Since its establishment some 28 years ago in the southern city of Tainan, the Tainaner Ensemble has been bringing excitement and innovation to the nation’s theater scene. Currently home to five edgy directors, each with a distinctive style, the company presents pioneering new works as well as unique interpretations of timeless classics. The ensemble gives theatergoers a workout with its six-hour epic K24; it presents Western masterpieces such as Macbeth in Holo, also known as Taiwanese and the language of Taiwan’s largest ethnic group; and breaks down the barriers between actors and audiences by moving between different stages in a performance space with no fixed seating. Innovative efforts such as these have helped it carve out a niche in Taiwan’s performing arts industry and forge a culture of theatrical creativity in its native city.
Founded by Father Donald Glover and a group of young Tainan residents with backgrounds in fields as diverse as Chinese literature, Western literature and metalworking, the Tainaner Ensemble has developed a reputation as one of the nation’s most accomplished theater troupes. The ensemble grew out of the Huaden Art Center, an organization that Glover set up to host arts-oriented activities proselytizing Catholicism. The center also served as a base for the various arts clubs that he formed in areas ranging from photography and video to screenings of independent films.
Lee Wei-mu (李維睦), head of the Tainaner Ensemble, was an early participant in those clubs, and among the first generation of arts-oriented young people that the center cultivated. Although neither he nor the other participants took up Catholicism, the center was a boon to young people starved for access to the arts.
By 1987, Taiwan’s experimental theater scene was developing rapidly. Recognizing that most of the island’s performing arts resources were in the north, Glover decided to establish a theater company at Huaden. In its first incarnation, the troupe consisted of Lee and a dozen or so other individuals, none of whom had professional theatrical experience. In fact, all of them had day jobs and only rehearsed at their base in Glover’s Sacred Heart of Jesus Church in the evenings.
At that time, most Taiwanese theater companies focused on producing interpretations of Western classics in Mandarin. However, the members of the Huaden troupe were accustomed to using Holo in everyday conversation, and felt uncomfortable performing foreign works in Mandarin. Instead, they decided to try their hands at crosstalk, a traditional form of Chinese comedic show involving a dialogue between performers. Productions in the genre like The Night We Became Hsiang-Sheng Comedians were gaining in popularity around that period, so the troupe created a crosstalk piece focusing on Tainan’s martial customs that it called Taiwanese Comic Dialogue: Ordinary Life.
The more the troupe performed, the more popular it became. When its shows began crowding out other events at the church, Glover decided to relocate the ensemble to the old St. Boniface Church on You-ai Street. The new location provided the troupe with a much-needed home of its own. Lee and the other members quickly converted the church into an 80-seat theater, and began using it to stage a variety of experimental pieces.
The ensemble’s six-hour epic K24 draws on the episodic plot structure of American television. (Photo courtesy of Tainaner Ensemble)
In 1992, Huaden was awarded a grant from a small theater program administered by the Council for Cultural Affairs, which was reorganized as the Ministry of Culture in 2012 as part of a government restructuring program. As it developed a more formal membership, it began turning into a professional troupe. In 1997, it marked that transition by changing its name to the Tainaner Ensemble.
After the success of its crosstalk show Ordinary Life, the ensemble introduced a series of pieces that drew on stories local to Tainan. By performing the shows, which included The Phoenix Trees Are in Blossom, in Holo, it brought something fresh to Taiwan’s Mandarin-oriented theatrical community.
In 2000, the ensemble took its performances to the next level by partnering with Lu Po-shen (呂柏伸), who specializes in Western classics. At the recommendation of Taiwanese theater professor Wang Chi-mei (汪其楣), Lu and the ensemble decided to adapt Antigone into Holo. Lee recalls that the eight tones of the Holo language worked surprisingly well with the rhyme of the Greek play, and created a wonderful effect on stage. The company’s interpretation of Antigone was very well received, and became a hot topic within Taiwan’s theatrical circles.
When the ensemble finished its tour of Taiwan with Antigone, it named Lu its artistic director. Lu then embarked on a program of translating Western classics into Holo, which led to William Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Samuel Beckett’s Endgame becoming popular parts of the company’s repertoire.
With Lu on board, the Tainan-based troupe decided to try and gain a foothold in northern Taiwan. Around this time, its unique performances caught the eye of the National Theater, which subsequently commissioned a production of the Japanese-era classic The Capon. “Our performance at the National Theater was a big step forward in our development,” Lee explains.
The company went on to add to its roster four new directors—Tsai Pao-chang (蔡柏璋), Liao Zou-han (廖若涵), Huang Cheng-yu (黃丞渝) and Chung Han (鍾翰)—inspiring a fresh burst of creativity from the ensemble. A graduate of the Department of Drama and Theatre at National Taiwan University in Taipei, Tsai is a writer, director and performer who has been described as the nation’s most interesting theatrical talent since Hugh Lee (李國修, 1955–2013) and Stan Lai (賴聲川). His recent works have included the six-hour-long K24, which draws on the episodic plot structure of American television, and Re/turn, a look back at the joys and sorrows of a love affair. Lee Wei-mu has described Tsai’s writing and directing as being filled with “love and urban appeal.”
Lee’s take on Lu is that his diligence provides a model for the younger generation, and that his adaptations of Western classics have grown out of the deep understanding of dramatic theory that he acquired while studying in the United Kingdom. Meanwhile, the head of the ensemble describes Liao’s work as very experimental, noting that she seeks to separate the audience from the material world and therefore keeps her stages bare. Lee refers to Huang’s plays as the ensemble’s “supernatural series” as they always involve ghosts. Chung, meanwhile, is a former student of Lu’s who has a similar style, but also “more of a sense of the vagabond,” Lee believes.
The innovative show K24 was created by writer, director and performer Tsai Pao-chang. (Photo courtesy of Tainaner Ensemble)
Having five directors with unique approaches all under one roof makes the ensemble’s style hard to pin down. Lee, who has been at the troupe’s helm since its Huaden days, serves more like a patriarch striving to cultivate and assist young talent than a typical director of a theater company. “People identify the Ping-Fong Acting Troupe with Hugh Lee and Performance Workshop with Stan Lai,” Lee says. “The Tainaner Ensemble is different. It’s a platform for a number of people.”
In 2014, the high cost of moving company members back and forth between its Tainan base and its Taipei shows prompted the Tainaner Ensemble to relocate its primary rehearsal and performance center to the capital. Lee, however, chose to remain in the southern municipality, moving the Tainan-based portion of the troupe into the 321 Alley Arts Village and building a new performance space there.
The ensemble’s new location is an old army dormitory, one of eight remaining at what was a Japanese colonial era (1895–1945) munitions factory. Tainan City Government’s Cultural Affairs Bureau (CAB) administers the facility, but had left it derelict for years. That began to change when the CAB invited the ensemble to move in after the lease on the troupe’s old premises expired last year.
While the dormitory retains its original structure, the ensemble has modified the building so that any space in its residence hall or rear courtyard can be transformed into a stage at a moment’s notice. Lee sees these open spaces, which lack permanent lighting or any distinction between stage and seating, as an inducement to push beyond the traditional confines of the theater.
In July last year, the ensemble launched its seven-day Mini 321 Arts Festival in conjunction with That Theater Troupe, an experimental offshoot of Tainaner, and the New Visions New Voices Theatre Company. The festival featured three 20-minute pieces while limiting the audience to just 99 people. This month, the ensemble will present another mini-festival featuring even more troupes and events. The idea is to create a “theatrical night market” that “sells plays rather than snacks,” Lee says.
Theatrical attendances in Tainan have grown greatly over the last 30 years, from just 20 to 30 regular theatergoers in the city in the old days to more than 1,200 today. The Tainaner Ensemble, with its commitment to artistic innovation, has played a central role in creating this thriving theatrical scene. As Ju Tzong-ching (朱宗慶), former president of Taipei National University of the Arts, has put it, the Tainaner Ensemble has progressed from just fooling around to taking theater seriously.
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This article originally appeared in Taiwan Panorama.