She once asked Liu to dress her up as the female role in The Drunken Concubine, which tells a story of the famous Yang Yuhuan, a concubine to Emperor Minghuang in Tang Dynasty (AD 618-907). Liu's mother helped Shavrova dress up. It took two hours.
When it was done, Shavrova stood up and felt dizzy.
"Literally, I couldn't move. And these actors, on top of all this, they have to sing and dance, and they have to do a sword dance. It's really tough," she says.
But while contemporary performances have stolen the stage from Peking Opera, Shavrova believes the genre is modern, rather than archaic.
"I thought of it as being modern on an intuitive level," she says.
"It is like contemporary art, which you wouldn't understand unless you put time into understanding what the artist means. It was very charming and very beautiful."
She also believes it operates according to its own rules.
"It has nothing to do with this life," she says.
Shavrova worries this performance art will die out if its popularity further declines and if the Chinese government doesn't sufficiently support it.
She points out a lot of the country's architectural heritage, such as Beijing's hutong, have largely vanished. If such performances as Peking Opera disappear, too, Chinese culture might be reduced to food and festivals.
Shavrova believes the solution may be to promote among youth, such as in schools.
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