Look into the soul of Huizhou Woman

By David Frazier
STAFF REPORTER
Friday, Dec 01, 2000, Page 7

An old saying goes: in every poem there's a picture, and in every picture there's a poem. In recent memory, the adage probably hasn't applied to any work of art as well as it applies to Huizhou Woman, a Huangmei opera that comes to Taiwan for the first time Wednesday.

First produced in 1998, Huizhou Woman finds its origin in the woodcut prints of Ying Tian-chi (應天齊), a contemporary artist in China, who in 1986 made his first visit to Xidicun (西遞村), an ancient town in China's Anhui Province (安徽) that once served as a minor outpost for mail couriers, which would prove to be the inspiration for the piece.

Among the city's confining walls, hidden archways and lonely corridors, Ying found ideas for a series of woodcuts, in which he endeavored to express the confinement and isolation he saw in that architecture.

When Han Zai-fen (涵再芬), one of China's greatest leading ladies of the Huangmei stage, saw Ying's prints, she was so taken by the images that she could not help but believe that there was a story trapped somewhere inside the stony enclosures of the wall. Starting in 1990, she began enlisting the aid of directors, writers and composers in the traditional theaters of Beijing and Shanghai, a process which finally culminated in a Huangmei opera based on Ying's prints. Now, touring with the Huangmei Opera Company of Anqing City in Anhui Province (安徽省安慶市黃梅劇團), she plays the opera's lead role.

Huangmei opera is a regional form of Chinese opera native to Anhui Province, where Xidicun is located. In a curious parallel to Huizhou Woman, the entire genre of Huangmei opera was developed out of another art form, Anhui's indigenous folk melodies.

"They're the kind of tunes you can hum as you walk out of the theater," says Kao Jian-kuo (高建國) of Hung Ju Chang (紅劇場), the agency responsible for bringing the production to Taipei's National Theater.

"Years ago, several Huangmei operas were made into films here in Taiwan. Many people still know these songs from those films," Kao says.

Generally speaking, Kao says that Huangmei opera is less stylized and less rigid than Beijing opera, while including the same elements of singing, dance and dramatic play. Also, the dialogue in Huangmei opera tends to be more natural and understandable to a contemporary ear, and for this reason, Kao feels that it also tends to be more accessible.

The story of Huizhou Woman is relatively simple. It begins with the heroine, known simply as "woman," getting married to a man whom she never sees. In this section, called "marriage," the man rejects the arranged marriage for the simple reason that he does not consent to it, and he goes out into the world to find his fortune, leaving his new bride alone.

Fettered by social bonds, the woman has no choice but to be faithful, so she spends her life keeping the household through the opera's middle two sections, "expectation" and "moaning," only to grow old and finally meet her husband as a stranger in the final section, "reunion."

Though the work's major overtones tell a tale of muted tragedy, the script is interspersed with upbeat and lively moments of song and dance that serve as a counterpoint to the main story.

Many critics have lauded Huizhou Woman for its many breaks with tradition, crediting it for maintaining classical standards of elegance while pushing the form into original territory.

Though the opera met with much controversy at first, audiences and critics have come to appreciate the work's innovative nature. Last year, Huizhou Woman received the top award for opera in the prestigious China Arts Festival.

WHAT Huizhou Woman (徽州女人)

WHERE National Theater (國家戲劇院), 21 Chungshan S. Rd. (中山南路21號)

WHEN Dec. 6 through Sat., Dec. 9, 7:30pm

TICKET NT$300 to NT$2,000