by Camille Searle
In the spring of 1930, two distinct forms of Chinese opera were being performed simultaneously in Manhattan. One filled the theaters of Midtown, where elegant audiences arrived in evening dress and left with that particular satisfaction produced by beauty when it is not entirely understood. The other had been operating for decades in the basements and halls of the Lower East Side, and the press described it as a deafening racket performed by actors dressed as festive bandits. It was not the artistic forms themselves that separated them; both were opera, both came from China, both depended upon sophisticated theatrical conventions that Anglo-American audiences ignored with equal depth. What separated them was geography....
by Camille Searle
In the spring of 1930, two distinct forms of Chinese opera were being performed simultaneously in Manhattan. One filled the theaters of Midtown, where elegant audiences arrived in evening dress and left with that particular satisfaction produced by beauty when it is not entirely understood. The other had been operating for decades in the basements and halls of the Lower East Side, and the press described it as a deafening racket performed by actors dressed as festive bandits. It was not the artistic forms themselves that separated them; both were opera, both came from China, both depended upon sophisticated theatrical conventions that Anglo-American audiences ignored with equal depth. What separated them was geography....