Photos

Saving stage beauty

By Han Bingbin (China Daily)
Updated: 2011-05-30 17:28

Law student Yang Nannan during an audition for Peking University's Peony Pavillion. Photos provided to China Daily

Yang Nannan, a 23-year-old law student at the university from Henan province, was among eight lucky students chosen to perform the famous opera. Even luckier, the untrained Yang got the leading role of Du Liniang.

Before the show, Yang had intensive training in acting, singing and the Suzhou dialect for more than a month from professional actors from Suzhou Kunqu Opera Theater.

Yang's first encounter with Kunqu Opera came in 2006, when more than 2,000 students watched a version of Peony Pavilion, initiated by Pai and performed by actors and musicians under the age of 30. Yang immediately fell in love with it after finding the opera form matched her own understanding of Chinese literary style: abstract, elegant and poetically refined, especially when compared with the better known Peking Opera, which is more straightforward and fiercer in both singing and makeup.

"It made me think that amid the wave of Western values, we should maintain our unique aesthetics," Yang said. "We should pursue a cultural identity that's typically our own."

Such views among college students delighted Pai Hsien-yung, who insists that Kunqu Opera education should remain a part of college education.

"I think in these young Chinese people's blood there is what is called 'the collective unconscious'," Pai said during a public discussion in April with another supporter, Ye Lang, dean of Peking University's institute for cultural industries.

"Now everybody wants to learn about their own culture to culturally identify themselves. Many young people don't know classical culture because they haven't had a chance to see it.

"Sure, we should learn about the great achievements of Western culture, but how can you do that when you don't even know your own culture? There should be a Chinese renaissance in the 21st century. We must learn how to combine traditional Chinese culture with modern values and with its Western counterparts."