East to West, She’s Living a Life Meant for the Opera

Imagine a new production of Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” minimalist in sets but adding all the airs and set pieces of Gounod’s opera version to the play. Further imagine it choreographed, as if Frederick Ashton, say, had set Gounod’s music rather than Prokofiev’s. Indeed, a guiding principle for the production would be that whoever is singing must also be moving.

Now think about casting such a production--finding an actress with the extraordinary classical music and dance talent and training to play Juliet under those circumstances. Not so hard, if you think East rather than West, for just that kind of role and multifaceted performance style marks the career of Chinese opera star Hua Wenyi.

Hua is one of the world’s foremost practitioners of Kun opera, the oldest of China’s 360-some theater genres. A sophisticated and literary art, with no scenery and few props, Kun opera is more complex in plot and characterization and has less emphasis on martial arts acrobatics and painted-face characters than the Beijing opera better known in the West.

“In Kun opera, we are meticulous about carving out a characterization,” Hua says, speaking through an interpreter backstage during rehearsal as her Los Angeles-based Hua Kun Opera prepared for performances tonight and Sunday at Occidental College. “This is a highly stylized art and it is very difficult to make it seem natural. You have to be so familiar with your character that it becomes your second soul. When you learn, you are taught by a teacher, but then you must shape the character yourself, following your own life experiences.”

The life experiences of Hua Wenyi are operatic stuff themselves. Stage-struck as a child in Shanghai, she knew she wanted to be an actress; what kind hardly mattered. So in 1954, when the 12-year-old Hua saw an ad announcing auditions for the Shanghai Chinese Opera Institute, she applied. Out of more than 1,000 hopefuls, she was one of 60 who earned a place. Eventually, Hua became one of China’s most distinguished actresses, winning her country’s highest theater awards and becoming artistic director of the Shanghai Kun Opera Company.

“We began at 6 a.m. with physical exercises and training--everything that makes you sweat,” Hua recalls. “Then in the afternoon we studied the music and texts. It was very difficult for a 12-year-old because these operas have very deep, very profound, very literary texts. We were always falling asleep, but the more we studied, the more we understood over the years.”

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In 1989, Hua was with her company on tour in San Francisco when the Tiananmen crisis broke out. She sought political asylum in the United States, leaving behind in China a husband and daughter. At the time, Hua cited the rigors of a hectic performing schedule and a desire to learn new things as reasons for her decision, but now all she will say is that it was a personal matter. Eventually, she settled in Monterey Park, teaching Kun opera privately and occasionally working for a dry cleaner. She has since remarried, to Su Shengyi, a skilled dancer and painted-face actor, and her daughter has joined her here, studying at UC Riverside.

When Peter Sellars became aware that Hua was living in Los Angeles, he invited her to put together a program of Kun opera for the 1990 Los Angeles Festival.

“That was one of the most profound performances of my lifetime,” Sellars recently told the audience at a UCLA round-table and Kun demonstration. “Hua Wenyi has the most powerful eyes of anyone in Chinese opera.”

One of the reasons that is important, as Sellars explained, is because often only a rug adorns the stage in Kun opera. Everything the audience knows about the physical situation of the opera must be indicated by the performers--how they walk and use their hands and eyes, reacting to scenery that isn’t there.

Hua is collaborating with Sellars in a new production of an early Kun classic, “The Peony Pavilion,” by Tang Xianzu, scheduled to open in Vienna in celebration of its 400th anniversary in 1998. A four-day epic known to recent generations only in excerpts, “The Peony Pavilion” as reconfigured by Sellars will have new English text by San Francisco poet June Jordan and music by New York-based emigre composer Tan Dun, along with traditional Kun scenes.

Hua also has on her slate the extensive performance and educational activities of her own company, founded in Los Angeles in 1991. Tonight the Hua Kun Opera presents “The Horse Trader’s Tale,” a tangled drama of family intrigue falling in style midway between Kun and Beijing operas. Sunday, the company offers a program of excerpts from both Kun and Beijing repertories.

Members of the orchestra for these performances, which will also feature supertitles, include musicians from New York and the locally based Spring Thunder Chinese Music Assn. Hua also has been able to bring in illustrious guests from her former company, Cai Zhengren and Liang Guyin. Last September Hua performed with them for the first time since her defection, at a Kun opera festival in Beijing.

“These are the best,” she says, “all national treasures.” She also has imported the Shanghai company’s makeup artist, a real blessing since what Kun opera lacks in scenery it makes up for in elaborate costumes and makeup.

Although she is planning further projects in China, such as a Kun opera program for Hong Kong television, Hua, now a U.S. citizen, is content to be practicing her art form on this edge of the Pacific Rim.

“I like the environment and the flowers--particularly the roses,” she says, adding with a laugh, “and the houses are bigger.”

* “The Horse Trader’s Tale,” tonight at 8; mixed bill, Sunday, 8 p.m. Occidental College, Thorne Hall, 1600 Campus Road. $18, $20. (213) 259-2922.