The Characteristics of Kun Opera

Through long-term stage practice, Kun Opera has achieved high accomplishments in the performing arts, with highly integrated performance means such as singing, dancing and gestures.

The tunes of Kun Opera have beautiful melodies. For example, in the famous "The Peony Pavilion", its singing is full of twists and turns, which can delicately convey the emotions of the characters.

Performance

The movements of Kun Opera actors are highly dance-like and closely coordinated with the lyrics and music. For instance, in some highlights from operas, every move of the actors is rhythmic and, when combined with the singing, is highly entertaining. The scripts of Kun Opera are elegant. Most of the scripts of Kun Opera are created by literati, with extremely refined language and many beautiful poems and lyrics. For example, the lyrics in "The Palace of Eternal Youth" are elegantly and luxuriously worded and possess a strong literary flavor.

In addition, Kun Opera has unique artistic charm and profound cultural connotations in aspects such as music, costumes, facial makeup, and stage settings.

Costumes

After continuous development through the Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties, the costumes of Kun Opera finally established the Ming Dynasty style as the main style. The costumes of Kun Opera have diverse styles, are colorful, and feature ingenious pattern designs. The civilian costumes worn by the actors in Kun Opera, such as the Black Coat, Ceremonial Robe, Official Robe and Robe, are called "Great Coats". These costumes have different styles and represent different types of characters.

Black Coat: The Black Coat is worn by the poorest characters on the Kun Opera stage and is also known as the "Poor Coat".

Common Robe: Wearing a cape in Kun Opera represents ordinary people. Couples wear robes of the same color to show their love.

Kun Opera: A couple in Common Robe

Ceremonial Robe: In Kun Opera, this is the official robe of emperors, generals and ministers in the imperial court, with dragon patterns embroidered on it.

Official Robe: In Kun Opera, the official robe is mostly the clothing worn by ordinary officials, with only the front part embroidered with patterns of birds and beasts. The colors of the official robe are divided into purple, red, blue and black, representing different official ranks.

Facial Makeup

Kun Opera Facial Makeup

I'd like to show you an example first. Guan Yu's facial makeup has almond-shaped eyes with upward slanting outer corners and thick eyebrows like silkworms, and green dragon patterns, all of which reflect his heroic style. Through all these colors, patterns and decorative elements, the facial makeup of Kun Opera shows the personalities and stories of the characters, enhancing the artistic expressiveness of the opera.

The Staging

Kun OPera Stage

The stage settings of Kun Opera mainly focus on simplicity. The stage design of Kun Opera attaches great importance to "blank-leaving". Through the virtualized movements and stylized postures of the actors, it presents the dramatic situations and forms an abstract, flowing, ethereal and impressionistic stage picture. The props such as tables and chairs on the Kun Opera stage also have multiple uses and can represent different scenes and environments, like high mountains, towers, beds, bridges and so on. This simple yet imaginative stage setting provides a broad space and infinite possibilities for Kun Opera performances.

Music

The music of Kun Opera is beautiful, mellifluous and highly emotional. It belongs to the structure of a cycle of tunes, simply called the "tune-title system". There are approximately over one thousand tune-titles used. It is based on the Southern Opera tunes and also incorporates the singing methods of the Northern Opera, and creates music by means of techniques such as "Fan Diao", "Jie Gong" and "Ji qu". The accompanying instruments of Kun Opera mainly use the bamboo flute, supplemented by the Mouth Organ, the xiao (a vertical bamboo flute), the suona (a Chinese wind instrument), the Three-string Lute (a three-stringed instrument), the pipa (a plucked string instrument) and so on.

Due to the use of the bamboo flute with a delicate sound as the main accompanying instrument, the wide application of the additional rhythm board, the way of enunciating words by dividing them into the beginning, middle and ending parts, and the characteristic of being "flowing and far-reaching" influenced by the folk songs in the Wu region, the music of Kun Opera is renowned for being "graceful, charming and evoking deep emotions with each singing".

• The Characteristics of Kun Opera
• Famous Kun Opera Artists
• The Most Popular Stories of Kun Opera
• Where Can I See Kun Opera?