Robert Cohen - Theatre, Brief Version-McGraw-Hill Education (2016)

Theatre 207
In the Indian kathakali dancedrama,
royal characters
wear an elaborate kiritam,
or crown, which frames the
actor’s eye movements—one
of the most intensively studied
skills of kathakali performers.
Kalamandalam Gopi, a senior
kathakali maestro, is shown here
in the role of King Rugmangada in
Rugmangadacharitam, performed
in Trichur, Kerala (India), in 1993.
© K.K. Gopalakrishnan
Professional-level acrobatics are a fundamental part of all kunqu, and
indeed of all Chinese opera. Here, in Hell, a devil leaps high over Du
Liniang to terrorize her in the Suzhou Kun Opera production of The Peony
Pavilion at the University of California–Irvine in 2006. © Hsu Pei Hung
CHINESE XIQU
China is Asia’s largest nation and its oldest continuous
culture. It also has Asia’s oldest continuous theatre tradition.
Like all Asian drama, Chinese theatre is more
sung than spoken, but since Chinese speech itself is
semimusical—it is based on tonal changes as well as
syllabic pronunciation—all traditional Chinese theatre
is known by the Chinese term xiqu (“tuneful theatre”),
which we translate as “Chinese opera.”
Although forms of xiqu existed in China before the
first century A.D., the first well-defined Chinese opera
form, known as zaju (“various plays”), appeared in China
during the Song dynasty in the tenth century and reached
its golden age in the thirteenth century under the Mongol
emperor Kublai Khan. Zaju was a comedic music-dancedrama,
with acrobatics and clowning; it was so popular
that a single amusement park in thirteenth-century
Keifeng (then China’s northern capital) featured at least
fifty indoor zaju theatres, the largest holding several
thousand people.
By the end of the Ming dynasty, in 1644, zaju had been
succeeded by a more stately, aristocratic, and poetic opera
form known as kunqu, which originated from the town of
Kunshan. Soon thereafter, kunqu became the favored theatre
entertainment of the Chinese court; it is still performed