Fire on a Stick, and Faces from the Shadows

If you've seen one of the Peking Opera (jing ju) troupes that are touring the world nowadays, probably you got the impression it was only half opera, and half circus - colourful faces, acrobatic dances and varieties of juggling are nearly as important to the performance as singing and acting. Sichuan opera (chuan ju) is still more colourful and has some circensic disciplines that are unique to it.

Seeing an actor in the guise of a demon or dragon spitting fire may hardly surprise you, considering the amount of chili you find in the Sichuan cuisine.
But then there's this other guy of clown-like appearance doing the Rolling Light - difficult acrobatic feats and contortions (such as crawling under a small table, limbo-fashion) while carrying a biggish burning candle on his head. He, too, likes to play with fire, trying not to scorch his audience too much, or the props either.

During an interlude, shadows of birds, beasts or even humans may appear on a screen, created by contortions of the shadowgraphers hand. And sometimes the action is taken over by wonderfully crafted stick puppets: they, too, can dance, sing and act, and I have heard of some puppets that can even spit fire!

But the most closely guarded secret art of the Sichuan opera is Mask Changing (bian lian). No troupe is really complete without the Mask Changer, and nearly every play has a role for him written into it: maybe a cunning villain assuming different faces to shake off his pursuers, or a demoniacal magician whose face changes with his mood. There must be an opportunity for the artist to do a pantomime or dance, changing his face as often as he can - quick as lightning. Mr. He Hongqing, who has been calling himself the youngest and fastest Mask Changer in Chengdu (the capital of Sichuan Province) can change his face three times in 1,5 seconds; and Mr. Peng Denghuai, also from Chengdu (he's the four-eyed guy in the last picture), has established a world record by doing 14 changes in 24 seconds!

Exactly how Mask Changing is done is kept very, very secret... even today, with some Mask Changers taking on pupils for a fee, there aren't more than a few hundred people who can do it, nearly all of them in China. Some artists went so far as to propose it should be made a national secret!
Though looking Chinese enough, Alex Tan (see the video below) is something of an exception - he is from Singapore, and is that country's one and only Mask Changing Master, besides being a very good magician and illusionist. He can do something that even astonishes most other Mask Changers: at the end of his act, when he has shown his face without any mask and everyone thinks his repertoire is exhausted, suddenly he wears a mask again - one that wasn't seen before, of course.
However, Master Peng Denghuai wouldn't be astonished at that. When he did his world record act, after the 14th mask he showed his bare face - and quick as lightning he was masked again, only to change his mask four more times!