Today Jos and me went to see a representation of Suzhou opera in the opera house just 20m from my apartment.
The first thing we noticed when entering, were the big and comfortable seats with sufficient space for the legs. Additionally every seat had a very spacious tea table on the side where a hot cup of green tea awaited us. A kind of a living room experience, actually.

In China there are many different opera styles: the popular ones include Beijing opera and Sichuan opera. The Suzhou-opera style is totally different from both of them. It’s less dramatic and takes much more use of the spoken word. The singings accompanying music is much more simple. In our show they only used two different, light instruments with strings.
I guess the style was initially performed in a Suzhou garden setting, where the scene consisted partially of the surroundings and where the music, singing and acting tried to reflect the intimate personal setting.

For the show that we saw, the scene consisted of one table with two chairs and a big Chinese flower painting in the back. There were just two actors.
The singing was very interesting. I particularly liked the cleanness of the female actors head-voice performing very high-pitched arias. It was also very impressive to hear the volume that the two singers got out of nasal and non-tonal sounds! I liked it a lot!

The spoken parts were very difficult to understand for our basic Chinese knowledge.
They both gave their characters a very noble and proud attitude with very few and simple elements. It was impressive to see the male actor move his hands, body and face-expressions. Yet with this simplicity he reflected nicely the inner calm and pride of the character he played. I indeed liked it a lot! A pity I didn’t understand much of what they said…

All in all it was a very interesting experience! But also a little bit monotone: the setting didn’t change at all throughout and the accompanying music only varied slightly for each song.
It was also funny to see that after about 30min, about half of the audience seemed to be fast asleep in their comfortable seats.
Anyway: we both decided that after one hour we saw what there was to see and hear and left for the second half of it.

Remark: All these conclusions are just a personal reflections based on the two different Suzhou operas that I saw so far…

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 18th, 2006 at 4:48 pm and is filed under Short News, Pictures. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.