As a mark of my refinement and extraordinary cultural breadth with which you are all undoubtedly familiar, I agreed to accompany my girlfriend, Pei Han, to a Chinese Opera performance at our local theatre. I have never attended an opera, Chinese or otherwise, but I do enjoy listening to Western Opera music. I find the lyrical music and harmonic voices absolutely captivating, even if I do not understand what the characters are singing about. Understanding the words is, for me, secondary to feeling the beauty and emotion of the music.
Hearing the solo voices competing with each other in angry argument or joining together in a duet of the sweetest love, only to be joined by a third, jealous or envious or unfortunately overlooked love, her voice rising plaintively above the other two, is remarkably stirring to me. An opera chorus, especially when it's only men's voices, is so powerful that I cease doing anything else and simply immerse myself in the strength of the sound, my hands anonymously conducting the singers through the piece and it thrills me that they follow my instruction.
It was with this expectation of musical grandeur that I went to my first Chinese opera. As the lights dimmed, the tiny operatic orchestra tucked away in the wings to stage right, some of whose feet were visible to me sitting on the left side of the theatre, struck the first chords on their traditional Chinese instruments. I do enjoy Chinese traditional music and have a few CDs at home, so my apprehension that I wouldn't understand a thing was somewhat eased by the music's relative familiarity.
Then the curtain rose to reveal ... the stage!??? Huh??? Admittedly, there was a gaudily painted desk, with a wicker chair on either side of it, right at the back of the stage, but absolutely, and I mean absolutely, nothing else on the stage. No grand sets, or architectural structures, or winding staircases, not even an empty flower pot, nothing, nothing at all, to tell me where the hell we were! I was not transported to another distant in time and space world. No, I was still in the Yuanlin Theatre, staring at a painted desk and two chairs and as suddenly as this disappointing realization struck me, so the music seemed to squeal discordantly, mockingly, at my shattered expectations. It was downhill from there.
An old woman appeared, dressed in obvious period costume, but sweeping the stage floor with a thoroughly modern pink-and-green plastic broom, and started singing in Taiwanese, which dashed any chances of me following anything at all. If she had sung in Chinese, which I again had mistakenly expected, at least I would have understood some, if not all of what she sang and been able to follow the gist of the story. Now however, all hope was lost!
As the old lady exited stage left, two women entered stage right. They were dressed in ornate Chinese robes, one in red and one in pink, and were attended by about eight other, more simply dressed, women. They engaged in lengthy dialogue, the two ornate women that is, while the eight attendants simply stood around, or made some choreographed movements that seemed, to me at least, to add very little to the meaning of what was being said. Intermittently, what sounded like two sticks being banged together would come from the orchestra as the two women spoke, presumably to emphasize something that they said, although I can't be sure of that, of course! The intention of the banging sticks, or whatever it was, was undoubtedly musical, but for me it was extremely irritating! Imagine having a conversation like this:
"Who was that old woman?" "She was my mother! clack clack My God, didn't you recognize her?" clack clack ... clack clack clack "Well, it's been so long since I've been to your house. You never invite me here anymore!" clack clack clack ... clack "Um ... clack I wanted you to come clack clack clack but, you know clack ... clack clack I thought you hated me because clack I stole your boyfriend." clack clack clack clack ... clack UGH!!!
I needed to understand more, so I leaned over to Pei Han and asked her who those two women were. "They are husband and wife," she informed me. HUH??? "The one in pink is the wife," I was told. "But they're both woman!" was my flabbergasted response. "Yes," she said, "but you can see from their clothes that one is a man and the other is a woman." Oh, really? Now, I knew that I had completely lost it.
And so the show ... clack clack clack ... went on and me just sitting there, everything way beyond my comprehension clack. There weren't even any grand choruses (the attendant ladies, I presume they were, just moving silently around the principals), nor any enticing duets (the principals taking turns to sing solos when their lengthy dialogues were over). Just the interminable mocking clack clack clack ... clack that increasingly sounded to my ears more like clack ha clack ... ha ha ha!
What had started as a new cultural adventure for me ended with me leaving early to get some fast food to ease my hunger pains and keep me awake while Pei Han reveled in her understanding.
Dion Marc Delport
22 September 2006