How a group of octogenarian opera singers tried to sustain their passion and a loyal community of opera lovers in a southern Chinese city
In December 2021, I watched an online documentary that a college sophomore named Qin Zijing had shot about a group of elders from the Wenyuan Guicai Opera Troupe (文苑桂彩剧团). Here, “Guicai” stands for two traditional genres of opera local to the Guangxi region—Gui Opera (桂剧) and Caidiao (彩调). The former is an exquisite craft relying on delicate facial expressions and body posture to convey a wide range of emotions. Caidiao was originally performed in pairs of the opposite gender. Later, it bloomed into a performance format featuring multiple actors onstage.
Renjian the Livings is the nonfiction storytelling platform under NetEase. It aims to “reconstruct life through narration.”
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Ana Padilla Fornieles is a Spanish translator, writer and creative currently based in Beijing, where she is part of Spittoon International Arts Collective and a regular contributor to The Beijinger. You can find her prose and poetry featured in The Shanghai Literary Review, Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine, Womanhood, Sledgehammer and more. Her comics and linocut prints have appeared in Shaving in the Dark, F*EMS and Celestite Poetry. Her literary translation work has been published or is forthcoming with a series of publishing houses and magazines, such as Penguin, De Gruyter, Spittoon Magazine and Books from Taiwan.
