Peking Opera

This is the first opportunity most Americans have had to observe one of the world's most elaborate and developed art forms. The experience turns out to be both spectacular and exhilarating.

This is not opera in the Western sense, but the term still applies because the conventions of the form are so theatrical. The only backdrop on the stage is a plain curtain. The stage is carpeted. Props are few and simple. The costumes, by contrast, are spectacular, brilliantly colored and painstakingly embroidered. A mind-numbing combination of skills is required of the performers who wear those costumes: ballet, acrobatics, pantomime, acting, singing, and, I believe, some knowledge of martial arts. The music is played by an orchestra of Chinese instruments in the wings and at first sounds as strange and forbidding as Schoenberg does to Tschaikovsky lovers (interestingly, some of the singing sounds rather like Schoenbergian speech-singing).

With pragmatism typical of the current Peking regime, the programs have been chosen to make this introduction for spectators unschooled in the subtleties of Peking opera as painless as possible. Most of the pieces being done on this tour are single scenes from longer works, and three of the four works that I saw depicted battles of one kind or another. The effects in these scenes become progressively more elaborate, including choreographed swordfights and spears juggled between performers (often with the feet, from behind the back), climaxing in the final Yen Tang Mountain in a colossal and transcendental display of group acrobatics.

Yet, to me, the most impressive number was the scene from The Jade Bracelet, a subtle, highly stylized pantomime of a courtship, but I also have two complaints/suggestions: some equivalent of the current Chinese practice of projecting "titles" on screens alongside the stage should have been utilized for the benefit of those who couldn't understand the dialogue; and the entire opera should have been performed.

It is a racist cliche that the Chinese are supposed to be inscrutable and paradoxical, but the Peking Opera performance here does represent a paradox of sorts: it delivers full value for the steep ticket price, yet it is the shortest evening imaginable.