The Contemporary Legend Theater has been trying for the last decade to find a new direction for Peking opera. Since it was established in 1984, the group's aim has been to keep the 200-year-old traditional art form alive in Taiwan by infusing it with new ideas. One approach has been to apply the opera's characteristic high-pitched singing, rhythmic recitation, and stylized acting to classic Western plays. Another has been to incorporate Western theatrical elements, such as more elaborate stage and costume designs, and to add a slight touch of Western-style characterization. The resulting mixture, which still strongly adheres to the Peking opera tradition, has been well-received by local and international audiences.
The group's first major work, The Kingdom of Desire, which premiered in 1987, was an adaptation of Macbeth. Many viewers were captivated by the introduction of Westernized elements such as the imaginative stage sets and costumes, and the complex personalities of the characters. But they were also pleased with the conventional opera elements that were retained, including the stylized singing patterns, poetic language, exciting acrobatic scenes, and precise sense of movement. The play was also well-received by London audiences in 1990 and in Tokyo last October. In 1990, Contemporary Legend also staged its second Shakespeare adaptation, based on Hamlet. In this production, the group adhered to its original successful formula.
Co-director Lin Hsiu-wei wanted the new play to be a more drastic departure from tradition than previous works-"lf we had tried to follow the steps we took before, we wouldn't grow professionally. Doing Lolannu allowed us to experiment."
In its most recent production, however, the Contemporary Legend took a new direction – one that left its audience somewhat confused about the future of modernized Peking opera. Lolannu (樓欄女). the latest work, was based on the ancient Greek tragedy Medea. It abandoned much of the hallmark singing and movement style that many viewers had expected to enjoy. In fact, this performance went further than ever in shedding the traditional opera basics and embracing a more modem, Western-oriented theatrical style. Many critics responded harshly to the new approach. Wang Sheng-shan (王生善), a professor of theater directing, wrote in the United Daily News, “In order to make an artistic breakthrough, the director [of Lolannu] has given up all the beauty of traditional Chinese theater.”
But the leaders of the Contemporary Legend defend their latest venture. Lin Hsiu-wei (林秀偉), who helped to found the group and was co-director of Lolannu, says they had decided long before the first rehearsal that they would not use the same formula as they had with The Kingdom of Desire and Hamlet, despite the popularity of those two productions. They felt it was time to try something new. “If we had tried to follow the steps we took before, we wouldn't grow professionally,” Lin says. “But neither did we want to do a traditional Greek tragedy. Doing Lolannu allowed us to experiment.”
Choosing Medea provided an opportunity for Contemporary Legend members to see what they could learn from traditional Greek theater, which in some ways differs from Peking opera even more than the Shakespearean dramas they had worked with before. It was, for one thing, a chance to use a new kind of dramatic structure. In keeping with the original play by Euripides, Lolannu was performed as a one-act drama, which is rare in both Chinese opera and Shakespeare. In fact, one reason for choosing Shakespeare for their initial attempts was its multiple-act structure, which corresponds to the structure of a typical Chinese opera. The Medea story could have easily been adapted also to a longer multiple-act version, but that would have left too little room for experimentation. “If we did the play beginning with Medea first meeting her husband, then getting angry with him, killing his new bride and then her children, and so on and so forth, it would have been too narrative, too similar to traditional Chinese theater,” Lin says. “That is exactly what we wanted to avoid.”
Medea also offered a vast departure from the usual plots and themes of Chinese opera. As Lin points out, the story of a woman like Medea, who kills her own children to revenge her husband, is far removed from the Chinese opera repertoire. Contemporary Legend members hoped such a thought-provoking story would echo among modern theatergoers who find the obligatory moral teachings of most traditional Chinese theater archaic. The viciously dominating character of Medea is also a drastic change from the outdated female roles of Chinese opera. Although she may not be an ideal to aspire to, Medea at least offers a new dimension. “The female protagonist in a traditional Chinese play is often a woman of chastity and virtue, willing to sacrifice her own happiness in pursuit of her husband's happiness,” Lin says. “It's difficult for modern audiences to identify with those kinds of values for women.”
There was another reason for Contemporary Legend members to choose a play that focuses on a strong female character: they wanted a challenging role for one of the group's biggest stars, Wei Hai-min (魏海敏). Wei has not only been a hit as the leading actress in the Contemporary Legend's Shakespearean adaptations, she is also an admired performer on the traditional Chinese opera stage. It was to the theater's advantage to give her the chance to take on a strong role. “Six years ago, after we did Macbeth, we felt we must find a play for Wei Hai-min,” Lin says. “She was not only good as Lady Macbeth, she is an excellent actress.”
For Wei, playing Medea was indeed a new challenge in her career, far different from the roles she took on as Lady Macbeth and Gertrude, Hamlet's mother, even though these characters are also unusual female types for Chinese opera. Trained as a Peking opera actress since age twelve, the 36-year-old Wei explains that traditional Chinese acting is based on physical expression, rather than on psychological expression, and focuses on four main elements: singing, recitation, stylized movement, and choreographed fighting scenes. “The emotion of a character is expressed through carefully designed movements to give the most beautiful visual effect,” she says. “And the lines are all recited or sung in falsetto like chanted poems.”
When Wei was told that she was to play Medea using a more natural type of acting and more subtle emotional expression, rather than designed physical movements and a stylized voice, she was at first intimidated. She felt unprepared, even though she had already played Lady Macbeth, one of the most famous and challenging roles in Western theater. “When I did Lady Macbeth,” she says, “my acting was still in the style of Peking opera.”
To help Wei prepare for the new role, two modern theater professionals were invited to join in the production of Lolannu: long-time stage actor Lee Yung-feng (李永豐), who now runs his own children's theater, and Lo Pei-an (羅北安), who teaches Western-style acting at the National Institute of the Arts in Taipei. Lee's job was to help the actors analyze the personality of each character, the psychological changes that they undergo, and the relationships among the characters – approaches common to Western acting but not often applied in the traditional Chinese theater. “Lee helped us to have a clear picture of our role in the play,” Wei says. He was also in charge of arranging the scenes.
Lo's job was to teach the performers specific Western-style acting skills. His first challenge was to help them learn to use their natural voices on stage. This was a special challenge for Wei, who has been so immersed in the opera tradition that she finds it natural to use the opera's conventional shrill, artificial tones whenever she performs. To help her make the change, Lo instructed Wei to grab his arm and push with all her strength while at the same time trying to make a sound with her natural voice. Since Wei's voice in reality is very mellow, she practiced and practiced until she was finally able to say her lines in a voice that was full of the raw emotion needed to express Medea's anger, hatred, sadness, and sorrow.
Lo also asked Wei and the leading male actor of the play, Wu Hsing-kuo (吳興國), to practice together outside rehearsal so they would be able to get into their roles more quickly. That was also a new approach for these experienced Peking opera actors, even for Wu, who played the starring roles in both Macbeth and Hamlet and is the group's artistic director. In traditional Chinese theater, Wei says, the actors practice their own roles individually and then go through the lines and actions together only a few times before the actual performance.
Wei and Wu were also asked to sit facing each other on the floor, then close their eyes and feel each other's faces with their hands. This kind of modern acting technique is also unheard of in Chinese theater. Wei recalls with a laugh, “It was so weird in the beginning. Normally you wouldn't look a familiar friend so straight in the eyes or study his hand, ear, hair, mouth, and everything about him with such intensity. I felt very embarrassed. Many times I couldn't help but burst out laughing in the middle of the exercise.”
Another challenge was to release the actors from their characteristically overstated acting habits so they could offer the more restrained and suggestive performance stressed in Western theater. As Lin Hsiu-wei says, “Peking opera players seldom if ever let their body go so as to fully project their soul into a character.” Instead, she says, they are always confined by the conventions they have learned for portraying set roles, such as the role of the chaste young woman or of the high-ranking general.
To help the actors learn to relax their bodies, Lin borrowed techniques from her work as an experimental modern dancer. Since she also has her own dance company, in which she often recruits dancers with Peking opera backgrounds, she is familiar with the problems they have in adopting more expressive techniques. Lin had Wei lie down in a pitch-dark room where she was to picture herself as a corpse long buried underground. She was then supposed to imagine water slowly seeping in and gradually loosening the soil, bringing her body back to life again.
It was, in fact, the idea of a mysterious corpse that helped the Contemporary Legend figure out how to create a Chinese adaptation for the story of Medea. They wanted to give the playa Chinese feel while still keeping the same storyline and the personalities of the original characters. When they heard the news of an ancient but well-preserved woman's corpse uncovered in 1980 in what was once the ancient kingdom of Lolan, now Xinjiang in western China, it seemed to offer the perfect historical setting. The woman who had been buried for at least one thousand years in the sand seemed to be shrouded in the same kind of mystery as the character of Medea. “We wondered why an aristocratic woman who had died ages ago would be destined to appear again today,” Lin says. “Did she commit such an unforgivable sin that she was punished by not being allowed any peace even after her death?”
So in the Contemporary Legend's play, Medea became Lolannu, the princess of Lolan, rather than the daughter of an ancient king. And the play was set in Dunhuang, an ancient city to the west of Lolan. The unearthed corpse also gave Lin an idea for how to open the play. It begins, in a sort of flashback, with the coffin of Lolannu being carried down a mountainlike staircase against a background of gloomy, sonorous electronic music. Although Lolannu does not die at the end of the play, the coffin suggests the tortured eternity that awaits her after the grave.
Except for the dramatic opening and the changed setting, the story of Lolannu stays close to the original Medea. The princess of Lolan is even given a Chinese pronunciation of the name Medea. The play proceeds with Medea learning that her husband, Jason, is about to allow her and their two children to be sent into exile so that he can marry the daughter of the Lord of Dunhuang, in the hopes of gaining power. Medea, who had already killed her own brother in order to marry Jason, now begins to plot her revenge. Her passionate love for her husband turns into relentless hatred. She uses her powers of black magic to kill his new bride with a poisonous robe, sent as a wedding gift. Then, in the act of ultimate revenge, she murders her own children, a gesture that leaves their father, Jason, in unending remorse and despair. In the end, Medea takes flight, rejoicing in her morbid victory. No Chinese opera has ever ended in such perverse tragedy.
Lolannu also departs from tradition in its style of language. A first attempt was made to translate the script into the recitation style of Chinese opera, which had worked well for the group's versions of Macbeth and Hamlet. But it didn't work with Lolannu. “Peking opera's language is very subtle, elegant, rhythmic, and almost poetic,” says Lin. “In that kind of style, it was impossible for Wei to express the complex emotional turbulence, the intense anger of Medea.” According to Lin, the script was rewritten three times until an appropriate style, combining the language of modern poetry and everyday conversation, was found.
But the new language proved one of the most difficult changes for audiences to accept. For some it was too great a departure from traditional Chinese opera, especially since many of the lines were also not sung or recited in the accepted operatic style. Wei says that some long-time operagoers even told her she was wasting her talent by playing Medea. They were most disappointed, she says, that she did not use the traditional singing style for the final song, “Crying Over My Children.”
In that scene, one of the few in which Wei was given a chance to sing, Medea bids farewell to her children before killing them. Although she is tormented by her motherly love, her determination to punish her husband in the cruelest way possible finally gets the upper hand. Still, in the song, she cries for her children and the fate that awaits them. The three of them huddle together on the floor, Medea rocking the two children in her anns as she sings a low, sad melody. The song, composed by the play's music director, Hsu Po-yun (許博允), was inspired by Mongolian folk melodies. Although it was a very touching scene, one of the highpoints of the play, many audience members were still disappointed in the non-traditional singing approach. Wei emphasized her natural singing voice rather than the high-pitched, artificial tones of Peking opera. “When I had to raise my voice,” she says, “it was my natural voice that did the trick.”
Director Lin insists, however, that both types of singing can be detected in the final song, making it very difficult to perform. Wei also says she did not entirely give up the high-pitched opera voice for which she is so well known, either in this scene or throughout the play. Often, after allowing her natural voice to reach a high pitch, she would switch to the operatic falsetto right at the very end of a particular speech. Nor does Wei think she was wasting her training or her talent. She says she would never have been able to switch her voice as freely as she did in playing Medea if not for her Peking opera voice training.
The rest of Hsu Po-yun's music for Lolannu was an even greater departure from tradition. Instead of traditional drums, gongs, horns, and small stringed instruments, he used an electronic synthesizer to create an atmosphere of eerie, wretched solitude. Hsu was not so much concerned about tradition as about creating music that reflected the story of the play. He also wanted to stimulate the audience's association with the vast expanse of desert in western China, where ancient Lolan and Dunhuang were located.
The elegant and rhythmic verse of Peking opera proved unsuitable for the intense emotions that Wei Hai-min had to express as Medea. Instead, the directors chose a new language style that combined modern poetry and everyday conversation.
The movement style of the play was another source of controversy. Many viewers had expected to see at least one of the exciting acrobatic scenes that are common to Chinese opera and were still an important part of Macbeth and Hamlet. But instead of acrobats, Lolannu made use of the chorus that is found in the original Greek play. This group of darkly robed and masked figures often surround Medea or move hauntingly about the stage. The way in which the chorus encircles Medea, however, could be seen as an extension of a common Peking opera practice in which a group of minor actors builds up a theatrical climax by running around a character along to the beating of drums and gongs. But the movement style of the Lolannu chorus is drawn more from modern dance. In fact, about half of the chorus members had modern dance training.
Again, Lin insists that Lolannu was not devoid of the stylized grace typical of traditional opera. In fact, Lee Hsiao-ping (李小平), a Peking opera actor and director, was invited to choreograph the gestures of the play. The male characters were all instructed to walk in the traditional opera style, by emphatically raising one leg in the air before taking each step. The female actors were required to make use of the stylized “orchid finger” movements and the short, quick “lotus steps,” both typical opera gestures.
Wei thinks that because Lolannu incorporated these kinds of gestures, an attentive audience could still experience it as Chinese opera. “If you watched our play very carefully, you would have noticed that every gesture we used was taken from traditional Chinese theater,” she says. “Often I borrowed a basic pose from Peking opera to balance my body, or I shook my hands as if I were shaking the flowing sleeves of a traditional theater costume.”
But she does admit that viewers might have been distracted from seeing such subtle movements by Lolannu' s unusual costumes, designed by Yeh Chin-tien (葉錦添), an accomplished art and costume designer in the Hong Kong film industry. “Under those long, heavy, layered garments, the audience would find it hard to perceive the way we moved,” she says. Initially, Wei herself had refused to wear the costume for Medea's opening scene. She was bewildered about the short clubs attached to the ends of the long sleeves. “What am I supposed to do with these two funny things?” she asked. But after some practice, she found them useful in enhancing her acting. Costume designer Yeh thinks the clubs helped Wei create a more powerful visual dimension in her body language to express Medea's changing moods. “Especially when she violently threw her arms out with both hands firmly grabbing the clubs as she turned and walked away in anger,” Yeh says. His design was inspired by the double iron sticks used by the late kungfu actor Bruce Lee.
Rehearsing the opening scene-Inspired by the 1980 discovery of the corpse of a mysterious woman from ancient Lolan, Lin Hsiu-wei transported Medea to the same setting, and included a symbolic coffin in the first scene.
The inspiration for many of the other costumes, Yeh says, came directly from Peking opera, although he was also criticized for an overly Westernized approach. “My designs might look Western,” he says, “but they are Chinese.” For example, the skirts worn by Medea and the children's nurse are full and layered in a Western fashion, but they have distinct Chinese touches, such as a traditional high collar and flowing sleeves.
The fantastic headdresses that Yeh designed for Lolannu were even more directly inspired by conventional Peking opera. He says Medea's flowery, fan-shaped headpiece, with long ornamental tassels hanging down the side, was a recreation of a headdress worn by the famous opera character Lady Yang Yu-huan, the beautiful concubine of a Tang dynasty emperor. In designing the various headpieces, Yeh also followed the traditional practice of using symbols to emphasize a character's temperament. Yeh's symbols, however, are much larger and more exotic than in conventional opera. The nurse, for example, wears a headdress topped by a great woolen ball, symbolizing her motherly nature. The crescent moon on top of the headpiece of the children's tutor represents intelligence. And Jason's relentless ambition is suggested by a tower-like ornament placed on top of his hat.
Some of Yeh's other designs, while not inspired by Peking opera, are drawn from elsewhere in Chinese culture. The idea for the masks of the chorus members, for example, came from the mask theater of Guizhou province. And the design of the chorus' dark green, ragged garments was an adaptation of the traditional costumes worn by the Dai minority people in Yunnan province.
Seeing Yeh's costumes on stage, it is difficult to judge whether they are Chinese or Western. But, along with much of the rest of Lolannu, many operagoers were disturbed by the gulf between what they saw on the stage and what they had expected from a Chinese opera group, even one that promotes modernization of the form. The audience response, however, didn't surprise Lin. She feels it always takes time for the public to get used to changes in a traditional art form. “We had a similar experience when we staged The Kingdom of Desire for the first time seven years ago,” she says. “Many members of the audience did not think our version of Macbeth was Chinese – nor did they think we followed the tradition of Shakespearean theater. But we also realized one thing: that in all artistic creations, you take the risk of being rejected.”
Lin was also not surprised that many foreigners who saw Lolannu in Taipei reacted more favorably. “That also happened in our previous productions,” she says with a laugh. “I was told by one foreign audience member that our version of Medea was very Chinese, and that only Chinese could have done it that way.” Already, the group has been invited to perform Lolannu at an Austrian arts festival this May. And there is talk about doing performances in Japan and Europe. Says Lin, “That at least helps justify our endeavor to try to make a breakthrough in our art.”