Premiering to an enthusiastic, if slightly understrength, audience at Taipei’s Metropolitan Hall (城市舞台) on Friday night, Lanting Kun Opera Troupe’s (蘭庭崑劇團) Quest for the Garden Saunter and the Interpreted Dream (尋找遊園驚夢) showed that kun opera is going places in the 21st century. A post-modern reworking of the classic story of The Peony Pavilion (牡丹亭), Quest had its work cut out with a pitch that had the potential to annoy traditional opera lovers with its unconventional structure and the inclusion of a non-kun singer in the lineup, and leave enthusiasts of contemporary theater confounded by its long and highly elaborate arias and flowery poetic abstractions.
The inclusion of Sean Hung (洪瑞襄) as a modern woman reading The Peony Pavilion and commenting or echoing the sentiments of the two leading players is a bold move that for the most part was carried off successfully. The passages in which she sang duets with kun star Kong Aiping (孔愛萍) were remarkable for the subtle combination of two very different singing styles that created a music both alien and familiar at the same time.
This effect created a sense of familiarity in an archaic operatic form, exactly what Lanting’s director Wang Chih-ping (王志萍) has sought to achieve in the company’s work. This double-layered singing effectively conveys the work’s flowery passages about love, loss and longing for home to modern audiences.
The reshuffling of the familiar narrative was unsettling at first and the fluid movement of the action, without the conventional punctuation of stylized entrances and exits had the audience slightly confused at the beginning, unsure when to applaud the fine demonstrations of skill taking place on stage. But this little hiccup was quickly overcome as the new rhythms of this unconventional production became familiar.
The stripping away of the original’s involved narrative and the focus on the essentials of romantic longing gave the opera a disembodied quality — it was more a meditation on love than a story of two lovers. For audiences unfamiliar with the story, the whole thing might seem too ethereal.
That being said, Quest is one of the boldest experiments in adapting traditional opera to the modern stage, and it successfully avoids the pitfalls of many productions of recent years for which unsympathetic styles were forced together with little regard to how they work when combined. Wang has created a highly abstract distillation of The Peony Pavilion that exudes a deep respect for the kun opera forms, and she gives them a new relevance through her command of stagecraft and spatial design. It would be wrong to call this fusion: it is a much more organic revitalization of a traditional art for the modern world.
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