I was reading about the Peking Opera on a blog site dedicated to Chinese culture. My exposure to opera is a handful of performances that I have seen at the Met and my favorite La Bohème CD that I have completely worn out over the years. The Peking Opera is described as an ancient Chinese opera originating in Beijing around 1840 and remaining extremely popular in China through the mid-1900s.
Women were not allowed to participate in the operas or receive publicity, so female roles called “Dan” were played by men. Mei Lanfang is a Chinese Peking Opera legend who is noted as being the first to expose United States audiences to Peking Operas through his travels here in the early 1900s.
I can appreciate and admire the costumes and slow, deliberate movements of the Dan from this clip from The Drunken Beauty without really understanding the plot of the episode or the implications of the gestures.
Watching it, though, does make me wonder if getting a teenager to go to the Peking Opera in China is anything like getting a teenager to go to the opera in the United States.
An extraordinary Chinese female impersonator, Li Yugang, is accredited with bringing the ancient art of the Peking Opera to a younger Chinese generation with a modern, pop take on the traditional Peking Opera style.
Reading about the history of ancient art forms is something that I can get absorbed in for hours at a time. It’s intriguing to see these ancient artistic traditions and connect them to relatable, modern works. Li Yugang has been successful in doing just that.
Of course, there are critics that say that Li Yugang’s work diminishes the integrity of the ancient Peking Opera, but I think that his work expands the art to a broader and younger audience – which is a good thing.
In a Yugang performance of One Night in Beijing, he actually integrates beatboxers into his musical set. Beatboxing actually made its way overseas and through cultures to make it onto a Chinese Peking Opera stage!
While listening to beatbox pioneers Doug E. Fresh and the Fat Boys on the radio back in the day, if someone asked me if I could ever image this hip-hop vocal percussion technique making it to China, I would have said, “not in a hundred years!” Well, it’s only taken 30.
Appreciation for the arts is not foreign – whether marveling at a Peking Opera or moving to hip-hop beats. And there is much to be appreciated with this expansion of styles and blending of cultures through dance and music.
Begrudgingly,
BB
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