Culture Days. Cantonese Opera Concert In Signature Chinese opera makeup and costumes

Tickets

Cost: Free

Cantonese Opera is a regional opera in Guangzhou, China and it is sung in Cantonese, a regional dialect. It is a unique art form that combines singing, miming, gestures, dancing and martial arts.

On Sept.25, 2022, we will present a short Cantonese Opera repertoire in Signature Chinese opera makeup and costumes.

Festival participants will have the opportunity to witness a Cantonese opera in costumes and makeup, and the amazing Cantonese opera arias singing and performance.

This event is free and will be accepting optional pay-what-you-may donations for admission.

Vancouver Cantonese Opera:
Vancouver Cantonese Opera is uniquely situated as a Canadian arts organization deeply rooted in its local community yet maintaining strong global ties to the opera scenes in China, Hong Kong, and North America. We work closely with performers and audiences at home and abroad, exchanging ideas and mutual support.

In the local context of Vancouver, BC, our organization continues to serve the Chinese-Canadian community as a site of creative expression, social bonding, and cultural exchange. While our current audience is primarily Chinese-Canadian opera fans, we have a growing audience of diverse Canadians. What distinguishes our work from other opera troupes is our focus on outreach to broad audiences, including non-Chinese viewers, youth, and families. Our performances are subtitled in English and we provide workshops, demos, and classes in English to a general audience. We have brought our performances outside the traditional theatre, to perform in libraries, community centers, and cultural festivals.

The rapid gentrification of Vancouver’s historic Chinatown in recent years has raised the stakes for our work, as we struggle to keep alive the stories and theatrical practices so rooted in Chinatown’s history and culture. Despite our best efforts, we believe that bolder steps need to be taken to safeguard our traditional heritage. Therefore, our creative vision for the future is to engage more effectively and strategically in reaching out to new audiences, especially the younger generation who must carry the torch with our art form.
We realize dramatic steps are needed to realize this goal and that a single-minded focus on innovation and risk-taking is both necessary and desirable. We have thus reached out to new community partners to engage in more creative forms of performance and outreach. In particular, we plan on working with the younger generation of performers and artists to launch an exciting, new repertoire of performances that incorporates new media. Building on our past successes and strong local following, we believe this new direction has great potential to address our broader goal of sustaining the Chinese-Canadian heritage in a meaningful, open-minded, sustainable, and creative way.
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