UBC Press Blog

Siu Wang-Ngai with Peter Lovrick, 1997, Chapter 1, p. 3-5.

• Shortlisted, 1998 George Freedley Memorial Award, Theatre Library Association
• Shortlisted, 1997 Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize, Pacific Rim Voices Project

CACOPHONY! Cymbals, gongs, and drum demand attention. Their incessant beating fills up every corner of the theatre. Their rhythm and pace are urgent and exciting, as if to say, This is important! Something is about to happen! The musicians sitting on stage left in clear view of the audience are intensely focused on their leader, who furiously beats a small drum on a tripod with two sticks. The stage itself is fully lit but bare except for a carpet.

Suddenly a whirlwind of colour blows in from stage right, quickly followed by another. Fantastic beings, made larger than life by enormous shoes and padded shoulders, leap before the audience. They wear heavy, gloriously embroidered costumes and hold tasselled whips out at their sides, making them undulate. Four pennants rise from each of their backs and flutter as they move. But the most astonishing thing about them is their faces, painted in bold and calculated designs of many colours. Everything gives the impression that some mythical creatures have taken the stage. Then one of them begins to sing. A powerful and arresting voice resonates nasally. The delivery is aimed directly at the audience.

A first visit to the Chinese opera is an overwhelming experience of colour, sound, and movement. The dramatic tradition of China is a blend of song, speech, mime, dance, and acrobatics, held together by theatrical conventions resting on a concept of drama quite different from the realism and naturalism that have had such influence in the West. A realist play re-creates a story on stage down to the smallest detail. The characters are unaware of the audience; actors are trained to believe in the situation so that the audience will too. The Chinese tradition, how- ever, presents rather than reproduces the story. Waving a tasselled whip indicates riding a horse, and letting it hang straight down from the finger-tips shows that the rider has dismounted. There is no need to bring a live animal on stage to convey the idea of a horse. The stage is bare to give the actors the imaginative flexibility they need to suggest what is happening. Walking in a circle around the stage, for example, conveys making a long journey. When they arrive at the end of their journey, they may use mime to open an imaginary door and step over an imaginary ledge into a house. A table and two chairs can become a mountain from which a general surveys the battlefield. Acrobatics indicate the war.

These stage conventions make the performance accessible. The audience also finds clarity in the make-up and costumes of the actors. It knows when it sees a man in oily white make-up that he is crafty and not to be trusted, just as a man in red make-up is courageous and generous. The inner hearts of these characters are painted on their faces, as are their specific identities. The audience sees a given facial design on an actor and knows immediately that he is portraying this particular general or that particular legendary being. Costume reveals the character’s social station. An actress appears in a red and gold embroidered gown with tasselled cape and an elaborate headdress. The audience instantly understands that she is playing an imperial concubine. Thus an audience can size up characters pretty well before they have uttered a word. But then they do speak or sing, addressing the audience directly and giving a synopsis of who they are, what has happened to them, and why they are here now. Once characters have performed this introduction, they are then free to engage others as the scene progresses.

Musical styles and stories vary among the many regional operas of China, but conventions are generally shared. They use accepted and familiar methods of demonstrating how something occurred. The audience delights in watching how well these are executed. Much like the audience of a traditional Western opera, Chinese opera-goers know the story very well before it begins. They are there to enjoy the execution of a particular aria, acrobatic scene, or much-loved part of a story. Right into the twentieth century people would come into a teahouse or theatre in the middle of a performance and chat or eat, waiting for favourite spots.

This approach to the theatre goes back century upon century. When Chinese drama begins depends on how you define it. It is crucial to keep in mind that drama in China is a synthesis of many arts and tracing the development of the one means tracing the development of the many. A good example is an exorcism performed in Taiwan in 1982.An elderly woman was afflicted by devils. The Taoist priest arrived on the scene in ceremonial robes to do what was necessary to free her. He breathed fire and had a battle of wits with the demon, played by a masked assistant. He spoke, he sang, he gestured. The battle with the infernal reached its climax with acrobatics and dance that went on far into the night. There was great drama and great seriousness in this event. Priests in the second millennium BC used dance in ritual with the same seriousness. Oracle bones -the shoulders of oxen or the shells of turtles, inscribed with divinations -tell of Shang dynasty priests performing rain dances. These shamans used ritual dance as well in spiritual communion and in exorcism.

Dance in later dynasties performed the function of memory. The Great Warrior Dance, called Dawn in Chinese, re-enacted how the King of Zhou overthrew the Shang in 1030 BC. Lines of court dancers imitating a battle performed Dawu and kept an important event alive and present. A later dance in the Tang dynasty (AD 618-907) told the story of Prince Lanling, who was so good-looking that his enemies would not take him seriously in battle. His wife made him ferocious masks to solve the problem. This performance gives us an example of combined dramatic elements -a dance that told a story and employed masks -and the tale of Prince Lanling is still alive on the Chinese operatic stage. Another dance from the same period was The Stepping and Swaying Lady, A woman walked and swayed on stage lamenting her sad fate: her husband abused her when he was drunk. A chorus sympathetically joined in, but then her husband entered, his nose red from drunkenness, and they fought. The elements of drama are all here: music, singing/movement, a situation, characters, and even, as the red nose suggests, make-up.

Another example of the meeting of dramatic elements comes in the person of the court fool. The Zhou kings counted jesters among their entertainers. Like the Elizabethan fool, the Chinese court jester performed comedy and had a certain licence to speak more frankly than others. The name of one of them, Jester Meng, figures in the development of Chinese drama. One day, the story goes, Jester Meng encountered a young man cutting and selling wood to stay alive. This man, it turned out, was the son of the late prime minister, who had served his king honestly and well. Now that the prime minister was dead, however, his son was reduced to poverty. The jester promised to help and then proceeded to spend an entire year preparing the role of the deceased official. He practised his mannerisms, walk, and appearance. When ready, Jester Meng performed the role at a banquet before the amazed king and appealed to his conscience. Apparently, it worked.

The fool turns into one of the first definite role types in Chinese dramatic history, and that is another story. Around the third century AD, a high-ranking minister stole some silk from his king. He was found out and his punishment was to be a terrible one -humiliation. He had to dress up at banquets, presumably in the silk that he stole, and play the butt of the court fool’s slapstick jokes. This quickly became a successful entertainment known as adjutant drama, either because the official was an adjutant or because one fool performed so well that he was awarded adjutant status. By the beginning of the Song dynasty (AD 960-1279), the adjutant drama had expanded to five set roles, becoming something new -an entertainment in the form of a play. The adjutant had become a character type called a fujing, and the character who made the adjutant the butt of jokes had become the fumo. Three other roles -a woman, a man, and an official -were added, though they were sub- ordinate to the other two.

About the Author

Siu Wang-Ngai is a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britian and Chair of the Federation of Hong Kong-Macau Photographic Association. He lives in Hong Kong where he practices law.

Peter Lovrick has taught the History of Performing Arts in China at the University of Toronto’s East Asian Studies department for the past several years. He also teaches full time at George Brown College’s English and Liberal Studies Department.