I skip to July 10, our last night in Beijing, bypassing for now our visit to the Great Wall and my walk with Jen in the Beijing night market. I skip ahead because this was the first totally satisfying and relaxed event of the tour: we were cool, we were not rushed, it was not crowded and the setting and show represented aesthetically remarkable aspects of Chinese culture -- even if this particular manifestation was designed primarily for the tourists. It was a revealing experience that illustrated the Chinese people's love of color, lights and pageantry.
On that evening the seven of us who signed up for the optional Beijing (or Peking) opera tour were taken to the Shaanxi Opera House for dinner and an shorter performance of Chinese opera. Only half of our group signed up for this event which I consider in retrospect one of the highlights of our tour. This kind of performance seems also not to be very popular with young Chinese people and may be a dying art form. Clearly, without government subsidy it would not exist.
According to the Shaanxi Opera web site the opera is "sponsored by the Shaanxi Provincial Government. [The] Shaanxi Grand Opera House is an entertainment center of Tang Palace Dance Show and dining theater opened to public in 1998. The opera house is elegantly decorated and has a first class stage and performers with 700 people seating capacity.[The] Tang Palace Show is performed by Shaanxi Dancing Troupe and created in 1980s. It was jointly designed by a group of scholars, artists specialized in Tang culture. We have given more than 24,000 performances to over 10 million visitors which is the largest scale in recent Chinese history."
Before the performance we went backstage and saw the singers/dancers being made up or, in the case of the men, making themselves up. Then we were served an elegant dinner before the show started. It was our great fortune to have a table front row center. I took many pictures. These three give a sense of the evening and its setting.
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