Hong Kong Street Opera
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- Опубліковано 20 січ 2025
- During the seventh Lunar month, Spirits start wandering the streets of China - and they must be fed. And entertained! Apparently, what ghosts REALLY like is…opera.
A stage has been set up in a local park, and an audience is already gathering for the coming 5-hour performance.
Behind the scenes, the actors are hard at work. Makeup is an essential part of the story-line. In fact it’s something of a cheat-sheet. The colors - and their placement - symbolize the character’s role, health, fate, and emotional state.
Almost every detail matters - even the shape of the eyebrows convey information.
Costumes are layered with meaning: headgear tells you social status, age, and capability - and the character’s marital situation. Even a beard tells a complicated story.
Once the audience and actors have paid homage to the ghosts and ancestors, the play begins.
There are two kinds of Cantonese opera:
• Martial - with lots of warriors and battle scenes
• Scholarly - more focused on poetry and elegance.
Everything is choreographed - how you wave your sleeves around, walk, and hold your hands. Performers start around age 10 and take decades to master their roles.
But if you want to be in charge of everything, you should take up the drums. Actors move and sing on beat. Percussion even indicates a change of mood. Or a horse that isn’t there. It’s a heavy responsibility.
But in the end, it’s not just the ghosts who enjoyed the show. The audience had a good time as well.
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Category: Travel
I have seen a couple of your videos but the quality is amazing and it’s all very detailed it also goes over many topics that range in so many topics. Please keep up the amazingly informative work.
Thank you, Josh!
One thing I noticed is how culturally we have very same patterns and tangible things and ways to doing same things but it views differently.
Those stall which sells thing which used in this event as prayer looks and feels very familiar with some of the event in other countries aswell, the feel is the same the expression is different.
This is a valuable thing in life, it's like having something to do despite of who you are and enjoy it
Fantastic!
Beautiful
This is not cantonese opera, this is teochew opera 潮剧 (chiuchow) opera which is a genre popular in the east of guangdong province (chaoshan area). Teochew opera uses the teochew dialect which is different from Cantonese and they use F major key as opposed to C major key used in Cantonese opera.
Thank you for setting the record straight! I apologize for the error. You are clearly an expert in Chinese opera.
Wow/ i like do you have any full version, with out explain. We are Chinese Opera too in Thailand.
Thank you..for your video
Thank you for your comment! :)
0:21 what it's name of the music instruments
not sure if u used a new camera here but the quality looks really good!
Wowww I only knew Peking Opera, and didn't know Hong Kong Opera. Is it the same thing? Does it have the same roots?