Opera in the City: Theatrical Performance and Urbanite Aesthetics in Beijing, 1770-1870

This talk maps out the place of theater within eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Beijing by focusing on three of the key venues in which opera was performed: the playhouse, the salon, and the temple fair. This study attests to the place and power of theatrical performance in Qing dynasty Beijing. Opera had the power to upset social hierarchies — making men of means and privilege feel emotionally vulnerable to status-degraded cross-dressing boy actors; it could parody social and cultural norms or it could be harnessed to the state's civilizing mission. Opera served as a kind of cultural glue — creating shared repositories of cultural knowledge (if not common cause) across differences of class, gender, and ethnicity within the Qing capital. Theater, then, was a key site of public discourse in the Qing metropolis; and to the extent that it fulfilled that role in the urban community, it was also a site of competition, conflict, and controversy.

The speaker, Andrea Goldman recently received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, completing her dissertation on “Opera in the City: Theatrical Performance and Urbanite Aesthetics in Beijing, 1770-1870.” She teaches at the University of Maryland, and her specialty is cultural and urban history of Ming and Qing dynasty China.