Clemente Ladrido
Clemente Ladrido, MBA, MPhil, is Director, Finance and Administration, at The Norman Lear Center

As the fastest growing market for just about everything, China continues to sate the appetite for entertainment of a populace whose disposable income has grown exponentially in such a short time. Outlets in China rise everywhere, be they cinema multiplexes, shopping malls, sports arenas, or gaming centers. Now add opera venues to these.

China is experiencing an opera renaissance and it appears that everyone, well almost everyone, in the opera world gains. As a lot of new opera houses open, there will be demand for singers. A musical exchange program called "I Sing Beijing" currently hosts 20 Western performers whose brief is twofold: bring Western productions to the local audiences, and learn and interpret the classical Chinese opera style in Mandarin for export to the rest of the world.

Commerce, of course, dictates a significant aspect of this undertaking. Western artists hope to advance their careers through a platform that ensures some financial security, a situation that is getting more difficult in the West as opera's presence in the contemporary landscape gradually dims and funding sources become scarce. Capitalizing on its newly acquired wealth, China intends to regenerate the classical Chinese opera through productions that hope to entertain a global contemporary audience.

Who loses? I think it is not so much a question or a case of loss as it is of transformation, or redefinition of the indigenous, in this case, traditional Chinese opera with its highly stylized productions and an unmistakable musicality of shrillness and tension. In an effort to preserve the genre, it is necessary to contemporize it, to infuse it with elements that conform to the times, to let it move along its continuum.

This art form that traces its roots to the third century CE was curtailed in the mid-sixties during the Cultural Revolution when Mao required strong representation