British Man Devotes Life to Beijing Opera

China has just 76 traditional opera troupes today, compared to 2,000 four decades ago. But it has an unlikely new champion: a Briton driven to master Beijing opera and bring it to new audiences.

From NPR news. This is All Things Considered. I'm Melissa Block. And I'm Michelle Norris. Beijing Opera is largely seen as a dying art in China. 40 years ago, 2000 troupes crisscrossed China performing traditional operas. Now there are just 76. NPR's Louisa Lin wants to introduce us to the unlikely new champion for Chinese opera. He's a British man who has devoted more than a decade to bringing Chinese opera to new audiences.

An elderly man in glasses squats at the side of the stage, tapping drumsticks together to keep time as actors whirl weapons through the air. The younger actors defer to a middle age man who's spinning a sword around the top of a long stick. It's a feat of balance and rapt spectators do a double take when they realize the performer isn't even Chinese.

And I saw a Beijing Opera in London in 1993. And that just shocked me. It really moved me.

GP is British, born to Iranian Azeri parents. At the age of 32, he gave up his life as a computer animator and enrolled in a Beijing Opera school, drawn by the difficulty of mastering this art form.

And there is no other culture which has put that much discipline into training at the perfect performer. That is what the Beijing Opera is about, the perfect performer.

On stage, the actors not only act, they sing and dance at the same time as performing heart-stopping feats of acrobatics and sword fighting. To get this far, GP spent five years undergoing punishing training at a school so dirty he describes it as a big toilet. He was decades older than the other students and he was testing his body on a daily basis starting at dawn with unbelievably painful contortions.

You lie down on the bench, one foot would be tied to the bench, and then the other foot would be stretched all the way back to reach your forehead or your nose at 180 degrees. And then the teacher will just, ur, wrench that foot, up and down until the muscles relax. And it does work. It's just that you have to go through that threshold of pain.

Once the show begins, it's clear that P has taken a Chinese classic and made it his own.

Hi, G. what are you doing?

Painting my face. We have a show to do in a minute.

The cast is partly non-Chinese. And there's a lot of explanation in English.

En, the Monkey King has three colours.

The story is the much loved legend of the Monkey King, a mischievous monkey born from a stone who learns supernatural skills and uses them to challenge the emperor of heaven. P is the multilingual monkey.

I can move it, you'll give it to me. You promise. （En,不骗你呀。。。）Oh, let me try.

It's within the rules of the art form that you perform for that audience. What I have done is by taking it to London, to change the spoken parts into English. And that's, that's within the rules of the opera.

He's destroyed my party.

That even means adding a bit of comedy rap opera to the mix.

I'm gonna slap that monkey. I'm gonna kill that monkey.

This is performed by the queen of heaven KL who's enjoying working with P.

He's got a striking resemblance to a monkey without the makeup. This role was made for him. This role was really made for him.

It's true P does have something simian about him. On the stage, his eyes dart back and forth and his nose twitches. Nonetheless, P admits some of the old pros still look down on him. But he earns praise from Ren Guangping, tonight's Dragon King, who has been in the business 35 years.

I really admire G for making it this far, he says, it's not easy even for Chinese performers. And this hybrid bilingual opera wins good reviews from both Western and Chinese audience members. Like GF and HL.

Surprising, it's very different from what I expected. But I'm really enjoying it.

Have you seen Beijing Opera in the past?

Never, never. I've always been put off by the threat of shrieking. But I'm enjoying this.

And that's really Chinese stuff, expressing the more acceptable way. So it'll be more popular.

But the popularity of Beijing Opera is fading fast with young Chinese audiences turning to karaoke, DVDs and the Internet. Much to P's sorrow.

I used to get really angry at the state of the opera as it is, I mean, angry at the Chinese people. I just tell them that this, this is yours, you made this, this incredible beautiful thing, and it's also you who are destroying it, who are forgetting it, throwing it away. What can I do?

He's now decided what to do. This foreign Monkey King is revolutionary, too, reinventing Beijing Opera for a wider audience. But it's a measure of just how great the problem is that the very innovations that may just keep Beijing Opera alive, also risk destroying its most traditional forms. Louisa Lin, NPR news, Shanghai.
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crisscross
to travel many times from one side of an area to another:
They spent the next two years crisscrossing the country by bus.
defer
defer to somebody/something phrasal verb
to agree to accept someone's opinion or decision because you have respect for that person:
I will defer to your wishes.
do a double take
to look at someone or something again because you are very surprised by what you saw or heard
feat
something that is an impressive achievement, because it needs a lot of skill, strength etc to do
heart-stopping
very exciting or frightening

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