Chinese opera

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Chinese opera
Traditional Chinese	戲曲
Simplified Chinese	戏曲
Transcriptions Standard Mandarin Hanyu Pinyin xìqǔ IPA [ɕîtɕʰỳ] Yue: Cantonese Yale Romanization hei-kūk Jyutping hei3-kuk1 Southern Min Tâi-lô hì-khek

Transcriptions
Standard Mandarin
Hanyu Pinyin	xìqǔ
IPA	[ɕîtɕʰỳ]
Yue: Cantonese
Yale Romanization	hei-kūk
Jyutping	hei3-kuk1
Southern Min
Tâi-lô	hì-khek

Chinese opera (Chinese: 戲曲; pinyin: xìqǔ; Jyutping: hei3 kuk1) is a popular form of drama and musical theatre in China with roots going back to the early periods in China. It is a composite performance art that is an amalgamation of various art forms that existed in ancient China, and evolved gradually over more than a thousand years, reaching its mature form in the 13th century during the Song Dynasty. Early forms of Chinese drama are simple, but over time they incorporated various art forms, such as music, song and dance, martial arts, acrobatics, as well as literary art forms to become Chinese opera.

There are numerous regional branches of Chinese opera, including the Beijing opera, Shaoxing opera, Cantonese opera and kunqu and Lvju.

An early form of Chinese drama is the Canjun Opera (參軍戲, or Adjutant Play) which originated from the Later Zhao Dynasty (319-351). In its early form it was a simple comic drama involving only two performers, where a corrupt officer, Canjun or the adjutant, was ridiculed by a jester named Grey Hawk (蒼鶻). The characters in Canjun Opera are thought to be the forerunners of the fixed role categories of later Chinese opera, particularly of its comic chou (丑) characters.

Various song and dance dramas developed during the Six Dynasties period. During the Northern Qi Dynasty, a masked dance called the Big Face (大面, which can mean "mask", alternatively daimian 代面, and it was also called The King of Lanling, 蘭陵王), was created in honour of Gao Changgong who went into battle wearing a mask. Another was called Botou (撥頭, also 缽頭), a masked dance drama from the Western Regions that tells the story of a grieving son who sought a tiger that killed his father. In The Dancing Singing Woman (踏謡娘), which relates the story of a wife battered by her drunken husband, the song an dance drama was initially performed by a man dressed as a woman. The stories told in of these song-and-dance dramas are simple, but they are thought to be the earliest pieces of musical theatre in China, and the precursors to the more sophisticated later forms of Chinese opera.

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