Taiwanese narrative opera group visits campus, Sept. 18-26

Aug. 31, 2005 -- Uhan Shii, an award-winning Taiwanese theatre group, will visit campus Sept. 18-26 and offer a public performance of the narrative opera "My Journey" at the Saint Louis Art Museum auditorium at 7 p.m. Sept. 23.

The visit, sponsored by the Visiting East Asian Professionals (VEAP) Program in Arts & Sciences, also will include a series of workshops for university students. Tickets for the Art Museum performance are free to Washington University students and $10 for the general public.

Uhan Shii, an award-winning Taiwanese theatre group, will visit campus Sept. 18-26.

The St. Louis Art Museum is located in Forest Park. For more information on the Art Museum performance or the workshops, call Krystel Mowery at 935-8772 or visit the VEAP Web site.

Uhan Shii performs traditional Taiwanese opera, much like the better-known Peking opera, except that all roles are performed by women. The plays are highly self-conscious plays that address questions of masking, role-playing, and identity; they bring up questions of age, gender, social status, and ethnicity. The plays are performed in Minnanhua; however, language is never an issue. Uhan Shii has performed widely in Europe and has won several awards. "My Journey" has been featured in three international festivals.

"My Journey" is about the life of Shei Yua-Sha, a famous Taiwanese Opera actress who has performed Taiwanese Opera since she was 5 years old. Now, in her 60s, she has spent the last 55-plus years specializing in the male role. On the stage, Shei portrays the gender conflicts and confusion deep inside her mind. Is she man or woman? She performs her story assisted by two younger Taiwan Opera actresses who represent the female and male roles, the two sides of her psyche.

Elements of traditional Chinese opera are incorporated into the play, which adapts an episode of the classical Chinese opera The Butterfly Lovers into the overture. Like Taiwanese opera, traditional Chinese opera saw a shift from having males play the roles of females to females playing the roles of males. The phenomenon had to do with the decline of traditional opera in popular culture, resulting in fewer and fewer people dedicated to the performance of the art as their life-time pursuit.

Uhan Shii, which in Chinese means happy, was founded in March 1995 by Mrs. Ya-Ling Peng who started her own theatre career in 1981 and works as an actress, director and playwright. Uhan Shii is a performance group that produces modern plays in addition to traditional Taiwanese Opera. The modern plays feature actors over sixty and young children. The theater productions are based on oral history in a series called "Echoes of Taiwan". It is oral history theatre that passes on life experiences of the elders through its true stories, so that the younger generations can learn more about how and what Taiwan had been through. "My Journey" is the eighth production in the "Echoes of Taiwan" series.

In the past 50 years the Taiwanese have been through the Japanese Occupation, the Chiang Kai-Shek Government and recently released from martial law. No government recognizes Taiwan as Taiwanese; they have tried to make the Taiwanese become Japanese or Chinese but not Taiwanese. "Echoes of Taiwan" is the first time to say "Yes" to Taiwanese. "My Journey" is an affirmation of Taiwan's traditional opera, one that for decades had been suppressed.