Dong Opera
01 · Historical Records
Dong opera is a local operatic genre much loved by the Dong people; it arose about the Jiaqing to Daoguang reigns of the Qing and circulates mainly in Liping, Congjiang and Rongjiang in Guizhou, Tongdao in Hunan and Sanjiang and Longsheng in Guangxi.
02 · Core Techniques & Process
At its beginnings Tongdao Dong opera had monotonous singing, simple form, plain movement and single plots. In exchange with other operatic genres it drew on their strengths and made up its own shortcomings, striving to enrich its means of speaking, singing, playing, martial performance and dance and raising its performance level, while attending to strengthening dramatic conflict and bringing out a group of plays with intricate plots. The “ping qiang” circulating in the southern Dong dialect area is the earliest singing of Tongdao Dong opera, with only one upper and lower line, from which many tunes such as the dan tune, sheng tune, chou tune and weeping (sad) tune derive. With Tongdao Dong opera's constant innovation its vocal music has made a considerable breakthrough, the song tune being widely applied and new tunes emerging. Tongdao Dong opera has a fairly large repertory, traditional and modern plays together totalling more than three hundred kinds, among which Liu Mei, Zhulang Niangmei and Wuliang Qing are representative works. Since reform and opening-up Tongdao Dong opera has suffered strong impacts from many sides, gradually declining under the influence of the economic tide and modern media.
Liu Mei
A representative work among Tongdao Dong opera's more than three hundred traditional and modern plays.
Zhulang Niangmei
A representative work among Tongdao Dong opera's traditional and modern plays, a well-known Dong tragic romance.
Wuliang Qing (Love at Wuliang)
A representative Dong opera by the inheritor Wu Shangde, which won five major awards at the four-province Dong opera festival.
03 · Regional Records & Related Items
Tongdao Dong opera is popular in Tongdao, Hunan, and the Dong areas at the Hunan–Guangxi–Guizhou border and is representative of Dong opera in the southern Dong dialect area; its singing is based on “ping qiang” and, sharing an origin with the Dong opera of Liping, Congjiang and Rongjiang in Guizhou and Sanjiang and Longsheng in Guangxi, it has its own local style.
Other submitting regions for the same item: Dong Opera · Dong Opera.
04 · Cultural Value & Contemporary Safeguarding
Moreover, as most young and middle-aged people of the Dong villages go out to work, the opera masters pass seventy and many die one after another, so Tongdao Dong opera has now fallen to a low ebb, struggling to survive and lacking transmitters, in an endangered state that urgently needs rescue and protection. Its traditional and modern repertory, more than three hundred kinds, is an important vehicle of Dong social history and life; facing aged opera masters, young people working away and shrinking audiences, the Tongdao Dong Autonomous County Cultural Heritage Protection Centre sustains the genre through recording and collation, opera-in-schools and amateur troupe performance. Wu Shangde (as recorded in the official dossier of an associated inheritor): male, Dong, born in December 1938 in Tongdao Dong Autonomous County, Hunan. He has served in the Huangtu township art propaganda team of Tongdao Dong Autonomous County and the art troupe of Huangdu Dong Cultural Village. Over several decades he has written more than three hundred Dong opera scripts and trained more than two thousand six hundred actors. In 1995 he created a programme combining Dong opera and Dong song and dance, performed at Huangdu Dong Cultural Village to this day and much welcomed by the art world and audiences. He is a representative inheritor of Dong opera in the third batch of national intangible cultural heritage projects. His Dong song-and-dance work Goluo Dada has won many domestic competition awards and been invited to Japan, and his Dong opera Wuliang Qing won five major awards, including playwriting and directing, at the Dong opera festival of twelve counties in Hunan, Guangxi, Guizhou and Hubei.
05 · Associated Representative Bearers
Representative bearers recorded under this item, organized by national nomination batch:
- Zhang Qigao 02-0640
- Wu Shengzhang 02-0641
- Wu Shangde 03-1071
- Yang Kaiyuan 05-2394
- Wu Shenghua
06 · Authoritative Sources & Bibliography
Sources
China Intangible Cultural Heritage Network (ihchina.cn)
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