A Night at the Opera

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Rich and Brent find some culture... (some would argue it is wasted on us but we need to start somewhere)

I think we can both honestly say that the furthest thing on our minds when we booked the China trip would be spending an evening at a Chinese Opera. So when the opportunity came up tonight and the guest house we are staying at runs a tour to the Opera...well how could we say no.

So here we are in Chengdu, its day 2 and our blogs are out of order. Brent lost the last 2 days of photos this afternoon and given we are just back from the most amazing Opera we thought we should load up some images before we loose them. It has been an amazing couple of days in Chengdu and when we get a chance we will sit down and load up Richard's photos and pen some thoughts on what we have experienced.

The Opera images hopefully speak for themselves. It was a night of colour, laughter, culture and entertainment. We arrived about 30 mins early so managed to take a few make-up shots. It was pretty amazing to be able to wander amongst the performers and take some photos. Everyone was relaxed (actually when we arrived they were so relaxed they were in the car park doing warm up exercises).

The Opera we saw was at the Shu Fang YaYun Teahouse located in Chengdu Cultural Park.

The Opera began with a musical piece then continued at a cracking pace before culminating with the famous costume changing segment and fire breathing dragon. That said it was not all about music, two of the acts, the finger puppeteer and the puppeteer were at a rather tranquil pace and a nice lead in to the next act. The dog eating the rabbit was a classic image as was the owl at the end with its eyes moving to the left and right. The were also a couple of musical pieces and the band started the opera with a rather upbeat Chinese number.

The whole opera was in Mandarin (except for the introductions to each piece which were in English... unfortunately we had more chance of understanding the Mandarin but that did not matter as I think we got it!

The show lasts about 1.5 hours and was worth the 150 Yuan each. As a side note Tea is served out of the longest spouted tea pots we have ever seen with the pourer standing about 2 metres from your cup and not spilling a drop.

For anyone visiting Chengdu, a night at the Opera is a must do. The imagery will stay with us for a long time.

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Photos

The Fire God
The opera culminated with the fire breathing dragon and the famous costume changing act. Try as hard as we could we could not catch them mid costume.