Last Saturday, I attended a Cantonese opera excerpt performance at the Esplanade Recital Studio. There were a number of foreigners, several of whom indicated that it was their first time watching a Chinese opera.
There was a pre-performance talk on Chinese opera by Mr Leslie Wong, chairman of Chinese Theatre Circle.
One point mentioned by Mr Wong was that was that you can still appreciate Chinese opera even if you do not know the language or dialect. Quite true.
But, I feel that in this case your appreciation is not complete and your enjoyment is limited. You would miss out on the beauty of the language or dialect, the poems and songs, the metaphors, the humour,…. You can only appreciate visual parts - the gestures and movements, dances - and maybe the music.
Subtitles only help you to follow the story line. The subtleties of the language are lost in the translation.
I am sure a Chinese opera lover would feel the joy and exhilaration when a good song is well sung by a competent artiste. Would someone not knowing the language have such emotions?
I think the decades-old no-dialects policy is bad for Chinese opera. It makes it difficult for Chinese opera groups to recruit youths to train as opera artistes. It is also hard to increase the pools of Chinese opera fans
KIDS' PERFORMANCE
One of the excepts was performed by a group of 12 children from the Chinese Theatre Circle’s Children’s Opera Class. They performed an excerpt from Madam White Snake – Stealing the Magic Herb.
They looked cute in their costumes and slight makeup. It was quite funny watching the younger ones tottering around the floor and the older one trying nervously to recite their lines. And there was one kid dressed as an elderly saint complete with a long white beard.
Considering their young age, short training period and lack of performing experience, they performed creditably.
Unfortunately, taking photos is not allowed.
Hope the kids’ interest in Chinese opera can be sustained when they enter secondary school and later.
5 comments:
I agree fully with your views on appreciating Chinese opera without knowledge of the dialect. Every dialect has their unique expressions and idoms, which can't be translated into other dialects or even languages to retain it's full flavour. Hence I'm totally against CTC's idea of staging Cantonese opera in other languages other than Cantonese. And anyway their Mandarin version, in my opinion, is a disaster enough. I can't imagine their English and Malay versions...
How to enjoy Cantonese opera without Catonese? Like eating satay without gravy; prawn noodles without prawns; tomyam soup without chilli ... Pardon all the food analogies. I just came from Victor's blog. His foto of the beef noodles is doing havoc to my brain cells.
Haha good one Chun See. I don't know enough about Cantonese operas to be able to comment intelligently on Frannxis' blog. The only thing I remember about Cantonese operas is that when I was a kid, my family used wooden boxes to reserve seats at wayang shows in Queen Street. This was done early in the day in order to get the best seats nearest to the stage.
However, regarding beef noodles, I can say more. I have recommended another stall that you should try - please read the comments thread in my blog again.
When I think of Cantonese opera movies, I always think of this song - 老婆越老越可爱。I think the stars were Lam Kar Sing and Tang Pik Wan.
I think this song was from the CO movie Pik Hoi Kong Zhang which I think starred Tang Pik Wan and Hor Fei Fun.
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