Uhan
Shii, an award-winning Taiwanese theatre group, will visit campus
Sept. 18-26 and offer a public performance of the Taiwanese opera
“My Journey?at the Saint Louis Art Museum auditorium at 7 p.m. Sept.
23.
The visit is sponsored by the Visiting East Asian Professionals
(VEAP) Program at Washington University. Tickets for the Art Museum
performance are free to Washington University students and $10
for the general public.
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 at artsci.wustl.edu/~veap
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, one
of the most famous Taiwanese Opera actresses 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.
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