WRITTEN ALL OVER HIS FACE: Facial makeup depicting black-faced Bao Zheng, a judge in ancient China. The brush on his forehead represents Bao's role as a judge (GONG SIQUAN)
WINGED WARRIOR: Facial makeup depicting Ma Jun, a folk hero nicknamed the Jade Butterfly (GONG SIQUAN)
COLORFUL GUARD: Facial makeup depicting door god Heng with the Chinese character heng painted on the forehead (GONG SIQUAN)
COLORFUL GUARD: Facial makeup depicting the door god Ha with the Chinese character ha painted on the forehead (GONG SIQUAN)
COLORFUL GUARD: Facial makeup depicting the door god Ha with the Chinese character ha painted on the forehead (GONG SIQUAN)
With the flick of a wrist, the intricate patterns painted on the opera performer's face magically shift; the audience, awed by the speed of the transformation, bursts into applause. The trick—called face changing—is a unique part of Sichuan Opera.
Their changing faces are adorned in thick oil-based makeup, an important part of the opera's art. Changing it in less than a second in front of spectators is hard for audiences to fathom.
But Liu Lian, a folklorist and senior editor with Beijing-based Academy Press, who is in charge of editing the upcoming book Sichuan Opera Facial Makeup, believes the art of the applied makeup is very charming as well.
"The face changing skill is so fantastic that many people think only of it when they speak of the whole art of Sichuan Opera," said Liu. "People tend to focus more on the changing part and less on the charm of faces."
The colorful faces
A renowned form of China's local opera types, Sichuan Opera is most popular in southwest China's Sichuan, Yunnan and Guizhou provinces. Most of the performances are adapted from classic Chinese novels, myths, legends and folktales.
Qian Mu, a renowned historian and scholar on Chinese traditional culture, wrote in an article on the subject that most of the stories are well known, so the audiences already know the plots before they go to see the operas. They come to enjoy the details of the performance. In order to make the opera more impressive, facial makeup plays an important role.
Qian compared the facial makeup to Chinese paintings. They both focus more on abstraction than being lifelike. This is the spirit of Chinese traditional art, said Qian. He noted that in Chinese traditional novels, writers sometimes assign no name to characters and only use descriptions of personality to identify them. The facial makeup, with exaggerated patterns, hides the real faces of performers and helps audiences tell characters' personalities.
"We first paint on a basic color for a character, which tells the audience about the characters nature," said Gong Siquan, a naster of Sichuan Opera and a facial makeup collector, in an interview with People's Daily. Gong said that white represents evil, red stands for loyalty and bravery, black is used to signify upright and outspoken people, blue and green are for folk heroes and gold, silver or gray can depict mysterious characters like immortals, ghosts or monsters.
Cao Cao, an official in the late Eastern Han Dynasty (25-220) who manipulated the emperor to expand his own military strength and sphere of influence, is a typical white-faced character in the opera. On the other hand, Bao Zheng, a judge during the Northern Song Dynasty (960-1127) who was a champion of the downtrodden, is typically presented in black makeup.
"There are a few stories behind the origin of facial makeup," said Liu. "One is that opera players who were good at neither performing nor singing used it to compensate for their failings to attract bigger audiences."
It may have also started for those who were given few speaking or singing lines in the opera, like clowns, to entertain the audience, added Liu. Another possibility, Liu said, is that the tradition began as a ghost-purging ritual before performers went on stage. Those workers may have worn scary makeup to scare the ghosts away. The ritual may have become part of the main performance over time.
"No matter what the origin is, makeup is now an indispensable part of the opera," said Gong. "We don't have people who draw the patterns for the performers, all the players have to do it by themselves."
After the basic colors, players apply more patterns to reveal to audiences in more detail characters' personalities. Some of the patterns are symbolic materials, some are images of animals, and some are Chinese language characters.
The black-faced Bao Zheng can be decorated with the pattern of a brush whose one end is inked red on the forehead. In ancient times, this particular brush could only be used by officials who had the right to judge and represented Bao's political status.
Drawing animals is a unique feature of Sichuan Opera, said Gong. Ma Jun is a Robin Hood-like hero in the traditional Sichuan Opera Truth and Fakeness. Since his nickname is Jade Butterfly, a colorful form of the winged insect is painted on the face for identification.
"To draw animals on the face requires that a performer pay attention to the position of the animals in order to make it move with the emotions of the players," Ouyang Ronghua, a Sichuan Opera player, said during an interview with China Central Television. "We draw the mouth of the snake just above the player's mouth, with the snake's body extending to the cheeks. So the reptile can move like a living snake when the player opens and closes his mouth."
Since the 1950s, Chinese-language characters have been used as part of facial makeup in Sichuan Opera. The Chinese characters are all placed on the face using different calligraphic styles. For example, to represent the two famous door-gods (posted on the front door of a house to ward off evil spirits) in folk culture, Heng and Ha, players place the characters heng and ha in the middle of their foreheads.
Besides different painting tools that players have to represent their characters, unlike the facial makeup used in other local operas, the same character in Sichuan Opera can sport a series of different makeup configurations, according to Ouyang. Makeup on only the upper half of the face above the nose can represent a character in his youth. Makeup also changes with the character's mood. The style changes when a character is angry or sad. This is most often when face changing is employed.
During a celebration for the 10th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China in Beijing in 1959, Ouyang demonstrated his face-changing skill and awed people all over the country. Since then, the technique has become well known across China.
"Normally there are three ways to accomplish the face changing," said Ouyang. "One is by blowing colorful powder from the hand onto the face, which quickly changes the color. The second method is to use colored oil hidden in the hands to rapidly make the change. What we mostsee now is the third method, which involves stringing several facial makeup styles that have been drawn on very thin media with a thread and pulling the thread to change them one by one. It has to be done very quickly and involves secret skills. The special masks for changing faces must be made in advance to fit the performer's face to ensure that they are pasted as close as possible to the skin."
"Face changing is kind of like a magic performance ," said He Hongqing,who is said to be the quikest face -changing performer.He, a 45-year-old Sichuan native,cna completelylater facial makeup three times within one and a half seconds."We have special skills and tools for face changjing,and the skill is only handed down in secret from teacher to student."
Preservation and progress
After editing the book Shaanxi Opera Facial Makeup in 2008, Liu started to work on Sichuan Opera Facial Makeup. "The makeup comes from folk culture. But now most of the local operas are on the decline. Though they still have stages to perform on, some of the big traditional operas are seldom seen."
Together with her workmates, Liu finally collected 850 facial makeups of Sichuan Opera by visiting old performers in
SichuanProvince to collect different examples.
She is not alone in this effort. Ouyang, who was born in 1937 to a Sichuan Opera family, started his collection of makeup in 1976. He is also accomplished at applying the makeup. Now Ouyang has drawn more than 700 faces and some of his collection is kept in the ChengduSichuanOperaMuseum.
Since retiring, Ouyang, who performed for 50 years, has more free time and can focus his attention on painting faces. In the opera Sichuan Good Man, which has been staged in
Europe, he designed a 1.8-meter-high face as the backdrop and attracted an admiring audience there.
Gong also indulges in collecting and saving the culture of Sichuan Opera facial makeup. He started collecting in 1958. Through the 1960s, he collected more than 1,000 pieces of Sichuan Opera facial makeup artwork, but they were all destroyed during the "cultural revolution" (1966-76), said Gong, who restarted the collection in the late 1970s.
He visited more than 200 old Sichuan Opera players and collected more than 2,000 drafts of different makeup designs. In 1990, his collection was exhibited in
Chengdu, capital of SichuanProvince. In 1995 and 2003, he also held exhibitions in Beijing.
"Collecting these makeup designs is a great joy to me," said Gong. "But what I have done is far from enough. Saving and preserving the culture of the Sichuan Opera needs more effort from many people."