A Fish Swimming Across Tanks
- 7月11日
- 讀畢需時 8 分鐘
Even with solid training in xiqu, or Chinese opera, Yu-Hsuan Chou tried to leave traditions behind when she first entered contemporary theatre. “I was there to learn how to write musicals. What’s the point of returning to the old stuff?” Yet, unlearning might not be the most clever move for her, in hindsight, since her plays are often praised for their capacity to reinvent old forms in new styles. “Why did I want to tie my own hands then?” she asks self-deprecatingly.
It is, of course, accurate to call Chou a xiqu playwright, but with School of the Underworld, a genre-bending musical, and Othello, a cross-cultural adaptation, that title seems increasingly insufficient. Categorizing her as a contemporary playwright wouldn’t do her justice, either. She stands right between xiqu and contemporary theatre, summoning power from both sides.
Chou is currently in the second year of her residency at the Prologue Center for New Plays. Kuan-Ting Lin, the literary manager at Prologue, sat down with her on a sunny morning. They talked about her fifteen years of experience in playwriting, her views on xiqu and contemporary theatre, and how she found power in remaining beautifully uncategorized.
Lin: You began writing plays through xiqu, often in response to specific performers or commissions. Before you came to identify yourself as a playwright, what first drew you to writing for the stage?
Chou: I wrote my first xiqu play in graduate school. There’s this funny idea that graduate students are always learning something new to get away from writing theses, and playwriting was mine. The play is called The Kunqu Connoisseur (顧曲郎), and it was inspired by a true story between a kunqu (崑曲) performer and his lover. However, it’s not a kunqu play by definition. I took and mixed elements from kunqu performances, Peking opera, and contemporary theatre without even realizing it. That play was where everything started.
Lin: 2019 was a turning point for you. You were selected for Our Theatre’s The Farm of Plays, a three-year new play developmental program, and the Taipei Performing Arts Center’s (TPAC’s) Musical Theatre Training Project. How did that year change your sense of what it meant to be a playwright?
Chou: My writing always served other purposes before 2019, either for a specific performer like Chao-Hsin (兆欣), my dear actor friend and long-term collaborator, or for a writing contest. I wrote more like a craftsman than an artist.
2019 was transformative in a few ways. For one thing, that was the year when people started calling me a “playwright,” especially at Our Theatre. It’s less common to be called a playwright in the xiqu circle. Xiqu is based largely on actorship, thus holding a different view on the roles that contribute to a theatre production. That said, the title kept reminding me that my words are the magic that builds a stage. For another thing, it was my first dive into modern drama and musical theatre. The lexicons are so different that fancy concepts like “context” often dazzled and overwhelmed me in the beginning.
My key takeaways from 2019 are that good playwrights are craftspeople, yet great playwrights are artists. And, like all artists, playwrights are entitled to explore through writing. They should be encouraged to keep on writing until a play has their own voice in it.
If I were a fish, 2019 had drawn me out of an old fish tank and put me into a new one. Adjusting to the fresh water took some time, but it was worth the effort.
Lin: Your work often stands at the intersection of xiqu and contemporary theatre, but your approach to writing doesn’t seem to treat them as opposites. How do you understand the relationship between these two worlds?
Chou: Xiqu is often considered traditional theatre, and that’s probably why it’s often pitted against contemporary theatre. While contemporary theatre plays the role of encouraging innovations, xiqu is expected to focus only on the preservation of heritage. The idea is common in the contemporary theatre community, but it’s downright pervasive in the xiqu circle. Some xiqu makers are proud of being the gatekeepers of traditional arts.
However, it doesn’t seem very grounded to me. The audience watching my work, whether it’s a play, a musical, or a xiqu performance, will always be my contemporaries, and so are my artistic partners. How could a work be purely traditional, if not historical, when everyone and everything involved exists at this moment? The work will always be a hybrid of the past and the present.
A playwright’s job is to write good plays, not to categorize them. Since The Kunqu Connoisseur, this thought may have already been on my mind, and maybe that’s why my writing takes parts from various theatrical forms.
Lin: With such a spirit, how do you navigate the writing conventions framed by the codified role types, or hangdang (行當), in xiqu, where a character’s age, gender, social status, and moral position are predetermined?
Chou: Xiqu began with role types, so it never really appreciated the concept of character development. This tradition has also influenced xiqu performers’ ways of training. Most xiqu performers spend a lifetime on one role type. For example, when a performer chooses to play a xiaosheng (小生), their life is dedicated to mastering how to walk, talk, and sing like a young man, and it’s impossible for them to take on other roles.
However, as a playwright, I love being playful with the performance codes. I did that a lot in Seven Tales: Under the Skin (形色抄). All seven short scenes in the play question the rigid distinctions between actors and their roles, humans and their spirits. Actors have to play the five traditional role types—sheng, dan, jing, mo, chou (生、旦、淨、末、丑)—but they’re required not to play in code a lot of times.
The role types establish the framework of all xiqu performances, so I use them as the middle ground where I meet my audience. After greeting them and inviting them into my play, I start writing against the framework, making the roles do the unexpected. Playwriting is often about dancing with the audience’s expectations, and it’s the most fun when a play reaches the point of being unexpected yet inevitable.
Lin: “Chang nian zuo da (唱念做打)”—meaning singing, recitation, acting, and acrobatics—is a four-word expression that ranks the importance of a xiqu performer’s skills. Singing comes in first, highlighting the emphasis on the musicality of xiqu. How does the sense of rhythm and density affect the way you write dialogue for different kinds of theatre?
Chou: Language in xiqu comes in various forms, including sung passages, verse patterns, stylized speech, and more. They all serve certain dramatic functions and carry different emotional weights. They’re like Lego bricks, and whether as an audience member or as a playwright, I’ve developed the gut instinct to tell where there should be another brick—an inner monologue or a scene change—a different mood anyway.
This gut feeling proved very helpful in writing musicals. Just as a xiqu performance jumps from speeches to verses, a musical alternates between dialogue and songs. So, when the instinct hits, I know it’s time to move onto another passage.
Nevertheless, carrying the writing habits of a xiqu playwright was occasionally an obstacle in my crossover to contemporary theatre. Lines in a xiqu play often stick strictly to a form—a ten-syllable line (十字句), for example—so my diction tends to be more concise and historical. Funny enough, when I’m working on a contemporary piece, actors often ask me to rewrite the lines because they sound too archaic.
Lin: School of the Underworld is an exemplary piece of your hybrid dramaturgy. You blended the forms of xiqu and musicals in this play that reveals the dark side of school. Would you like to share how it came into being?
Chou: I teach Chinese at a high school. So when TPAC asked me to come up with a writing project, I thought it would be meaningful to take advantage of my experience and observations as a high school teacher.
Classrooms are very different nowadays, for both students and teachers. On the students’ end, there are more incidents of school violence; on the other end, teachers often feel pressured or bullied within the bureaucratic system. The dynamics between students and teachers are getting more intense too. The change in teaching sites gave me a good reason to create a piece about it.
I didn’t intend to integrate xiqu and musicals at first. Surprisingly, when the musical was under production, TPAC paired me up with a theatre company dedicated to experimenting with Peking opera. Since the production team and I come from a similar background, it would be silly to leave out the xiqu elements.
Besides the xiqu elements, the Hakka language plays a significant role in School of the Underworld, and there are reasons for this artistic choice. A famous Hakka actor was playing the female lead, and I couldn’t resist the idea of making the piece for her. Also, musical theatre loves wordplay, and using more than one language helps create the space. However, most importantly, even though Hakka is the third most spoken language in Taiwan, it’s always been under the suppression of Mandarin Chinese. The hierarchy between these two languages could mirror that between the leading female teacher and her superiors. She uses Hakka for inner monologues or at resilient moments. For her, it’s the language of empowerment.
Lin: Many of your plays find their origins in canonical works, like The Life of Du (杜子春) and Othello (奧賽羅), but they rarely remain straightforward adaptations. What’s your approach to existing texts when you transform them into theatrical forms?
Chou: My approach varies from play to play. The Life of Du was a collaboration among me, a Peking opera company, and a Chinese orchestra. Before writing, we talked about the actors’ traits and the musical elements and agreed to adapt Du Zichun. Du Zichun is a text with numerous versions across cultures. It was originally a Tang dynasty tale (唐傳奇), adapted into fiction in the Ming dynasty, and eventually reborn as a short story by Japanese novelist Ryūnosuke Akutagawa. Handling a text with such a rich bibliographical history, I read every accessible version and took out the elements I found interesting.
Othello, on the other hand, was assigned to me by Taipei Puppet Theater. The adaptation, therefore, was on an even larger scale. The Shakespearean play had to not only travel from the west to the east but transform from humans into glove puppets. To translate the premise of the original text into an Asian context, I researched extensively on Chinese history and decided to set my Othello in the Ming dynasty. It’s a historical period when a similar tension between local people and foreign travellers could be found. The research was time-consuming, but I believe there should always be a reason behind my artistic choice.
Looking back now, I might be able to boil down my approach to a few steps. I always break apart the original texts first: what’s the plot, what’s the theme, what’s the character’s desire, what’s the writer’s intention…After answering these questions, I ask myself what resonates with me the most. What’s able to move me must be able to move my audience. Then, I put together the interesting parts, either from the original text or from the world outside.
Lin: You have a repertoire that spans xiqu plays and contemporary pieces, and your love for writing seems to grow throughout the years. What continues to compel you as a playwright?
Chou: I told myself to forget about xiqu for a while in the first year of TPAC’s program. I was there to learn how to write musicals. What’s the point of returning to the old stuff? However, I came around one day. It’s silly to ignore my xiqu background in the theatre community, and it’s also silly not to apply my understanding of story arc or character development when writing xiqu plays. I’ll always be a fish swimming across two tanks, and being able to do so makes me who I am.
Now, the categorization bothers me less, and what interests me more is what I can say through my mixing elements and inventing new forms. I’m aware of standing at the meeting point of xiqu and contemporary theatre, and I’m also excited to see the two opposites meet. There surely will be the unexpected yet inevitable.
