All the Tea in China (Part 1)

Today's tea: Green Jasmine, from Liu Xiang Ge Tea Shop, in Tianzifang (Shanghai). 

This summer I took part in a three week summer school at Shanghai Theatre Academy! The course was an introduction to Jingju - a style of Bejing/Peking Opera. We had a three week introduction to the art form through a series of lectures and movement classes, before rehearsing a scene from a Jingju Opera, and performing it on the last day.

Jingju as a style wasn't something I knew a huge amount about before starting the course - so I really went into it not knowing what to expect! I've seen Opera in Britain, so I guess I was really expecting something along those lines, but I was proved wrong about that pretty quickly.

For a start, the style of singing in Jingju is very different to a 'western' conception of 'opera singing'. With a classical singing background myself, I'd been taught to create these wide, open sounds and tried to create something of a purity in tone with singing. Jingju Opera creates a sound quite nasally in quality, to the point where the sound almost resonates in the front of the face. The diapragm support still needs to be there, but the overall sound being made is all in the head.

Not only was it difficult to get used to singing in that style - we we're also singing in Chinese! My Mandarin gets me no further than 'Thank you' and 'Excuse me', so again, no easy task. The extract I performed was from 'The Fisherman's Revenge', which is one of the older Jingju Opera's performed, and was in an ancient Chinese dialect, as opposed to modern day Mandarin.

The manner of speaking was again different to anything done before. The whole style of performance is as 

far away from anything naturalistic as possible - and the voice used for my character role type () is a high 

pitched, nasally, quite 'girly' voice - nothing like my own northern accent! As I had very little idea of what I

was saying, my delivery was copied of that of my teacher, and honestly at times felt like I was just making

sounds - and hoping they were in Chinese!

   The costumes were beautiful, and though the hair and make-up process took an absolute age, the end 

result was great! Here is a video of the process, sped up, as it actually took hours!