Taiwan Today

One of 's best-known opera performers has devoted herself to becoming a "sales representative" for the art form.

Four decades of total devotion to the promotion of Peking opera and the development of innovative performance techniques based on solid traditional skills won Wei Hai-ming the 2007 National Award for Arts--Taiwan's highest artistic honor--in the performing arts category. For Wei, it was another entry in the long list of awards she had won, but she was nevertheless very excited. "The art of opera has been overlooked for so long," she says. "I was so excited because the award could mean that more people will become interested in opera, and there's also no doubt that it's an encouragement to those who are still performing it."

Born in 1957, Wei is the youngest of three daughters. Her father's playing the huqin, a traditional Chinese string instrument, and occasionally singing lines from opera gave Wei an early encounter with the art. One day, Wei's father saw a small ad that a Peking opera school in near their home in Chiayi, southern was recruiting students and he asked his 11-year-old daughter if she was interested. "I had loved to sing and dance since I was very young and thought life couldn't be better if that was all I had to do," Wei says. "I guess I was looking at the opera school as an escape from the pressures of the normal school system." So in 1969, she joined the , which was operated by the navy's Haiguang Chinese Opera Troupe. Some troupes require members to change their names by adding the first character of the troupe's name to their given name, and thus, Wei Ming, as she was formerly known, changed her name to Wei Hai-ming.

One Month of Joy

Life at the opera school turned out to be joyful indeed--but only for the first month. After that, her education took on a much more martial aspect. The students were awakened at 5:.m. and had to complete an entire set of vocal and physical exercises before breakfast. More training came in the morning and afternoon, while the evening was spent on "normal" school subjects such as math. "It was training, training and training," Wei recalls. "I guess we got that first month because the school didn't want to scare all the students away."

The basic training went on for 18 months, after which time the students had to choose the category of character they would specialize in. opera characters are divided into four categories according to sex, age, rank and function. Each category has its own repertoire of stage movements that performers can choose from to express the particular situation of their characters. Wei was encouraged to study the category of qingyi characters, which consist of virtuous women such as dutiful daughters or devoted wives and mothers. Since the qingyi role focuses more on singing than other categories, the performer needs to have a good voice, as well as attractive looks and sufficient height.

Wei graduated from the opera school in 1976 and entered a two-year internship with the Haiguang Chinese Opera Troupe. A natural talent with all the essential qualities--a graceful figure, noble face, excellent voice, acuity of mind and innate charisma--Wei soon became the diva of the troupe. At the time, Peking opera was still an important form of entertainment for immigrants who came to from mainland in the late 1940s. It was also an art form promoted by the government, as all the military branches had their own troupes. In addition to entertaining soldiers, these troupes also performed for the public and sometimes for overseas Chinese communities. The Ministry of National Defense would also organize opera contests among the military troupes, and Wei won several awards in these contests.

Life was also busy off the stage. In the decade after she graduated from the , Wei became a wife and mother; performed in two movies, televised drama series and televised Peking operas; and also hosted programs about opera. Moving to in 1980 with her now former husband also had a tremendous influence on Wei. During her stay there, she had the chance to watch videos of mainland Chinese master performers such as Mei Lanfang (1894-1961), and in 1982 she saw a live performance by his son Mei Baojiu. This father and son developed a style now known as the Mei school, which is one of opera's four major branches in terms of female roles, with the primary differences most apparent in the performance and singing style.

Wei explains that there was no communication between performance troupes in and mainland at a time when was still under martial law, and it was almost impossible to get any information about mainland opera performers and their performances. However, without making a conscious effort to do so, Wei had picked up a few of the Mei school's techniques. "All I had done back when I was a student was to follow suit without really knowing it, but I could better appreciate and go deeper into the beauty of the Mei school after several years as an actress," Wei says of her experience of watching Mei Baojiu in . "Sitting in the audience, my whole world became different after the sound of the gong [indicating the beginning of the show]."

In 1982 Wei became a student again, enrolling in National Taiwan College of Arts in , a school now known as National Taiwan University of Arts. Wei explains that opera is an art form that has developed over a very long time, to the point that every detail is shaped and fixed. The opera schools' approach is to train the students to perform within such "framed" singing and movement. Going back to school allowed her the opportunity to learn the theory and history of opera, but the knowledge, in a way, had less impact on Wei's future than her fellow students. More important to her were the conversations with classmates such as Wu Hsing-kuo, who is also a opera performer. The two talked frequently and in depth about the genre--the tradition, the performers, the declining audience, as well as possibilities for its future.

Rise of a Legend

One of Wu's ideas for reviving the popularity of opera was to adapt the traditional art to modern theatrical forms. The idea was enthusiastically supported by Wei and Lin Hsiu-wei, Wu's wife and a dancer and choreographer, as well as by a dozen young friends, most of whom were opera performers. In 1986, they founded the Contemporary Legend Theater and staged its first play, The Kingdom of Desire, in the same year.

Adapted from William Shakespeare's Macbeth, The Kingdom of Desire sought to fuse the singing, acting, reciting, and acrobatic fighting of traditional opera with Western dramatic concepts and present the final result in the form of theater. Contemporary Legend found similarities between Shakespeare's plays and opera, such as the narrative recitals, the poetic lines and the asides. However, for those schooled in opera, there were also huge changes in stage design, costumes, lights and almost everything else to cope with.

Reviews for The Kingdom of Desire were mixed. The fans of traditional opera did not like it one bit. "They said we were neither traditional nor modern," Wei says. "In fact, they thought we'd turned opera into some kind of monster." On the other hand, the production was warmly received by those more open to modern performing arts and Western theater, with many saying the performance successfully challenged perceptions of opera and created a totally new aesthetic in the theater world. Since its premier, The Kingdom of Desire has been staged in countries around the world including , , , the , Hong Kong, mainland and Shakespeare's home country, .

The success of its first play encouraged Contemporary Legend to continue its work. In 1990, it produced Love and Eternity, which was based on Shakespeare's Hamlet and in which Wei played Hamlet's mother, Gertrude.

Despite her success, in 1991, Wei set herself the goal of sharpening her Mei school vocal techniques. She decided to go to the source, formally becoming Mei Baojiu's student in after political relations with mainland eased and cross-strait travel was allowed. Wei flew to as often as she could and soon began performing with several troupes there.

In 1992, when Contemporary Legend started to work on Lolannu, which was based on the Greek tragedy Medea, Wei's outstanding performances in The Kingdom of Desire and Love and Eternity led the group to develop a play focusing on a strong female character. Despite her solid opera techniques and previous experience with Contemporary Legend, Wei considered Lolannu one of the biggest challenges of her career. She points out that the story of a woman like Medea, who kills her own children to gain revenge against her husband, is far removed from the typical opera role, where a female character is usually a woman of chastity and virtue who is willing to sacrifice her own happiness for her husband's. " opera is about beauty and virtue, but Western dramas depict life and human nature," she says. "Shifting from years of training in the tender and obedient qingyi role to one struggling between love, hate and conscience was a big challenge."

It made Wei even more uncomfortable when she was told that she should play the role of Medea by using a more natural type of acting and finding ways to subtly express the character's emotions. Wei, who had played Lady Macbeth in The Kingdom of Desire, admits that her performance in that play was still in the style of opera--that is, based on physical expression--while Western theater is based on using language to express a character's psychology. To help Wei and other players prepare, Contemporary Legend invited two modern theater professionals to teach specific Western-style acting skills, as well as to analyze the characters' personalities, the psychological changes they undergo and the relationships between them. The joint efforts paid off when Lolannu premiered in 1993 and found success both at the box office and with reviewers.

Declining Interest

While Contemporary Legend has been gaining worldwide recognition, it has not been able to attract more fans to traditional opera. Wei explains that since the dismantling of 's military opera troupes in the mid-1990s, there have been few performances to go to, with the result that performers have left the genre and public interest has declined. Currently, the only troupe that stages traditional Peking opera regularly in is the National Guoguang Opera Company, which was created by merging the army, navy, air force and marine troupes in 1995. Wei has been the star of the troupe since then, sharing the responsibility of preserving the traditional art, but she finds the lack of public interest difficult to cope with. "One minute on stage takes 10 years of practice, but the hardest thing for an actor to take isn't the training, it's performing without an audience," she says.

As long as the topic is opera, however, Wei remains active and enthusiastic, even when she is not on stage. "I like to call myself a 'sales representative' for opera," she says. And to "sell" the art, she founded the Wei Hai Ming Chinese Opera Foundation in 1995 and teaches traditional Peking opera at of the Arts and . Rather than training students to become opera performers, Wei hopes to stimulate their interest in appreciating the art form and thus create more fans.

In order to draw the interest of younger generations, Wei also gives many speeches at high schools and universities. "Most first-time audience members come to the speeches to see this celebrity called Wei Hai-ming, but they don't have much of an idea about what opera is," she says. "It's perfectly alright with me because I'm confident that they'll leave having learned something." So for every speech, Wei arrives early, puts on her costumes and makeup and delivers her presentation half by speaking and half by acting and singing.

Wei's work to boost the profile of Peking opera in bore fruit in 2008, when her album The Ultimate of Peking Opera, which was performed in the Mei school style, won that year's Golden Melody Award for Best Traditional Music Interpretation. Still, she is not content to rest on her laurels, and was scheduled to open a performance of Virginia Woolf's in in February. Under groundbreaking American director Robert Wilson, is another work that fuses a Western storyline and characters with elements of opera. But after the curtain goes down on that production, Wei will still be found standing on stages in high schools, playing her two roles in life--that of a Peking opera qingyi, and that of a Peking opera sales representative.

Write to Jim Hwang at jim@mail.gio.gov.tw