On Wednesday night, Mark of Desire (淚痣圖), the latest production of the Taiyuan Puppet Theater Company (台原偶戲團), premiered at its newly renovated and expanded Natou Theater (納豆劇場) venue in the heart of Taipei’s old West District. The new project continues to extend the company’s horizons outward, and while Taiyuan still remains true to its roots in Taiwan glove puppet theater, it has increasingly embraced all aspects of contemporary drama in a number of high-profile new productions.
Mark of Desire takes its story from the classic Chinese tale of Wang Zhao-jun (王昭君), a princess of the Han dynasty who was one of many young women who lost everything they knew and loved when they were married off to the chieftains of various semi-nomadic peoples as pawns in a high-stakes diplomatic game. The current production brings the story into the 21st century, and uses it as a springboard for a exploration of sexual desire, obsession and repression.
The production employs giant puppets, masks and traditional Taiwanese glove puppets. Shadow puppetry of a sort also makes a brief appearance. This overlaps with the extensive use of lighting and multimedia projection. The central character, Wand Zhao-chun, is played by Chen Hsueh-chen (陳雪甄) without any prosthetic devices.
Wang Zhao-jun is renowned for her skill on the pipa, a kind of Chinese lute, and much of the music is based on a score performed by pipa, at times as it is conventionally played, and at others mediated through an electric guitar effects peddle, creating some amazing sounds. This also allows the pipa score to be integrated into the electronic music that makes up the powerful soundscape that is central to the expressive ambitions of the work. While the dialogue is spoken in Mandarin, director Robin Ruizendaal emphasized that there are enough visual and musical cues to make the play comprehensible to all audiences.
As with a number of previous productions, Ruizendaal makes use of the troupe’s core discipline of puppetry to set up some powerful physical contrasts, with menacing giant characters seeking to impose their domination over merely human-sized actors, and treating extras, in the form of glove puppets, as figures, both metaphorically and literally, to be manipulated.
In Mark of Desire, a further layer is imposed over the story in the form of two narrators, who at the very opening of the play state that when two people fall in love, everything descends into chaos. The play then proceeds to explore the chaos created when the modern day Wang Zhao-jun seeks out photographer Mao Yan-shou (毛延壽) for a series of glamour shots to bring her to the attention of a character called the Chairman. Mao falls in love with his subject, and in trying to keep her to himself brings calamity to all.
This is not the first time that Taiyuan has drawn on Chinese classics for a mixed production of puppetry and theater, the last occasion being in Autumn Rain (秋夜梧桐雨), which took its material from The Palace of Eternal Youth (長生殿), and the troupe has regularly mixed various styles of Western and Chinese puppetry.
The seams between the various performance styles that Taiyuan seeks to embrace in The Mark of Desire have been remarkably and effectively incorporated into the design of the whole. This sort of artistic fusion is notoriously full of pitfalls, which have brought calamity to a number of recent big-budget productions, and it is encouraging to see a small theater company managing to perform so dexterously, finding its way by means of a commitment to core disciplines and expressive goals.
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