Clown is one of the main trades of Beijing Opera, including Wen Chou and Wu Chou, also known as "three faces" or "small faces", and Wu Chou is also known as "jumping at will". Wen Chou is divided into official Wen Chou, square towel ugly, tea ugly, towel ugly and colorful Dan. It is characterized by putting a white "tofu block" in the center of the bridge of the nose to express the comic characteristics of the characters.

Development history:

In Daming Palace, there is a place called Liyuan. Because of Tang Xuanzong's obsession with art, it gradually developed into a royal art center. Tang Xuanzong liked clowns and often dressed as ordinary people in the pear garden. In any case, the king of a country dressed as a clown is detrimental to the image of the Tang Dynasty empire. In order to conceal the emperor's dignity, a piece of white jade was specially designed to hang on his face, which is the origin of clown facial makeup in the history of China opera. In China's opera, the clown's nose should be painted white. Because of Xuanzong of the Tang Dynasty, the clown is highly respected and respected by opera artists, and his status has always been very high. In the traditional troupe of China, clowns are makeup actors regardless of their status and qualifications.

In the long history of the development of China opera, the clown's makeup gradually formed a complete and systematic set of facial makeup according to the differences and differences of characters' identity, age, personality and behavior. Such as waist-shaped powder face, round powder face, jujube powder face, Zheng powder face, ingot powder face, ugly old face, ugly broken face, broken face, wiped face, pictographic face and so on. The most typical is the ugly square towel, the center of the face is outlined with white powder-a "tofu block" type of white powder face. So the audience knew that the actor was a clown as soon as they saw this piece of tofu.

Clown is a stylized role in China's traditional operas, and generally plays a funny role. It is said that Tang Xuanzong liked acting and played the clown on the next stage, and Tang Xuanzong was regarded as the originator of China's drama, so the heads of traditional theatrical troupes were all clowns, and the first president of China Theatre Academy was the famous ugly Xiao Changhua. Clowns generally do not perform duets, mainly in chanting and working, and chanting is different from other roles. Generally speaking, the so-called "Bai Jing" in Beijing Opera can be divided into the following categories:

Wen Chou is dominated by workmanship.

Wu Chou is mainly martial arts, and there is no obvious difference between Wu Chou and Wang Jiao San Wa.

Cai Dan plays the role of a female clown, usually a matchmaker and a maid.