Sichuan Opera

One of the first things I did in Chengdu was to attend the Sichuan Opera. Operas in China aren’t like what you would think of as an opera. When I went to the Peking Opera when I was in Beijing in 2006 the only similarity to western opera was that everything was sung. The style of music was completely different and can only be described as high-pitched wailing. There were also tele-prompter like screens on the side of each stage that translated what they were singing into English. The Sichuan opera was similar in that there were screens with translations, but instead of one long play it was a series of shorter acts. I guess you could call it the Sichuan Variety Show. There were a few acts with dancing/singing girls, a lady with a puppet that could control the puppet’s hands as if it were a real person, a comedy skit mocking the relationship between a husband and wife in which the husband balanced an oil lamp on his head, a man playing a traditional Chinese violin, and a hand-shadow show complete with sounds effects of all the animals the man was making. The coolest act and what the Sichuan opera is famous for is the face-changing act. The people in the skit have masks on, and it the blink of an eye can change from one mask to another (thus, they are “changing faces”). They change so fast that at times I didn’t even notice that there was a new mask. Each actor probably changed about 10-15 times during the act, and the whole time I was trying to figure out how they did it. It looked like the mask got pulled either up, down, or sideways into a headpiece, but in that case the masks would had to have been made of soft fabric but they were very formed and seemed like upon touch they would be hard. Two of the actors came into the audience and changed the masks right in front of our eyes, and I still couldn’t see how they did it. It was amazing. Pictures: The lady with her puppet; the hand-shadow show. Videos: The dancing girls; Face changing (look closely towards the ends of the video)