As is usual for parties organized by Back 2 the Future (B2TF, 回到未來), Underworld (地下社會) was packed on Halloween night for a three-DJ set that started at 11:30pm with Yggiwt, and continued with Pomby (狄波拉) and then Floaty Keith until 4am, although the bar didn’t close until well after the sun had risen.
At least half of the crowd was wearing costumes, which included the usual vampires, zombies, a Bruce Lee and a man wearing a Stars Wars Storm Trooper helmet. But the trendiest theme of the evening for both men and women seemed to be dressing up like a member of 1970s glam-metal band Kiss, which meant donning a black cocktail dress and a nappy black wig and painting one’s face white with animal features or a black star drawn around one eye.
There was barely enough room to dance in the small basement club because more than 120 tickets were sold for the party, according to Wang Yuan-kang (王元康), of B2TF, also known as Chiu Sheng (秋生) of heavy metal band Triple Six (666). But dance people did, and all three DJs kept the groove going with a random mix of tunes ranging from “Weird Al” Yankovic’s Eat It to Common People by Pulp to Peaches’ Fuck the Pain Away.
National Taiwan College of Performing Arts (國立臺灣戲曲學院) has had a number of not inconsiderable successes in producing experimental works of Chinese opera. Unfortunately, The Plum Blossom Fan (桃花扇) at the National Theater over the weekend was not one of them. Having boldly leapt into the bloody melee of producing an opera that combines modern Western classical music and traditional Chinese opera, this attempt to bring about the dawn of a “modern Chinese musical” — the show’s aim as stated by scriptwriter Tseng Yung-yi (曾永義) — mostly produced bemusement among the first-night audience on Friday at the National Theater.
The show opened with an encouragingly empty stage — clearly the performers rather than the set designers were going to be the stars. Then the overture begin, and the performance seemed to lose its way almost from the get-go. It remained lost for most of the following two-and-a-half hours, unsure what it was supposed to be doing. The general feeling was of some slightly comic scenario in which a Chinese opera troupe has blundered into an orchestral rehearsal, and the two groups then proceeded to trip each other up.
The Taipei Philharmonic Orchestra (台北愛樂管弦樂團) under the energetic direction of conductor Liao Hsiao-ling (廖曉玲), had a score that according to the program notes, was intended to enhance the emotions of the opera. What it managed to do was trip up the performers, denying them the natural rhythms of Chinese opera so that their movements and singing drifted in a free-form cacophony that try as one might, was difficult to enjoy. Taipei’s generally enthusiastic audiences tried to find something to applaud, but the first occasion came almost 70 minutes into the show, and was directed at a battle sequence that featured none of the main stars, and owed its effect more to the choreographer and lighting technicians than to the composer or lyricist.
There was little to like in Yu Chang-fa’s (游昌發) score, and his unfortunate passion for brass, and growly bass notes from tubas, horns and cellos, seemed calculated to maximize the incongruity with what was happening on stage.
The performers, from the leads to the extras serving as soldiers and servants, were all clearly working hard and seemed generally well rehearsed, but neither lyrics, score or the ill-conceived format seemed to give them any breaks. National Taiwan College of Performing Arts’ Plum Blossom Fan joins the ranks of the many recent casualties that are the result of the current anxious search for a new format for traditional opera.
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