After six years of interruption, the Festival of Traditional Chinese Operas, a biennial event initially launched by the China Cultural Center in Paris in 2003, is making a comeback in Paris. From November 6, stage performances, exhibitions, conferences and screenings of filmed operas were offered for five days to the French public at the beginning of November.
On stage, the actors, dressed in the costumes and makeup that have made Chinese opera famous throughout the world, alternated between spoken and sung parts, interacting with the percussion and strings played by the musicians, located on both sides. sides of the board. In the room, thunderous applause and bursts of laughter. The auditorium of the National Museum of Asian Arts-Guimet, a mecca of Asian culture located on the Place d’Iéna in Paris, was filled to capacity for the four evenings of Chinese operas. An audience of curious people or amateurs was quick to reserve their place for one of the performances, or even for several. On the programming side, leading artists come directly from China to perform classic pieces from the traditional Chinese opera repertoire.
Muriel, in her sixties, arrived with her friend Bernard early at the Guimet Museum, eager not to miss the performance of the opera she had discovered during a trip to Beijing in 1996 and to share the experience with her friend. Little interested in opera in general, she has strong memories of the show seen in China and wanted to “travel while remaining in her seat”.
We recognize in the audience figures familiar with Chinese cultural events in France, such as Jean-Chrétien Sibertin-Blanc, general delegate of the Chinese Cinema Festival in France. “I am interested in Chinese culture in general, not only modern culture, but also ancient culture. We have different, very complementary conceptions of the world. Chinese opera is really at the source of Chinese culture, so I “I really want to find out,” he enthused.
To open the season, actors from the China National Theater Academy (Zhongguo xiqu xueyuan) performed one of the great classics of Beijing opera (jingju), “The Orphan of the Zhao”, on Wednesday evening. A tragic plot: a minister has the entire Zhao family executed and only a newborn survives, saved by a doctor friend of the family. The latter raises him as his own son, with the aim of getting him to take revenge on the minister. Served by outstanding actors and musicians and in a staging not devoid of humor, the play visibly won over the audience.
For Lisa, a doctoral student in classics, this evening was a first. “It was a little deafening at first, but you got immersed quite easily within the first 10 minutes,” she conceded. For her, it was the acting that was most interesting in this experience. “The acting is sometimes very serious, and sometimes almost comical. This helps relieve the tension and prevents it from becoming just a Greek tragedy,” she commented, particularly thinking about the character of the dog, played by a human.
Sensitive to the traditional two-stringed Chinese violin, the “erhu”, Carlos Garcia came away impressed by the quality of the show and the enthusiasm of the audience. “I was expecting a great show and I wasn’t disappointed. It lasted two and a half hours and you can’t see the time passing at all,” he exclaimed, continuing that “we’re so close from the stage that we can see all the facial expressions, all these details around the music totally transport us to another world!
Returning to the warm welcome from the French public, Roger Darrobers, member of the festival jury, former professor of Chinese language and civilization at the University of Paris-Nanterre and author of several works on Chinese opera, still remembers the enthusiasm caused by the return of traditional opera to China in the late 1970s when he himself was a student at a theater school in Beijing. “It must be said that these are remarkable pieces, which speak to many people,” he concluded.
Inscribed by UNESCO on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity since 2010, Beijing opera is the most widespread Chinese theater genre, including internationally. But the Festival of Traditional Chinese Operas also presents local, more confidential forms of opera. During the 2024 edition, in addition to jingju, we could appreciate Ou opera, from the Wenzhou region, Min, or Fuzhou theater, a genre of local opera from Fujian and Chao, named after the region of Chaoshan in Guangdong (Canton). Each with its formal specificities and interpreted in the regional dialect.
The presence of local operas is one of the specificities of the Traditional Chinese Opera Festival. For Jean-Marie Fégly, member of the jury since the third edition of the festival and specialist in kunqu, the oldest form of Chinese opera still performed, the festival contributed to enriching the knowledge of Chinese opera in France. “Previously, the French only knew Beijing opera, to the detriment of other local operas, little known and yet very rich,” he recalled.
Nearly 30 genres of Chinese opera have been performed since the festival’s inception. “This event in Paris is quite exceptional because it allows us to see several troupes together, whereas even in China, it is not easy,” also estimated Roger Darrobers, who discovered during this edition the Or theater, performed by the only surviving troupe of this form of opera.
Over five days, the festival also includes a series of film screenings, exhibitions on the stage art and costumes of Chinese opera, as well as conferences on theatrical art. New to this edition is the introduction of filmed operas, a particular genre in China to transmit the memory of these works. This year’s festival presented 4 very different films, some of which were released very recently. “Opera in cinema works very well, it is not just a recording, but an adaptation to cinema, sometimes with special effects,” explained Roger Darrobers, while emphasizing that the first Chinese film was an opera film. opera.
Jean-Pierre Wurtz, honorary theater inspector general of the French Ministry of Culture and French co-president of the 9th Traditional Chinese Opera Festival, welcomes the return of the festival after a 6-year hiatus. Having devoted most of his career to theater and particularly internationally, he developed a passion for Chinese opera very early on. “In fact, it’s sung theater. What’s exciting is that the artists are actors, dancers and acrobats at the same time, so a whole very wide range of expression, which makes it a kind of show total,” he greeted.
After a partnership with three important Parisian and Ile-de-France theaters, including the Théâtre Silvia Monfort, the Scène nationale de Malakoff and the Théâtre de la Ville, the Guimet Museum hosted the performances of this ninth edition of the festival, which took place in 2024 in the double celebration of the sixtieth anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between France and China and the Sino-French Year of Cultural Tourism. While waiting for the tenth edition scheduled for 2026. F
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