Catherine Diamond

Kingdom of Desire: The Three Faces of Macbeth

The idea of a Beijing opera adaptation of Macbeth was hatched in 1983 by a group of young actors in Taipei who were discussing the decline of Beijing opera. As artists, they wanted to keep their form alive and stimulating and were not content to perform museum pieces or serve as mere preservers or repositories of a bygone culture. They were concerned because Beijing opera was not only losing its present audience of elderly knowledgeable supporters but failing to attract new replacements; without an audience appreciative of the subtleties of the form, it would gradually disappear. This younger generation of Beijing opera performers had to find a source of renewal that not only gave them artistic inspiration but also validated their activity in the eyes of the young intellectuals they wanted to attract. Noting both the diminishing audience and the decreasing enrollment in the Beijing opera training schools, scholars and performers have begun to analyze the troubling situation and consider solutions. Beijing opera today confronts several problems: the archaic language has created a dependency on subtitles projected on screens to help both Taiwaneseborn and mainland-born spectators alike, a stopgap solution that inhibits proper development of the form; the music-now that many audience members are more familiar with Western music, they find the sounds of the Beijing orchestra too raucous and unappealing; the arias, emphasized at the expense of dramatic content, no longer sustain the audiences interest; and, most seriously, Beijing opera appears irrelevant to the modern world, embodying as it does an older morality and worldview (Perng 1989, 132).1

Fire in the Banana's Belly: Bali's Female Performers Essay the Masculine Arts

Balinese performing arts have had remarkable fluidity in their gender presentation, in which female impersonators have predominated. Over the past twenty-five years, however, women have been making inroads in the presentation of female characters, then androgynous characters, and now even some of the more crude male characters. Gamelan wanita, the all-women ensembles that were once a novelty, are now commonplace throughout the island and they are aspiring to ever higher levels of musicality. All-female troupes are performing formerly all-male genres such wayang wong, kecak, and topeng. Solo performers are both exploring the increasingly porous boundaries between masculine and feminine representations and probing the etiology of gender inequality.

Red Lotus in the Twenty-First Century: Dilemmas in the Lao Performing Arts

The small and sparsely populated country of Laos is squeezed between Thailand and Vietnam, and receives information, financial investment, and cultural influence from both – arguably overwhelming the development of its own modern identity. While theatre has often been a popular and important means of disseminating cultural information and values in societies with low literacy levels, in todays Laos the mass media have become the most influential source of information and influence, with Thai television dominating the Lao airwaves – and Vietnamese-style socialist realism still the model for the live performing arts. Although the troupes disseminate didactic messages deemed important by the central government, they are supported primarily by foreign aid agencies that also dictate their content. In the following article, Catherine Diamond traces the history of the three major performing arts in Laos, describes their present state, and assesses the difficulties they face in developing along their own creative and artistic paths. Catherine Diamond teaches theatre and ecology in literature at Soochow University in Taipei, Taiwan. She is a theatre reporter in Southeast Asia, and has previously written about theatre in Burma, Vietnam, Turkey, and the Czech Republic for NTQ.

Emptying the Sea by the Bucketful: The Dilemma in Cambodian Theatre

From the perspective of the French colonialists and contemporary tour producers, Cambodian classical dance has been the star of Cambodias performing arts, overshadowing the other theatrical forms. Yike, bassac, lakhaoun niyeay, andsbek touchall have taken second place for political as well as aesthetic reasons. During the 1990s when the United Nations and other aid agencies were helping Cambodia recover from the effects of civil war and foreign occupation, the performing arts relied heavily on foreign aid to sustain them. This essay questions both the renewed focus on the classical dance and the reliance on foreign funds for performance inside the country—and asks whether such aid will in the long term benefit the performing arts and artists or create a dependence that lessens their own initiative and local audience interaction.

Human See, Human Do: Simianification, Cross-species, Cross-cultural, Body Transformation

Simianification is the practice of humans inhabiting the simian body on stage. Because Asians have lived with monkeys and apes, several Asian theatre traditions have long legacies of representing monkeys on stage. In Europe and North America, where non-human primates did not exist, they are not a familiar feature in performance until nineteenth-century music hall and circus and twentieth-century film and television. In some recent performances in Asia dancers and actors have expanded their understanding of monkey roles by incorporating scientific discoveries, modern movement techniques, and global pop culture. On the British and American stage, actors experiment to ‘impersonate’ the humanized ape bodily and mentally, without the aid of the disguises and prosthetics usual in film. These performers ‘embody’ the philosophical inquiry of what it means to ‘be monkey’ by inhabiting a monkey’s body while still performing ‘art’ for a human audience. Catherine Diamond, a Contributing Editor to NTQ , is a professor of theatre and environmental literature at Soochow University, Taiwan. She is also the director of the Kinnari Ecological Theatre Project in Southeast Asia.

Prague Summer: Encounters with a Third Kind of Theatre

All major cities are now competing with each other to attract cultural tourists: yet Prague, since the Velvet Revolution, has been distinctive in using the city itself as a cultural icon, also capitalizing on the artists associated with it – notably Mozart, Gluck, Kafka, and Arcimboldo – to create performances that present an idealized and imagined Prague, the city as its own persona. Since tourists might hesitate to go to Czech-language drama, theatrical entrepreneurs instead offer puppet opera, Black Theatre, and Laterna Magika – forms closely associated with Prague, and which circumvent the language problem. Thus, during the summer, when the regular theatres close, Prague theatricalizes itself for tourist consumption. Catherine Diamond is a professor of theatre in Taiwan, where she also dances and directs. A regular contributor to NTQ, she has written several books, including Sringara Tales , short stories about Asian performers, and Madmen and Fools: Taiwan Theatre 1988–1998 .

Mending the Sky: Fighting Pollution with Bread and Puppets

On January 18, 1994, Peter Schumann, the director and originator of the Bread and Puppet Theatre, brought some of his one-hundred-year-old sourdough starter to make and break bread with the 425 Environmental Theatre (425 Huangjingjuchang)a in Taipei. The two were collaborating in the Council of Cultural Planning and Developments (CCPD) two-week workshop and performance of Mending the Sky (Bu tian),b an antipollution allegory based on Chinese creation myths. Bread and Puppet was invited specifically to help stimulate Taiwans community theatre by introducing new methods of developing and presenting community-based productions. Founded in 1963 in New York City, Bread and Puppet has become internationally known for its outdoor performances with masked actors, enormous effigies, improvised music, choreographed movement of large numbers of people, and narratives dealing directly with political or social issues of importance to the host community. As an environmentally conscious theatre, Bread and Puppet purposefully converts junk and cast-off materials to make its props and puppets, and although the design of most of the puppets bears the distinctive mark of Schumann himself, their actual production is a cooperative effort of the participants. The troupe has toured all over the world, always performing in public places and involving local inhabitants in some part of the performance to promote its underlying message: art is not elite, but for all people-as basic and as necessary as bread. Zhong Mingde,c the director of 425, first encountered the

The Masking and Unmasking of the Yu Theatre Ensemble

During its five years of existence, the Yu Theatre Ensemblea of Taipei has undertaken the task of creating a new Taiwanese theatre by incorporating Taiwanese folk arts, classical Chinese stories, the martial arts, and contemporary Western theatrical techniques. As part of a growing movement in Taiwan to explore and develop local traditions and arts, the Yu Theatre confronts two related obstacles: the underdeveloped tradition of Taiwanese spoken theatre that is now trying to carve a niche for itself in a posttelevision, postfilm era, and a recent history of repressive regimes that have stifled the development of Taiwanese local culture (Ma 1991, 215-216). It may seem a contradiction to incorporate foreign techniques when ones intention is to revitalize and reestablish ones native traditions, but Yus founder and director, Liu Ching-min,b feels that Taiwans culture has been so imposed upon and so broken by external forces that all resources should be explored for the creation of a new and uniquely Taiwanese theatre. The people currently called Taiwanese are descendants of immigrants from Chinas southern provinces, primarily Fukien, who came over four hundred years ago and speak the min nanc language. In 1895, Taiwan was ceded to Japan by the Chinese Manchu government as indemnity for its defeat in the Sino-Japanese War. The Japanese colonized the island for fifty years, and although in the 1920s and early 1930s both Taiwanese and Japanese spoken dramas were performed, Taiwanese performances, especially those advocating national identity, were banned when the war with China began. In 1949, when Chiang Kai-sheks Nationalist forces and supporters retreated to the island, writers of Mandarin from the mainland came to dominate Taiwans theatre and literature. The mainland Nation-

Fools rush in … and succeed: how an outsider's naivety effected an arts and reconciliation initiative in Indonesia's Sulawesi

ABSTRACT Without knowing anything of the contentious history between Sulawesis Chinese and Indonesian Moslem communities, Taiwanese director Peng Ya-ling went to Makassar to conduct a reconciliation workshop. As director of Uhan Shii Theatre, Peng creates performances from oral histories she collects in interviews. She applied this technique in Indonesia, first having to overcome deep-seated suspicion from both sides. The Moslem Indonesian actors performed symbolic re-enactments of the Chinese settlers’ stories for a mixed audience from both communities, thus effecting a moment of racial harmony.

Planting virtual lemons: performing forest protection in the context of political performativity

ABSTRACT The socialist People’s Democratic Republic of Laos (Lao PDR) has some of the largest intact forests in Southeast Asia, yet these are being quickly depleted by illegal logging, slash-and-burn farming, increasing population pressures, monocrop plantations, mining and dam building. Foreign government and nongovernmental organizations stage “infotainment” theatre plays to educate and inform the Lao public of its role in protecting the forests even though government projects and concessions are the primary causes of forest destruction. Because all the nationally subsidized performing arts troupes are government mouthpieces they cannot critique the government’s role. Foreign aid agencies funding the dramas are also made complicit in the hypocrisy of promoting forest protection to those with the least power to do so, while both performers and spectators know who is profiting the most from the sale of forest products. This article examines theatrical performances regarding forest protection presented in this context of performativity in which the state manipulates socialist rhetoric to conceal its actions that enrich its officials and capitalist partners at the expense of the rest of the Lao public.