Taiwan Today

The Tainaner Ensemble’s move to Taipei provides a glimpse of the challenges faced by performing arts groups outside Taiwan’s capital.

In January this year, the Tainaner Ensemble, which up to that point had been the oldest and most established theatrical troupe based in Tainan, southern Taiwan, moved its headquarters to Taipei City, leaving the city the group had called home since its founding in 1987. When news of the upcoming move was leaked in December 2011, many in Taiwan’s performing arts community were caught off-guard. “I was somewhat surprised [to hear the news],” says Lo Wen-chun (羅文君), administrative director of the Scarecrow Contemporary Dance Company (SCDC), a troupe that has been based in Tainan since it was launched in 1989. “After all, the Tainaner Ensemble has made significant contributions to the development of performing arts in Tainan and has brought inspiration to many here. And with a name like Tainaner, we’ve always felt like it represented the city.”

Tainaner’s move came as a surprise because the troupe had built a reputation for producing plays that reflect Tainan’s perspectives and interests through techniques such as the frequent use of dialogues in Holo, or Taiwanese, a dialect widely spoken in southern Taiwan. Given those strong local roots, the troupe’s abrupt relocation to northern Taiwan had the effect of drawing attention to the factors behind its move, the foremost of which is the struggle for resources faced by performing arts groups outside the Taipei area. Tainan’s SCDC, for example, continues to face such challenges, which include the difficulty of finding trained performers, technicians and affordable rehearsal space, as well as obtaining public and government support.

Tainaner’s decision to move to Taipei was arrived at after several challenging years for the ensemble. Lu Po-shen (呂柏伸), Tainaner’s artistic director, says its productions began to grow much larger in 2008, when the ensemble gained its first opportunity to stage a performance at the National Theater in Taipei—one of the nation’s most important performing arts centers—with a program titled Castrated Chicken. That play was based on a 1942 novel by Chang Wen-huan (張文環) and tells the story of a Taiwanese woman’s determination to pursue her own dreams in a male-oriented society. Large-scale productions usually require a large cast, but Tainaner had only a handful of its own actors at the time. To stage Castrated Chicken, the troupe had to hire many more outside actors and actresses, and most of them needed to be recruited in Taipei. That trend continued in 2010 with Q&A: Quest and Amnesia, an original play about a man struggling to rebuild his life after losing his memory in a car accident. “When we began Q&A, about two-thirds of the performers were from Taipei and we had to ask our members from Tainan to go to Taipei for practice and rehearsal,” says Lu, who is also a lecturer in the Department of Drama and Theatre at National Taiwan University, which is located in Taipei.

Like Nomads

Lu says that the troupe’s Tainan-based actors immediately felt uncomfortable rehearsing so far from home. “Our situation was a little like that of nomads because we had to move to different places to rehearse depending on which space was available to rent that day,” Lu says. The temporary accommodations were not at all like the troupe’s dedicated rehearsal space in Tainan, where the actors and crew could quickly put their hands on any piece of stage equipment they needed, he says. After the production of Q&A, such inconveniences and the need for access to a pool of professional actors prompted the troupe to consider the possibility of moving to Taipei.

The shortage of professional freelance actors in southern Taiwan has been a problem for a long time, Lu says. Since the country’s performing arts groups are concentrated mostly in the Taipei area, there are many more freelance actors available for hire in the capital. In southern Taiwan, on the other hand, most actors have to moonlight at other jobs and thus cannot commit fully to an acting career. “Actors in Taipei also have more exposure to stage plays and get more opportunities to work on commercials, TV shows and films. That gives them more opportunities to receive training and polish their skills,” Lu says.

According to Lo, all of the SCDC’s seven dancers, including Lo’s sister, SCDC artistic director Luo Wen-jinn (羅文瑾), have to work part-time jobs to make ends meet. As a result, many of the dancers’ family members object to their desire to continue dancing, which leads to a high turnover rate. “It’s difficult to keep a dancer around [in Tainan],” Lo says. “We know that they are struggling between things they want to do and the reality of life. Sometimes I’ve had to ask myself ‘What I can give to them’ if I ask them to stay?”

Lu says that the ability to hire trained professional actors in Taipei has been crucial for Tainaner’s continued development because “inconsistent acting skills from one performer to another” had been one of the most common criticisms directed at the troupe. In Tainan, the ensemble formerly employed many university theater majors as actors. Though enthusiastic, the students often lacked acting experience.

In addition to the difficulty of finding trained actors, Lo says that performing arts groups outside the Taipei area struggle to find professionals specializing in lighting, sound and set design. The SCDC, for example, has long relied on experts from Taipei for such tasks.

The limited number of performance venues in southern Taiwan also forces performing arts groups in the region to improvise, which sometimes entails additional cost. “For example, we were looking for an experimental theater [in Tainan] to perform in, but there wasn’t one,” Lo says. “So we ended up using a space in the basement of Eslite Bookstore. We had to install lighting, remodel it with a black vinyl floor and build seats for the audience with wooden planks, all on our own.” Lo notes that the SCDC thus spent more money to put on a show in Tainan than it would have cost in Taipei, where an experimental theater facility was readily available.

Above all, Lo is most frustrated with the general lack of public interest in stage performances outside Taipei. She says that it is disappointing when the troupe has created a new and visionary work, but fails to generate the same attention as groups staging similar shows in Taipei. The SCDC only began to attract the public’s notice after the group launched annual performances in Taipei, she says.

Tainan-based Ten Drum Art Percussion Group leader Hsieh Shih (謝十) agrees, saying that media coverage and ticket sales are lacking for performing arts groups in the municipality, as the concept of paying for live performances has yet to find widespread acceptance among local residents. Hsieh taught traditional Taiwanese drumming in Tainan before founding Ten Drum in 2000.

Despite such difficulties, Hsieh points out that being located in Tainan has helped inspire Ten Drum in different ways. Hsieh notes that the roots of traditional Taiwanese drum music can be traced back to the music and musical instruments employed in the battle formations of Chinese General Zheng Cheng-gong (鄭成功, 1624–1662), better known as Koxinga, who led his troops in a landing at Luermen in Tainan in the 17th century. Echoes of the drumming of Koxinga’s army can still be heard in the Tainan area in some of the classic pieces Ten Drum performs, as well as at the Tiao Gu Zhen religious festival and the Song Jiang Battle Array, which originally served as a form of martial training for young men but survives today as a unique type of folk performance art.

“A performing arts group gets nourished by the place it calls home,” Hsieh says. “We get inspired by the lives and lifestyle of everyday people here, and we’d miss that if we were in Taipei.” He notes that while Taipei revolves mostly around the economy and media, Tainan residents feel more connected to their city because of its rich cultural heritage and slower pace. Because Tainan has less hustle and bustle than bigger cities, its environment inspires musical creativity and provides the tranquility necessary for drum training, Hsieh adds.

Building Connections

Lo believes that her troupe’s base in Tainan yields valuable opportunities to build connections and collaborate with local artists in other fields. For the SCDC’s 2007 production Shadow of Andersen’s Illusion, for example, the troupe invited Hsieh Ming-you (謝銘祐), a well-known composer of Holo songs who lives in Tainan, to write the music. Hsieh also composed the music for the SCDC’s 2009 production of Wanderer of Time, which adapted lyrics from the poem Wanderer by Chen Jian-cheng (陳建成), a local writer who also edits a periodical published by the Tainan City Government.

Hsu Rey-fang (許瑞芳) is a founding member and former artistic director of the Tainaner Ensemble. Hsu says that the group was originally named the Hwa Deng Theatre Troupe and employed amateur actors. When the decision was made in 1991 to become a professional acting troupe, members relied on their deep connection to Tainan to maintain a sense of identity. Now an assistant professor in the Department of Drama Creation and Application at National Tainan University, Hsu was born in Tainan and has spent most of her life living there. She wrote many scripts for the ensemble during the time she served as artistic director, and the “Tainan identity” she shared with the troupe was evident in its works in the 1990s. During that period, Tainaner’s plays featured themes related to the traditional glove puppetry and baseball popular in the region, as well as the controversial redevelopment of Hai An Road, an old commercial area in Tainan.

Hsu is a believer, however, in the maxim that a troupe’s vision should develop as it grows in scale and support. As a result, over time it became less important for Tainaner to confine productions to local themes. “Playwrights should not be limited to writing only from their direct experience; the most important thing is to keep our creativity in tune with the times,” she says. Lu shares a similar conviction, saying that a drama’s storyline is more important than its connection to a specific geographic area. Lu says he added a secondary title, A Theater of Difference, to Tainaner’s name after he succeeded Hsu as artistic director in 2003 to reflect the troupe’s growing emphasis on telling unique stories.

In 2008, the secondary title was revised again to Change the Way You Experience Theater. “I hope that what we achieve at the Tainaner Ensemble are things that haven’t been done in Taiwan’s theater circle before,” Lu says of the latest change.

As part of its drive to innovate, Tainaner began using Holo dialogues in its adaptations of Western drama, the first of which was a rendition of Antigone in 2001. Lu says that he did not initially intend for Antigone to be performed in Holo. The play was his first production at Tainaner and came at a time when Hsu was still the artistic director. “Hsu told me that the actors could speak Holo more fluently and more beautifully [than Mandarin],” Lu says. “So I decided to give it a try.” Through producing the show, Lu says he discovered the potential of using Holo as a stage language and decided to stick with its use afterward. “Spoken Taiwanese has eight tones, which gives the language more variety in intonation than Mandarin. That makes it work better for interpreting [Western] poetry,” Lu explains.

In 2004, Tainaner continued innovating with Shakespeare Unplugged, a series of productions designed to attract younger audiences by modernizing the playwright’s dramas through the use of fewer actors, simpler sets and dialogues in Holo, Mandarin and other languages. According to Lu, Tainaner updates theater classics to give audiences more theatrical choices, as most of Taiwan’s troupes focus on producing plays based on original scripts.

Tainaner also cultivates new acting and playwriting talent in Taiwan. The ensemble has adopted 13 scripts by outside writers since 2003 and began to host workshops for aspiring actors in 2011.

Although Tainan’s lack of professional actors and the trials of Tainaner’s nomadic existence when performing in Taipei were important factors, the ensemble’s decision to move was ultimately sealed after it learned about the affordable rehearsal and office spaces the Taipei City Government makes available to local performing arts groups. Tainaner, for example, pays only for utilities and management costs at its new rehearsal space in a cultural park in Beitou District, Taipei City. The park was formerly the site of an elementary school. Tainaner is one of six performing arts groups that now enjoy rent-free access to the renovated building’s 12 studios.

Yeh Tse-shan (葉澤山), director of Tainan’s Cultural Affairs Bureau, acknowledges that his municipality needs to catch up to Taipei in terms of offering such support. “Tainan already has quite a few idle spaces that could be provided to performing arts groups,” Yeh says. “The problem is that these places are scattered, and some are inconvenient to reach. So now we’ve begun to concentrate on identifying and renovating idle spaces near the central business area, including unused classrooms in schools.” By the end of this year, Yeh expects that three rehearsal spaces in downtown Tainan will be made available for arts groups.

In the meantime, Yeh says the Cultural Affairs Bureau is considering the feasibility of providing subsidies to artists to help them rent performance venues. The bureau also increased its financial support to local performers. As one of Taiwan’s five special municipalities since the end of 2010, Tainan has been entitled to a higher level of funding from the central government. That funding helped annual grants awarded to performing arts groups in Tainan grow from a maximum of NT$20,000 (US$667) in 2011 to a maximum of NT$200,000 (US$6,667) this year, Yeh says.

The city is reaching out to Taiwanese and international performers in its quest to boost local interest in the performing arts. In 2011, for example, the Tainan Cultural Affairs Bureau invited the Taipei-based Ping Fong Acting Troupe to the southern city. During the group’s nearly two-month stay in Tainan, it hosted more than 100 lectures and acting workshops.

Exchange Opportunities

Tainan is also hosting its first large-scale arts festival this year. A total of 39 groups are expected to perform in the Tainan Arts Festival, which began in February and will run through this month. The performers include members of 10 troupes based in Tainan and 11 individuals or groups from overseas. According to Yeh, the arts festival offers affordable admission tickets priced as low as NT$200 (US$6.67) in order to attract local audiences. “We hope that the festival can also provide an opportunity for more exchanges between Taiwanese and international performing artists,” he says. Major festival events that have already taken place include a collaborative performance between local bands and American musician Bobby McFerrin, and a performance and follow-up talk given by German-American classical violinist David Garrett at Tainan’s National Cheng Kung University.

In the bigger picture, Tainaner founding member Hsu Rey-fang believes that building a favorable environment for performing arts should start with educating young students in art appreciation. She proposes measures such as routinely providing students with discounted tickets and transportation to live performances as part of normal school curricula and inviting troupe members to give talks about their work and ideas to young audiences. Developing a new generation of theater-goers, Hsu says, would eventually lead to more performances being staged in the Tainan area and the creation of more job opportunities for local performing artists.

Lo Wen-chun of SCDC says that it is important to have performing arts groups based in different areas of Taiwan. She believes, for example, that the Tainaner Ensemble’s idea of using Holo dialogues in its dramas would not have occurred to a troupe based in Taipei. “It’s through collaboration and interaction with local people, events and places that we’re able to gain a new perspective on things around us and create more possibilities in the arts,” she points out. “Without that kind of variety, the arts would be too homogenous.”

Write to Audrey Wang at ycwang06@mofa.gov.tw