FRIDAY 11TH MAY 2012 ­ BST +7HRS ­ Evening Beijing Peking Duck Dinner and Chinese Opera

The early evening Beijing traffic almost put pay to dinner and the performance since we had less then 40 minutes to enjoy our meal and take our seats for the opera.  Chinese or Peking opera has a long history and is today regarded as a cultural treasure.  There is heaps about Peking opera its staging, costumes, singing andmusic at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beijing_opera

 

For the record Peking opera or Beijing opera is a form of traditional Chinese theatre which combines music, vocal performance, mime, dance and acrobatics. It arose in the late 18th century and became fully developed and recognized by the mid-19th century.  The form was extremely popular inthe Qing Dynasty.  With elaborate and colourful costumes, performers are the only focal points on Peking opera's characteristically sparse stage. They utilize the skills of speech, song, dance, and combat (Kung Fu) in movements that are symbolic and suggestive, rather than realistic. Above all else, the skill of performers is evaluatedaccording to the beauty of their movements. Performers also adhere to a variety of stylistic conventions that help audiences navigate the plot of the production. The layers of meaning within each movement must be expressed in time with the highly distinctive music that includes a lot of percussion and difficult for the western ear to appreciate. The repertoire of Peking opera includes over 1,400 works, which are based on Chinese history, folklore, and, increasingly, contemporary life.

We saw 3 short operas the first about an Emperor who wants to marry a Princess who is secretly in love with a Rebel Prince, the second is based on a shadow boxing incident (See photo) – this was by far the most entertaining watching 2 opponents shadow boxing using Kung Fu in imagined total darkness – very funny and adeptly performed and the last about a concubine pining for her master who disgraces herself by becoming very drunk. Thoughtfully the theatre had a TV screen on which a translation of the words sung appeared so one way or the other we had a pretty good idea of what was going on.

It was very colourful although the stylised singing which is more akin to ‘baby doll talk’ and music takes a bit of getting used to but if you sit back and think about the cultural origins it is and was an entertaining event.