Tibetan Opera hops from field to stage

Abo Chungchung, 40，from Yendum of Qamdo Prefecture in eastern Tibet just finished performing the Yendum Tibetan Opera in Qamdo Tibetan New Year Gala, together with 46 fellow villagers on Feb. 12, 2013.

As an inheritor of the Tibetan Opera, he said that it was the first time for them to put the Yendum Tibetan Opera from the field onto the Gala stage.

The Yendum Tibetan Opera, one school of the Blue Mask performance, is featured with strong flavor of Qamdo life in many aspects, such as motion, costume, scene, dialogue, melody and so on.

They played the Opera entitled Drowa Sangmo, one of the Eight Great Tibetan Plays, which tells folk stories such as the imperial struggle happened in Menba, one little kingdom located in the Himalaya.

Abo Chungchung said，actors are all chosen from ordinary Tibetan families. He taught singing and dancing hand by hand, together with other inheritors of the Yendum Tibetan Opera troupe. We usually put on traditional plays, such as Drowa Sangmo and Prince Drimed Kunden. Due to the imbalanced sex ratio, women roles are often played by elderly men by putting on makeup.

Yang Pei，a cadre from Qamdo Bureau of Culture, said that the Yendum Tibetan Opera is listed as the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity at the level of autonomous region by local government in 2010. Like other eight schools of the Tibetan Opera such as the Shambha Tibetan Opera, the Yendum Tibetan Opera has also obtained funds of around two mln yuan（320.2 thousand US dollars）.

Those funds are applied for cultivating young inheritors and improve existing facilities used for skill learning. The invitation for Yendum Tibetan Opera to Tibetan New Year Gala has offered a platform bigger than ever for this valuable cultural resource and presenting its charm to more and more people, Yang Pei also said.

Originated from 14th century and inscribed by the UNESCO on the organization's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2009, the Tibetan Opera is a comprehensive art combining folk song, dance, storytelling, chanting, acrobatics and religious performance.

As the most popular traditional opera among Tibetans，Tibetan Opera is divided into many genres and has lots of theatrical troupes, which have formed their own unique style.