About halfway through this five-act extravaganza there’s a tableau of a theatre audience: bejeweled matrons in brocade gowns, young flappers, dandies in pork-pie hats, strolling snack vendors, creaky mandarins in quilted robes. Just the sort of throng that might have greeted the house-counting eyes of a 1920’s Peking Opera actor onstage.
Except instead of gazing up at an opera platform in China, this meta-audience is itself onstage, peering out over a packed house in Vancouver’s Queen Elizabeth Theatre: silk-sheathed socialites draped in furs, stolid Chinatown burghers, grandparents with pre-teens, Goh Ballet luminaries, swarming camera hobbyists with howitzer-sized telephotos.
The Chinese government spent a lot of pre-devaluation RMB to buy this crowd. The advance publicity alone fattened the ad revenues of a whole gamut of local media (including – full disclosure – the VO) for a month before the show’s North American premiere last week. The promoters shipped container loads of props, costumes and scenery, as well as 40+ stars and choristers from the Shanxi Academy of Arts. To accommodate it all, the 3,000-seat QE Theatre, Vancover’s most lustrous venue, with its 70’ x 40’ stage, was “a bit tight for us,” the troupe’s artistic director, Wang Jinghua confides in a foyer interview. “But we made shift.”
China thinks big, when it comes to such spectacles. The “Opera Warriors” production team is packed with name-brand talent, veterans of far vaster projects than this. The script was penned by Hongkong celebrity writer Lillian Li, who wrote the blockbuster screenplay for “Farewell My Concubine.” Choreographer Xing Shimiao has mounted fully eight editions of Chinese Central TV’s Lunar New Year farrago. Lighting designer Sha Xiaolan illuminated the opening and closing ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics.
But the tradition of grandiose state-sponsored showmanship dates back much farther than that – as early as the salad days of the People’s Republic in the 1950’s. Before the Sino-Soviet split, the new Communist regime could import top-flight Russian ballet masters to train a corps of world-class Chinese dancers. Even after the break with Moscow, this home grown talent pool could be drawn on to perform (with technical mastery and aggressive global diffusion) Madame Mao Zedong’s two approved “Revolutionary Model” dance dramas, “The White-Haired Girl” and “The Red Detachment of Women.”
With the purge of Madame Mao and the ebb of Cultural Revolution zealotry, the Model Dramas fell into disrepute. But the ballet influence lingered on, blending with endemic folk and theatrical traditions for a hybridized “Chinese classical dance” genre, as espoused by the Shanxi Arts Academy. Of course this mode has nothing at all to do with the discredited Revolutionary Model style, Wang Jinghua hastens to add.
Nevertheless, Professor Liu Siyuan of the UBC theatre department concedes (in a phone interview) that there could be a certain family resemblance. Not a lineal descent, but a kind of second cousinship via a remote common ancestry in the Russian ballet. For instance Chinese classical dancers move more fluidly than the highly stylized Peking Opera actors, he notes. And their toes point down instead of up.
Nor does the kinship end there. Chinese classical dance seems to share with the Revolutionary Model genre a penchant for stark melodrama, with unambiguous good guys and bad guys. What’s changed, though, is the underlying notion of who’s good or bad. And, given the unstinting government promotion of such galas, these shifting subtexts say a lot about Beijing’s evolving worldview, priorities and ideology.
It’s still safe to demonize exploitative fat cats. But instead of lionizing proletarian guerrillas, as in Cultural Revolution times, the latest dance dramas extol the disciplined, self-abnegating conservators of China’s glorious civilization and traditions – the very people who, not long ago, were hounded, often lethally, as “cow demons and snake spirits,” avatars of superstition and feudal oppression.
“Opera Warriors” is set in the heyday of such demons, the early 1900’s, the “decadent” Nationalist interregnum between the fall of Imperial China and the rise of the People’s Republic. The plot centers on a trio of brothers who train as traditional actors. The eldest (Xie Haibo) plays cavalry generals, the most acrobatically demanding roles in the opera repertoire. The handsome middle brother (Ren Zhongjie) specializes in dazzling hand-to-hand combat duels. Black Bean (Lu Jianfei), the youngest and least talented of the three, is a mere tumbler. Yet he nevertheless wins the heart of the opera troupe-master’s winsome daughter, Swallow (Yang Xuan).
Black Bean courts Swallow under a banner of opera troupe's motto: "First build character, then stage the play; the stage is wider than the heavens."
The opera trainees undergo a regimen of visibly excruciating (yet kinkily graceful) contortions, interspersed with frequent beatings by their master. Their masochism pays off; by Act Two, they’ve attained star status. Second Brother’s onstage virtuosity wins him a backstage tryst with the mistress of a sinister tycoon whose henchmen, in revenge, murder both elder siblings and attempt to kidnap Third Brother’s sweetheart.
To thwart the abduction, the opera master has no choice but to disband his troupe and hang himself, after first confiding his daughter and his artistic lineage to Black Bean. The dispirited disciple clumsily performs his stilted warrior routines before scanty and scornful audiences, comforted only by the steadfast devotion of Swallow and her pet monkey. But then, watching the monkey gambol with its wild, forest-dwelling confreres, Black Bean devises a new, more naturalistic (not to say simian) style of movement. This he embellishes into what the program note describes as “the lively and mighty ‘Monkey King’” school of opera.
The takeaway message: despite setbacks, China’s ancient and invincible “spiritual civilization” can achieve anything – even innovation – through diligent hierarchical discipline.
Corny and didactic though it may be, the story line provides a framework not just for stunning acrobatic stuntsmanship, but also for some emotionally pitch-perfect dance. With a cast equally fluent in the (illusory) naturalism of Western ballet and the stylized gestures of Peking Opera. Choreographer Xing skilfully plays upon the contrast of the two styles.
For instance, the elder siblings’ death scene. It starts with an opera rendition of a warrior champion sent on a suicide mission, but then morphs into a sort of checkmate montage of the brothers and their assassins playing out a menacing endgame amidst a crush of dancing rooks. Or the torrid tryst amidst the backstage wardrobe; an almost palpable sense of rustling silks on tingling flesh. Or the tycoon’s black-clad gangster henchmen swarming en masse like a cancer.
Composer Fang Ming limns all this action with an unremitting tone poem of a score. The lush orchestration, Wang Jinghua assures me, “grows on you, like a fine wine.” Maybe so, but at first hearing I thought it cloyed a little, like Chinese loquat flavoured cough syrup.
One of the most affecting – and least orchestrated – moments of the production came in the penultimate scene when Black Bean, at the humiliating nadir of his career, retreats to the forest. There, stripped of his brocaded costume armour, he gradually sheds his stiff, operatic poses to mimic the monkeys’ antic, free-flowing body language.
This might have made a satisfying climax to the story, but then we’re offered a grand finale with Black Bean now at the head of a new opera company, grimacing and japing in a blonde wig and pheasant plumes. An uninitiated Westerner might be very puzzled to see an impersonation of Liberace blowing kisses.
But Chinese viewers (who comprised about 80% of the opening night audience) would immediately recognize the character as Monkey King Sun Wukong from the classic saga “Journey to the West.” This protean demigod has the handy knack of transforming each of his hairs into a clone of himself. The apparent kiss-blowing, it turns out, is just Sun Wukong inspiriting his whisker trimmings with his immortal breath to launch them forth as an invincible, world-beating monkey army.
That could stand as a fair metaphor for the ambitious and confident rising power that sends forth a lavish production like “Opera Warriors” as a global calling card. “China’s a huge country with many people, lots of talent,” Wang Jinghua points out. “As long as we creatively keep up with the times, the world will surely welcome what we have to offer.”