Chinese Opera

Lately the weather is really hot and sticky. It's not comfortable to sit outside, except late at night, so mostly I migrate between the air-conditioned apartment to the air-conditioned bus, to my air-conditioned school. I don't know how people managed to live in this sort of climate before air conditioning.It's so draining to constantly be sweating and uncomfortable. It's especially amazing to see pictures of nineteenth-century Europeans in India or various African nations because they are always fully clothed in black wool. They must have been miserable.

I am enjoying school a lot. My teacher is quite good, and I especially enjoy learning how to read and write the characters. Many of them are so beautiful and elegant. I can see why the Chinese don't want to switch to an alphabet, although really it would be a better idea to do so in many respects. Work is OK, but they were not able to enroll enough students for the next quarter. So as of this Thursday, I will be unemployed again. I'm not really upset, because it will be easy to find a new job, if somewhat of a hassle. I was already looking, due to the school's flakiness (since they messed up my visa). B may have a new job writing paragraphs for English testing, which he is excited about, since he'll have a chance to practice his written English again.

Today we went to a Chinese opera performance by the National Guo Guang Opera Company. It seems to be a dying art, as the audience was almost exclusively over 60. We were the only Westerners there. I had never seen a real performance before, just snippets in movies.

The plot is usually based on a well-known story from history or folklore, which is already known to the audience, so there's no suspense about who the characters are or what will happen. All the actors are elaborately costumed, in beautiful embroidered silk robes, and their faces are covered (to the point of unrecognizablity) in paint. The costumes and face paint identify the personality and social status of the characters, so if you're familiar with the conventions everything is very clear. The action is like Western opera, in that they chant or speak in this very stylized way, so that the audience needs subtitles to understand, most of the time, and then there are periodically interludes corresponding to arias, where one or two characters perform full-throttle songs and dances. The audience applauds them in the middle of the play if they did a good job.

In addition to singing, all the actors can dance too. Some of them (depending on their character) also perform acrobatics, like backflips. The acrobatics are performed by the clowns, who provide comic relief. There's a lot of slapstick and cheesy humor involved, which surprised me. The audience was always laughing, though I didn't understand why most of the time. The actors are accompanied by a live orchestra of 15 or so musicians, who are an integral part of the performance, just like the orchestra in a Western opera.

I liked the singing and dancing and it was very interesting to see how it's done. However, the performance went on and on (more than three hours!) so we left early. B does not like Chinese singing and music much, and found it really dull. The Chinese traditionally use a different scale than we do, so to a Westerner all their music sounds kind of discordant or off-key at first. Also, all the female actors (and some of the males ones) sing in a very artificial, high (almost screechy) way, which is something you just have to get used to--or not. It's definitely not something everyone would enjoy.