Chinese Opera

Last night was our big Chinese Opera performance. It occurs to me that I haven't written much- or anything- about Chinese Opera even though it's the primary focus of my studies in China. I guess I haven't written about it mostly because it's very strange to describe. As I'm sure you can observe, it's not much like the western theater we know.

The singing is often high-pitched, nasal, shrill- frankly, difficult to listen to. The movement- all of it from your eye balls to your toes- is highly controlled and calculated. It's choreographed to the second in time with music.

But the most interesting thing, i think, is the design. Everything is extremely ornate. The make-up takes an hour at least to apply and each piece of hair is applied individually to your head. There's a photograph of it above, I think. Anyhow, they take chunks of hair and soak them in sap and then glue them down to your head. After that, they put on a face tightener. Those are the white straps in the picture. They're excruciatingly tight pieces of tape that are meant to stretch your face. They pain is incredible. Our teacher told us that when she trained as a little girl, the first time they tried on the face tighteners, all of the students began to vomit. It's really, really awful. But it looks pretty cool.

I'm fairly certain that I have no future in Chinese Opera but at the end of the semester, I have a lot to take away from studying it. Telling a simple story can be incredibly complicated, it's often nice to have a right and wrong answer, if you have to, you can assimilate to almost anything, and everywhere you go, people are mostly the same but the subtle differences of mannerisms and language and perspective are the most interesting parts.