Search

Ensconced in a spacious office among the dimly lit halls of the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) in Manila, Nicanor Tiongson, the artistic director of the center, explained the dilemma of contemporary Filipino theatre. Refuting the common compliment that Filipino actors are so versatile they can perform in major productions all over the world, he said that instead he envied Indonesian performers their strong, unbroken classical tradition: whichever new idea or movement Indonesian performers encountered, their tradition effected and assimilated it into their own stylistic structure and ideology.' Therefore, everything the Indonesians came in contact with became identifiably their own, in contrast to the chameleon mutability of the Philippine performer whose talent lay in the unconscious imitation of the original. This very talent, according to Tiongson, reveals the Filipino's own lack of cultural identity and the culture's lack of a core tradition (1994). This situation does not follow a typical postcolonial model in which dramatists must choose between an indigenous but antiquated tradition and a modem but foreign implantation. The lack of a formalized classical tradition is also the reason Western scholars have taken little notice of the Philippines' unique theatrical developments. In spite of this, most current Philippine performances are part of a conscious culture-building project to establish a national identity within the theatrical context.

On January 18, 1994, Peter Schumann, the director and originator of the Bread and Puppet Theatre, brought some of his one-hundred-year-old sourdough starter to make and break bread with the 425 Environmental Theatre (425 Huangjingjuchang)a in Taipei. The two were collaborating in the Council of Cultural Planning and Development's (CCPD) two-week workshop and performance of Mending the Sky (Bu tian),b an antipollution allegory based on Chinese creation myths. Bread and Puppet was invited specifically to help stimulate Taiwan's community theatre by introducing new methods of developing and presenting community-based productions. Founded in 1963 in New York City, Bread and Puppet has become internationally known for its outdoor performances with masked actors, enormous effigies, improvised music, choreographed movement of large numbers of people, and narratives dealing directly with political or social issues of importance to the host community. As an environmentally conscious theatre, Bread and Puppet purposefully converts junk and cast-off materials to make its props and puppets, and although the design of most of the puppets bears the distinctive mark of Schumann himself, their actual production is a cooperative effort of the participants. The troupe has toured all over the world, always performing in public places and involving local inhabitants in some part of the performance to promote its underlying message: art is not elite, but for all people-as basic and as necessary as bread. Zhong Mingde,c the director of 425, first encountered the

The idea of a Beijing opera adaptation of Macbeth was hatched in 1983 by a group of young actors in Taipei who were discussing the decline of Beijing opera. As artists, they wanted to keep their form alive and stimulating and were not content to perform museum pieces or serve as mere preservers or repositories of a bygone culture. They were concerned because Beijing opera was not only losing its present audience of elderly knowledgeable supporters but failing to attract new replacements; without an audience appreciative of the subtleties of the form, it would gradually disappear. This younger generation of Beijing opera performers had to find a source of renewal that not only gave them artistic inspiration but also validated their activity in the eyes of the young intellectuals they wanted to attract. Noting both the diminishing audience and the decreasing enrollment in the Beijing opera training schools, scholars and performers have begun to analyze the troubling situation and consider solutions. Beijing opera today confronts several problems: the archaic language has created a dependency on subtitles projected on screens to help both Taiwaneseborn and mainland-born spectators alike, a stopgap solution that inhibits proper development of the form; the music-now that many audience members are more familiar with Western music, they find the sounds of the Beijing orchestra too raucous and unappealing; the arias, emphasized at the expense of dramatic content, no longer sustain the audience's interest; and, most seriously, Beijing opera appears irrelevant to the modern world, embodying as it does an older morality and worldview (Perng 1989, 132).1

During its five years of existence, the Yu Theatre Ensemblea of Taipei has undertaken the task of creating a new Taiwanese theatre by incorporating Taiwanese folk arts, classical Chinese stories, the martial arts, and contemporary Western theatrical techniques. As part of a growing movement in Taiwan to explore and develop local traditions and arts, the Yu Theatre confronts two related obstacles: the underdeveloped tradition of Taiwanese spoken theatre that is now trying to carve a niche for itself in a posttelevision, postfilm era, and a recent history of repressive regimes that have stifled the development of Taiwanese local culture (Ma 1991, 215-216). It may seem a contradiction to incorporate foreign techniques when one's intention is to revitalize and reestablish one's native traditions, but Yu's founder and director, Liu Ching-min,b feels that Taiwan's culture has been so imposed upon and so broken by external forces that all resources should be explored for the creation of a new and uniquely Taiwanese theatre. The people currently called Taiwanese are descendants of immigrants from China's southern provinces, primarily Fukien, who came over four hundred years ago and speak the min nanc language. In 1895, Taiwan was ceded to Japan by the Chinese Manchu government as indemnity for its defeat in the Sino-Japanese War. The Japanese colonized the island for fifty years, and although in the 1920s and early 1930s both Taiwanese and Japanese spoken dramas were performed, Taiwanese performances, especially those advocating national identity, were banned when the war with China began. In 1949, when Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist forces and supporters retreated to the island, writers of Mandarin from the mainland came to dominate Taiwan's theatre and literature. The mainland Nation