Baling Opera

01 · Historical Records

Baling opera was originally called Baxiang opera, and among the people it is also known as the Yuezhou troupe; it was formally given the name Baling opera only in 1953. Baling opera has its origin in the kunqiang introduced during the Wanli reign of the Ming dynasty. The influx of Yiyang qiang into Hunan in the late Ming and early Qing periods had a considerable influence on the emergence of gaoqiang in Baling opera. During the Qianlong reign of the Qing dynasty Baling opera absorbed artistic elements from other operatic genres, made tanqiang the main part of its singing and also sang kunqiang together with miscellaneous tunes and ditties, so that it gradually developed into a relatively stable operatic vocal genre. In the middle and late years of the Republic period Baling opera began to decline; after 1949 it was revived through rescue work.

02 · Core Techniques & Process

Baling opera is one of the important operatic genres of Hunan Province, circulating chiefly in Yueyang, Yiyang, Changde, Xiangxi and Changsha in Hunan and in parts of neighbouring Hubei and Jiangxi. More than three hundred and seventy traditional plays of Baling opera survive. Their content is drawn chiefly from historical romances and vernacular storybooks, and it deals mainly with political and military struggles through the ages. Representative plays include Da Yan Song (Beating Yan Song), Jiu Zi Bian (The Nine Sons' Whip), Ye Meng Guan Dai (Dreaming of the Cap and Belt at Night), Cui Zi Shi Qi (Cui Zi Slays the Duke of Qi), Da Chai Suan Liang (Beating the Grain-Levy Clerk), Zhang Fei Gun Gu (Zhang Fei Rolling Drums) and San Shen Ci Ke (Three Examinations of the Assassin). The music of Baling opera falls into two parts, vocal styles and instrumental accompaniment. The vocal styles in turn comprise kunqiang, tanqiang and miscellaneous tunes and ditties; the tanqiang is divided into a southern and a northern road, each of which has its own fandian (reverse mode). At the same time there is a special vocal form, the western erhuang, whose inter-passage music ingeniously fuses the southern and northern roads into one: the south sings while the north plays accompaniment, giving it a distinctive flavour. The tanqiang is accompanied by the huqin, the yueqin and the small sanxian, supplemented by the suona, the bamboo flute and the changganzi (long-rod zither). The percussion used for accompaniment includes the ban drum, the kezi, the hall drum, the great gong, the small chao, the cloud gong and the horse gong. It has a complete set of luogu jing (gong-and-drum scores), which form the link binding singing, acting, recitation and percussion into a single whole. The role types of Baling opera fall into three great lines — sheng, dan and jing. The sheng line includes laosheng, sansheng, kaoba, xiaosheng and tiebu; the dan line includes laodan, zhengdan, guimen, qiaozi and erxiaojie; the jing line includes dahuamian, erjing, ermutou, sanhualian and qiqilang. Baling opera is sung in Zhongzhou rhymes, with Huguang pronunciation combined with the northern Hunan dialect. It pays particular attention to the portrayal of character, and it has a fairly complete set of traditional performance conventions, which together have formed an artistic style that is bold and unadorned yet fine and vivid. Its performance has such techniques as the “inner eight skills” and the “outer eight skills”. The “inner eight skills” are the eight basic techniques for depicting a character's inner state and expressing a character's feelings — joy, anger, sorrow, happiness, grief, worry, hatred and fright. The “outer eight skills” refer generally to the use of the hands, the legs, the body and the neck, and of the beard, the wing-like hat ornaments, the plumes, the fan, the water sleeves and the like. The performance of Baling opera pays particular attention to the use of the eyes; more than thirty eye expressions are in common use, among them the level eye, the slanting eye, the joyful eye, the angry eye, the sorrowful eye, the sick eye, the crafty eye, the jealous eye, the coquettish eye and the lifeless eye. Baling artists through the ages absorbed folk martial arts and acrobatics into their fighting plays, creating many extraordinary performance skills — throwing the fork, throwing the chair, passing through a ring of blades, passing through a ring of fire, overturning the table, building a human pyramid and the “fair-wind banner”. Baling opera is the representative theatre of the north-eastern Hunan region and holds an important position among the major local operatic genres of Hunan Province and of the country as a whole. Its stage language, repertory, vocal styles, music, performance and even its performance customs carry a large amount of historical and cultural information about Yueyang. It is a “living fossil” for the study of Yueyang's history and culture and of its folk ways and customs, and at the same time precious material for the study of the changes and transformations of Chinese opera and of the taking shape and development of local genres.

03 · Regional Records & Related Items

Apart from the rhymed speech and the colloquial stage speech in common use, the spoken parts of Baling opera also include plain speech in the Beijing, Suzhou, Sichuan, Huai, Jin, Mianyang and Tongcheng dialects, used to render the regional character of certain figures together with their status and personality.

04 · Cultural Value & Contemporary Safeguarding

At present, under the impact of modern culture, only one professional Baling opera troupe remains in Hunan, in Yueyang City. The genre is on the verge of extinction and urgently needs rescue and protection. He Qijian (official archival record of the associated inheritor): A national first-class actor. His range is broad: besides the plays proper to his own role type, he can also perform in turn as laosheng, sansheng, painted face, dan and chou. His representative works include Lanjiang Duedou (Blocking the River to Seize the Dou), Shou Jiang Wei (Winning Over Jiang Wei) and Shiyuzhuo (Picking Up the Jade Bracelet). His performance is steady and expansive, fine and slightly wild, and his singing is rounded and clear. Male, of Han ethnicity, born in September 1944, died in May 2016, a native of Pingjiang County, Hunan Province. A representative inheritor of Baling opera in the fourth batch of national intangible cultural heritage projects. In 1986 he was named an outstanding middle-aged actor of Hunan Province, and in 1994 he received the Hibiscus Award for drama in Hunan Province. He devoted himself throughout to the training of successors in Baling opera.

05 · Associated Representative Bearers

Representative bearers recorded under this item, organized by national nomination batch:

• He Qijian 04-1634
• Liu Maolin

06 · Authoritative Sources & Bibliography

1. Baling Opera (Yueyang, Hunan) · China ICH Official Project Archive
2. He Qijian · National Representative Bearer Archive

Sources

China Intangible Cultural Heritage Network (ihchina.cn)

Read the official ihchina.cn record ↗