Kunqu Opera still flourishing despite fears for future

Another theater that draws a fairly young audience is the Northern Kunqu Opera Theatre in Beijing, which said 90 percent of the audiences for its new series are people under 45 years of age.

During the pandemic,one of its directors, Zhang Peng, and one of its main actors, Shao Tianshuai, pondered how they could make the opera more attractive to young people through the use of new media.

"Our audience members in Beijing were not allowed to come into the theater, so we decided to use livestreaming platforms," Zhang said. "By that I mean not relying on recorded videos but rather using cinematic techniques to show more details, such as micro-expressions and the performers' movement of fingers only visible to those in the front row of a theater."

The team shot a 30-minute cinematic video of The River Watching Pavilion in late May and it premiered online on June 12, with the background to the story as well as an introduction to Kunqu Opera.

Audience members posted their questions and interacted with each other through the platform, which recorded 2.66 million views for the program.