Research On The Ancient Huanhun Opera

Huanhun opera (opera with the plot of people revive after death) is a kind of ghost opera, which is created by the opera writers on the basis of the ancient people’s soul concept, as well as the resurrection narrative tradition. At the last of the huanhun opera, it always comes to the end that the person who has died in the opera revives. Huanhun opera displays the resurrection plot with romantic tone, and it makes the audience experience the power which is beyond the limitations of reality and natural life. Not only the texts and the thought of the huanhun opera, but also the performance, all make us feel the charm of it.According to the types of the people revived, the huanhun opera will be divided into four kinds:love, women virtue, legal case and practice Buddhism or Taoism. And they sing the praise of love, propaganda the women virtue, call out for the justice and express the thought of the Buddhism or Taoism respectively. As a kind of narrative literature, huanhun drama has several narrative features. In the aspect of narrative time, huanhun opera uses lots of flash-forward. And there exist much binary opposition in the huanhun opera, such as life and death, the real world and the hell, reason and emotion, good and evil, and so on. The existences of the binary opposition not only promote the development of the plot, but also reveal the author’s creation purpose. Then, the huanhun opera also embodies unique cultural implication. Resurrection motif exists in ancient mythology and novel, and the emergence of which is related with the soul concept of ancient people. And huanhun opera is subject to both resurrection narrative tradition and the soul concept. Huanhun opera is always magic and has a happy end, the performance of which is mystery and bizarre. And all of these cater to the aesthetic individuality of Chinese people. The huanhun opera uses karma comeuppance to educate people, and this demonstrates the social function of Chinese opera. Then, from the microcosmic aspect, the big winner of the huanhun opera is the love opera, and on the whole, almost all of them were created in the late period of Ming Dynasty. And this has something to do with the society background and the create purpose of the author. After focusing on the performance of the huanhun opera, we find that the performance of the two key plots——the stray state of the soul and how to revive on the stage fully reflects the charm Chinese traditional opera pursues.