Chinese Opera: Gongs & Whiteface

It seemed a cultural crime. In mainland China during the late 1960s, as part of Mao Tse-tung's Cultural Revolution, the ancient art of Peking opera was deliberately put to death. The person responsible was Mao's wife, Chinese Cultural Queen Chiang Ching. To Madame Mao, Peking opera was bourgeois, reactionary, too concerned with court life. She replaced it with an unadorned, realistic style of opera that celebrates the struggles of workers, peasants and soldiers against landlords and imperialists. Gone forever, or so it seemed, were the highly stylized music dramas about kings and concubines, scholars and lute-playing ladies. Gone, too, were the elaborate costumes and makeup and delicate performances in which characterizations were conveyed through a series of ritualistic actions and formal gestures.

But cultural traditions die hard.

Across the Formosa Strait on Taiwan, the Nationalist regime has made a point of preserving the Peking-opera heritage. After appropriating $400,000, the regime dispatched a 73-member troupe to the U.S. to present the operatic form to more than 30 cities in a 3 1/2-month tour (see color pages). After opening last month in Honolulu, the troupe played Los Angeles and San Francisco last week, and by November will have reached Chicago, Boston, New York, Washington, D.C., and Vancouver. If the tour ends as well as it started, it will be a major step toward American acceptance of one of the oldest, most rarefied operatic traditions in the world.

Peking opera dates back to the 8th century reign of the Emperor Hsuan Tsung, but did not reach its final, refined form until the reign of Emperor Chien Lung (1736 to 1796). The style poses formidable challenges to Western audiences. There is appealing exotica in the pentatonic backgrounds played by such instruments as the two-stringed erh-hu, or alto fiddle, and assorted gongs, clappers, drums and pipes. But the high, falsetto fioritura of the singers is difficult to take at the start, even if it is the Chinese ideal of good singing. Most problematical of all are the symbolic sets and the symbol-laden gestures.

On the current tour, the Taiwan troupe provides thorough program notes and a helpful between-acts narration. These explain to American viewers that in At the River Ford, for example, the all-white face of Prime Minister Ts'ao Ts'ao

indicates that he is an evil character.

The long beards worn by Ts'ao Ts'ao, General Ts'ao Hung and their principal adversary, the loyal General Kuan Yu, symbolize great age. The thin soles worn by the protagonists in The Cowherd and the Village Girl establish their low station in life. Waving ribbons, such as those used by the title character in The Heavenly Angel, may indicate anything from the sea to clouds to the wind. Since many a Chinese opera can run as long as seven hours, the evening's program is wisely limited to climactic excerpts from these and such other large-scale classics as The White Serpent, in which the title character, helped by her maid, the Blue Serpent, struggles with the gods while searching for her husband.

The program's immense visual appeal lies in costumes that can hardly be matched anywhere else. By and large, they are replicas of what was worn by emperors and ordinary folk during the Ming dynasty (A.D. 1368-1644). Silk is the predominant fabric; even beggars wear it, but with patches. Monarchs always wear yellow gowns embroidered with dragons; women of the higher classes, long skirts concealing their feet. Anyone without a headdress is presumed to be in great danger--and, in fact, may already have been beaten up.

Magic Power. Peking opera is at times a dizzying mix of dance, music, mime, processionals, tapestried tableaux and hilarious acrobatics. Banners are everywhere, signifying anything from magic power to the number of troops in a general's army. Nothing sums up these diverse elements better than the Taiwan company's version of The Monkey King, which tells the story of a cleric's disciple who drinks too much, fights too much, but does a lot of good and in the end becomes a Buddhist. Perhaps China's most popular legendary hero, the Monkey King is a sort of 16th century superman who carries a seven-ton club and can cover 36,000 miles in a single tumble. Actor Chang Fu-ch'un, 28, brings off the title role with a series of preposterously effective battles against wind, fire, rockfalls and water spirits.

So skilled, indeed, are the performances that it may come as a shock for American audiences to learn that the National Chinese Opera Theater did not exist six months ago. Peking opera has had its hard core of followers on Taiwan, but nothing to match the popular appeal of the Ko Tsai Hsi, the Chinese folk opera company that regularly performs at festivals and on Taiwan TV.

The company was assembled from recent descendants of pre-Mao mainland opera stars and graduates of the island's five Peking-opera schools. By Nationalist government command, leading performers from several theater and opera troupes were also recruited for the tour. This may pose a problem for those companies, because pressure is already building to make the National Chinese Opera Theater a permanent institution.

It deserves to be that.

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