O rlando, which opens tonight at Taipei’s National Theater, is a work by celebrated US director and artist Robert Wilson based on UK author Virginia Woolf’s fantasy novel of the same name, first published in 1928.
The novel and play follow the 400-year life of a man, who halfway through the story changes into a woman, from the time of England’s Queen Elizabeth I to the 1920s. The original novel allowed Woolf to meditate lightheartedly on English history, but also more importantly on issues of androgyny and bisexuality, things that to some degree were reflected in her own life story. Characters in the novel, including Orlando, can even be seen as lightly veiled portraits of some of her own friends.
Wilson has already presented versions of Orlando in Paris and London. This weekend’s Taipei staging, however, which stars Beijing opera diva Wei Hai-min (魏海敏), has been heavily reworked as a collaboration between director and performer, and is in many ways a completely new version.
For Wei, who is widely regarded as one of Taiwan’s top Beijing opera performers, her participation in Orlando is part of a decades-long flirtation with modern theater. Most recently, she performed in the revival of Contemporary Legend Theater’s (當代傳奇劇場) 1993 groundbreaking work Medea (樓蘭女), which welded Greek tragedy, Beijing opera and experimental theater.
At a dress rehearsal of Orlando on Tuesday, the stark setting and highly abstract architectural sets put this production far beyond any of her previous efforts. Wei, who endured considerable criticism from fans for her involvement with Contemporary Legend, has taken a leap into the avant-garde, and while there are plenty of operatic elements, they have been utterly transformed — whether for better or worse remains to be answered.
It is a question that will reflect on Wei not only as a performer, but also as a creative artist, for given the obstacles of language and culture faced by Wilson, who generally takes a very strong hold over the look and feel of any work he is directing, Wei has also played a significant role in realizing this new production. “I think I gave him many ideas for this production,” Wei said. She has drawn much from the vocabulary of Beijing opera, to make this “very much a collaborative process.”
During talks and interviews in the run-up to this new version of Orlando, both Wei and Wilson agreed that much of the impact of the production relies on the single performer’s ability to “stand on stage,” holding the audience’s attention with little more than her presence. Wei’s Beijing operatic training stands her in good stead. “There is the phrase: ‘the drama is in every inch of your body (渾身是戲),’” Wei said, “from the top of your head to the soles of your feet, you must be performing.” She has never lacked for stage presence, whether in traditional or modernized Beijing opera, but from the dress rehearsal, there is a fear, in this writer’s opinion at least, that too much is being taken out of context. The clouds of pointless exoticism loom, as they have over so many recent attempts to “modernize” Chinese opera.
Wei said her operatic training was a considerable advantage in trying to achieve one of Wilson’s goals, which is the disassociation of the vocal and visual. This is described by Wilson as “listening to the pictures,” by which he refers to the importance of hearing the text spoken by the body independently of the voice. In addition to playing Orlando, Wei, the only performer in the nearly two-hour-long show, will also take on the roles of all the characters in the protagonist’s 400-year life, giving her an opportunity to showcase the skills that make up the foundation of traditional Chinese theater, as she flits between characters both male and female, old and young.
From the inception of the collaboration, Wei wanted to include aspects of Beijing opera. “Previous productions of Orlando have been ‘dramatic,’ with no singing. As my background is in opera, I wanted to incorporate song, and this was discussed right at the beginning,” she said. That having been accepted, considerable work had to be done in adapting the text. At first, Chinese translations of the novel were considered, but the literary quality of these did not really work within an operatic context. Wei invited Wang An-chi (王安祈), the artistic director of the Guo Guang Opera Company (國光劇團) and the scriptwriter behind many experimental Beijing opera productions, to rewrite the text. “At first she was very reluctant, for she frankly found the story ridiculous,” Wei said.
After Wang produced her opera script, Wei then got to work tinkering with the musicality of it, taking it away from the conventional rhythms of Beijing opera, which she said, “sounded inappropriate.” She added rhyme to some of the spoken parts, drawing on theatrical conventions that indicate the social class of a speaker. And, she said, she also made personal sacrifices for her art. At a public lecture about her involvement in the project last week, Wei said that having spent a lifetime learning to express herself through multitudinous layers of clothes and makeup, she now finds herself on stage with the simplest of costumes, and by the end, stripped down to little more than a camisole. Such a state of undress for a traditional artist is virtually unheard of.
Enormous effort has been made to meet the technical demands imposed by Wilson on this production, and Liu Chiung-shu (劉瓊淑), artistic director for the CKS Cultural Center (國立中正文化中心), which is sponsoring the production, spoke to the press about the improvements made to the rigging and lighting of the National Theater for this production.
What remains to be seen is whether a play about Western feminism in the 1930s will translate convincingly into this very new medium. Given the stature of both Wilson and Wei, there is plenty of interest in discovering if this will work. Some tickets remain, but are selling fast.
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