Performance Review: Two Decades of Selling Peking Opera White Snakes to Foreigners: From Tourist Peking Opera in Beijing (1996) to Zhang Huoding at Lincoln Center (2015)

Abstract

After ten years of Model Peking Opera (yangban xi 樣板戲), Chinese audiences, especially residents of Beijing, were euphoric to see the return of “traditional” (chuantong 傳統) Jingju 京劇 plays to the stage. But that euphoria only lasted for a limited number of years, and Peking opera in Beijing had to turn to a new audience to bring in money: foreign tourists. This rather unusual performance review will look at two performances at either ends of two decades to investigate what changes were made to Peking opera to make it more palatable to this new audience, and to speculate, if ever so briefly, on whether the contrasts between the two productions give us reasons for pessimism or optimism, whether from the point of view of the health of Peking opera, or the education/enlightenment of foreigners. Both productions shared the same name in English: Legend of the White Snake, even if their Chinese names were slightly different, as we will see below. They share the same heroine, Bai Suzhen 白素貞, a white snake who was able to take on human shape through dint of thousands of years of self-cultivation and to get a young man, Xu Xian 許仙, to fall in love with her and marry her in quite a jiffy. She eventually gives birth to a son for him before she is stuck under a pagoda by a meddlesome monk, Fahai 法海, who does not believe in inter-species marriage. Women have been associated with snakes in the West in the Bible and The Lamia, but those snakes never became as domesticated as Bai Suzhen, nor