Warrior Women of Yang from the Chinese National Peking Opera Company. Photograph via State Theatre.
Warrior Women of Yang from the Chinese National Peking Opera Company presents stunning performances, extraordinary music; fabulous richly-coloured costumes; masterful acrobatics and martial arts. Warrior Women of Yang combines all this with a slow-building story line, which, as it develops, becomes more and more gripping.
When messengers arrive from the battlefield with news that the male warriors of the Yang family have been killed in battle by invading forces, the Yang family female warriors decide to take up arms to avenge their loss. The women struggle to get the Emperor’s approval, but eventually succeed in overcoming the court’s widespread lack of belief in their fighting ability and gain the Emperor’s permission to take the fight to the invaders.
In the second half of the show the women warriors take up arms and ride in to battle. Discovering a secret route through the mountains which will enable them to cut off the invaders’ retreat, they position their army and then lead their troops into battle. The fight scenes are conveyed through martial arts, acrobatics, and stylized gesture to show the scuffles and flurries of battle breaking out across the countryside. The acrobatics are stunning – erupting in unison and cannons of movement which crisscross the stage, with the costumes adding spectacular flourishes of colour.
Instead of a Western psychologically-based approach to acting, the performers express the emotions of the characters through physical movements and stylized hand gestures – the family matriach shows her grief through a delicate fluttering of the fingers of one hand as she sings. In this work the performer does not attempt to embody the character but instead signals the characters’ emotions to the audience through stylized movement and gesture which the spectator then decodes.
This work from the Chinese National Peking Opera Company takes us into the realms of performance beyond Western naturalism, showing the form of theatre that had such a profound influence on Bertold Brecht. This is an opportunity to experience a uniquely fascinating cultural experience. Warrior Women of Yang is not to be missed!
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
Warrior Women of Yang
The Chinese National Peking Opera Company
The State Theatre, Sydney
6 November 2016​
