Letter from London
The Suzhou Kunqu Opera Company of Jiangsu Province, The Peony Pavilion--The Young Lovers’ Edition
Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Sutra
Sadler's Wells Theatre
August 13, 2008
The Suzhou Kunqu Opera Company of Jiangsu Province in The Peony Pavilion-The Young Lovers’ Edition. Photo by Hus Pei-Hung.
Until the international success of such movies as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the British public probably hadn’t thought very much about Chinese culture; according to a recent survey, many people here believe that China’s principal claims to fame are its food and Sumo wrestling, which is actually Japanese. So as part of the year-long China Now festival, launched in February, Sadler’s Wells’ three-week Chinese season may have opened a lot of eyes to the variety and beauty of Eastern expression, both ancient and modern.
For traditional culture, you couldn’t find anything more intriguing than The Peony Pavilion, a leading example of kunqu opera--that’s pronounced “kwun chyu”--which dates back more than 400 years to the Ming dynasty. Written by Tang Xianzu, a contemporary of Shakespeare, this particular opera is one of the few that have survived intact despite ten years of deliberate suppression during the Cultural Revolution.
Like an exotic version of Romeo and Juliet, to which it is often compared, The Peony Pavilion immortalizes the amazing tale of a beautiful noblewoman and a young scholar. Having dreamed of the passionate lover she fears she will never possess, Du Liniang dies of despair, but her spirit remains among the living. After finding her self-portrait and losing his heart to the woman it depicts, whom he has previously seen in his own dream, Liu Mengmei encounters her spirit and learns of her sad fate. His declaration of devotion and promise of marriage enable her soul to rejoin her body, and eventually the couple is officially united.
Without sacrificing the essence of the original, the producer Kenneth Pai reduced the spectacular from 55 scenes to 27, distributing them equally over nine hours and three consecutive performances. He subtitled his version Young Lovers’ Edition and modernized it with new lighting techniques and stage designs, amplification and an enlarged orchestra, in which cellos and double basses anchor the skittery flexibility of bamboo flute, zither and percussion. He also overturned tradition by casting young artists as the young lovers, because, he explained, “the masters were aging.” But kunqu’s traditional combination of speech, singing and stylized movement remains paramount in his production, so the 200 gorgeously embroidered costumes, the calligraphic hangings and elaborate headdresses served, as they should, to frame those essential skills.
The Suzhou Kunqu Opera Company of Jiangsu Province in The Peony Pavilion-The Young Lovers’ Edition. Photo by Hus Pei-Hung.
I knew none of this when I decided to attend a complete sequence of three performances, and though you’d never mistake the opera for a dance event, my eyes had to work overtime to absorb the range and nuance of gesture. Executed with meticulous clarity, every movement was precisely choreographed and subtly expressive, whether of breathless eroticism or military ferocity. Selected for their “jade-like” appearance and scrupulously trained in the demanding style for more than a year, the slender hero and fragile heroine continually adjusted their stance by tiny increments, tilting the head, twisting the torso or rhythmically gathering up their silken “water sleeves,” which extend three feet beyond the performers’ wrists, to punctuate their speech.
A bold, flexed-foot swagger underlined the male characters’ forthright nature, while the heroine and a chorus of “flower fairies” adopted a gliding gait that created the illusion of floating--the women are taught to walk with one foot directly in front of the other. Always in motion even as they sang, judges, witches, servants and spirits all re-enforced their social status and interior emotions through posture and gesture, and on an empty stage much like Shakespeare’s, the tiniest gesture resonated with meaning.
Exquisitely portrayed by Shen Fengying, Du Lianing slid her long sleeves flirtatiously, suggestively, across Liu Mengmei’s outstretched arm, and the flower fairies bounced gently beside her drowsing figure like visible heartbeats. A kneeling band of warriors, frozen in a diamond pattern, bristled with tightly leashed power, and a short procession of four characters, rocking and dipping in unison, immediately conjured a boat journey.
Informed both by Confucian ideology, which supports a reasonable, orderly society, and by Taoism, which imposes a cosmic perspective on everyday behavior, the opera communicated on many levels at once, blending history, philosophy and poetry. Every chou, comedic role and jing, painted face role--red stands for loyalty, black for courage, white for treachery--enlivened the languid pace of the romantic epic, and garish tumbling demons occasionally jolted the delicate atmosphere with explosive energy. I had thought nine hours of this art form would be too many, but now I wonder why I didn’t return to see the whole extraordinary spectacle again. Who knows when London will have another chance?
The Flemish-Moroccan choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui approached Chinese traditions from a different direction, thoroughly immersing himself in them to better transfer them to the stage. To prepare for his new work, Sutra, he spent two months studying and training with the warrior monks of the Shaolin Temple near Beijing, who practice kung fu and tai chi daily, concentrating on perfecting more than 1,000 movement sequences as a form of spiritual, mental and physical discipline.
A longstanding fan of Bruce Lee’s daredevil tactics and fluid grace, Cherkaoui was “inspired by [the monks’] understanding of movement, their complete identification with life around them” and incorporated their skill and 17 of the young masters themselves into his choreography. Though many of them had never before left China, Sutra transported them to Antwerp for rehearsals and then to Sadler’s Wells to launch a European tour.
However, the most important collaborator in their combined effort turned out to be the British sculptor Antony Gormley, who, in 2005, designed the setting for Zero Degrees, a dance piece jointly created by Cherkaoui and Akram Kahn. Cherkaoui claims that Sutra is “filled with poetic imagery of how human or animal life goes from beginning to end.” But I doubt the movement alone could have realized that imagery without Gormley’s contribution, which consisted of 21 man-sized, lidless boxes, unvarnished wood for the monks and silver for the choreographer.
Arranging these boxes into lines, arches, mountains, forts and caves, the monks moved into, over and around them, springing off of them in a single astounding leap, dragging them on their back like snail shells, toppling them like a row of dominoes while still occupying them. Sometimes they sat, legs crossed, atop them, mirroring the flurry of Cherkaoui’s arm gestures; sometimes they stacked the boxes into tiers and stretched out in them like exhausted laborers. In a corner of the stage, an 11-year-old apprentice monk organized miniature boxes into the same configurations as the larger ones. Once, he and Cherkaoui shared the choreographer’s box--a space barely big enough for one--tucking themselves into complementary angles as they echoed each other’s movements.
Neither Szymon Brzóska’s score for strings and percussion nor Cherkaoui’s contortionist solo made as strong an impression as the interplay between the monks and the boxes they transformed into homes, coffins, shipping containers, flower petals and ageless ruins. Cherkaoui’s meditative meandering among them exactly defined his role as an outsider, observing and marveling at what he saw, and the serene assurance of the monks’ balance, speed and acrobatic agility established a mesmerizing atmosphere of order amid chaos. Part installation, part dance, part metaphysics, Sutra succeeded, in only 80 minutes, in linking spatial geometry, muscular virtuosity, religious faith and the imagination.
