While Contemporary Legend is making a return to tradition, the Taipei Li-Yuan Peking Opera Theater is showcasing two contemporary Beijing operas this weekend in a program titled One Heart, Two Leaves (一心二葉), a reference to the double leaf at the very top of a tea plant that is the most highly prized by connoisseurs.
On Saturday and Sunday it will revive its highly successful 2008 production of The Jester (弄臣), which is based on Verdi’s opera Rigoletto (See story on Page 13 of the Dec. 12, 2008 edition of the Taipei Times). Opening the series will be one of the group’s most daring modern operas, The Wilderness (原野), based on an unfinished play by China’s greatest modern playwright, Cao Yu (曹禺). This opera first ran in 2007. Although premiered relatively recently, they are being revived partly because The Wilderness will participate in the Shanghai International Art Festival (上海國際藝術節) and The Jester in the Beijing International Theater Dance Festival (北京戲劇舞蹈季) later this month.
A further and more significant reason, according to Vivien Ku (辜懷群), executive director of the Taipei Li-Yuan Peking Opera Theater, is to change the perception of new style operas and make them part of an established repertoire. She expressed hope that people would come and watch new operas such as The Jester to see a contemporary interpretation of a well-loved work built around a different cast, in the same way they would an established classic.
“Of course, to achieve this, we need to stage the opera more than once,” Ku said.
The Jester, with its clever mixing of musical genres, and which shows off Li’s prodigious versatility as he shifts from comic to tragic roles as the court jester Rigoletto, and The Wilderness, with its stripped-down modern setting and rebellious message that resonates with the idealism and naivety of a young China in the 1930s, are defiant rebuttals of any suggestion that Beijing opera is merely a relic of the past.
“In putting on traditional productions, we can pretty much take it easy as we are enjoying the riches handed down to us by others. But we must also do something for ourselves,” Ku said.
Underlining Beijing opera’s engagement with the contemporary theater, Ku has invited a new dramatic version of The Wilderness by the Tianjin People’s Art Academy (天津人民藝術劇院) to Taipei. The production of the opera and the drama took place almost simultaneously as part of a spate of activity surrounding Cao’s works related to the 10th anniversary of his death in 2006. It will be performed at Novel Hall on Nov. 20 to Nov. 22.
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