Duels & duets

Beijing Kunju Opera

by Marcia B. Siegel

Kunju, one of the many branches of Chinese Opera, made a brief stop at Sanders Theatre last weekend courtesy of World Music. It would probably take an American years of study and more viewings than we're ever allowed to recognize the esoteric species distinctions within this ancient theatrical practice. I can't say my experience is vast, but Beijing Kunju Opera Theater offered the strange and highly rarefied pleasures of the genre.

Dating back hundreds of years to the Ming Dynasty, Chinese Opera pictures a socially stratified world of emperors, warriors, effete intellectuals, and down-to-earth menials, who are frequently visited by ghosts and other supernatural interventions. All the characters behave and dress in prescribed, class-specific ways, though they sometimes break these rules in order to rearrange the plot.

The scholars and noble ladies wear smooth make-up and tasteful robes in expensive fabrics, with extra lengths of silk sewn onto the ends of their sleeves. They glide; even their voices glide. Military folk are big and forceful; they take up a lot of space when they move. The generals are the most flamboyant of all, and the footsoldiers usually come in cadres of identical fighters -- the more of them there are, the more precise their martial-arts and airborne maneuvers have to be. The servants are small and bouncy, cheerful, chummy with their masters and even the audience. Their quick movements, agile vocalizations, and acrobatic stunts symbolize their resourcefulness.

Presenters never seem to think we need coding sheets for these types, but they're all-important to our understanding Chinese Opera on anything except the most primitive terms. Primitive is hardly the word for Chinese Opera. Last weekend's program opened with the most accessible piece, "The Crossroads," which is better known as the Fight in the Dark. Through a series of plot twists, two men of different classes square off. The candle has gone out so they supposedly don't see each other, but of course the audience sees them both. They stalk each other in the wrong places, crouch within breathing distance of each other, and stage hilarious near-miss attacks.

In this case, each character has an introductory solo, and it's part of the fun, I think, that the aristocrat is a bit pompous and finicky while the innkeeper makes fun of him. "Oops, was that your back? I thought I was dusting the table." Eventually the official they're ineptly trying to protect shows up and they all make friends. The reconciliation across class lines is only a matter of convenience, though; feudal society didn't get over that for centuries.

The clever spirit of the lower classes is epitomized by the Monkey King, a spirited fixer-upper and aide-de-camp to aristos in trouble all across the traditional theater forms of South Asia. In the Kunju Opera's "Borrowing the Fan," he spars at length with a splendid Princess to get possession of a magic palm leaf fan. The Princess (Chen Xiaomei) is a knockout in silks and tassels, with five-foot-long pheasant plumes streaming from her headdress. She seems immense just standing still, but when she moves, she takes up even more space, twirling and circling and slashing her two swords, taking dramatic wind-ups before each thrust.

The Monkey King (Gu Feng), though, has a huge bag of tricks: flips, spins, fancy twirling with his long fighting baton. He juggles the weapons he's easily swiped from the Princess's guards and deftly blocks her circular advances. She seems to win for a minute and does an amazing slow backbend, but the Monkey returns and gets his prize with the help of more trickery.

There's an important lyrical and serious side to Chinese Opera, and Beijing Kunju presented "Walking in the Garden," an except from The Peony Pavilion, the famous tale of love and destiny. Du Liniang and her maid stroll in a garden talking about nature and love. They sing in high, sliding, nasal voices, and even before I read the dialogue provided in the program I thought they sounded like birds. The mistress (Wei Chunrong) falls asleep and dreams of a romantic encounter with a young man (Wang Zhenyi), who also sings (in falsetto) the melismatic, ultra-refined music that's so eerie to Western ears. Unlike the doings of the monkey, the soldiers, the innkeepers, these noble characters do everything under cover of elegant manners.

The last piece on the program, "Zhong Kui Marries Off His Sister," involved four acrobats, a grotesque but evidently noble figure on four-inch clogs, and many other characters. I couldn't quite make out what was going on, since the program gave a different scenario. Maybe they both came from the same epic tale.