User:Chinasaur/Model revolutionary operas

Background[edit]

"Mao Zedong Thought": "weed through the old to bring forth the new"
Of around 3000 theater companies existing in 1964, fewer than 100 were staging dramas while more than 2800 were specializing in operatic productions (Fokkema)
Opera more malleable than film or print, contrast to Soviets and Eisenstein (Fokkema)

State Council's Cultural Group under Jiang Qing
1963 sudden, politically motivated shift toward censorship of all traditional opera
Moderate reform movement predated eight model operas: against female impersonators and foot-binding stilts (Yang)
Peking Opera "has developed over the past century into a perfect art," and it "as a whole should be left as it is now." (Yang)
Sparks amid the Reeds a first modernist/Maoist revision

Raid on the White Tiger Regiment (Qixi baihutuan)
Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy (Zhiqu weihushan)
Sha-chia-peng/Shajiabang (the artistic offspring of Jiang’s Sparks amid the Reeds)
The Red Lantern/The Story of the Red Lamp (Hongdengji)
On the Docks (Haigang)

Also:

White Tiger Regiment: Mao mentioned 25 times, Mao quotes make up more than 3% of total text.
Trend away from secondary characters towards primacy of central character (Mackerras), consistent with perfect characters of "socialist realism"

Mackerras, Colin. “Chinese Opera after the Cultural Revolution (1970-1972)” The China Quarterly 55 (July/Sep. 1973): 481.
Fokkema, D. W. “The Maoist Myth and its Exemplification in the New Peking Opera.” Asia Quarterly: a journal from Europe. 4 (1972): 341.
“Brilliant Example of the Revolution in Peking Opera Music.” Chinese Literature 2 (1970): 93.
Yang, Richard F. S. “The Reform of Peking Opera under the Communists.” The China Quarterly. 11 (July/Sep. 1962): 131.