This paper looks at Latinx opera as a Latinx counterpublic in which joy and optimism take center stage. The history of opera largely coincides with the history of colonization, dating back to the sixteenth century. As European culture spread across the western hemisphere over four and a half centuries, opera’s cultural force directly and indirectly asserted white superiority, and later, became associated with the elite and class difference. Yet, in the twenty-first century, opera’s cultural force is radically different and—quite counterintuitively— Latinx artists are turning to one of the most traditional musical forms associated with whiteness and class privilege to express changing class and culture in the Americas.

In this paper, I address how the intersection of Latinx avant-garde and activist art and the operatic mode enable new possibilities for public address. Here, I examine several examples of contemporary Latinx opera to describe how the form stages an intervention into cultural hierarchies and makes possible a new form of political agency. These operas vary in musical style, from traditional orchestral instrumentation to Afro-Caribbean rhythms and beats. Historically excluded from artistic institutions historically credited with taste making, Latinx artists, musicians, and performers turn to opera’s emotionally-laden performance to create new affective structures that better resonate in our current social milieu. In particular, I focus on the emerging practice of immersive opera as both continuation and rupture of traditional operatic form. The practice of immersive opera stages the shifting cultural and class meaning of twenty-first century opera.

When Cantonese opera performers and fans in Hong Kong discuss Cantonese opera, they rarely describe it as having any connection to their identity. This relative silence is reflected in the academic literature on Hongkonger identity where Cantonese opera is seldom mentioned. Indeed, most studies focus on textual readings of Cantopop, film, and television. Among the few studies that have explored the connection between Hongkonger identity and Cantonese opera, most do so by analyzing explicitly political themes. However, the majority of performers today deliberately avoid political content in their productions, which may explain why the opera is widely overlooked in Hongkonger identity discourses. In contrast to these omissions, this paper argues that Cantonese opera performances play a role in shaping Hongkonger identity but do so through a subtle means of discoursing on authenticity. Whilst performers avoid political themes, they often assert that Hong Kong has preserved various “traditional” Chinese performance elements that signify the authenticity and uniqueness of Hong Kong Cantonese opera. This discourse differs from the dominant frameworks in studies on Hongkonger identity which tend to define the uniqueness of Hong Kong as located in its cosmopolitanism rather than its preservation of Chineseness. By highlighting this subtle process of identity construction, this paper positions Cantonese opera as an important yet overlooked cultural force in shaping Hongkonger identity. In doing so, it also offers a more diverse perspective on Hongkonger identity beyond the conventional portrayal of it as uniformly conflicted by its Chineseness, oriented toward cosmopolitanism, and explicitly politicized.

Some of the most sought-after artists in Bali are performers who cross-dress as the female Liku, a historically comedic character representing the crazy princess in the Balinese dance drama arja. Also known as “Balinese opera,” arja has long been a site for contesting and reproducing local and national values concerning gender through its cross-dressed roles (see Kellar 2003 and Collier 2022). This gender commentary has recently begun to expand beyond the arja stage, as many Liku dancers now have lucrative careers performing as freelance MCs, Instagram influencers, and YouTube music video stars. As a result, the visibility and influence of these performers has expanded to millions of viewers in Bali and internationally. Drawing on interviews with famous Liku dancers and analyses of their performances, this paper explores how contemporary Liku performances have become critical spaces for localized and globalized ideas of gender and sexuality to circulate. Focusing specifically on the social media and music videos produced by these performers, we invoke Sarah Sharma’s (2022) feminist extension of media studies and the ways in which technology serves as a bridge between culture and power, to examine how the media produced by Liku dancers is influencing the social experience of gender and sexuality in Bali. This paper has significant implications for ethnomusicology, as although gender and sexuality have been a major topics of discussion in Indonesian music and dance, more research is needed on the impact of modern technology and mediated expressions of gender and sexuality in the arts.

As far as I can remember, every time I listened to Peking Drum Song (Jingyun Dagu) or some other kinds of Chinese operas, I found the musicians’ abilities to perform from memory fascinating. Regardless whether they performed for thirty minutes or three hours, they played without looking at any musical scores. Why do they have such “super power” is a question that I always wonder and want to find out. As I studied the phenomenon, I found out that the singers had been trained with the method of formulaic composition/performance, a method that has been used for a long time and for many Chinese music genres, including folk songs, Chinese opera, and folk instrumental ensembles, which called “chengshihua”(程式化).

Formulaic composition/performance means musicians use formulaic music elements to facilitate their music composition, memorization, and performance. Formulaic composition/performance is not an unique method of Chinese music. It also appears into other world musics, literature, calligraphy, and other forms of art. What and how musical formulism work? This thesis examines “Three Pre-dawn Scenes”( “Choumo Yinchu”丑末寅初), a Peking Drum song, as a case study. My research aim is to investigate how literary, linguistic, melodic, rhythmic and other compositional elements and strategies constitute formulism in traditional Chinese music.