various arts to take various performing duties. It is noteworthy that they are mainly based in the Beijing areas, Tianjin and Metropolitan Shanghai. Many years of transformation have passed and each tended to introduce or remove a few elements of the traditional dynastic theatre. Nonetheless, a more profound transformation took place during the Chinese revolution in the 1960s and thereafter but the changes never laterally obliterated any elements. Instead, the awakening to the inclusion of modern elements to accommodate a rapidly growing younger segment of the audience was introduced.
A Contemporary Perspective of the Beijing Opera
The contemporary scenario of the Beijing Opera is wide representation of diverse innovations and adjustments to cope with the challenge of sagging audience. Through the 1960s when the modern form was taking shape, the Peking opera was denounced as feudalistic and elitist and the revolutionary phase almost removed some of the crucial elements of the performances (Wichmann 160). Nevertheless, the propaganda never did much and the aftermath was a more alert and more socially rationed assemblage of art forms. The most recent reforms have been in the improvement of the performance quality, the inclusion of new original plays, adapting new performance elements of lighting and sound accompaniments, and a variety of exotic accompaniments and instruments.
In a typical contemporary audience of the Beijing Opera, one is not surprised to find the old mixing up with the young and each with their own social and political backgrounds. Whereas the traditional opera was exclusively aristocratic and meant for the emperors court, the modern embodiment is widely a universal phenomenon. Beijing opera has been perfumed in many foreign nations like Japan and the United States of America. It has extended its reach to Russian and European audiences in equal measure.
The Interaction between Actors and the Audience
Many artists have characteristic ways of interacting with their audience for diverse reasons. Mostly, artists pose to receive applause or to allow the organizers to make meaningful announcements or they often engage the audience in the very acts they perform. All these methods are useful because the audiences are the most important part of any performances. The Peking opera is characteristically a performer’s spectacle. With elaborate costumes and colourful make-ups upon the sparse stage, it is through soft skills that such a performer can engage the huge number of audiences. Through the use of symbolic speech, dance, song, and combat movements, these artists have mastered the art of audience engagement (Ruru 102). Ultimately, the quality of a performance is judged on the definitive effect of the beauty of the movements. Sometimes the performance is complex and multifaceted, it is therefore necessary to adhere to a wide spectrum of stylistic conventions. Such conventions help the audience to trail the performance and have a grasp of the whole production. For instance, the complex layers of a performance could be expressed in tandem with appropriate musical accompaniment.
The artists and the audience in the Beijing opera often interact through a wide spectrum of aural and visual performance elements. In the visual elements, a great deal of only four prominent skills is utilized. Song and speech are the most common and dance-acting. Dance –acting is a bit complex because it embodies pure dance, a variety of modified dances and pantomime. The last is the acrobatic or combat show which involves a wide assortment of weaponry. The challenge of the artist is to produce an effortless performance that keeps in form with all the other elements on the stage. The element of beauty and the manifestation of elegance during the performance are very crucial. The performance that puts emotions and beauty together with each movement carries the day among the audiences and the judges.
Despite the modern and contemporary modifications, a lot of emphasis still lies with the ability to append traditional nuances with the modern. The gestures, the music and the settings are expected generally to characterize traditional characters and to tarry with long held conventions. For instance, audiences interpret walking in a large circle by the artists to symbolize a long journey or travelling a long distance. When a character straightens their costumes, it is interpreted that an important personality is about to appear or to speak or there is an important ceremony underway. Others like the pantomimic or the opening or closing of doors manifest their characteristic interpretations. The mounting or descending of the stairway is another convention that audiences readily interpret at the setting of a new scene or new show.
One astounding characteristic of the performances is that all movements are meant to avoid sharp turns. So the general trend of movement takes a smooth curve or a s-shape curve. This element of roundness is meant to be principally entertaining but has a social and political interpretation of gradualism rather than haphazardness. Whereas the stages of the performances are square, the stage is visible from three sides to the audiences. The elements on the stage always tell about the performance to expect. But there are always a table and at least some chair on the stage, many arrays of artists will successively perform different acts ranging from a purely civil encounter to martial scenes and eventually to the embodiment of a valiant or vanquished protagonist. Also, in staging a concubine, the stage might begin with joy then to angry encounters, further on to jealousy and to a spasm of drunken playfulness and eventually to gloomy defeat and sadness. Such transitions generally help the audiences and the actors to construct shared meaning and engagements throughout the performance.
The colours of the costumes are largely symbolic. The emperors and their families are traditionally adorned in yellow robes and the highly placed officials wear purple colours. These two classes wear python robes. Persons of exclusive status wear red while those meant for service put on blue colours (Liu 6). The amount of embroidery on the adornment is also a characteristic feature that distinguishes the high and the low, for the mighty put on extensively embroidered garments with the dragon design. The young and the old wear white or brown or olive but all other men in the cast who are not classed wear black colours. High heel shoes are worn by the highly ranking while the lowly ranking and acrobatic classes in the cast naturally wear flat or low heels.
The vocal engagement forms even a more astounding edge in the audience engagement than the visual cues. There are primarily four levels of voiced song. They are songs with music, recitations of verse, non-verbal vocalization and prose-dialogues. All these features are carefully crafted to bring about a great engagement and entertainment. There is a characteristic order of the sliding scale which fuses all forms of vocal engagement together in harmony. Basically, vocaliza...