Shanghai Senses: Sights & Sounds
The Arts
By Barbara Koh
Literature
Once upon a time, Shanghai was the literary and publishing center of China. In the foreign enclaves, novelists and essayists were protected from the censorship of Chinese authorities. Chinese literary hits that were written or based in Shanghai from the 1920s to 1940s include Ba Jin’s Family and Mao Dun’s Midnight, both about the tension in Chinese families between Confucian doctrine and modern, liberal ideas.
Lu Xun (1881-1936), considered the father of modern Chinese literature, wrote in a colloquial Chinese style rather than in the ancient, classical Chinese that most of the public couldn’t understand. Besides creating a vernacular prose, Lu made jabs at the Kuomintang and China’s social problems in short stories such as The True Story of Ah Q and Diary of a Madman. Eileen Chang, who spent the last part of her life in the US, described the city’s pulse and the often confining, downtrodden lives of women in The Golden Lock and other books.
In cooperation with the Hong Kong Literary Arts Festival, Shanghai stages a springtime literary festival that features talks by local and international award-winning authors, often on Asia-related themes.
Performing Arts
Music
Shanghai, the home of China’s first Western orchestra and first music school, has been a long-time lover of Western classical music. The Shanghai Symphony Orchestra was formed in 1879 as a band for the foreign concessions. It evolved into an orchestra and became known as the best in Asia. At first, its musicians were White Russians, Jews and other foreigners, but in the late 1930s, Chinese were allowed to join. The group has played in Carnegie Hall and is considered China’s top symphony.
Other classical groups include the Shanghai Philharmonic Orchestra and the Shanghai National Music Orchestra. Performances are often held at the Shanghai Grand Theater and the historic Shanghai Concert Hall. The concert hall opened in 1930 as a theatre (nicknamed the ‘Asian Roxy’) but later was converted into a symphony hall. In 2003, the 6,000-ton building was moved 230 feet to make room for a park. The renovated auditorium of baby blue with gilt trim was reopened in 2004.
Jazz’s history in Shanghai is almost as long as classical music’s. During the boisterous 1920s and ‘30s, Shanghai was China’s epicentre of jazz, where an estimated 500 jazz bands, composed of mainly Filipinos and Russians, played the clubs. Today the Peace Hotel’s band, which includes a few septuagenarians who were in the band before 1949, pipes out New Orleans-style oldies. Musicians from the Philippines, the US, Europe and elsewhere come to play the fast-expanding jazz circuit of five-star hotel lounges, swank restaurants and clubs like the House of Blues and Jazz, JZ Club, and Cotton Club. One of the best-known vocalists in Shanghai is Coco Zhao, a guy who often cross-dresses for his performances.
The Shanghai band Cold Fairyland. Photo by Micah Sittig.
By comparison, rock, pop and alternative music first appeared in China only in the late 1980s, and home-grown music today is still largely commercial and mainstream. The experimental scene suffers from a lack of sponsors, but is showing signs of growth. Local rock bands include The Honeys, Cold Fairyland, Bird on a Wire and Crystal Butterfly, and rappers include Bamboo Crew and Peng Peng. For now, the musicians who can fill Shanghai’s sports stadiums are primarily from Taiwan, Hong Kong and other parts of Asia, like Coco Lee, Jay Chou, Jacky Cheung and Rain.
Non-live music may well have a wider following than the live forms. Karaoke fans, who are especially faithful and serious, include middle-aged businessmen (who consider karaoke a perfect activity for entertaining clients) and younger sets. The newest brand of celebrities is DJs spinning techno, house, tribal, hip-hop or trance, and Shanghai clubs proudly trumpet their line-ups of local and visiting foreign DJs.
Chinese Opera
Chinese opera evolved from centuries of itinerant troupes blending and performing traditional ballads and dance. To the uninitiated, the opera’s whirl of falsetto arias, acrobatics, martial arts, shrill music and heavily stylized choreography can be difficult to digest. Since the stage sets and props are minimal and the actors’ movements often subtle yet highly symbolic, opera-goers must summon their imaginations. Storylines often trace Chinese historical events or legends.
The leads in The Peony Pavilion. Photo by Pascal Maresch.
More than 100 varieties of opera exist in China. The most famous is Beijing (Peking), which is heavy on the acrobatic maneuvers, percussion and facial make-up. The painted faces of the actors indicate their type of role or character (for example, a black face signifies an honest official; a white nose belongs to a clown). Often the tales are about epic heroes.
The mother of all Chinese opera—the oldest form of theatre in China—is Kunju. It originated in Kunshan, about an hour’s drive from Shanghai, during the 16th century, and is for strict traditionalists. Compared to Beijing opera, Kunju is slower-paced and more lyrical. The music, often led by a flute, is more melodic. The most famous Kunju opera is The Peony Pavilion, an erotic love story of a young maiden and a young scholar that easily stretches longer than 20 hours. Only a handful of Kunju companies remain in China, the best being the Shanghai Kun Opera Troupe.
Other opera varieties native to the Shanghai area are Huju, which is sung in the Shanghainese dialect, and Yueju from Zhejiang, which was born around the 1920s and which commonly has women filling all of the roles in tragic love tales.
A production of Fame in Shanghai. Photo by Toby Simkin.
Theater
Contemporary theater is flourishing in Shanghai. Drama enthusiasts normally have their pick of plays; offerings might include the Chinese hit comedy The House of 72 Tenants, an adaptation of Neil Simon’s The Last of the Red-Hot Lovers, plays exploring the meaning of life and love in a complex, modern city, and Hans Christian Andersen’sThe Little Match Girl and The Ugly Duckling. Theater from abroad comes to Shanghai regularly; English actors, for instance, have performed Othello and a show based on The Merchant of Venice.
China has allowed Western producers to bring in a smattering of musical extravaganzas including Cats and The Phantom of the Opera. Shanghai’s government, now anxious to create a local musical-theater industry, is collaborating with British impresario Cameron Mackintosh to develop Mandarin-language versions of Les Miserables and other crowd-pleasers.
Dance
White Russian émigrés brought ballet to Shanghai in the 1920s. During the Cultural Revolution, the delicate dance form was revolutionized, literally. The two ballets that were approved for performance featured battles against feudalism, fascism and oppression. Ballerinas who had spent years dancing to resemble gentle, lithe swans reappeared as rifle-toting peasants and soldiers with glares of hatred, clenched jaws and fists and bright red pointe shoes.
Afternoon dancing at Zhongshan Park. Photo by Augapfel.
Morning ballroom dancing on the Bund. Photo by Jim Fischer.
These days, the Shanghai Ballet repertoire contains Russian classics, Chinese revolutionary/proletarian ballets and modern Chinese and international choreography.
Other dance groups include the Shanghai Song and Dance Ensemble and Jin Xing’s eponymous troupe. Jin Xing, the boldest choreographer in Shanghai, if not China, is a transsexual who was formerly a People’s Liberation Army officer. Her renown comes as much from her high-publicity sex change as from her dance talent. But her young Jin Xing Dance Theatre has already partnered with foreign dancers and taken on complex projects such as interpreting the dark Carmina Burana symphony.
Dance in Shanghai is not only a spectator sport. Clubs and restaurants host weekly salsa and swing lessons. Teams of middle-aged and elderly women regularly converge in public for dance-cum-exercise, twirling red fans as they step, swivel and wriggle in practiced synchronicity. At dusk, parks in Xujiahui and near the US Consulate are transformed into outdoor ballrooms of waltzing, foxtrotting, and sashaying Shanghainese. They may like to watch dance, but Shanghainese love doing it themselves, too.
Barbara Koh was a freelance journalist in Shanghai, where she wrote Shanghai Chic and produced articles for Bloomberg, the New York Times, Artzinechina.com, Newsweek and other media. After five years in Shanghai, she returned to San Francisco in 2009 and has been working on the Asian Art Museum-led Shanghai Celebration and hunting for the best luo bo si bing in town. Being half-Shanghainese, she can't imagine living anywhere in China but Shanghai. This excerpt was taken from Shanghai Chic (Editions Didier Millet, 2006)
