Theatre Design & Technology - Fall 2008 - 69

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reviews
A family affair, children ran up and down the aisles, people
cracked salted watermelon seeds, and even set off fireworks
as the actors did their best on stage!
My early exposure to Chinese opera later surfaced as I
began to research Chinese opera costumes for my thesis at
Carnegie Mellon University. I found the 1957 book of designs,
reproduced by Lu Hua and Ma Chiang and published by the
People's Art Publishing House, which had been showcased in
a Dover pictorial archive series under the title Chinese Opera Costumes. Then I read A. C. Scott's 1958 Chinese Costume in Transition, which also inspired Alexandra Bonds.
Scott stood nearly alone as an accessible Western scholar
until the 1980s and must be acknowledged by historians as
a key pioneer helping those of us in the West understand the
complexities of Chinese opera and its costumes. In all, he
published five books on Chinese drama between 1960 and
1982. Prior to Chinese Costume in Transition, which was
illustrated with Scott's own drawings, L.C. Arlington's The
Chinese Drama from the Earliest Times until Today, published in 1930, provided plates of costumes and words by
the acclaimed actor of female roles, Mei Lan-Fang. Leaping

forward to 1968, there is a book by Steve Lu called Face
Painting in Chinese Opera. Colin Mackerras contributed to
the topic with two books, The Chinese Theatre in Modern
Times in 1975 and Chinese Theatre from its Origins to the
Present Day in 1983.
Understandably, during the years of the Cultural Revolution, when Jiang Qing proclaimed just four plays acceptable
for the masses, many who were conversant with Chinese opera went underground and those of us outside of China were
left to our own devices. The decade between 1966 and 1976
was quiet on the opera front.
In 1994, I attended the Beijing Stage Symposium as an
American delegate. Concurrent with the symposium was a
festival of Chinese opera, representing forms of opera from
across the entire country. I was struck by the differences in
style, from the raw, incense-burning, flowing, nearly nonchalant performances of the Tibetan form, to the magic of the facechanging Sichuan form where the actor's face changed colors
in the blink of an eye, to the powerful stories and magnificent
costumes of the traditional Beijing (formerly Peking and now,
in pinyin, Jingju) opera form. My personal connection with

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Theatre Design & Technology - Fall 2008