Kingdom of Desire: The Three Faces of Macbeth
1994; University of Hawaii Press; Volume: 11; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/1124387
ISSN1527-2109
Autores Tópico(s)Theatre and Performance Studies
ResumoThe idea of a Beijing opera adaptation of Macbeth was hatched in 1983 by a group of young actors in Taipei who were discussing the decline of Beijing opera. As artists, they wanted to keep their form alive and stimulating and were not content to perform museum pieces or serve as mere preservers or repositories of a bygone culture. They were concerned because Beijing opera was not only losing its present audience of elderly knowledgeable supporters but failing to attract new replacements; without an audience appreciative of the subtleties of the form, it would gradually disappear. This younger generation of Beijing opera performers had to find a source of renewal that not only gave them artistic inspiration but also validated their activity in the eyes of the young intellectuals they wanted to attract. Noting both the diminishing audience and the decreasing enrollment in the Beijing opera training schools, scholars and performers have begun to analyze the troubling situation and consider solutions. Beijing opera today confronts several problems: the archaic language has created a dependency on subtitles projected on screens to help both Taiwaneseborn and mainland-born spectators alike, a stopgap solution that inhibits proper development of the form; the music-now that many audience members are more familiar with Western music, they find the sounds of the Beijing orchestra too raucous and unappealing; the arias, emphasized at the expense of dramatic content, no longer sustain the audience's interest; and, most seriously, Beijing opera appears irrelevant to the modern world, embodying as it does an older morality and worldview (Perng 1989, 132).1
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