Taipei Times: What are your priorities as artistic director of I-Wan-Jan?
Huang Chiao-wei: To put it bluntly, it is to learn as much as I can while the older generation is still around to teach me. You must fill yourself up if you are going to have stuff to take out and show people in future ... There is no point doing lots of performances before the fundamentals are established. Ours is a long-term strategy, so that while people haven’t noticed us much recently, they will eventually.
TT: What is the greatest challenge facing puppet theater today?
HC: The ability to promote ourselves and our art. One of Master Li Tien-lu’s great strengths was that he encouraged us to innovate and use what we learned as part of the puppeteering tradition in new ways ... exploring every possibility. People don’t necessarily understand traditional puppet theater, so we must find ways of drawing them in. We have collaborated with Western classical musicians and experimental artists ... But our emphasis is still on tradition — 90 percent tradition, 10 percent innovation.
TT: Language is an integral part of Taiwanese puppet theater. How does that affect performances in the modern era?
HC: Glove puppet theater is performed in Taiwanese, an older style of Taiwanese that is not used so much today. We do not use subtitles in glove puppet performances. The audiences’ focus should be on the puppets, and they are too small for audiences to move from subtitles to the action and still get the full impact of the performance. Also, puppet theater has always had a strong improvisational aspect, so subtitles don’t work well for that reason. We have experimented with using other characters to explain difficult language and with providing abstracts for each scene.
TT: Li Tien-lu had a strong commitment to education. Does this continue today?
HC: We do a lot of teaching, especially of children. But Taiwan has no system for ongoing training in traditional arts. It’s not like studying the violin or the piano, where you can study it at university and beyond. So as a teacher, I used to find this very frustrating. You’d teach kids for three years, then they would move on to other things. It was a terrible drain on time and other resources ... A few years ago, I had become very depressed about teaching puppetry, but two years ago I came to a realization: Even if many of the students would never go on to study puppetry in later life, it would leave an impression ... it’s like planting a seed in society.
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