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Kung Fu Musical


Gwai LO

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and to add to this.. i found this one a few months ago. its a Muay Thai Stage show that looks epic also 5lZeVSp8gPg

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ShaOW!linDude
Red Detachment of Women has the best fight scenes of any ballet.

A ballet with fight scenes? I might sit through that if it's not too.....hmm, what word to use here......flamboyant (maybe?) with overly expressive moves.

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Cold Bishop

The foundation of screen fight-choreography is Chinese dance, much more so than the actual martial-arts that form their basis.

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A ballet with fight scenes? I might sit through that if it's not too.....hmm, what word to use here......flamboyant (maybe?) with overly expressive moves.

It's a mix of ballet and Chinese Opera, made during the Cultural Revolution. Overly expressive would be a massive understatement.

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You can see a fight scene starting at 1h16m.

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ShaOW!linDude
The foundation of screen fight-choreography is Chinese dance, much more so than the actual martial-arts that form their basis.

Agreed, and I've always considered it such. That's generally the illustration I use when someone tells me MA flicks are nothing but fighting and violence. My analogy is while that is true it is choreographed like a dance but with an even greater precision imo.

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Cold Bishop

Yes, to a point. The whole notion of fight choroegraphy as it applies to Hong Kong and Chinese cinema was derived from the Chinese Opera, who long integrated kung-fu into its mix of ballet and acrobatics (and lest we forget, the Opera was a prime hiding spot for Ming revolutionaries and Shaolin exiles). Martial-arts cinema, from the '20s to '50s, conception of fights was largely filmed opera.

With that said, that sounds like Wang Yu arrogance. Chang Cheh's films were crucial in "breaking the link" so to speak from the Cantonese operaritc-wuxias, but A) It's hardly a complete break. Fight scenes never desisted in being choreographic. And Chang himself eventually ended up re-adopting opera principles come the Venom films. B) This change was more of an inevitability than completely unprecedented innovation: American, Japanese and European actions films were huge business in Hong Kong and the Nanyang. The Mandarin studios entry into martial-arts cinema was spurred by this more so than the success of Cantonese wuxia. Lest we forget that Shaw regularly distributed foreign films, so they knew what was going on.

The Mandarin new wuxia, and eventually the kung-fu film, were more of a synthesis of old and new (and let us not overlook the authentic martial-arts of the old Huang Fei-Hung films) than something completely different. Later on, Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung and Yuen Woo-Ping were all opera-trained, and their comedies and "new wave" films reflect that.

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