Reimagined Chinese and Western operas serve as a medium for mutual understanding

In the age of globalization, the vitality of opera rests largely on its capacity for cross-cultural communication. Fusing diverse art forms, opera has long served as a medium for civilizations to understand one another.

When staging classic Western operas, the primary task is to move beyond a static, museum-like mode of presentation. Through creative transformation, we aim to connect Western narratives with the living experiences and cultural memories of Chinese audiences. This is not a departure from the original works, but an effort to ground them in Chinese contexts, thereby reactivating the enduring humanistic nature of the works.

One effective strategy to achieve cultural affinity is the transplantation of settings. By substituting key scenes in Western opera with physical and cultural spaces familiar to Chinese audiences, classic themes are given new life in local soil.

For example, in a production of Igor Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex at the Tianjin Grand Theatre, we set the story in a contemporary Chinese mining town instead of the ancient Greek city of Thebes in the original work. The plague afflicting the city was replaced by a series of deadly mining accidents. Oedipus was reimagined as the mine’s chief engineer, bearing responsibility for the lives of the workers. The plot where miners plead for help conveyed the original work’s core conflict between crisis and individual responsibility, while grounding it in an industrial landscape and a collectivist dilemma familiar to Chinese audiences. In this way, the abstract gravity of the Western tragedy of fate was transformed into a palpable concern rooted in local realities.

For Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata, the story was adapted through a “dual-city” strategy. In the Tianjin Grand Theatre production, the opera was set in Tianjin in the 1910s, replacing Parisian aristocratic salons with teahouses, traditional theaters and abandoned temples. The heroine Violetta Valery, renamed Wei Lanli, navigated a miniature society of officials, elites and ordinary tea patrons. With this recreated setting, it became easier for audiences in northern China to resonate with the heroine’s objectified existence.

In contrast, the Shanghai Opera House production of Verdi’s opera unfolded aboard an ocean liner departing from Shanghai for France. The ship’s shifting, unsettled space became a metaphor for the fleeting and illusory nature of love. At the same time, Shanghai’s history of interaction between East and West makes it an especially fitting setting for the opera’s focus on relationships across social classes, allowing local audiences to grasp the story with ease.

For Claude Debussy’s symbolist opera Pelléas et Mélisande, staged at the Shanghai Grand Theatre, I emphasized the alignment of mood and relocated the story to a water town in southern China. Flowing streams and misty rain harmonized naturally with the opera’s sense of mystery and restraint, allowing this Western symbolist masterpiece to find emotional grounding in an Eastern landscape while softening cultural distance.

Another strategy is to incorporate elements of Chinese aesthetics to express the artistic core of Western operas.

For example, in Pelléas et Mélisande, the heightened and overt acting typical of Western opera was replaced by the formulaic and symbolic body movements and restrained eye contact often used in Chinese opera. This balanced blend of poetic symbolist drama and subtle Eastern expression generated a quiet but potent dramatic tension.

Music and set design follow the same approach. In the Tianjin production of La Traviata, we preserved Verdi’s original score, but subtly introduced erhu (a Chinese two-stringed fiddle) into the heroine’s key aria, with its melancholic yet restrained timbre deepening her inner solitude and sorrow. To enhance the historical context, the chorus was conceived as a cross-sectional presentation of Republican-era society. Visually, the settings used Western realist designs while incorporating distinctive Chinese elements, such as square wooden tables, carved railings and fragments of ruined walls, to reinforce the opera’s tragic atmosphere.

When it comes to staging original Chinese operas, the central challenge is how to move beyond cultural boundaries, use artistic languages that are universally understood by global audiences to interpret Chinese stories, and enable Eastern philosophical thoughts and cultural values to resonate internationally. To achieve this, our efforts must remain firmly grounded in the local core themes as we reach outward through globally recognizable artistic forms.

One strategy is to employ cutting-edge stage design and visual styles, allowing global audiences to engage with Chinese cultural values through contemporary artistic frameworks that feel familiar to them.

When we staged Qu Xiaosong’s The Death of Oedipus at the inaugural Beijing Chamber Opera Festival, we built a visually striking stage using installations inspired by ancient Sanxingdui sculptures unearthed in Sichuan province and 3D-woven costumes, which quickly immersed foreign audiences into the opera’s irrational atmosphere. At the same time, the Eastern-style music, marked by a sense of desolation, conveyed a unique Chinese reflection on suffering and fate. This serves as a good example of how we use an “international shell” to express an “Eastern soul”.

In the China National Opera House’s production of Wang Yangming, we used a minimalist stage design with mirror installations to convey abstract philosophical ideas such as “the mind is principle”. The mirrors made the idea of self-examination visible. As the audience saw their own reflections alongside the action onstage, they could intuitively grasp the core ideas of the School of Mind, without the need for explanatory text. In this way, the production created a direct exchange between Chinese philosophy and contemporary stage aesthetics.

Another strategy to lower barriers for foreign audiences is to introduce familiar Western cultural lenses to aid storytelling. In composer Guo Wenjing’s Rickshaw Boy, staged at the National Center for the Performing Arts, the visual design drew on photographs of Beijing taken by Western photographers in the late 19th century. Hutongs, rickshaws and city walls from those images were recreated to establish a sense of recognition and credibility through a “historical China” in Western expression. At the same time, scenes such as weddings and funerals were rendered through a symbolic impression, rather than a realist reconstruction. This approach preserved the local artistic essence while avoiding a sense of distance due to cultural differences, and was well received on tours in Italy and other countries.

Years of practice have shown that cross-cultural opera staging is not a matter of choosing one culture over another, but of finding a dynamic balance through dialogue. Localizing Western classics does not diminish them; rather, it activates universal themes within Chinese contexts, allowing domestic audiences to engage more confidently with Western reflections on fate, love and redemption. Meanwhile, internationalizing Chinese works does not mean abandoning local roots.

The author is the artistic director of the Beijing Dahua City Performing Arts Center, director and professor of the Modern Script Translation, Creation and Research Center at the Central Academy of Drama and a recipient of the Chevalier de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France.

The author contributed this article to China Watch, a think tank powered by China Daily. The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.

Contact the editor at editor@chinawatch.cn.