AI and Cantonese opera: How Xiqu Centre, NGOs and arts groups are reinvigorating the sunset industry

But it will take time to prove its appeal. In the meantime, it has been increasingly difficult to find performers with “a genuine interest and talent for the maestros to take in as an apprentice. The actor must be good at all four skills [singing, acting, reciting and martial arts]—managing one is already hard enough.”

Choi, who is determined to make Cantonese opera a popular pastime again, had already come up with the idea of Shan Opera while she was still at secondary school. What was originally a hobby and passion project turned into a serious academic pursuit at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts, which established the School of Chinese Opera in 2013. It offers the world’s first accredited bachelor’s degree in fine arts in Chinese opera. The first cohort was between 15 and 20 students; Choi was one of them.

While that may suggest the tide was turning, she reveals that only half of her classmates have pursued a career in Cantonese opera. “There’s only ever so many lead characters to play, so half of them became musicians instead, which [made it] way easier to find a job,” she says.

It also doesn’t help that there is little financial support for the industry. For a long time, the government funding allocated to arts and culture covered provisions for public libraries and museums, venue support for arts activities, and grants to performing arts groups, none of which is a Cantonese opera company. Chung says there’s more support and promotion of the genre in Guangzhou and Foshan.

When Choi graduated, she became a professional Cantonese opera actor, and registered Shan Opera, which had been a passion project, as a non-profit. As well as staging both professional and youth performances, her organisation has been running workshops at both local and international schools over the past six years. Choi believes early exposure to this art form is crucial to showing younger generations that Cantonese opera is an option for both higher education and even a career.

“Before [young people] can like Cantonese opera, they need to understand it. A lot of people go to a show and have no idea what’s going on because [the archaic language] is quite difficult to understand,” she says. “Introducing them to the basic concept or the skills needed to watch a Cantonese opera show is a good first step to gauge their interest.”

To that end, Cristie To Wing-sum, the founder of the Hong Kong Young Talent Cantonese Opera Troupe, a non-profit organisation, feels that the art form may need a degree of modernisation if it is to attract new audiences. “In the old days, a performance could last for five hours, which is way too long for the modern audience. [Scriptwriters] took five minutes to talk about something that could be conveyed in ten seconds,” she says. “In the old days, the audience came to shows to marvel at an actor’s skills, such as singing and maintaining a note for ten seconds, and focused less on the simple story. But now, people have different [expectations]. The storyline has to be more sophisticated.”

To, 30, who took an online master’s degree in culture and art management offered by Rome Business School, is also exploring cross-genre collaborations between Cantonese opera and western or modern theatre, and coming up with original Cantonese opera productions based on Chinese historical stories presented with modern theatre aesthetics. She feels an international art management degree gives her a broader, more worldly perspective on how the Cantonese opera industry can keeps itself abreast of the times.

In March, she will stage a 90-minute black box production at Xiqu Centre’s teahouse theatre. “I’ve invited a lot of modern theatre artists to design the lighting and sounds and to stage manage. The singing and movements will be performed the traditional way, however,” she says. “This production will be a crisp, intimate experience; the audience may find it very different from the usual big theatre productions. But we hope that this will attract some first-timers and show them how this traditional art form can have a lot of flexibility and different types [of presentation].”

Xiqu Centre’s Chung says it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that the traditional art form is taking on new elements. “People are under the impression that Cantonese opera is old-school,” she says. “But I daresay Cantonese opera is one of the most innovative art forms. It used to run purely on box office income, so it’s always market-driven and reflective of audience demands.”

It’s true that it has changed as history and society demanded. Originating in southeastern China as long as 300 or 400 years ago, Cantonese opera is a variation on musical forms types that were performed for government officials and wealthy citizens in Central China. When it was introduced to the Guangdong province and the Pearl River Delta by these dignitaries who brought along opera performers to their assigned outposts, the opera performers started to adopt the dialects and cultural elements of their new homes.

From the 1930s to 1950s, as Hong Kong people turned increasingly to popular music, so too would opera troupes incorporate these songs into their work.

“Cantonese opera was really competitive among troupes: they had to stay ahead of the cultural trends to fight for the audiences,” Chung says. “If you think about it, today we talk about art tech a lot, so robots and AI are modern elements we add to the art form. The costumes may look traditional, but its content is constantly innovative.”

However innovative it may always have been, its popularity suffered once television became common. “Watching TV at mom-and-pop shops and bing sutt [cold drinks café] was free, so a lot of people saved the three cents [they would have spent] buying a ticket to a Cantonese opera show,” Chung says. By the 1980s, only a dozen maestros were still practising the art. “Even they would branch out to become TV stars.” The demand is even less today as cinema, streaming platforms and western performances offer audiences even more alternatives.

There have been gradual improvements in the city over the past decade or so. The government set up the Cantonese Opera Development Fund in 2005, and as of 2022, a total of HK$143 million had been allocated to support more than 1,000 Cantonese opera projects, according to a government press release on February 23, 2022. In 2013, the government added more than HK$100 million to the same fund to encourage the creation of new Cantonese opera productions. The Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office has also been hard at work bringing Cantonese opera overseas, including a series of shows in Toronto last June.

There are also commercial opportunities. In 2018, Cathay Pacific invited Grammy-nominated New York EDM duo Sofi Tukker to Hong Kong to work with Shan Opera on a music project. The result was a refreshing blend of the genres: the sentimental melodies of Cantonese opera juxtaposed brilliantly with the energetic electric guitar and fervent drum beats. Choi and the group recorded a new track in Hong Kong and Los Angeles, but the music initiative was put on hold during the pandemic with no release date. However, Choi feels that the campaign is a start for musicians from different cultures to “jam music and see what we can do”, and for more global audiences to be exposed to this traditional art form through popular genres and artists. She adds that simple things, such as adding English surtitles to more global productions, would help.

“I’m always wondering why Cantonese operas can’t be like Broadway musicals, which have their own theatres and are usually staged for years,” she says, adding that Cantonese opera isn’t lacking in great props, spot-on music and musicians—moreover, it carries important cultural value the same way many western art forms do.

“Cantonese opera is unique to Hong Kong [and the Cantonese-speaking regions in southern China],” she says. “When I first left home to study in London, I thought about Cantonese opera a lot more. It gave me a sense of cultural identity, and I think the same goes to a lot of Chinese people who shares the same sense of cultural identity and rich history.”

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