Beijing Opera

Good Advice from China:

“Watch out for that sword,” the rehearsal director shouted.

“I don’t want anybody’s head getting cut off because you don’t know what you’re doing.”

The article is about the Beijing Opera, which is in some trouble as China turns away from its history and embraces the West. Western observers tend to think the opposite is happening -- that China is embracing a kind of resurgent Confucianism and seeking to regain its ancient imperial dominion. What seems to me to be the case is that they've embraced capitalism, and are seeking mostly greater control over their export corridors (as well as easier channels for exports).

The Beijing Opera is worth some study, if you're not familiar with it. If you like Hong Kong cinema, the roots are in the Beijing Opera. If you were scratching your head in the 1990s at Xena, Warrior Princess -- it's because you were having your first encounter with the offshoots of the Beijing Opera.

It has the advantage peculiar to Chinese society of not needing spoken language to convey its meaning. Chinese writing is intelligible to every Chinese speaker, but spoken dialects may be so wildly different as to seem nonsense. The symbols carry meaning. Chinese writing may do this:

For instance, by modifying 刀 dāo, a pictogram for "knife", by marking the blade, an ideogram 刃 rèn for "blade" is obtained.

In day to day life, much bargaining is done by hand signals. Even though almost every purchase requires haggling, I could easily do business in spite of my limited grasp of the language. Ten hand signals indicate numbers; and their use is expected, because of the dialect issue.

The Beijing Opera carries this symbolism through elaborate postures designed to carry the meaning of the act. The Japanese, as the Japanese will, absorbed and refined this idea to its highest degree. Their version of this kind of opera is called Noh, which influenced the more famous later form Kabuki. You see elements of the elaborate-postures-as-signals in Spaghetti Westerns -- which were notably influenced by Japanese cinema -- and even in American film. Note how the constant movement of the snow emphasizes the pauses in the actors' movements, and therefore draws your attention to their poses and what they are signalling.



So it's an interesting topic, this opera in Beijing.

UPDATE: For a Spaghetti Western use of this concept, look no further than the closing scenes of The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly.