30 June 2007

I just woke up and it's a bright and beautiful Sunday morning. There's a light breeze--judging by the weather outside, this might well be San Francisco. Yay!

"Cultural Enrichment" Day Two: The Beijing Opera

At six o'clock last night, all 70 of us HBA-ers piled into the school's buses and headed to the Beijing Opera.

(Skip this paragraph if you're not interested in the technical stuff.)
We spent Thursday in class learning about 京剧 (Jingju). Our Chinese textbook tells us that this modern opera is a mixture of 湖北 (Hubei) and 安徽 (Anhui)'s--two regions'--local theater. The most striking aspect of the Beijing Opera is the characters' 脸谱 (lianpu), or face paint. Because the Opera uses no props and doesn't have much of a spoken introduction, the paint tells the audience each character's personality. Red indicates a good person, white a villain, and yellow a reckless person. There are four main roles: Sheng, Dan, Jing, and Chou. Sheng is the male hero, Dan the female hero, Jing a less important female, and Chou the villain/comic relief. Because the opera incorporates singing, speech, wushu, and acrobatics, training for it can take years. Nonetheless, nowadays the opera is becoming less and less popular, especially with young audiences.

We arrived at the hotel where the opera was being put on around 7pm. Our teachers lead us through the ritzy lobby (this was the nicest interior that I've seen in China) and into the theater. It was rather small, and by no means full. We sat down in Section 3--an area close to the stage, but better yet, in which all of the seats were around dinner tables piled with china, tea, sweets, and snacks. Ritzy.

The Opera began. If you're ever in Beijing, and you think you hear an ambulance, there are two possibilities: either someone has keeled over, or you're passing the Opera house. The Opera's "singing" is actually really high-pitched wailing. The strange thing is, it grows on you. Because the theater provided us with captions in both characters and English, I could often even understand what the characters were saying (I never can in American opera).

The singing was about what I'd expected--at our table, us students tried to be polite and hide our amused smiles under our hands. We thought that the Opera was, well, kind of silly. But then the wushu and acrobatics began. And wow! Suddenly I understand why it takes years to become a performer. It's difficult to describe the whirlwind of walkovers, flips, and juggling feats that the performers carry out. Suffice to say, the first day of training, I would have been kicked out.

The Opera was also short--only about an hour and a half--which left all of us slightly surprised and wanting more. I could've watched the female lead kick away her attackers' arrows (Really! So cool!) for hours. The Opera left me impressed, and saddened that it's losing in popularity.