Growing Up With Teochew Opera - 1

First Encounter With Street Opera In Johore - 1
与潮并长

In the village where I stayed in Johor Bahru, there was a basketball court where the villagers celebrated the lunar 7th month hungry ghost festival and other birthdays of the different Chinese gods and deities. I remembered watching street opera performance when I was just a little kid. My mum told me 新荣和兴潮剧团, 织云潮剧团, 老赛桃源潮剧团 and many other troupes performed there. I recalled the villages had to place benches to reserve some seats or standing places to watch the street opera or wayang (in Bahasa Melayu). As wayang performances were quite rare, only a few times a year, the basket ball court was packed with villagers whenever there were performances. Teochew, Hokkien and Hainanese opera troupes performed there depending on who organised the events. Occasionally, there were performances by Hakka and Hock Chew opera troupes.

In the late 1960s, there was a very funny arrangement for the audience. If you imagine yourself facing the stage, half of it was meant for male audience and the other half was meant for female audience. This was meant to prevent the male audience from taking advantage of the female audience. As time past, people began to socialise and hence there is no need to continue with such practice. In today’s context, there is insufficient number of audience and there is no need to do so.

During that time, the afternoon performance could last till 5.30 pm. Today, you can hardly see any troupe performing beyond 4 pm. The evening performance commenced at 7.30 pm and would last till midnight. In general, the Teochew street opera performances were more refined in terms of acting skills. I recalled that many Hokkien opera troupes engaged more pulley and wheel systems as there were many acts with swordsmen flying up and down. Also, their conversations were extremely vulgar. As kampong kids, we had a good level of understanding on vulgar words. Some Hokkien opera troupes even had a 40 to 60 minutes segment for the actors and actresses to sing pop songs. Presently, our local troupes ust end their performance by 11 pm.

In the past, an opera stage was of bigger size than the current street opera stage. Every troupe had many boxes or containers of costumes, headgears and other opera-related stuff. The backstage was fully packed and there was very little space for people to move about. In the 1960s/1970s, an opera troupe would have no less than 50 people including actors/ actresses and musicians. There was one particular Teochew opera troupe, 老一枝香潮剧团, which had more than 100 people. During their performance in Johor, they organized a tour to the Lee Pineapple factory. My mum told me the factory workers made a count to confirm the strength of the troupe. Indeed, the troupe had more than 100 people including the musicians. You can hardly see less than 20 people performing in a street opera today.