VIEW THIS PAGE Fifteen months ago, U-Theatre (優劇場) celebrated its return to its Laoquanshan (老泉山) compound in Muzha after a two-year renovation project with a festival and a production called Mountain Dawn (入夜山嵐), inspired by its mountain-top home.
The five chapters in the show covered a day in the life of the mountain, beginning with the awakening of life at daybreak and closing with the mist that fills the air after nightfall. In between there were meditations on bamboo, rainfall and sunsets.
The show’s focus was on the women in the troupe, and the gongs, as opposed to the men and the big drums. As company founder and director Liu Ruo-yu (劉若瑀) explained it, Laoquanshan has a very feminine energy, a softer, quieter kind of energy. The mountain is the troupe’s “mother.”
Sitting on a bench bundled up against the night chill watching the show in December 2007, it seemed that being outside amid the quiet rustling of the trees and the chirping of crickets was an integral part of the production. You could almost feel the vibrations from the gongs and drums in the breeze. The piece was tailor-made for the open air, for the intimacy of the small Laoquanshan seating area.
Hearing that the company was going to restage the production at the National Theater, I wondered how that could be done without losing the quietness of the piece. How do you bring a mountain inside?
You make the production bigger, for one thing, and you almost completely overhaul it.
“There is new music and movements, but the concept is similar. The dawn and mist parts are nearly the same, but the rest are very different,” Ken Kuo (郭耿甫), U-Theatre’s manager, said in a telephone interview on Tuesday. “And there is one new piece to do with clouds.”
Another difference is the costumes. The Mountain Dawn’s are all new, by famed costume designer and artist Tim Yip (葉錦添), who has collaborated with the company for more than a decade.
“In the old show, the costumes came from River Journey [2006] and other shows because we didn’t have time to make new ones,” Kuo said. “We invited the designer to come see the rehearsals. He wanted to use the color of nature, of the dew; light blue and green, not so deep or rich. River Journey was pure black and white.”
“This time the only character who wears black is the narrator,” he said.
Yip’s design for the narrator, played by Liu, is not only black, it’s long. He has given her a robe with a 3m-long cathedral train that trails behind her like a spreading stain.
“When they [the performers] move, the costumes show a story,” Liu said. “In River’s Journey the movement had to be very precise, very sharp, very clear. In Mountain Dawn the movements are softer. But because the material is different, you also move differently. Like the black one [I wear], you see something, you move toward it, but you have to walk slower because it drags.
“In this Mountain Dawn, the most important thing was how to give this ancient feeling of the mountain, how to catch the image. Like the way the old traditional Chinese paintings show the mountain … It’s more abstract, not so detailed, more of a feeling, like the way Cloud Gate [Dance Theatre] uses calligraphy [as a starting point for the Cursive trilogy],” Liu said.
“It’s almost a new piece; there was a lot of work. Adan [drumming director Huang Chih-chun (黃誌群)] had to change the melody to fit the new movements. In the old costumes, the movements were clearer, this one the movement is more natural, softer.”
“We want to let the people go to the quietness of the mind. To be quiet, soft, female,” Liu said. “We had to find a very soft way to tell the story.”
She laughingly added that she has to keep telling her troupe to make it “softer, softer.”
“The gong gives a universal sound. Like ‘om,’ you don’t disturb the world when you say it,” she said. “You really feel the quietness of the land; you don’t want to disturb it.”
After its four performances at the National Theater next weekend, U-Theatre will be taking its mountain on the road, with two performances in Kaohsiung, on April 10 and April 11, and two in Taichung, on May 15 and May 16. VIEW THIS PAGE
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