Peking Opera Artist Carries on “Painted Face” Art

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A prominent “painted face” in the country’s article/ppxfw201fjym.html" target="_blank">peking opera arena over the past twenty years, Meng Guanglu not only enjoys great popularity with domestic aficionados but also with overseas Chinese fans. A first-grade state artist, he is a member of Tianjin Youth Peking Opera Troupe and his accomplishment as a stage artist results from his passion as well as his dedication. He studied in theater academies three times in order to improve his art and learn more.

Three Academies

Born into a family of ordinary workers in 1993 in Tianjin, Meng was exposed to Peking Opera at the age of five. He learned arias from radio. Peking Opera plays were the only entertainment during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). After the chaos years,singers of Peking Opera in the city often gathered together on the banks of the Hai River that traverses the large metropolis of north China. Meng Guanglu often attended these outdoor singing parties. He managed to record arias by these aficionados and studied them carefully and learned to sing special arias. It happened that Tao Hanxiang, a son-in-law of Cheng Yanqiu, a Peking Opera master, lived across from the house of the Meng family. Seeing Meng was so enthusiastic, the famedartist coached the boy on vocal essentials of Peking Opera and taught Meng some classical arias of “painted face”, a character type in Chinese operas. China Academy of Theater came to Tianjin in 1978 to recruit some additional students for an existing course. Tao encouraged his star pupil to take part in the test. It turned out that Meng was the only one recruited in Tianjin that year. That year, he was sixteen and a middle school student. At the academy, Meng studied under the tutelage of masters such as Ma Mingqun, Wang Quankui and Sun Shengwen.

Meng graduated from the academy in 1981 and went back to Tianjin and enrolled himself in Tianjin Academy of Theater. He studied Peking Opera for another three years. In 1984, the Tianjin Youth Peking Opera Troupe came into being and Meng and his classmates joined the troupe. Years later he took a graduate course at China Academy of Theater again. He systematically studied theories and performing arts at the academy. What is more, he learned a lot from his classmates who were all established stage artists.

Mayor’s Recommendation

In 1985 Meng secured a wide reputation as a “painted face” artist in Tianjin. Local audiences simply loved him. Li Ruihuan, then mayor of Tianjin, after watching his performance, wrote a letter to the governor of Shandong Province, asking the governor if it was possible to make arrangements for Meng to become a disciple for Fang Rongxiang, a “painted face” master in Shandong. After listening to a tape of Meng’s singing, the master agreed that the young artist showed potentiality for becoming a good disciple of the Qiu School, a style of singing and acting developed by Qiu Shengrong (1915-1971). So the master took the disciple under his wing. The old and the young hit off immediately the first time they met. Fang was satisfied with the fast progress his new disciple was making in learning the art. Fang once commented to his wife that Meng from Tianjin was most like him in singing and that Meng would be an outstanding disciple to carry on the painted-face art of the Qiu School.

Meng Guanglu has also studied under “painted face” masters such as Qian Yunhong, Xia Yunlong, Li Rongwei, and Wang Zhengping. The reason a disciple needs to learn from so many masters is that Peking Opera has representative plays and the best way for a disciple to learn the performance of a character in a single play is to learn directly from a master. Within a school, a master passes special instructions for acting a character to a disciple. If possible, each disciple will add something of his own to the performance he inherits. This way, the character is honed and enriched artistically through generations of artists of the same school. By learning from different masters, Meng Guanglu expanded his repertoire.

An Accomplished Disciple of the Qiu School

As a “painted face” that has grown under the teachings of a number of masters, Meng Guanglu is now very accomplished in the Qiu-style singing and acting. Onstage, he not only displays the best singing and facial expressions but also adds weight to the images he interprets and creates. His vocal quality may be not as strident as that of his predecessors such as Jin Shaoshan, but he sings more artistically. His singing highlights resonance, vigor, mellowness and exquisiteness, which are major characteristics of the Qiu-School.

Many of Qiu-style arias have been polished by different masters. Meng has been able to introduce his own improvements into the singing of the classical Qiu-style arias. This is a great achievement. Chen Song, who heads an overseas Qiu-School performance research association, watched Meng Guanglu’s performance in Beijing and commented, “It took me 26 hours to fly from New York to Beijing to watch Meng’s performance. The experience is absolutely worth the trip.”

Over the past 20 plus years, Meng Guanglu has attained all the top prizes available to the elite stage artists in the country. In 1986 he rose to instant name in Hong Kong when troupes of local operas of the country joined hands to stage shows there. Later Meng was invited back to Hong Kong to stage more shows. His best record in Hong Kong was that he staged 11 shows in 9 days. In Taiwan, he and a prominent painted-face actress named Wang Haibo in Taiwan jointly staged a “painted-face” show. Over the past two decades, Meng has also participated in Peking Opera shows in Japan, Singapore, Thailand, Cuba, Peru, Argentine, and Mexico.

Dedication

Meng Guanglu, a conscientious and dedicated artist, studies his roles most meticulously. Whenever he is going to interpret a new role, he studies all the lines, facial expressions, steps and moves. And he reviews the whole script every time a show is going to be staged to avoid any possible blunders. He has taken part in various shows, sponsored by CCTV, in remote areas which used to be the revolutionary bases before 1949. Off stage he is a man of honesty and kindness. He has been awarded various honors for his model work.