The National Beijing Opera Company of China in one of their rare performances in London.

China: Opera with a Bang

If you find yourself at the YiFu Theatre in Shanghai, don't be alarmed if the man on stage screeches and flails: He's just an actor.

A performer carefully applies the makeup that will differentiate his character from all the others.

In Beijing Opera, costumes and makeup are more important than scenery and props.

Attending a Beijing Opera (aka Peking opera) is something that often gets left out of travel itineraries. And yet, it's an event like no other. Whether you go to a concert hall for the full opera experience, or just attend a shorter one performed at a restaurant, park, or hotel, you'll find yourself suddenly - and deeply - immersed in a completely unique world.

It's possible you'll wish you had earplugs. It's also possible you'll become so entranced by these imaginative, traditional performances that you'll keep coming back. Either way, you'll be in for an aural experience like no other.

"I've always enjoyed operas," says 70-year-old Geni White, an Oregonian who fell in love with this form of theater while spending 10 months teaching English in Jurong, China over the last year. "But the Beijing Operas are special: the stylized hand movements, the facial expressions, the acrobatics, the pantomime-type stage walking - it's all so expressive, far more so than Western operas."

Just 2 centuries old, Beijing Opera (called jingju in Chinese), is the best known of the roughly 300 traditional styles of theater in China. It's also one that has become harder to experience in recent decades. Mao's cultural revolution almost killed it, replacing its traditional themes with Revolutionary Opera in which Mao suits took the place of fancy costumes and Maoisms dominated story lines.

"Once that period was over, popular taste was for almost anything but Beijing Opera, with its incomprehensible screechy melodies and old-school morals," says Eric Golub, a musician who twice toured China playing a Chinese fiddle with the University of Hawaii's Beijing Opera troupe.

Therefore, to be able to see a modern performance of traditional Beijing Opera is truly special. Says Golub, "the small group of people carrying on the tradition usually concentrate on achieving the classical aesthetic."

In the early days of Beijing Opera, performances were held outdoors. The musicians basically competed with one another to be heard and since an orchestra and percussion band can get quite loud, the actor-singers created a forceful, piercing style of singing to ensure they would not be drowned out. Stages were illuminated only by dim oil lamps so, in order to be seen, performers wore oversized, vivid costumes, masks and makeup that delineated various roles - red face: good guy; white face: bad guy; yellow dress: emperor; purple dress: barbarian.

Costumes and makeup, in fact, remain more important than scenery or props; stages have virtually no set, requiring audience members to exercise their imaginations. It's as beautiful and bizarre as it was when it was first performed so many generations ago.

Can such a low-tech, idiosyncratic form of theater survive in the modern world? Colin Mackerras, author of the book Peking Opera , insists that this is one art form that still has a future ahead of it. "It's changing and declining," says Mackerras, "but it's not dying out."

Posted on August 07, 2006