OVERVIEW: Yueju (Shaoxing Opera) one of the most popular traditional Chinese opera forms. Originated in the 20th century in Shaoxing, it prospered in Shanghai and spread quickly throughout China. Yueju adopts an all-female cast and reflects female aesthetics and pronounced female narratives and voices in the socio-political environment around early PRC.

Yueju (Yue Opera, Shaoxing Opera)

Yueju, also known as Yue Opera and Shaoxing Opera, is named after the region where it arose from. It was the only Chinese theater genre to evolve into an all-female theater and it has been one of the most popular theater forms in modern China. Originated in Shengzhou, Shaoxing, Zhejiang Province as a local drama with an all-male cast, Yueju spread to Shanghai where it transformed into an urban entertainment with an all-female cast and a core female audience and achieved great popularity. The political May Fourth Movement in 1919 which promoted women’s liberation as well as the long-standing institution of the all-girls opera school which stemmed from the Ming Dynasty contributed to the maturation of Yueju‘s all-female cast. Thus, Yueju took shape in Shanghai in the late 1930s as a form of opera that represented female participants’ aesthetics and narratives, which fulfilled their aesthetic and social needs to define the female body and to share their struggles for women’s liberation and gender equality in the mid twentieth century.

A Female Opera, 1930s-1940s

Female Participants

In the early-mid twentieth century, Yueju’s unprecedented female participation lies in its all-female cast who first consisted of a large number of peasant girls from Zhejiang, and a majority of female audience, who not long ago gained access to public entertainment. The female audience came from various backgrounds, including a large number of middle or upper-class housewives and daughters, as well as lower-class factory workers, although the theaters they went to often differed. The female participants had the power to construct the female aesthetics and narratives of the opera, and thus helped to break the male monologue in public culture.

Female Aesthetics

The female aesthetics of Shaoxing Opera lie in its beauty that is gentle and fluid, shown in the singing, music, acting style, costumes, and stage design. The performance of Shaoxing Opera uses Shengxian Mandarin, which contains vowel sounds close to those in standard mandarin and softer consonant tones that endow the singing with more softness. The singing in Shaoxing Opera also highly focuses on the expression of emotions as opposed to showcasing complicated techniques and special training. The music becomes gentler by using striking gongs and drums less while increasing the use of  gentler instruments such as the bamboo flute and the huqin (a two-string instrument palyed with a bow, shown in Figure 1).

The female participants also demanded a physical beauty of actresses and the staging. Before Shaoxing Opera, in major operas like Beijing Opera, males designed and defined female characters according to an orthodox gender system that prioritized women’s virtue and suppressed their physical beauty, seen as a potential sign of decadence. Opposite of this moralistic orthodoxy were some operas that objectified and eroticized female bodies. In Shaoxing Opera, female bodies and female beauty were defined and shown by females themselves in an elegant way. Actresses and the audience engaged in constructing their aesthetics by adding more ornamentation to silk costumes using soft synthetic colors instead of the strong primary colors, applying lighter shades of make up, and designing stage sets in pinkish and greenish shades, all of which contribute to the female aesthetics which gives Shaoxing Opera its unique elegance and beauty. Note the greenish and pinkish stage set and the ornamental costumes in Figure 2.

Female Narratives and Voices

The most common subject in Shaoxing Opera is romantic love. Some of the famous love stories put onto Shaoxing Opera stage include Butterfly Lovers, Dream of the Red Chamber, and Jade Hairpin. Previous to Yueju, in major operas love stories were almost nonexistent, mostly due to the male elitists’ prejudice against romantic love stories which comes from the Chinese feudal society, where romantic love was considered as a minor concern that often dragged back ambition, determination, and self-cultivation. However, with the growing core of female audience in Yue Opera in the 1930s, many of whom, with their social roles as wives and mothers, were interested in the exploration of love and sexual relationships in the framework of marriage and family, and thus contributed to Yue Opera‘s focus on romantic love, which became widely popular among the female audience. An image of 1952 Performance of the love story The Butterfly Lovers is shown below. The protagonists are conversing with intense emotionality about the arranged marriage that prevents them from being together.

Furthermore, the romantic love stories in Shaoxing Opera serve as a medium to reflect women’s discourse of women’s liberation and their struggle for gender equality. A famous Shaoxing Opera actress, Yuan Xuefen, often played female roles who struggled for independence and liberation in a patriarchal society. For example, she played the female protagonist Zhu Yingtai in a Yueju play, The Butterfly Lovers, which was based on a folktale set in the Eastern Jin dynasty (265-420 AD) of the same name. Zhu Yingtai attended school under the disguise of a man since attending schools was only allowed for men at the time, and rebelled against her parents and her arranged marriage to pursue her desired love. While major operas such as Beijing Opera often reflected the type of virtuous women to cater to its male audience, who submitted themselves to rules in a patriarchal society, serving their husbands and caring for their children, Yuan Xuefen wrote in the 1940s concerning the unequal gender norms in the Chinese society which ascribed to women the duty to care for their families and often deprived them of the freedom to engage in activities outside familial responsibilities :

“Don’t you see that only women are asked to be virtuous wives and good mothers? Men are never asked to be “virtuous husbands and good fathers”. Why is that? Being respectful should be mutual and equal [between husband and wife]. The so-called ” virtuous wife and good mother” is only a loftly phrase men use to make women their slaves.”

Through Yueju, Xuefen Yuan encouraged women’s independence, while another well-known Yueju actress, Fu Quanxiang mirrored her own sufferings as a woman in tragic love stories to protest against male exploitation of women in love relationships. Distilling her life experience into her portrayal of female courtesans including Jiao Guiying and Du Shiniang, who suffer humiliation and betrayal at the hands of their lovers, Fu sympathizes with the powerless women in a feudal society and denounces male exploitation of women of love, sex and labor. With an all-female cast and a core female audience, Shaoxing Opera provided a platform to share female struggles in a patriarchal society and pronounced female voices for gender equality in the public culture starting in the early twentieth century. This Youtube video shows The Butterly Lovers in Yueju performance featuring Yuan Xuefen as Zhu Yingtai. One episode starting at 52 minutes (52-53m, 55-56:30) to shows Zhu Yingtai’s attempts to reject to her arranged marriage. https://youtu.be/oJgaaGen1mA?t=52m2s  Another Episode from the Scene Meeting on the Balcony show Zhu Yingtai and Liang Shanbo’s emotional upheavals and powerlessness in face of the institution of arranged marriage in the feudal society. https://youtu.be/oJgaaGen1mA?t=1h18m54s  (1h18m54s-1h23m00s)

The Other Side of the Coin

Yueju’s emergence and development shows the rise of women participation and influence in public culture, and their increasing awareness and efforts to achieve gender equality. However, outside the Yueju circle, Yueju had its limitations. It faced contempt from the male elites and ultimately lacked the power to challenge greater social-political institutions.

Rhetoric of the Female Opera in domestic and international politics, 1949 – mid 1960s

Despite Shaoxing Opera’s wide popularity in Shanghai and southern China, its influence were geographically limited while Bejing Opera occupied theatrical central stage for the first couple of decades. However, as the PRC was established in 1949 with its reform of local drama and the promulgation of the marriage law that echoed communist ideals, Shaoxing Opera gradually gained a national popularity as an educational tool to advocate for gender equality and freedom of marriage. Yueju also spread internationally through the production of Yueju films, which served diplomatic functions to show the communist party’s preservation of folk art, and to represent China’s peaceful imagery after the Korean War.

1) The Reform of Local Drama

In addition to local drama reforms, the new regime’s promotion of gender equality and free marriage also supported the female voices in Shaoxing Opera. The regime also issued the 1950 Marriage Law which promulgated free marriage against arranged marriages that were common in the previous feudal society. The 1950 marriage law faced strong resistance from the more conservative and less educated rural regions and scarcely changed rural familial relationships. Thus, plays that depicted the struggle of the Chinese people against the feudalistic marriage system for freedom of marriage became important instruments of mass education that could get around problems such as illiteracy and newspaper shortages. The Butterfly Lovers was again a major example.The Huadong Experimental Yueju Troupe, for example, staged the Butterly Lovers drama eighty-two times from January 1953 to January 1954, with an audience totaling more than 120,000, spreading Yueju nationwide.

3)Yueju Films and Cultural Diplomacy in the Early PRC

Shaoxing Opera as a female Opera also served as the new regime’s tool to build its peaceful and culturally attractive image on the international stage in early PRC, and at the same time helped Shaoxing Opera to gain its international recognition and influence. As the new government changed its foreign policy approach to “peaceful coexistence” after the Korea War in 1953, it attempted to change its “stiff and cold” image in international relations as well as to demonstrate its achievements as a new regime, especially in the integration of minority peoples and also the folk arts. Yueju as a soft and gentle drama originated as a local drama became a great medium. Zhou Enlai, the Premier of the People’s Republic of China at the time, was closely involved in using yueju to serve the purposes of cultural diplomacy. Figure 3 below shows that Zhou worked closely with Yueju artists to reform Yueju and to promote it internationally. In May 1954, when Zhou Enlai attended an international conference in Geneva concerning maintaining peace in the Indochina region, he brought the Yueju film The Butterly Lovers to be screened to journalists and he intended to counterbalance the interpretations of China’s rising militarism after the Korea War by emphasizing the film’s gentle poetics and sadness. The film was well received by western journalists and subsequently led to a world tour of the film. Similar Yueju films played an important role in China’s international relationships in the 1950s. Yueju had a greater influence and popularity in Hong Kong and southeast Asia. The Shanghai Yueju Troupe was invited to perform for more than thirty times between 1960 and 1961 in Hong Kong.

Today’s Yueju – what is left beyond the all-female cast?

After Yueju went through its lowest ebb during the cultural revolution in the 1960s-1970s, it slowly revived into the twenty-first century, retaining its all-female cast, the exquisite aesthetics and the common theme of love drama, which still attracts a predominantly female audience. The difference is that as in the twenty-first century, the women in Shanghai no longer need Yueju to provide one of the few platforms to participate in public culture and to voice their opinions, Yueju loses lots of the progressive social purposes and emotional connections that it once had with the female participants.

With the young generations’ preferences shifting towards global mass entertainment represented by domestic and international rock and popular music stars, it is concerning that despite a small number of young audience who remain active in Yueju theater, Yueju’s principle audience mostly consists of the middle-aged and the elderly. This dilemma is shown in “Yueju – The Formation of a Legitimate Culture in Contemporary Shanghai” through an interview with Shanghai Performing Art Company’s Director Ding Zhiyuan in 2008.

Ding says, “According to our database, there is a regular ballet audience of around 3000 in Shanghai; a regular concert audience of around 4000, most of them are white collar workers. Out of all operas, Yueju is the most popular opera and has the best market. We have a loyal regular Yueju audience of around 400, and the number is slightly lower for Jingju and Huju. […] The Yueju audience is a mixed group; in terms of age, twenty percent are between their teens and thirty, sixty percent are thirty to forty five year olds, and twenty percent are forty five years and above.”

In the twenty-first century, Yueju becomes a cultural heritage that faces challenges of redefinition and reinvigoration as it continues as a traditional cultural form in the present day.

 

 Works Cited