The Great Birthday Party

Heaven and heavenly beings are very popular topics in Chinese opera, including Cantonese opera. The primary three ideologies in China are Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism. The Chinese see these as complementary rather than contradictory, and it is not unusual to see Buddhist monks, Taoist priests, and Confucian sages all under the same roof. This is especially true when people think about Heaven. Heaven is a very tolerant place, with room for gods and saints from both Taoism and Buddhism (Confucianism is an ethical system, not a religion, although it has temples and honours its sages).

The Great Birthday Party is one of the Four Routine Cantonese Operas, which are performed whenever there is a festival or ceremony commemorating the founders of Cantonese opera. There are four artists who are considered founders within Cantonese opera circles. Whenever any of their birthdays come around, all Cantonese opera troupes present this play if conditions allow; if not, the troupe will at least perform a smaller play before the divine tablet of the founders.

The full play is divided into two parts. The first half presents the story of the Buddhist dispenser of compassion named Guanyin, or the Goddess of Mercy, from her birth to the point at which she obtains enlightenment. The second half narrates the birthday greetings she receives at her party from Taoism's famous Eight Immortals. The performance takes almost five hours, so normally only the second half is presented at festivals. It is typically full of cheerful scenes. All lines in the play are highly auspicious, and the atmosphere is quite lively. It is also strongly coloured by local Cantonese characteristics. For example, the play mentions that Sun Wukong — the popular Monkey King who exists in many forms of art in China — has a wife and children. This is typical of Cantonese folklore, since no similar scenario is found anywhere else in the story, the novel, or the drama of the Great Birthday Party in other parts of China. The play also features the lion dance.

In addition to its difficult dance movements, the play includes two sets of collective group dances, called Flower Arrangement and Flower Setting. Cantonese opera performers of the past were uniformly male, and the only group dance was Flower Arrangement. Later, troupes with all female performers would emerge, and would also have to perform the play during festivals or the birthdays of the opera founders. Since there were no male actors to perform the martial arts parts in these cases, the women created a dance called Flower Setting. Afterwards, both males and females could perform on the same stage, and the two dances were performed at the same time in the play. After 1949, this play was no longer publicly performed, and the two dances have been lost.