Taiwan Today

In April this year, a Taiwanese documentary won a gold award in the arts and culture category of the 2009 Houston International Film Festival, an event founded in 1961 and dedicated to independent filmmaking. Submitted by the government's Council for Cultural Affairs (CCA), the film tells the story of Liao Chiung-chih, a veteran performer of kua á hì, or Taiwanese opera, who received the 2008 Executive Yuan Culture Award in recognition of her lifetime achievement in promoting the art form. This year, Liao was again honored by the CCA as a "significant traditional art preserver," together with Yang Hsiu-ching, a central figure in the art of liam kua, or Taiwanese ballad singing and speaking. The awardees received the opportunity to teach their art forms along with a regular salary, equivalent to that of a university professor, in order to promote these Taiwanese art traditions.

Kua á hì has been considered one of the locally developed genres of drama in Taiwan. In the mid-17th century, ethnic Han people, largely from the southeast Chinese coastal provinces of Fujian and Guangdong, started to migrate to Taiwan, at that time dominated by indigenous Austronesian peoples. Among other cultural traditions, these immigrants brought with them their own dramatic practices such as pak kuán (or beiguan, northern style) and lâm kuán (or nanguan, southern style) music and plays as well as glove puppetry.

During the 19th century, another form of drama that combined singing and acting sprang up in northeastern Taiwan's Yilan region for both entertainment and as part of religious festivities, a style of performance that became known as kua á hì. Before long, these dramatized stories from classical novels, historical texts or folklore acted and sung in Holo became a common sight on outdoor stages as local audiences came to prefer them over other forms of drama. Many scholars and dramatists, including Liao Chiung-chih, believe that kua á hì developed as a natural extension of liam kua, which is usually performed by just one or two people playing many roles. With kua á hì, individual parts were created for a whole cast of actors. While Liao thinks liam kua might have been of Chinese origin, some researchers, however, maintain its lineage as essentially a native Taiwanese art form that combines local traditions of oral performance with the musical qualities of Holo, a language which retains seven of the ancient Han language's eight tones, in contrast with modern Mandarin Chinese, which has four tones.

During the period of Japanese rule (1895-1945), kua á hì troupes moved from open-air stages in small communities and temples to indoor theaters targeted at urban audiences. Among other innovations following the switch to performances inside theaters, troupes started to rely on a repertoire of complete scripts instead of the improvisational "live play" model, which was based on brief plot outlines. When Liao was born in 1935 in Taiwan's northernmost city of Keelung, the homegrown genre was at its heyday of professional performances across the island.

Life of Sorrow

In 1961, Liao won the best actress award for traditional drama in a national competition that was organized annually by the now defunct Taiwan Provincial Government from 1952 until the late 1990s. The type of character for which Liao received the top prize--a category named "Blue Dress" after the female character's usual costume--is typically a graceful, knowledgeable yet ill-fated woman who has a beautiful, enthralling singing voice. In fact, the mournful quality behind Liao's voice of the "tragic female," a role she has developed to an artistic height via a unique method of singing over the sound of crying, reflects many of the sad events in the artist's own life.

Liao grew up never knowing her father and her mother died in a shipwreck on the way to Guishan Island off the northeastern coast of Taiwan when the artist was a very young child. Liao moved to Taipei's Manka area--now the capital city's southwestern district of Wanhua--to live with her grandparents at the age of four. By the age of 10, she was selling the popular breakfast food you tiao, or fried bread sticks, in the early mornings and ice bars during the daytime to help her by-then widowed grandmother, who otherwise made a living by doing chores such as washing clothes for wealthier families. One of the little girl's small pleasures in her spare time was visiting a kua á hì troupe based near her house. Watching their rehearsals and classes with interest, she gradually developed her own lyrics to fit specific tune forms, a basic requirement of kua á hì performances. Eventually troupe members invited Liao to study the genre with them. At that time, the greatest enticement for the young girl to join the drama training program was a pair of embroidered shoes that performers were allowed to keep, and she persuaded her initially reluctant grandmother to let her go.

Then, when Liao was 14 years old, her grandmother died and she was left alone in the world. For a while, she worked for a traveling group selling traditional medicine and one time almost fell into the hands of a prostitution ring. After that she contracted herself to a kua á hì troupe named Jinshan, and later to other groups, leading a wandering life with traveling opera companies like many other children from poor families. What awaited her with the troupes was intensive, rigorous physical training including stretching exercises and various gymnastic drills as well as the routine hardships of an apprenticeship at the time such as all kinds of chores, severe reprimands and even beatings by senior troupe members. As for singing skills, a beginner must start by learning basic tune forms such as the Seven Words Tune, usually composed of four seven-word rhyming lines framed by tonal rules. Moreover, the teenage Liao had to develop her lung capacity and breath control and learn to sing in a high-pitched voice with a drawn-out tone. Before long, however, Liao found herself playing leading roles on the stage.

'Tragic Female'

In 1956, Liao joined the Long-xiaofeng Opera Troupe to learn from Chen Xiu-feng and gradually shifted from her former specialization as a martial arts character toward her distinguished "tragic female" category of roles. Her weeping, mournful tone conveys a great intensity of feeling that has the power of moving listeners to tears even though the Holo lyrics are barely intelligible to many of them.

For some art critics and scholars including Shih Ru-fang, a playwright who holds a master's degree in the study of kua á hì, Liao's singing is not only a lament for the hardships of her early life, but is also quite expressive of the repression and anguish felt by older generations of Taiwanese women in a patriarchal society. Taking Liao's experience as an orphan as an archetype of female sorrow, Shih wrote a script called Death and Love of My Mother: The Reminiscence of the Diva Daughter, a semi-staged production in November 2008 at the National Concert Hall in which Liao took the starring role.

"On stage, I would take glimpses of the audience, searching for a look that might have come from my mother," Liao narrated in this biographical piece, for which the National Chinese Orchestra, Taiwan (NCO) played orchestral versions of kua á hì melodies and Taiwanese ballads. "I've had no parents since my childhood and were I not such an orphan, frightened and beleaguered at every turn, sadness would not lead my voice," Liao sang in her signature moving style. The work featured three female characters--the current-day Liao, her younger self and her mother--who cross the borders of time and space to comfort each other, producing more heartbreaking, cathartic scenes for Taiwan's "No. 1 tragic female."

In a time of an economic downturn, the top performance of Taiwan's version of a Western operatic aria earned a good box office return as well as critical acclaim, making the shortlist of the 2008 Taishin Arts Awards. A major prize in Taiwan, this annual award, with its two categories of visual and performing arts, is funded by the Taishin Bank Foundation for Arts and Culture. Interviewed prior to the award, NCO conductor Wen Yi-jen said Liao's performance had the power of transporting listeners beyond her singing into a very personal state of imagination and spirituality. "One is entirely drawn into it," he noted.

Liao's rise to stardom through female roles marks a contrast to other female kua á hì celebrities such as Yang Li-hua and Ye Ching, who became superstars in the 1970s by playing "trouser roles" as male characters on television when televised kua á hì developed a huge following, especially among Taiwanese women. While the female audience might have been attracted to the gender-crossing image of Yang's or Ye's roles, they could find something to identify with in Liao's representations of common difficulties and repressed feelings. This somewhat female-centered aspect of Liao's art can be seen in Death and Love of My Mother, Shih has said in an explanation of her scriptwriting.

Liao was also one of the first kua á hì performers to appear on television. Before Taiwan's first television station was established in 1962, Liao had frequently been invited to sing live or prerecorded kua á hì programs for radio broadcasts, then a major entertainment medium. As the old art form found a new lease on life through the modern media, kua á hì helped cement Holo shows as an integral part of Taiwan's popular entertainment culture, especially at a time when Mandarin Chinese was promoted by the government. As kua á hì developed its commercial potential on the air, however, some aspects of traditional performances were compromised. For example, realistic settings replaced the subtle symbolism of traditional sets and the amount of time for singing was kept to a minimum during the daily shows of just 30 minutes, which included advertising time. The result was a show just like many other classically set costume dramas.

Mastering the Essentials

Liao believes that any development of modern styles must start with mastering the essential elements of the traditional art form. She has devoted herself to carrying on the kua á hì tradition since the early 1980s after being sought out by Paris-trained composer and scholar Hsu Tsang-houei (1929-2001), a major promoter of the preservation of Taiwanese folk music and drama. In 1994, Liao helped found and began to teach at the Taiwanese opera department of what is now National Taiwan College of Performing Arts in Taipei City's Neihu District. In 1999, she established the Liao Chiung-chih Taiwanese Opera Foundation for Culture and Education with the prize money from the National Culture and Arts Award she had won in the previous year. Among other programs to preserve and promote kua á hì, the foundation provides classes for lovers and would-be professionals of the art form. It also holds competitions for amateur performers, with an event in April this year included as part of the Baosheng Cultural Festival 2009 organized by the Dalongdong Baoan Temple in Taipei. Currently, Liao teaches at local communities and in schools including the Hsiu Lang Elementary School and the National Taiwan University of Arts in Taipei County. "I see all kua á hì learners as potential lovers of the art form and its future audience members," she says. This was also what she had in mind when she accepted the position of artist in residence at National Chengchi University in southern Taipei City earlier this year.

Liao would like to see the formation of government-funded kua á hì troupes. She says this would enable performers to devote themselves full-time to the practice of the art form, which she says is essential for the effective continuation of this authentically Taiwanese dramatic art. "There should also be more mid-sized theaters around the country to enable more kua á hì performances on a regular basis," she says. "Young people know much about fashion and trendy things, but they can also be drawn closer to something long cherished in their own culture."

Write to Pat Gao at kotsijin@gmail.com