Can you imagine spending two-and-a-half hours making up your face to a strictly-laid-down pattern and getting dressed in an elaborately embroidered and decorated costume – for a performance lasting a quarter of an hour?

That’s exactly what two members of the Singapore-based Chinese Theatre Circle did for their audience during a recent show at The Pavilions pool villa spa resort in Phuket recently, as a showcase for The Pavilions’ Passion for Music programme. We know, because we were lucky enough to be in the audience that evening.

It was the first time either Kay or I had seen a Cantonese opera performance, and we weren’t sure what to expect, although the notes we were given beforehand told us that the duet we were to hear, The Parting Song of Love, was a gem of Cantonese opera.

The story’s a very sad one. A Chinese princess is rescued from drowning by a warrior from a barbarian state. The couple fall in love, and marry. But the Emperor of China soon hears about the marriage and threatens that he will send his armies to invade the barbarian state if the princess does not immediately return to China – without her husband.

Neither of us speak Cantonese, so we weren’t able to appreciate the full beauty of the performance. (Indeed, we wouldn’t have known what was going on without the programme notes.)

Not only that, but there’s a good deal of symbolism and significance behind costumes, make-up, gestures and movements. Take for instance the pheasant tail-feathers in the barbarian warrior’s head-dress in our photos: they show he’s a military leader. Meanwhile long cloth sleeves – known as water sleeves – are used for expressive effect to show the elegance and tenderness of the female characters, as you can see from the princess’s costume. Make-up also helps identify characters; at a very basic level, men’s eyebrows are usually drawn thicker than women’s, though there are of course many more layers of sophistication than that.

But even without knowing about the traditional symbolism – or even the title of the duet – it was clear enough that the couple were lovers expressing their anguish at being forced to part. And the singing, the music, and the acting all made for a beautiful and touching spectacle.

The Chinese Theatre Circle was founded in 1981 by husband-and-wife couple Leslie and Joanna Wong, who for the previous 14 years had been in charge of a Cantonese clan association’s cultural activities and had taken the clan’s opera shows to unprecedented heights of success for a local troupe. That same year Mrs Wong became the first Chinese opera artiste to be awarded Singapore’s prestigious Cultural Medallion.

Since then the Chinese Theatre Circle has performed to audiences all over the world, including particularly notable performances of The Poet Emperor Li Yu and A Costly Impulse in Beijing – the latter of which was broadcast across China to a viewership of 700 million.

If you did your sums a couple of paragraphs ago you’ll have realised that the Chinese Theatre Circle is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year. Sadly, though, we’ve read in the Straits Times that the company is facing funding difficulties – young Singaporeans, presented with a plethora of entertainment choices, aren’t so devoted to Cantonese opera as the older generations, and government grants to boost the traditional arts have largely passed the Circle by. There’s also the question of who will take on the running of the Circle when the Wongs, who are both now in their seventies, finally retire.

Let’s hope their problems find a happy resolution soon – it would be a real loss to Singaporean and Cantonese culture if this wonderful opera company had to close.

You can read more about The Pavilions’ Passions programme here:
The Pavilions, Phuket: Passions

Author: Dave McMahon

Dave left school at the age of 30 with the odd O-level (like Ancient Icelandic) and a doctorate in something so obscure even he can't remember what it's about. He then joined the FCO. Dave has travelled to most European countries (including several that don't exist any more, though he denies responsibility), as well as Bangladesh, Barbados, Thailand, St Vincent, UAE, Laos, and many more. Having managed to escape from London in 2001, Dave's now resorted to taking unpaid leave to stave off the evil day of his return.

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Cinema

67th Venice International Film Festival
The festival runs from 1-11 September 2010.

Architecture

People meet in architecture
12th International Architecture Exhibition
From Sunday 29 August to Sunday 21 November 2010, in the exhibition venues of the Giardini, the Arsenale, and in other locations in Venice.

Music

Don Giovanni and the man of stone
54th International Festival of Contemporary Music
The festival runs from 23 September to 2 October 2010.

Art

54th International Art Exhibition
The next International Art Exhibition will run from 4 June to 27 November 2011, directed by Bice Curiger.
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One-Day Course

One-day classes are based in and around Bangkok. You will be picked up at your hotel and given an assignment brief for the day’s course. Photography takes place at two locations and in the evening photos are edited with assessment. You will be taught simple but industry-effective Photoshop skills while processing your work. For photographers using film your work will be assessed in the morning for the same one-day price.

Three-Day Course

Three-day courses give you the opportunity to see more of Bangkok and the surrounding provinces. The course structure is extended to the three-day period, giving you the chance to further explore your photography subject. Work will be edited and assessed each evening then adjusted in Photoshop. This course offers you a great opportunity to get to know Bangkok in depth, giving you a great introduction to the region.

Five-Day Course

Five-day courses allow us to get out of town. You will stay, where possible, with the locals and really get to explore. Be it living on a rural Thai farm or inside a small village temple, you will experience something truly special.

Ten-Day Course

Ten-day courses open up much more of Thailand; again the courses will be created specially for you but you will be able to really explore the country. Travel to the North of Thailand and stay in hill-tribe villages truly off the tourist map, or stay and illustrate a fisherman village waking with the birds and off we go out to sea; all are possible with this exciting course.

Term Course

Longer-term courses are also possible. You can learn at your own convenience, on days and at times that best suit your needs. These courses are bought in five-day sets; book from the first day you wish to begin and then arrange a schedule with us for the remaining days. Contact us for further details if this option suits you.

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Author: Jonathan Taylor

Jonathan Taylor is an English freelance photographer whose work has appeared in numerous international publications. His Photography School Asia photography classes are now available online via his website:

The Haywain
(click for larger image)

From 1 June, a major exhibition at Tate Britain of John Constable’s seminal “six-foot” exhibition canvases, Constable: The Great Landscapes, offers the first opportunity to view them all together. The “six-footers” are among the best-known images in British art and comprise the famous series of views on the River Stour, which includes The Haywain 1820-1, as well as more expressive later works such as Hadleigh Castle 1829 and Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows 1831. These paintings lie at the very heart of Constable’s achievement. Not even in the artist’s lifetime were they ever brought together in the way that this exhibition has achieved.

The artist

John Constable (1776-1837) was born and raised at East Bergholt in Suffolk, the fourth child of Golding and Ann Constable. In 1792 he began work in the family business of trading and transporting corn and coal on and around the River Stour. However, his ambition was to be a painter. A local amateur artist, John Dunthorne, offered encouragement and after Constable created a series of six-foot wide landscapes, he was granted membership of the Royal Academy and won a gold medal at the Paris Salon.

To support himself and his family he painted portraits, several of which are in Tate’s collection and can be viewed at Tate Online, developed in association with BT. His real interest however was in painting the landscape of his birthplace. This agricultural region was unpopular at the time for landscape subjects but Constable said in his correspondence that it “made me a painter”.

“Six-footer” canvases

Constable’s decision to start painting major landscapes around 1818-19 marks a significant turning point in his career. He was determined to paint on a larger scale (about six foot by four-and-a-half feet) both to attract more notice at the Royal Academy exhibitions but also, it seems, to project his ideas about landscape onto a scale more in keeping with the achievements of classical landscape painting.

As important as the “six-footers” themselves was Constable’s decision to paint related full-scale preliminary sketches for most of the subjects. These large sketches, with their free and vigorous brushwork, were unprecedented at the time and they continue to fascinate artists, scholars and the general public. It has been said that it is this practice, more than any other aspect of Constable’s work, which establishes him as an avant-garde painter resolved to re-think the demands of his art and to address them in an entirely new way. The exhibition re-unites the full-scale sketches with their corresponding finished pictures in order to explore their role in Constable’s working practice. The display includes nine such pairings.

Highlights include the bringing together of the six River Stour pictures for the first time, which show how Constable succeeds in developing a single thematic concept – the life of the Suffolk river he had known since boyhood – and gradually invests it with a greater sense of drama, heroic action and narrative weight.

For further information on the exhibition you can visit the exhibition homepage.

Technical Research

The exhibition has prompted technical research into some of the works set to feature in the show. The results have revealed fresh perspectives on Constable’s working practice. In preparation for this exhibition, the majority of Constable’s exhibited “six-foot” paintings and their full-size sketches have undergone scientific analysis as part of the Constable Research Project. Together with technical reports supplied by the lending institutions, this has provided a substantial body of new information on Constable’s working methods of the 1820s and 1830s. In addition, Constable’s extensive and detailed correspondence reveals his artistic temperament and the extent to which his physical environment and domestic circumstances affected his work.

Tate Online, developed in partnership with BT, will provide the chance to further explore the work that has been carried out with a number of interactive features. By visiting the Constable’s Techniques page you will be able to see a variety of features from cross-sections of Constable’s paintings to x-rays of the sketches and the paintings. It is also possible to see interactive sketches which can be enlarged for a closer, more detailed observation.

View on the Stour near Dedham

View on the Stour near Dedham
(click for larger image)

The sketch for View on the Stour near Dedham has been x-rayed for the first time, revealing a number of significant compositional alterations including three figures in the foreground that are not visible on the surface of the work.

View on the Stour near Dedham, 1822, is the fourth of the six large River Stour paintings that Constable exhibited at the Royal Academy between 1819 and 1825. As with the other great “six-foot” River Stour scenes, Constable made a preliminary full-scale compositional sketch in oils when planning the exhibition picture.

The x-ray clearly shows that Constable’s original working of the sketch included two boys fishing by the water’s edge and a little girl close to one of the wooden beams marking the edge of a boat building yard in the foreground. These figures were then painted out of the sketch by Constable and replaced by two young boys sitting on the edge of the river bank. In the finished exhibition painting, View on the Stour near Dedham, Constable altered the composition again and did not include the two boys from the sketch.

This new research carried out by Tate has revealed that by eliminating figurative detail in the foreground of the painting, Constable wanted to create a more powerful visual and narrative focus in the centre of the composition. He was to refine the design still further in the exhibition picture, by adding a second barge to the centre of the composition together with a man strenuously poling the boat mid-stream. It’s fascinating to see from the x-ray Constable’s working practice in creating the composition.

Constable wrote to his great friend, John Fisher, about the changes he had made to the sketch and the exhibition painting. He says in the letter that he had “taken away the sail”, and – as the x-ray proves – he can only have been referring here to a sail which once appeared on a barge in the sketch. Constable also told Fisher that he had introduced a second barge into the exhibition picture, with a “principal figure” strenuously poling the boat towards mid-stream.

The comparison between the sketch and the exhibition painting of View on the Stour will be one of the most exciting in the exhibition. This is the only pair from Constable’s River Stour series that has not been reunited since the early 1820s. They were last together side-by-side in Constable’s studio when he was working on the finished painting.

View on the Stour marks an important turning point in the River Stour series. Its ambitious design anticipates the even more dramatic compositions of The Lock, painted in 1824, and The Leaping Horse, 1825. All six paintings in the Stour series will be shown together with their full-scale sketches for the first time in Constable: the Great Landscapes at Tate Britain.

The exhibition is at Tate Britain from 1 June to 28 August 2006 and is sponsored by AIG.
Book tickets online

BT’s in-house team uses the possibilities of broadband to create highly innovative designs, interfaces and interactive videos for Tate, that have helped make www.tate.org.uk the UK’s favourite visual arts website. Through the provision of cutting edge online technical application, BT is making art accessible to all via www.tate.org.uk . Tate Online is exclusively sponsored by BT.