A night at the Beijing Opera

Last night Nettie and I trotted along to watch some Beijing Opera here in Yichang. It wasn't only myself who had never seen it, Nettie was also going for a first time experience :-) It was held at the "Yichang Theatre" which is a new building, only small (two tiers) but cosy, clean and a great little venue. It reminded me a bit of our Concert Hall in Perth, but of course much more modern.


The performers were from the "Shanghai Beijing Opera Troupe" and the star of the show, who played the leading role in the performance we watched, is actually a Yichang girl "Xiong Mingxia 熊明霞". The performance was called "Hong Niang 红娘" (meaning Red Lady). In the below photo she is wearing red.



The Chinese people love to spend their freetime match making and organising dates and "Hong Niang" is the name given to a lady who sets up a date between two people. I really enjoyed it for the first hour and a half, but the whole show( including a small performance taken from another famous Beijing Opera as the opening act) went for around three hours and whilst many of the older Chinese people really enjoyed it, even many Chinese people were fading out, so considering I could understand very little (without Netties pre description of what the show was about, I would have had no idea what was happening)We did rather well, I think.
The first performance was really very cool as it involved a lot of "Wushu"(martial arts)It was called "Sanchakou, 三岔口", a story from the song dynasty. We watched a fight scene taken from the story in which the guys are fighting as if they are in a pitch black dark room. It was very clever!


The main performance was colourful, traditional music was great and with very little stage props, was still quite engaging to watch. Although as you can see from this picture, maybe Nettie didn't enjoy it as much as I did, the book was obviously much more interesting :-)




Anyway, to sum it all up, very entertaining, something very unique to China and I think alot of fun.