Meeting of the Eyes: Invented Gesture, Cinematic Choreography, and Mei Lanfang's Kun Opera Film
Overview
This article review examines Xinyu Dong's 2010 analysis of Mei Lanfang, a renowned male performer of female roles in Kun opera, focusing on his adaptation of traditional opera to cinema. The paper explores how Mei's collaboration with scriptwriter Qi Rushen bridged classical theater traditions with emerging film media, analyzing the use of gesture, body language, and cinematic techniques to preserve and promote Kun opera internationally.
What this literature review covers
- Overview of Mei Lanfang's career as a female impersonator and his role in Dream of the Garden
- Analysis of Mei and Qi Rushen's twenty-year collaboration to revive and globalize Kun opera
- Examination of Mei's signature performance techniques and body language mastery
- Comparison of cinematic treatment versus traditional Kun opera performance, including camera angles and editing
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Article Review: Meeting of the Eyes: Invented Gesture, Cinematic Choreography, and Mei Lanfang'sKun Opera Film(draft)
Xinyu Dong wrote this article from the University of Chicago in the year 2010. The article examines the professional life of Mei Liefang, a male actor who best-impersonated females before he died in 1961. He played a significant role in the film Dream of the Garden, which is an excerpt from The Peony Pavilion, a classics play of Kunqu. Dong used this article to outline the life and success of Mei in his artwork. There is another aspect of Mei's career in theatres and generally in the art, which is his artistic experiment of various kinds of visual forms, from Kun opera to Peking opera to cinema. Dong uses Mei in his article to link the old tradition and the new emerging media. This expands the scope of the article from Mei's art life to the transitions of art from the traditional ways (Thorpe, 165).
Mei is so determined to see Kun opera continue being famous and even expanding to other countries. When he saw the popularity of Kun opera coming down and even on the verge of totally collapsing, he offers to do some performance to revive Kun opera and maintain its popularity. He gets help from Qi Rushen, a scriptwriter of the Peking opera reform, who is determined to take Kun opera global.