All on-screen martial arts choreography in Sinophone cinema has roots in traditional opera, many early pioneering directors and actors like King Hu, Lau Kar-Leung, Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung, either came from an opera troupe background or looked to it for inspiration. The difference between wuxia and.. - ThreadSky

xuetingni.bsky.social • 1 day ago

All on-screen martial arts choreography in Sinophone cinema has roots in traditional opera, many early pioneering directors and actors like King Hu, Lau Kar-Leung, Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung, either came from an opera troupe background or looked to it for inspiration. The difference between wuxia and..

Reposted from Gilrandir

And so, I concluded that wuxia fighting is fight choreography (with wire work), and xianxia fighting is Chinese opera choreography XD 3/3

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xuetingni.bsky.social•1 day ago

...xianxia, isn't so clear-cut, it's world building, powers and supernatural elements, hence the difference in choreographic styles, but of course the flying and leaping is all done with wires and these days.

xuetingni.bsky.social•1 day ago

...It's worth noting that the forefathers of modern wuxia, had very little practical experience of real wushu but employed their knowledge of it and such things like TCM, qigong, together with their literary imagination to fabricate amazing fictional martial arts in their novels 3/

xuetingni.bsky.social•1 day ago

...And when it came to representing their aesthetics on film, integrating traditional Chinese performance and dance was an innovation that ran simultaneously, often overlapped with the representation of actual martial arts. To put it simply, Bruce Lee was kungfu master AND a great dancer. 4/

gilrandir.bsky.social•1 day ago

Yeah for sure! To be clear, we were only talking about fight aesthetics, since we'd already previously talked about the difference between wuxia and xianxia when we were watching The Untamed, and I'd also showed him this excellent Venn diagram from Yilin https://bsky.app/profile/yilinwriter.bsky.social/post/3lhtnzbahxk2y

yilinwriter.bsky.social•1 day ago

Traditionally wuxia involved a lot more realistic (but gravity-defying) blow by blow fights and techniques based on actual martial arts, whereas in xianxia often it's much magical and hand waving

yilinwriter.bsky.social•1 day ago

Stereotypical wuxia:

yilinwriter.bsky.social•1 day ago

Xianxia:

yilinwriter.bsky.social•1 day ago

Of course neither is 100% realistic. It's always stylized, so naturally there's the Chinese opera (and dance) influence to make things look beautiful. But Wuxia tends to have a lot more actual realistic fight choreography.

gilrandir.bsky.social•1 day ago

He was thinking about the contrast between the fights in, say, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon or Hero, where there's more of a sense of physicality to the martial arts when the characters fight hand-to-hand or weapon-to-weapon (in between the wire work and qigong and such,

gilrandir.bsky.social•1 day ago

but in Love Game (at least, the first episode we were watching last night) it was MUCH more stylized, in a way that he (as a Westerner) noticed and I (as an Easterner) did not XD

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