The Drought Goddess (大神魃) by the Ethan Chen Production House (野墨坊), which opens tonight at the Experimental Theater, is the second production in the New Idea Theater Festival (新點子劇展). It follows similar production criteria to Liou Ching-ti’s Hell (劉青提的地獄) by the Taiwan Bangzi Company (台灣豫劇團), which opened the festival last week, but takes Production House in a very different direction.
Setting out to integrate nanguan (南管) and beiguan (北管) performance styles into something modern and fun, Li Yi-hsiu (李易修), the show’s director, created a hectic collage of diverse media that may, by dint of its sheer devil-may-care inclusiveness, coalesce into a style uniquely its own.
Nanguan is a traditional musical form that is remarkable for its ponderous elegance, and in its unadulterated form is likely to put the uninitiated to sleep. Li and his young production team, as something of a joke for the musically and culturally hyper-aware, incorporated the theme from the Transformer-like Super Robot anime series Mazinger Z (無敵鐵金剛) — wildly popular among children in the 1970s — into the score to be performed in the nanguan style.
Other humorous elements include the use of tap dancing as part of a traditional beiguan percussion ensemble, and made-up language that incorporates words from the Hoklo, Hakka and Cantonese dialects. Subtitles are hand-written on a background projection, mingled with a background reproduced in classical ink wash and modern animation. Costumes seem to be a mixture of cosplay and Halloween, and the story is a meditation on the end of the world based on a 100-word segment in the Classic of the Mountains and the Seas (山海經), an ancient text of uncertain date. And the list of incongruous elements doesn’t end there.
The story tells of the battle between the Yellow Emperor (黃帝) and the monster Chi You (蚩尤). Chi You’s forces included the spirits of the wind and rain, so the Yellow Emperor summons his daughter, the drought goddess, to defeat them. After she aided him in victory, she is exiled and wanders the face of the earth, bringing destruction wherever she goes.
Although the story is about death, destruction and the end of the world, there is a jolly, witty eclecticism about the whole project that is in tune with the subversive, discursive nature of The Classic of the Mountains and the Seas.
Though based on an ancient text and employing traditional performance techniques, The Drought Goddess is clearly a fully-fledged contemporary work that tries to have fun with the classics and comment on the nature of power, alienation and the destruction of the environment.
Performances are at 7:30pm today and tomorrow and at 2:30pm on Sunday. Tickets are NT$500 and are available through NTCH ticket outlets.
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