Chinese music and Opera

[Kathy]

I have been working on a project "Classical Chinese Media Library" for the past 6 months with some Chinese university students. For the last several months we have been working on a mock-up site of resources for T'ang poetry that includes downloadable MP3 recordings, poem text in both simplified and traditional characters, character practice worksheets, games and little videos of the poems. We plan to roll out the real site by summer.

After this part of the project, we plan to work on songs, rhymes, other classical texts including The Art of War, The Analects, and The Three Character Text. I would also like to do a section on Chinese Opera. I have been working on the development of language learning materials for many years, and I have a strong belief that students are well-served by an introduction to the classics. When I first started studying Chinese many years ago, I happened to have a teacher who was an opera singer and she singled me out for Chinese opera appreciation lessons every Friday night. She took me to the opera, introduced me to her friends, and did her best to explain the story lines to me. In advance, she provided me with the text of the opera. I was a beginning student and could barely find my way around the train station, but that did not deter her from the belief that she was providing me with an excellent learning opportunity. She was the teacher and I was the student, so I tried my best to keep up, but I was always hopelessly lost. However, in the intervening years, I have come to appreciate the gift she gave me. I would like to make Chinese opera accessible to those students who are interested and as a resource for teachers who can persuade their students to spend a little time with them material.

I see that a number of posters to this forum are likewise interested in this art form, and I wonder if some of you might be interested in forming a Chinese opera ring to work on the opera section of the Media library. To see the approach we are taking with the T'ang poems, check out:

http://newstore2005.googlepages.com/index

Although the address has "store" in the title, this is not a commercial venture. The site and all of its resources are free.

Please click on the world map to see where our users are.

We can talk about how to set up an Opera section, but based on what I have learned with the Poetry section, I think the best tack to take is to select a few famous, relatively easy-to-undestand operas and break them down managable chunks - tell a bit about the history, setting, characters, plot and symbols. Just as in the Poetry section, we can include text, translations, worksheets, activities, games, recordings to use for practice, and videos (the father of my children and my dear firend is a TV producer and has shot 1000's of hours of these operas - so the video is not hard to get). This is not an offer of a job. Although the group working on the poetry site is now paid, we started out just talking about how to approach the project and work together. Although most of the people working on the poetry site are Chinese, this is a project that non-Chinese can participate in too. My daughter, the product of many years of Chinese Saturday school, did much of the work for the character worksheets and now knows very well who LiBai, Du Fu, and Wang Wei are.

If you are interested in this idea, drop me a line at kathyfelts@aim.com.

[Kathy]

Check this out:

http://www.chinapage.com/beijing-textgb.txt

I am looking too, so if you come across something you think is interesting, please PM me.