Elaborately painted faces, songs sung in the high-pitched falsetto and audience interaction are a few of the unique characteristics that separate Beijing Opera from the more familiar Western Opera.
Following its UCLA debut this past Wednesday at Schoenberg Hall, the world-renowned Mei Lanfang Beijing Opera Company will be performing tonight and tomorrow at Hollywood’s Kodak Theater.
Beijing opera consists not only of dance and song, but also heightened dialogue, poetry and elaborate costumes and make-up.
Assistant history professor Andrea Goldman, who specializes in Chinese studies and the Qing dynasty, insisted that there are significant differences between its western counterpart.
“Chinese opera is (similar to) world musicals in our performance world. So there’s dance, there’s dialogue, there’s singing. It’s a real (convergence) of art forms so to just call it opera sometimes doesn’t seem quite enough,” she said.
According to Goldman, Chinese opera works according to certain character types: The male role, the female role, the clown role and the “painted face” role, who plays general characters and wear brightly colored paints on their faces.
The performers start formal training as young as 10 or 11-years-old, often joining one of the many opera troupes in China at the age of 18. They are trained to perfection in singing, dancing, acting and even martial arts, which is often infiltrated into their movements.
“Their movement vocabulary is as rigorous as our ballet is. Unless you get it in your body early, you’ll never master it,” said Susan Pertel Jain, executive director of the UCLA Confucius Institute, which sponsored the event along with The Center for Chinese Studies. Jain called the Beijing opera performers: “The most highly trained artists in the world.”
While the traditional theater experience in the U.S. consists of sitting quietly in a theater, operas like these are also more encouraging of audience engagement.
“Often times the audience members will talk while the performances are going on. They’re designed that way,” said Jain, “It’s a lot more interactive than our western theater experience when you are in the dark and it’s quiet.”
In China, many of the viewers are familiar with the story lines, so that viewers often compare different interpretations throughout the show. At the Kodak theater, subtitles will be provided.
The company, which is just one of many Beijing opera troupes, was named after the late Mei Lanfang, who was China’s greatest opera star and introduced the performance style of Beijing opera in the West in the 1930s.
“He was very influential in the last century with performing Chinese opera and really raising the bar, pushing creativity,” Jain said.
Mei Lanfang is also known for his portrayal of female roles. He was performing at the time of transition between men playing the female roles and women beginning to perform on stage as career actors.
“He played the female role in the 20th century and he was a star,” Goldman said, “Everybody, if they could afford to get tickets to see his shows, loved his shows. He was admired by men, he was admired by women.”
Although Mei Lanfang died in 1961, his legacy is still alive and well; The troupe’s artistic director is Mei Lanfang’s son Mei Baojiu, who also specializes in female roles. He was presented with a Distinguished Artist Award at the performance on Wednesday by the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music.
While the show is guaranteed to be a different kind of opera, Goldman insists that when Western drama was introduced in rural China, it was difficult for the Chinese to accept the “peculiar” theater experience ““ with its straight dialogue, peculiar use of props and lack of spectacle. Chinese audience members wanted stylized movement and rich speech, which is exactly what the Mei Lanfang Beijing Opera Company’s performance will have, giving American audiences a taste of that Chinese entertainment culture.
“Conventions (that are) foreign to us, we see them as odd and we don’t understand them. But once you understand those conventions, then you can get inside them, and it seems perfectly natural,” Goldman said.