PEKING OPERA GOES DISCO--OPINIONS DIVIDED

In a theater here, a group of Peking Opera stars took the stage and bravely sang their traditional, high-pitched arias against a backing of electric guitars, synthesizers and drums.

The result, many members of the audiences felt, was less than successful. At the very least, hearing Peking Opera selections being performed to a pounding disco beat was a culturally jarring experience, a bit like hearing Joan Sutherland singing Mozart with a reggae band as back-up.

But the leading performers in one of the world’s most highly stylized art forms are getting desperate. As they gaze out over the footlights in theaters across the country, they see their audiences dwindling at an alarming rate.

Chinese opera, the main form of mass entertainment here until recently, is losing out in the battle for the attention of the younger generation.

Attendances are still healthy in rural areas. But at a normal performance in the Good Fortune Theater in central Peking, half the seats are empty. The rest are filled by gray-haired retirees and a sprinkling of foreign tourists there to see something ethnic.

“We have a real problem competing with television, films and pop music,” said veteran actor Ma Chongren. “In the cities especially, audiences are down. Even soccer is a bigger draw than opera.”

Opinions on the recent Peking-Opera-Goes-Disco experiment were mixed.

“I think it is a successful experiment,” Mei Baoyin, daughter of the late Mei Lanfang, Peking Opera’s most famous performer, told Reuters backstage. “This is the first time I have performed in something like this, but we hope it will help attract more young people.”

“Unsuccessful” was the verdict of one young member of the audience. “If I want to hear Peking Opera, I want the real thing, not something like this. It doesn’t work as Peking Opera and it doesn’t work as modern music either.”

“If we did these songs with the traditional backing, no young people would come,” said producer Liu Weiren. “But with the addition of these modern instruments, they are interested.”

Whatever the audiences think of this blatant play for the youth market, the Communist Party has given its blessing. Senior party leader Wang Zhaoguo went to one performance and was later quoted in the official press as saying:

“I approve of some reform to Peking Opera. If Peking Opera does not change, it is going to be difficult to attract young people. Change is the only way our precious cultural heritage can be preserved.”

Others are not so sure. Many are worried that by changing in hopes of luring new audiences, Peking Opera will lose its soul. They fear, too, that the guitars and synthesizers might alienate the old audience without attracting any permanent new following.

There is much to lose. Peking Opera, which came into being in the late 18th century, is just one of more than 100 different types of Chinese opera, but it is considered by experts to be the apogee of the art.

Traditional operas are based on stories from history, told largely through song and accompanied by an orchestra of gongs, cymbals, flutes and a variety of Chinese stringed instruments.

Melodies are few and repeated over and over, costumes and make-up are garish and all actions, down to the tiniest hand movements, are highly stylized.

Mime is used to compensate for the spartan sets, and symbolism is all important.

An actor holds up his hand before the rest of the cast to indicate they do not hear what he says. An actor holding a Chinese fly swatter is understood to be riding a horse, and one with four flags on his back is a general leading an army.

The way in which the actors manipulate their extra-long sleeves is an important clue to their state of mind.

The government provides financial support for 230 Peking opera troupes around the country along with more than 3,000 other professional Chinese opera troupes, and there are state institutes where young performers are trained.

Performers must perfect 20 different types of laughter and smiles, and actresses doing matronly roles are said to practice the slow, mincing walk of their character while gripping a brush between their knees.

But audiences, in the cities at least, are taking less and less interest in the finer points of the art.

“The skills of performing and singing can be passed on from one generation of opera actors to another, but what you can’t pass on is a love of opera amongst the audiences,” lamented one local opera fan. “If people don’t want to come, you can’t force them to.”

There is great irony in Peking Opera’s present problems--it is fading just as it has been rehabilitated.

The art was banned in the radical Cultural Revolution which swept China in the decade before Chairman Mao’s death in 1976. In those days, Madame Mao wielded a big stick in the cultural arena and decreed that all traditional opera was feudal and worthless.

In place of the hundreds of traditional scripts, she allowed performances of only eight “model” operas, all based on revolutionary themes.

Year after year, on stage and screen, those eight operas were repeated. To perform any other work would have been political suicide.

Reviving the art after such a stultifying decade was not easy--many of the masters had died in the interim. And just as it was getting back on its feet, interest started to flag.

“It is partly the result of the Cultural Revolution,” said Ma Chongren, an actor with the Peking Opera Institute Number One Troupe.

“Young people in those years were not exposed to Peking Opera and they were also not taught the history stories on which most of the operas are based.”

Peking Opera’s golden age was in the late 19th century when it was, to quote one expert, “the cinema of the Manchu Dynasty.” It was especially popular at the Imperial court.

Opera scripts were sometimes risque in content or were used by authors for political purposes to attack such targets as the corrupt Imperial bureaucracy.

“All the old scripts have been emasculated since the Communists came to power in 1949,” said one foreign expert on Peking Opera. “They rewrote them all to take out anything which they considered impure or which could be used against them.”

But the tradition of using opera as a cover for political attacks continued into the Communist era, and an opera named Hai Rui Dismissed from Office, written by an opponent of Mao’s in the early 1960s, helped trigger the Cultural Revolution.

Today, Peking Opera has lost even this slight aura of controversy. Authors wishing to use historical allegory as a way of expressing veiled comments on political events now tend to use ordinary plays as their vehicle.

So with performing standards down and increased competition from more modern forms of entertainment, Peking Opera is faced with a terrible dilemma--should it try to preserve its traditional character or change with the times?

The brother of China’s last Emperor, Pu Jie, now a sprightly 78, grew up in the Imperial court where he developed a lifelong love of Peking Opera, but even he is pessimistic about the chances of the art retaining its mass appeal.

“Peking Opera has changed a lot over the years,” he told Reuters recently. “It’s better in some ways, but young people prefer to watch movies. That is natural and there is nothing that can be done about it.”

But there is no need to give up hope altogether, he added.

“Peking Opera will not disappear completely, whatever happens. It will perhaps become like Western opera, something enjoyed and supported by a minority. Ordinary people in the West don’t go to see opera, but it still manages to survive.”