East Entertains West : Peking Opera Makes Its First Visit to San Diego

Even those who hold to the theory that music is a universal language have to admit that, to Western sensibilities, Chinese opera is pretty exotic stuff. It is a vivid, highly stylized theater that encompasses acrobatics, juggling, and martial arts as well as the usual music, drama, and dance.

Under the sponsorship of San Diego Opera, the Peking Opera of Chongquing opens tonight at San Diego Civic Theatre and plays through Saturday. Sixty members of the company, which has a year-round roster of about 300 performers, have been touring North America on a 31-city circuit since mid-November. Since this is the first local visit of Peking Opera and because of the art form’s esoteric nature, San Diego Opera has gone to the local Chinese-American community for assistance.

Two San Diego State University professors, Catherine Yi-Yu Cho Woo and Paochin Chu, are helping the local opera interpret the ethos of Chinese opera to its Occidental opera audience. Chu and Woo are also garnering support in the local Asian-American community, working with groups such as the Chinese Benevolent Society and Chinese Friendship Assn., to welcome the members of Peking Opera with a 250-person banquet at the university Friday.

“For the last 15 years, we have been trying to bring Chinese culture to San Diego,” explained Woo. “Both P. C. (Chu’s nickname) and I have invited various Chinese musicians and amateur Chinese opera groups from Los Angeles and San Francisco to perform here. But nothing so grand as Peking Opera.”

Woo is an ideal advocate of Chinese culture. A member of the San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture, Woo is a noted painter whose works have been shown across the country as well as in the Orient. Writing poetry and even lyrics for popular music heard in Taiwan has not encroached on her academic duties as professor of Chinese at SDSU. This year she is SDSU’s nominee for the statewide California State University Outstanding Professor Award.

Woo’s appreciation of Peking Opera goes back to her childhood in Beijing, where she grew up in a household of scholars and government officials.

“I was born in a big house that used to belong to a princess and her husband. We had over 100 rooms and many servants. For my great-grandparent’s birthday, they would set up a stage and invite the famous opera singers to come to our house and sing. So, as a child of 2 and 3, I saw them in our house singing.”

Unlike Western opera’s elitist connotations, opera in China has always been a popular art form, according to Woo.

“The famous Chinese opera stars are famous like Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable are famous in America. Ordinary people would know them by name. The Chinese love the opera almost like the Western world likes sports. Here in the Western world, we often think of opera goers as very sophisticated, attending the opera dressed up in furs and diamonds. In China, everybody goes to the opera--rich or poor, educated or illiterate. Even the servants can hum and sing opera; they know the words and the stories.”

There are many types of Chinese opera, as well as regional variations. Kuencheu is the designation for the older, classical style of opera, while Peking Opera is a newer, eclectic form of the 1,000-year-old tradition that did not surface until the end of the 18th Century.

“Peking Opera has absorbed many

other local opera traditions,” explained Chu, who is a professor of history at SDSU. “That’s why it is so popular. No matter which part of China you’re from, people like Peking Opera.”

Although the principal Peking Opera company is associated with the ancient Chinese Capital, the name denotes a style of opera that is now practiced by companies in all the major industrial cities of China. And, even though Peking is now Beijing, the opera style retains the traditional name.

Chu was born near Beijing, but the turmoil of World War II kept him from artistic pursuits.

“When I began to know the world, it was on already the eve of war. When the war began, there were many lost opportunities. At one time, I thought I should have taken opera as my career,” said Chu.”

It was not until he was a university student in post-war Taiwan that he became involved in Chinese opera.

“We had an amateur opera club that performed a few times each year,” Chu said.

One of the unusual aspects of Chinese opera is that men have traditionally played the women’s roles, although some sources state that this practice was an innovation of the early 18th Century.

“At one time, the acting profession was very cheap, like a prostitute,” said Chu. “Women were not allowed, nor were members of the ruling class allowed to become involved with opera. That’s why men played all the female roles. They had to train to walk on high shoes and walk with all of their weight on their toes, imitating the women with their bound feet.”

After 1911, when the Manchu dynasty was overthrown, women were allowed to perform on the opera stage, and many members of the former imperial household, who had been dilettante opera performers, took to the stage.

“During the 1930s, ‘40s, and ‘50s, almost all the famous female roles were played by men. Today, it is a declining art, and only a few men do these roles. It is a policy of the current government to encourage each sex to play its own roles,” Chu said.

Woo noted that today, in both China and Taiwan, there are Chinese opera companies made up entirely of women.

To Western audiences, the spectacle of Chinese opera--the brilliant costumes, the acrobatics and sword-swallowing routines--appears to be its primary appeal. Woo, however, corrected this notion.

“When Chinese people attend opera, they say that they go and listen to the opera instead of going to watch the opera, even though the costumes are very colorful.”

Listening to the vocal style of Chinese opera is one of the challenges to Western ears.

“In Western opera, the singer sings from the diaphragm to produce a deep, resonant sound. But, in Peking Opera, the females use a high, intense head tone,” Woo explained. Another divergence, she noted, is that men who play women’s roles, as well as those who portray the scholarly lover, a traditional category, sing in falsetto.

Although most Western opera plots revolve around romantic triangles, Woo said the plots of Chinese operas tend to teach lessons about social values, Chinese history and philosophy. And the audiences do not take in the performances with hushed reverence.

“In China, you might be shocked to see people eating melon seeds and drinking tea while enjoying opera. It doesn’t bother anybody there. Over here, if you talk (at an opera), people go, ‘shhh!’ ”

Another difference from Western opera is the lack of realistic scenery in Chinese opera. Although the stage setting tends to be simple, the gestures are complex. Every hand movement has a specific meaning, and no prop or mustache is without its symbolic function.

“Many of the operas are drawn from historical novels,” said Woo, “but you have to use a lot more imagination in watching a Chinese opera. In the Western opera, when ‘Romeo and Juliet’ is staged, you see the real setting, the balconies. In China, you might see a man come out with a whip. That means he’s riding a horse. On the stage, there may only be one little table and two chairs, but they may indicate a city wall.”

In San Diego, the visiting Peking Opera troupe will present four excerpts from the traditional repertory. Although this is not a typical format in China, according to Woo, it allows Western audiences to experience a sampling of types in a single viewing.

“The Sword is a Gift from Bai Hua” combines romance and political intrigue, and “Stealing the Stored Silver” is based on an ancient Chinese fairy tale about two snakes who are turned into beautiful women.

The finale, “Havoc in Heaven,” centers around the antics of the fabled folk hero the Monkey King. The story is taken from the 16th-Century Chinese novel “Journey to the West,” an appropriate allusion for Peking Opera on an Occidental mission.