Changing Faces Ceremony

A Night At The Teahouse

I went to see the show with two ladies from my escorted tour. We arrived at the “Shufeng Yayun”, one of Chengdu's best-known Sichuan Opera theatres and when we first arrived, we were taken on a backstage tour and met some performers before they went on. One of my favourite photos, of all the photos I have ever taken was taken backstage here. It was of a performer facing a mirror putting his stage make up on. As much as I have tried to since I have never worked out who he was in the performance we saw.

Before the show started we were shown to our seats for the performance. We were lucky to be given a table very close to the stage and in the centre of the room, giving us a great view. Within minutes a performer in flowing robes spun across the stage, swept a hand across his face, and a brand-new mask appeared where the old one had been, no visible mask, no pause, nothing to see the trick land. It is the kind of thing you watch happen twice before you believe it happened once.

Back to top

Where Sichuan Opera Comes From

Sichuan Opera, or Chuanju, is one of China's oldest living theatre traditions. Its roots reach back to popular drama in the Sichuan region as far as the Three Kingdoms and Tang dynasty periods. However, the opera as it is performed today took shape later, as a blend of five older regional styles, Kunqiang, Gaoqiang, Huqin, Tanxi, and Dengdiao (lantern theatre). Each style has its own musical tradition and history.

Those five styles merged gradually, as migrants carried opera traditions from northern and southern China into Sichuan and local troupes absorbed them. By the early 20th century, a notable troupe formed in 1912 combined all five styles onto a single stage. Chuanju had become a distinct, unified form, centred on Chengdu, where it remains most closely associated today, though it is also performed in Chongqing and neighbouring provinces.

The technique that now defines the art form in most visitors' eyes, face-changing or bianlian, is a comparatively recent addition: it's generally dated to around 300 years ago, during the reign of the Qing dynasty's Qianlong Emperor. The exact method is still a closely guarded trade secret passed down within opera families.

Back to top

What Was In The Show

A Sichuan Opera and Folk Arts programme, the kind staged nightly for visitors at Chengdu teahouses like Shufeng Yayun, is really a sampler: a run of short acts rather than one long narrative. A typical bill mixes:

• Traditional music opening (naotai): the show opens with gong, drum, and chime rather than dialogue: an overture called naotai, traditionally used to settle the house before the acting starts.
• Face-changing (bianlian): the headline act. A performer swaps between layered silk masks in a fraction of a second, sometimes switching ten or more faces in under twenty seconds, each change meant to reveal the character's hidden mood without a word of dialogue.
• Fire-spitting: performers breathe jets of flame into the dark, often worked into the same sequence as a face change for extra drama.
• Hand & shadow puppetry: folk storytelling forms performed alongside the opera acts rather than as part of them, showing off puppetry traditions that are much older than Chuanju itself.
• A comic husband-and-wife story, leading into acrobatics: a bickering married-couple sketch, often built around a henpecked husband caught gambling, that the duo uses to set up the evening's big physical feat: “Rolling Light” (gun deng), in which the husband is punished by having to balance a bowl of fire on his head while contorting through an increasingly difficult run of acrobatic poses.

The music underneath it all is spare by design: a small gong and a two-stringed instrument called a muqin, close in sound to an erhu, rather than a full orchestra, so the spectacle on stage is always the thing holding your attention.

Back to top

Why It's Still Running

What struck me most, looking back, is how little of it needed translation. You don't need the plot or the dialect to feel the room hold its breath before a face change, or to laugh at a clown character mugging his way through a scene. That's probably why the teahouse version of the show has thrived as a visitor-facing format even as full-length Chuanju performances, which can run for hours in Sichuanese dialect, have a smaller audience than they once did.

It's also, by most accounts, still a living craft rather than a museum piece: the face-changing technique is taught master to apprentice, closely guarded, and still evolving. Years later, it is still one of the few times I've watched something happen in front of me and genuinely couldn't explain how what I saw was done.

Back to top