At the Boxing County Lyuju Opera Troupe, in east China's Shandong province, Liu Ning, 41 and his apprentice Wang Chenglong, 24 were rehearsing Sisters' Marriage Switch, a classic from the Lyuju repertoire. Amid clanging gongs and resonating drums, Wang wears a winged traditional official's headdress bobbing above a gold-embroidered crimson robe. With a sharp snap of his folding fan, he performs the character's commanding stage presence.
As one of the major local operas, Lyuju Opera was inscribed on China's National Intangible Cultural Heritage List in 2008.
"During festivals, villages in my hometown would stage operas. My grandmother always took me along, though I only watched for fun initially," Wang recalled. His artistic awakening came during a Maoqiang (another Shandong opera genre) performance by artist Sun Hongju. "Enthralled, I enrolled in Maoqiang training after junior high, unprepared for the rigors."
The regimen proved grueling: predawn rehearsals, week-long drills for eight-character recitations requiring flawless articulation. "A short section of recitation, only eight words, needs to be practiced for a whole week until there is no deviation in posture, expression, or tone, and if there was a slight error in the position of the tongue it meant starting over." Faced with this grind, Wang quit. His subsequent factory work "taught me life's hardships". Matured through experience, he seized a second chance through enrollment in the local Lyuju Opera Class.
Confronting decreased physical flexibility, Wang persevered through intense pain during leg-stretching exercises. As graduation approached, Wang heard that Boxing County Lyuju Opera Troupe was recruiting young actors, so he chose to join and stay in the troupe, emerging as a rising talent.
Today, he has become a leading drama expert and scholar, and he is also actively promoting new media communication.
On Tiktok, he has nearly 30,000 fans, many of whom are local people, and a considerable number of young people are attracted to it. He shared the clips of his own performances and those of his daily life of training, which received a lot of attention and praise.
In fact, Lyuju Opera a still has a very stable elderly audience in many areas of Shandong, Liu said. "Today, the attraction of Lyuju Opera in Boxing county is still very strong. Performances may not need the top stage, or even a stage, they occur in the local communities, hidden in every corner of Boxing. In our town, local villagers organize their own performances of Lyuju Opera weekly."
Wang added that "seeing children in the audience today reminds me of my childhood experiences attending performances with my grandmother''.
The support local authorities is essential.
Official statistics indicate Lyuyi Town, Boxing county sustains over 10 local troupes with 150 performers, delivering 300 annual performances while attracting 20,000 cultural tourism participants yearly.
"In 2020, we premiered the large-scale original Lyuju Opera lianxinsuo (The Heart-linked Lock), chronicling a touching story of two generations of an ordinary family's sacrifices and their collective navigation of national hardships," stated Liu.
"The production toured from county theaters to Jinan's municipal stages, later representing Shandong in Qinghai province with resounding successful performances."
With the development of the times, many local operas are losing audiences.
"What we need to do is to impress young people with better and better stories, "said Wang.
Wang Zixian contributed to this story.
