"Hao! Hao! Hao!" shouted the audience, to express their appreciation.
They were saluting a Peking Opera performer who had just finished a marvelous "qiangbei," a movement in which he twirled himself around, threw himself on the ground and rolled on the stage. The audience applauded lustily as they jumped out of their seats.
This, however, was not a scene from Beijing's Liyuan Theater, which offers foreign tourists a fiesta of Peking Opera. Instead, I was sitting in the Kennedy Theater, campus playhouse of the University of Hawaii (UH), watching the English premiere of the highly-rated "Women Generals of the Yang Family" staged by students of the UH theater department.
The audience was mostly Americans and I had no idea how these local, mostly first-time Peking Opera viewers had figured out that the Chinese word for bravo was "Hao." But I could tell from their applause-reddened hands that they had fallen in love with this Chinese performing arts form.
Monica Ham, a UH major in Asian Theater, was one of these happy clappers. She knew a little about Peking Opera and had come without very high expectations.
"Oh, but I like its music. I became attached to it ever since the first clicking beat of the wooden castanet reverberated across the theater," Ham told me excitedly during the intermission.
When told that many Chinese youth describe Peking Opera music as an ear-splitting combo of loud clanging of the gong, sharp rattle of the flat drum, and piercing sound of the Beijing violin, Ham shrugged, saying: "Well, I do think the music helps set the tone of the play and motivate the audience."
Peking Opera can enthral audiences; what it needs is simply a localized adaptation for people foreign to Chinese culture and language.
"It's like showing Shakespeare play and Italian opera in China. As long as people can understand the language, the charm of the art itself will prevail," said director Elizabeth Wichmann-Walczak, the most knowledgeable local expert on Peking Opera in Hawaii, who, with Hui-Mei Chang of China, translated "Women Generals" for its English-language debut.
When Wichmann-Walczak talks about Peking Opera, she insists on using the Chinese word Jingju. "Jingju should become the art of the world. We should have American Jingju, French Jingju," Wichmann-Walczak said. She is obviously excited about its future.
Sure to catch on
"When I first watched Jingju in Beijing, I was not used to it. But later on I thought I should not use my standard to interpret an exotic art. Then I learnt to appreciate it for what it is," said Michelle Valle, a graduate student at UH, majoring in Chinese political history.
Valle has frequented Peking Opera theaters while doing her field study in Beijing and knows that many Chinese young people ignore Jingju and show a clear preference for pop music.
But she is pretty sure that once they learn to appreciate Peking Opera, they will love it.
"I have no doubt about the charm of Jingju. What is difficult is to bring those young people into the theater," said Wichmann-Walczak, who came to China to learn about Jingju first hand in 1979.
She has come across so many young Chinese whose views of Jingju did an about-turn after they sat through just one play.
"There was one boy who said, almost indignantly, to me that he has been 'brainwashed' by his peers' bias against Jingju. He was told constantly that Jingju was not in tune with modern art form. 'It's too slow. It's simply dull'," Wichmann-Walczak recalled.
"But after watching just one episode of 'Takeover of Weihu Mountain,' he was hooked.
"I think China should use proper incentives to bring its young people into the Jingju Theater, just as we have done here."
As the curtain lowered and the hilarity so recently witnessed on stage evaporated, I suddenly felt a strong yearning to come to the next show.
Jingju has cast its spell on me too.
(China Daily March 1, 2006)
