Peking Opera is a form of traditional Chinese theatre which includes acrobatics, music, vocal performance, and dance. This tradition started in the 18th century, but did not become recognized until the 19th century. It was mainly popular in the Qing Dynasty. Peking Opera has evolved throughout the years, and is now what we know to be Peking Opera through integration of other traditional art forms, "through a period of more than a half a century of combination and integration of various kinds of opera evolved the present Peking Opera" (Hyaunge). Peking mainly consists of styled fighting, acrobatics, dance, and music to depict a story of what each character is going through.
Training for Peking Opera starts at a very early stage. Most performers started training at just the age of 8. These children are picked by their physical ability, endurance, stamina, and flexibility. Training for these young children is extremely rigorous, but the outcome is what makes Peking Opera beautiful. Training sessions consists of most of the day. At a younger age, sessions are usually a class full of students, but as they grow older, sessions are one on one depending on which role is given. One famous performer that had to undergo this training is Jackie Chan.
There are usually four main characters that represent gladness, happiness, anger, sorrow, fear, and sadness. Elegant music greatly helps represent which character has a certain role, "performance is accompanied by a tune played on wind instruments, percussion instruments and stringed instruments" (Hyuange). The four main characters consist of one male called a sheng, a young female called dan, a painted faced male called jing, and a clown which can be either male or female called a chou. These characters are "graded" on how smooth their movements are throughout the play. Costumes in Peking Opera are bright, elegant, magnificent. They are usually handcrafted and embroidered. This makes "the costumes of high aesthetic value (Hyuange).
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