Overlooking a life on stage and screen

After a five-year hiatus from performing with a troupe, celebrated operatic thespian and dancer Wu Hsing-kuo (吳興國) makes a welcome return to the stage next week when he joins forces with the Tai-Gu Tales Dance Theater (太古踏舞團) for three nights of modern dance fantasy entitled Silk Road (飛天).

Wu's name has been synonymous with theater since he graduated from the Chinese Cultural University (中國文化大學) with, quite literally, flying colors in the late 1970s. Within three years of graduation, Wu had became one of Taiwan's leading exponents of Wusheng (武生) -- the acrobatic lead male role in Beijing opera.

Throughout the 1980s he performed in countless productions with the Lukuang National Opera (陸光國劇隊), one of the nation's most prestigious classical opera troupes. Whether suspended from theater ceilings by wires in order to simulate flight, or simply relying on his ground-based martial arts skills to stage theatrical combat, Wu's acrobatics were guaranteed to ensure the success of any show he appeared in.

Saddened by what he describes as a "declining interest in traditional opera," Wu parted company with the Lukuang National Opera in 1984. That same year he teamed up with a handful of members of Taiwan's Beijing Opera Youth Troupe (青年京劇團), who like Wu were also disenchanted by the wane in popularity of traditional forms of Chinese opera. By early 1985, the group had formed the Contemporary Legend Theater (CLT, 當代傳奇劇場).

While still labeled by many as an opera troupe, productions by the Contemporary Legend Theater veer radically from traditional operatic performances.

"Standard classical opera was slowly losing out to western-style productions that were arriving in Taiwan. After all, they were fresh and offered audiences something they'd never seen before," recalls Wu in an interview with The Taipei Times.

"We felt that one of only ways to ensure that audiences didn't forget about classical opera was to combine it with aspects of popular western theater, thereby giving audiences a totally new theater experience."

Under Wu's guidance, the troupe set about rejuvenating the standard classical form of Chinese opera by combining it with elements of western theatrical themes and storylines, using very complex sets, even more grandiose costumes and employing casts of over 50.

Since its founding, the CLT has performed adaptations of Euripides's Medea and Aeschylus's Oresteia, westernized re-workings of several classical Chinese operas and Shakespeare's Hamlet, re-titled War and Eternity.

It was Wu's 1985 The Kingdom of Desire, an orientalized re-working of Macbeth, however, that was to bring the CLT world acclaim. When it premiered at the National Concert Hall critics applauded the show as one of the most exciting performances of the year. And when it traveled abroad to the US and Europe it was met with equal acclaim.

"The huge casts, magnificent sets and costumes were only part of the show's attraction. No one had had taken well-known western plots and storylines and retold them using ancient China in such a grandiose manner on stage before," he said.

Always on the lookout for acrobatic talent to play either a clean-cut hero or evil villain, the Hong Kong movie industry soon came knocking on Wu's door. Making his movie debut in director Ho Ping's (何平) 1992 movie, 18 (十八), Wu won the Best Newcomer Award at the annual Hong Kong Movie Awards that same year.