The Collision Between Drama and Life

The Collision Between Drama and Life ~ improved version — YouTube

Chinese traditional opera, Greek tragedy and comedy, and Indian Sanskrit opera are considered as three major ancient dramas in the world.

Chinese traditional opera is time-honored performance art and intriguing cultural heritage, it scintillating the artistic effulgence on the humanistic stage of the world.

Chinese traditional opera is a poetic theater beyond “narrative” reproduction.

The symbolism of the theatrical text is a synthesis of stylized action, singing, dialogue, mime, acrobatic fighting, and dancing to portray plots or profile characters and their feelings.

Different aesthetic elements achieve consonancy and interfuse in a vivacious and prismatic exposition.

In a dynamic link of the performance structure, these elements influence each other and complement each other.

The vocal tone is the art of singing with the rhyme of the tune. The dialogue is the intonation of the line chanting, and stylized action (mime, acrobatic fighting, and dancing) of the actor’s body movements in Yuan Zaju is called “ke”, and the Southern Opera legend is called “ke-jieh”.

Each symbolic system has its own unique form of expression, and it should also have its own expression sovereignty on the stage.

However, in the Liyuan jargon of “the expert “listens” the essence and the layman “sees” the excitement”, there is a depreciation of body movements.

The subjectivity of “ke-jieh” which outfaces the dominance of the “foregrounding” of phonology and language is a harbinger for the corporal revolution.

The post-colonial mimicry theory is a doubling discourse: it is apt to declare on one side and be questionable on the other. There’s an irreconcilable disaccord that lies in its dual vision, exposing the absurdity of colonial discourse, and at the same time completely destroying the arrogant authority of the colonial posture.

Singing and dialogue took advantage of being favored by mainstream consciousness and dominated the stage, but Ke-jieh was demoted to a “female” role in polyphonic performances.

Ke-jieh transposed this repression and acted a parody show, which resulted in a double-marginal female identity presentation.

Isn’t this tumultuous stage of opera, a projection of the real world?

The collision between drama and life creates double mimicry and double damage in the entanglement of illusion and reality, bringing about the disintegration of order, and the primary female identity takes the opportunity to break free from the chasm, surfaced.

The somatic invigorating of feminine nature from “other shaping” to “self-shaping” converge into the most annihilatory and disheveling potency in the postmodern scenario.

Originally published at http://poeticmindfulness.wordpress.com on January 23, 2021.