The journey to 1433 began in early January 2007, when famed American stage director and playwright Robert Wilson came to Taiwan to give a lecture about his work as part of the National Theater and Concert Hall’s 20th anniversary celebrations.
NTCH staff showed Wilson around Taipei, including a trip to U-Theatre’s (優劇場) Laoquanshan (老泉山) home in Muzha to meet the celebrated Zen drumming troupe.
Since that trip, Wilson has become a frequent visitor to Taipei — he created Orlando with Beijing opera diva Wei Hai-min (魏海敏), the production that opened last year’s Taiwan International Festival — while U-Theatre has made two extended trips to Wilson’s Watermill Center on Long Island, New York.
On Feb. 20 the Wilson-U-Theatre collaboration 1433 — The Grand Voyage (鄭和1433) will have its world premiere at the National Theater as part of the 2010 Taiwan International Festival.
Liu Ruo-yu (劉若瑀), U-Theatre’s founder and director, explained how it all came about.
“In 2007 Wilson was here to give a speech. The National Theater introduced him to our mountain home in the morning. He was very impressed and he talked about the company in his speech. He invited the company to Watermill [for the summer program] — we performed and did workshops. We decided we could work together. The next year we went there again,” Liu said.
“The first table work of Zheng He was in the summer of 2008 in Watermill. In March [2009], he came to do Orlando and we held auditions for U-Theatre so he saw all our members. He came here from Sept. 2 to Sept. 27 and we rehearsed. We already had the structure in place. His team came — technicians, lighting — so the work was very fast,” Liu said.
The combination of Wilson and the ritual-based, deeply meditative U-Theatre is not as quirky as it might appear. Wilson has built his reputation on abstract productions that feature elaborate sets, sculptural movements and intricate lighting, as well as working with avant-garde and jazz musicians such as Philip Glass. However, his productions remain focused on the basic elements of theater: light, sound, space, movement and time. These are also the key elements to U-Theatre’s drumming and dance pieces, which are usually both abstract and deeply philosophical at the same time.
1433 is a musical theater production that centers on the fabled Chinese mariner Zheng He (鄭和), who lived from about 1371 to 1435. Zheng made seven epic voyages at the behest of his Ming Dynasty emperor between 1405 and 1433, exploring the South Pacific, the Indian Ocean, the Persian Gulf and the east coast of Africa, at times commanding a fleet of 200 boats and a crew of 28,000.
The show focuses on the last of Zheng’s journeys.
U-Theatre drumming director Huang Chih-chun (黃誌群), who plays Zheng, heads the 20-member cast. Huang, however, will speak through movement rather than words, while the story will be narrated by gezai (歌仔) opera star Tang Mei-yun (唐美雲).
Wilson designed the set and the lighting, while the costumes were created by longtime U-Theatre collaborator and Oscar-winning designer Tim Yip (葉錦添).
Wilson told a press conference in November that the work was about a journey, but not a journey from one place to an unknown destination, rather one from the East to the West and from the West to the East because it combined both Zheng’s explorations and his own experience as a Westerner working in Asia.
“It’s an exploration of different stations along this path. It’s not necessarily the kind of journey that would be told in a history book,” he said. “It’s a poetic journey. In this journey we see people coming from different cultures, different backgrounds and merging, socially, culturally, politically.”
He has also described the show as a parable of men searching for peace.
1433 mixes U-Theatre’s drumming with the free jazz of American composer Ornette Coleman and saxophonist Richard “Dickie” Landry. The latter, whom Wilson worked with on the 1976 opera Einstein on the Beach, will also be performing on stage.
“It’s not easy to put two opposites together,” Wilson said. “It’s always a question of how to take something very different. Basically there are only two lines in the world, a straight line and a curved line, that’s all. You have to make up your mind. Do I want it straight or do I want it curved. So it’s like putting two hands on one work, a left hand of one nature and a right hand of a different nature, and you’re holding the work together. It’s a time-space construction.”
For Wilson, putting the show together involved a lot of talking — and watching, watching how people interact.
“When I work I like to be in room and do it with the actual people. It comes from personalities of the performers, technicians, whoever is there,” Wilson said.
“You see what they can do, you prepare it and then you share it with other people. Even the setting. You look around, what’s outside, what’s in the garbage and put it together and it’s pretty close to what’s in the production. In this production we had a lot of bamboo, string, fabric, so we began to develop set pieces building up with performers,” he said.
Both Liu and Huang said working with Wilson had been a terrific experience — and a life-changing one.
“U-Theatre’s members learned a lot. It’s a new story, everything starts from zero,” Liu said. “We really learned so much from him [Wilson].”
The four-act 1433 runs almost three hours. It will be performed in Mandarin, with Chinese and English subtitles. In addition to the performances, there will be a talk about the show in the National Theater lobby a half-hour before each performance.
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