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Culture Days will return September 20 – October 13, 2024.

Cantonese Opera Concert In Signature Chinese opera makeup and costumes

In-person

History & heritage Music Performance Singing Theatre
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Date and time

Location

Richmond Cultural Centre

7700 Minoru Gate, Richmond, B.C.

City of Richmond, BC

Access

Free, and accepts optional pay-what-you-may donations for admission.

Offered in Chinese.

Wheelchair accessible.

About

Vancouver Cantonese Opera is a Cantonese Opera company with a mission to preserve and promote Cantonese opera in Canada. Cantonese Opera is a regional opera in Guangzhou, China and it is sung in Cantonese, a regional dialect. It is a unique art form that combines singing, miming, gestures, dancing and martial arts.

On Sept.25, 2022, we will present a short Cantonese Opera repertoire in Signature Chinese opera makeup and costumes.

Festival participants will have the opportunity to witness a Cantonese opera in costumes and makeup, and the amazing Cantonese opera arias singing and performance.

Links

Organizer

Vancouver Cantonese Opera

Vancouver Cantonese Opera is uniquely situated as a Canadian arts organization deeply rooted in its local community yet maintaining strong global ties to the opera scenes in China, Hong Kong, and North America. We work closely with performers and audiences at home and abroad, exchanging ideas and mutual support.

In the local context of Vancouver, BC, our organization continues to serve the Chinese-Canadian community as a site of creative expression, social bonding, and cultural exchange. While our current audience is primarily Chinese-Canadian opera fans, we have a growing audience of diverse Canadians. What distinguishes our work from other opera troupes is our focus on outreach to broad audiences, including non-Chinese viewers, youth, and families. Our performances are subtitled in English and we provide workshops, demos, and classes in English to a general audience. We have brought our performances outside the traditional theatre, to perform in libraries, community centers, and cultural festivals.

The rapid gentrification of Vancouver’s historic Chinatown in recent years has raised the stakes for our work, as we struggle to keep alive the stories and theatrical practices so rooted in Chinatown’s history and culture. Despite our best efforts, we believe that bolder steps need to be taken to safeguard our traditional heritage. Therefore, our creative vision for the future is to engage more effectively and strategically in reaching out to new audiences, especially the younger generation who must carry the torch with our art form.

We realize dramatic steps are needed to realize this goal and that a single-minded focus on innovation and risk-taking is both necessary and desirable. We have thus reached out to new community partners to engage in more creative forms of performance and outreach. In particular, we plan on working with the younger generation of performers and artists to launch an exciting, new repertoire of performances that incorporates new media. Building on our past successes and strong local following, we believe this new direction has great potential to address our broader goal of sustaining the Chinese-Canadian heritage in a meaningful, open-minded, sustainable, and creative way.