Enter the dancing yaks...

Last night I had the truly illuminating experience of going to see the "Tibetan Opera" with two Chinese friends.

Now I love performances of any kind, particularly musicals, the love of which harkens back to high school where I played three instruments in the pit band. This, however, was unlike anything I have ever seen. It was neither Tibetan nor an opera, and after much thought I have only come up with one way to describe it: If a circus, the Nutcracker suite, and a Tibetan Buddhist monastery had a collision and a Chinese man, with access to LCD screens and fog machines, caught it on tape it would have been as close to the same effect as what I saw last night as anything I can imagine.

And it was illuminating, not because of the green lasers or the shimmering representations of balletic gods, not because of the prayer wheel wielding tap dancers or the candle stick bearing contortionists, but because of the conversation that I had with my Chinese friends after the drummers, dancing yaks, acrobatic lotus', and array of Tibetan garb clad actors had all taken their bows.

To me, everything about the performance was Chinese. I've never seen a Tibetan twist their body into the pretzels that those Chinese performers were capable of. I've never known any Tibetan to dance around to a remix of their traditional songs with a butter churn. I've heard plenty of mumbled incantations and chilling monastery horns but I've never seen them accompanied by absurdly ornamented women and children mouthing words that they no doubt can't actually speak. I've seen many Tibetan minorities but never come in contact with so many Chinese dancers in braided wigs.

To my Chinese friends, this performance was the height of Tibetan culture. Didn't I notice the yaks? Had I never seen the drums or butter lamps at the temples? How do I explain all of the strange clothes... if it wasn't, in fact, Tibetan?

The truth is this: what I saw last night was Tibetan culture Chineseified to the max. For the first time I was watching what the best assumptions from the Chinese are for their Tibetan neighbors. It was illuminating... it was strange. No wonder things are complicated here.

Needless to say, I'll never be able to watch another performance sans dancing yaks and be satisfied ever again.