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A Hundred-Year Modern Peking Opera: Practices And Experiences, Hengfu Zhu

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

The hundred-year modern Peking opera (jingju) has gone through three stages. In the first stage, ranging from around 1910 to around 1964, jingju was used as agit-prop. In the second stage from 1964 to 1976, there emerged a series of new forms in acting, music, and stage art, with which theatre practitioners strove to use art to perform revolutionary historical stories or the struggle and construction in the socialist period. The third stage from 1976 to the present is characterized by a thematic departure from“politics”and“revolution”to the portrayal of“nobodies”by focusing on characters' psychology; this stage also features novel and beautiful physical …