CHAO-HUI JENNY LIU: There was a performance of "Farewell My Concubine" at Princeton.
And to our surprise tickets sold out in 4 days.
[CAO JIN: Speaking Chinese]
CHAO-HUI JENNY LIU: We're landing 19 American students here in Shanghai
and dropping them into immersion Peking opera.
We have the actors working closely with our students in very small groups.
Each of the students learn an aria by the traditional way of teaching line-by-line
and the teacher explaining, as they go along, what it means and then expanding on it.
That's part of the tradition and that's part of the culture.
TERESA IRIGOYEN-LOPEZ: I had actually seen this company perform at Princeton last fall.
I really had no clue what it meant to come here like what classes would be like.
It changes a lot my idea of what art means.
Like what different disciplines mean and also, like, specifically, like, what dance means.
Because for me, dance was always like a lot of movement and here
like even the tiniest movement is dance because it's already combined with, your face means
so much more when you're dancing really slowly.
And your eyes mean so much more when like that is all that constitutes the dance.
MING WILSON: My first memory of Peking opera was when I was 3 and I remember
on TV seeing someone dressed as a woman with the very colorful makeup.
Yesterday was actually a great moment for me
because I actually started feeling my nasal cavity vibrating.
Probably, to a normal person it's weird, but to me it was like, wow this is --
now I'm actually getting something very close to Peking opera style.
SHERYL CHOW: In Western opera, they focus on singing but in Peking opera those gestures,
those dance, those movements are integrated with the singing.
So they are all together. While you are singing you have
to remember [singing]. The excerpt that I am working on
it's a love story about a lady in the morning.
She go out and then feed the chicken and go back to do the needle work.
WILLIAM SIMON: What Peking Opera tries to do, like a lot of other art forms,
is just tell a story really well in its particular way.
WENDY HELLER: It opens up the students' ears to imagine that this one aesthetic
of what is beautiful does not necessarily pertain within another culture.
And that's an extraordinarily rich kind of experience to have both aurally and physically.
SHERYL CHOW: After three weeks of practice and then getting onto the stage and perform the piece --
it's a really great sense of accomplishment.
WILLIAM SIMON: We want to make our teacher proud so we are a little nervous because of that.
But, I think it went well.
TERESA IRIGOYEN-LOPEZ: To see, like, such an important Peking opera company invite us here,
teach us what they've been learning from so many years, let us perform with other students
and see how they actually enjoy our performance which is really nice.
[CAO JIN: Speaking Chinese]
[MUSIC]