Lecture 4 - Chinese Opera in Australia - Not Just Chinese
Operatic forms have a long history of development in Chinese culture with sources dating from at least the Tang Dynasty. Known poetically as the artform of the 'Pear Garden' (Liyuan 梨园), this musical tradition continues to hold relevance and meaning to the overseas Chinese and was mostly likely the first performative artform to arrive in Australia. In their very first collaborative project, Dr Michael Williams and Dr Nicholas Ng discuss nineteenth and mid-to-late twentieth century Chinese opera in Australia as examples of migrant diversity and identity. Their research engages with the origins of the genre in the examination of regional, cultural and linguistic forms, the meaning of opera in a migrant context, and the experience of diversity within a much larger fluid construct of "Chineseness".
