THE POSTGRADUATE SHORT ARTICLE
The subversive practices of reminiscence
theatre in Taiwan
Wan-Jung Wang*
Royal Holloway, University of London, UK
Founded in 1995, the Taiwanese Uhan Shii Theatre Group has created 12 distinctive reminiscence theatre productions and has performed locally in Taiwan as well as globally around the world. The company has developed its own theatrical aesthetics of memory, and their work not only represents the traditions of Taiwanese culture and habitus, but it also subverts its conventions. In this paper I will examine how the aesthetics of production represents Taiwanese cultural habitus and how their representation of female experience subverts orthodox cultural expectations and traditional gender roles associated with them.
The background and context of the Uhan Shii Theatre Group
Taiwan has been ruled by different political regimes, undergoing colonisation by Japan and ‘re-colonisation’ by the Kuomingtang nationalists (shortened to KMT)1 immediately after the Japanese occupation in the twentieth century. Culturally and historically, Taiwan has been influenced by Chinese and Japanese imperialism as well as ‘modernised’ by Western neo-colonialism, and the hybrid culture of Taiwan indicates this post-coloniality. It was only after the lifting of Martial Law in 1987 that the Taiwanese began to reconstruct their own multiple histories and, as part of the process of decolonisation, started to renegotiate a more secure sense of their own identities. The Uhan Shii Theatre Group was founded in this emerging movement of cultural decolonisation in the 1990s.
The director of the Uhan Shii Theatre Group, Peng Ya-Ling, was an active theatre practitioner in the experimental theatre movement in Taiwan in the 1980s, where she adapted Western avant-garde theatre forms developed during the 1960s. Later, she went to London to attend the London School of Movement and Mime, and received rigorous training in Etienne Decroux’s form of corporeal mime. Although her performance was often praised by her British teacher as ‘uniquely Taiwanese’, she was unaware of this quality in her work at the time. When she returned to Taiwan in 1990s, she embarked upon a personal journey to seek her ‘uniquely Taiwanese’
*Department of Drama and Theatre, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, Surrey
TW20 0EX, UK. Email: w.c.wang@rhul.ac.uk
ISSN 1356-9783 (print)/ISSN 1470-112X (online)/06/010077-11
# 2006 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/13569780500437754
qualities. Her personal journey collided with a collective quest for cultural identity on
the island. By interviewing traditional performing artists and community-based
elders, she started to re-learn her own culture and traditions. These interviews
motivated the foundation of the Uhan Shii Theatre Group.
The Uhan Shii Theatre Group is the first Taiwanese theatre company exclusively
dedicated to the performance of the oral histories of community-based elders. By
recovering and performing their buried memories, the company reconstructs
Taiwanese historicised identity and, in the process, reaffirms it. The elder
performers, who had never before undergone any professional theatre training,
perform their life stories in collaboration with Peng Ya-Ling, the director. Reclaiming
a sense of their own post-colonial subjectivity is a shared goal for Uhan Shii’s director
and its elderly performers, who are differently marginalised according to gender,
ethnicity, and class groupings. In the following section, I will demonstrate how the
aesthetics of production presents and reclaims a specifically Taiwanese cultural
identity.
Aesthetics of production
Places are often inscribed by people’s memories and interpretations. Conversely,
people are also inscribed by the places in which they have dwelt. The interrelationship
between people and places is a process of inter-inscription and is constantly
changing according to people’s different needs at different times (Agnew et al. , 2003,
pp. 290297). Places are inscribed upon the elders’ bodies with cultural meanings
which derive from their social experiences. Pierre Bourdieu described the significance
of such physical imprints as ‘social habitus’, and sociologists Halbwachs and
Connerton have stressed the importance of the body in producing and reproducing
cultural remembrances (Halbwachs, 1950, pp. 7884; Bourdieu, 1977, pp. 7887;
Connerton, 1989, pp. 58, 88). This combination of the social and cultural practices
inscribed on the bodies might be described as a ‘cultural habitus’, a term I am using
to suggest the ways in which Taiwanese elders in the Uhan Shii Theatre Group
demonstrated their neglected and colonised cultures in performance.
On stage, the elders’ physical presence is visible to the audience as they tell their
stories and means that reminiscence theatre exhibits the historical sedimentation of
places upon bodies. In the Uhan Shii Theatre Group, Taiwanese cultural habitus is
presented by performative elements such as the elders’ dialect, singing, gestures,
postures and movement as well as the director’s mise en scene. The social habitus of
Taiwan is presented by the individual elders’ habitual gestures and postures which
derive from their social encounters in Taiwan.
The aesthetics of production evident in the company’s work reflects the influences
of the cultural habitus of Taiwan in two ways. One is concerned with looking for its
‘roots’ and the other is related to the ‘routes’ Taiwanese people have travelled and
their encounters with other cultures. Firstly, ‘looking for roots’ suggests the quest to
re-establish the subjectivity of the previously disfranchised and oppressed Taiwanese
people. The company deliberately recovers histories and languages of ethnic minority
groups such as Hakka and Holo who have been suppressed in the past, and those
from the currently marginalised ‘mainlander group’ in Taiwan.2 By performing
stories in their own dialects, these performers are offered the chance to restore
subjectivities that have been exploited by different dominating political regimes.
In 1995, the Uhan Shii Theatre Group started to devise a series of productions
called Echoes of Taiwan based upon the oral history accounts of Taiwanese
community-based elders. These productions established critical acclaim for their
theatrical reflection of Taiwanese cultural identities. In the production Echoes of
Taiwan III*/The Story of Taiwanese Men premiered in 1998, the Uhan Shii Theatre
Group demonstrates the cultural hybridity of Taiwanese men and women under
Japanese colonialism and KMT’s nationalism. The production also reflects the
influences of both Western and Chinese theatre cultures on the director Peng
Ya-Ling. This mirrors the two directions of Taiwanese cultural habitus: the roots, by
recovering histories hidden during the colonial and nationalist periods; and the
routes, by renovatingWestern and Chinese theatre cultures with a renewed vision. By
synchronising the influences of routes and roots, the Uhan Shii Theatre Group
reflects the complexity of contemporary Taiwanese culture.
In the first scene of Echoes III , the ritual of a Taiwanese man taking a bath
demonstrates the imprint of Japanese imperialism through a series of movements.
Portrayed by a retired merchant, Wu Wuen-Cheng, the man sits upright and
motionless with one arm straight up whilst his wife rubs his back silently. The
commanding and unyielding posture of the patriarchal man and the submissive
posture of a subservient and obedient wife reflect the imprint of Japanese colonialism
on Taiwanese culture. In contrast to the dominating position in his domestic life, in
public the Taiwanese man kneels down and bows in front of a Japanese soldier to ask
forgiveness for smuggling pork for his family. These two images mirror the complex
imprint of Japanese colonialism on elderly Taiwanese men. He both enacts Japanese
patriarchal postures at home and succumbs to an inferior position as the colonised in
public. By contrast, Taiwanese women are doubly oppressed by complying with both
colonialism and patriarchy and diminished into the role of silent submission. The
humiliation inscribed upon the wife is shown vividly in another scene when she serves
the tea respectfully for her husband and persistently extends her hand to ask money
from him, but in vain.
After Japanese colonialism, the KMT nationalists also left a legacy of suffering and
restraint on the Taiwanese people. That means that when the KMT nationalists
practised stringent political and military rule in Taiwan, they left physical imprints of
suppression on Taiwanese people. This point is demonstrated in the second part of
the Uhan Shii Theatre Group’s production of Echoes of Taiwan III . The character,
Tsai Yi-Shan’s father, was almost beaten to death in the period of ‘White Terror’
when the KMT crushed opposition to its police state. His crime was to ask KMT
soldiers to return his sheep which had been taken by force.3 Seeing his badly
wounded father, his mother’s creaking scream and cry resonates on stage. The image
of his mother wrapping his father haunted him for years and was made into an
Reminiscence theatre in Taiwan 79
unforgettable stage picture (see Figure 1). Consecutively, the hushed gestures
exchanged between the two men crouching with their backs on small stools and their
image bound by the long white strips of cloth hanging from the ceiling, reflect the
physical and psychological restraints experienced under nationalist rule.
An alternative direction of Taiwanese cultural habitus is manifested in the
director’s travelling ‘routes’ from the West back to Taiwan. Through exploring
indigenous cultures, Peng Ya-Ling counter-balances the Westernisation and neocolonialism
that permeated the cultural scene of Taiwan in the 1980s. Furthermore,
her ‘unique Taiwanese’ quality is especially reflected in the hybridity of her acting
training and directing style. It is fused with indigenous Taiwanese theatre aesthetics,
Chinese traditional theatre concepts and Western experimental theatre forms.
Nevertheless, this hybridity reflected in her theatre works also contains a strong
awareness of the need to seek and sustain her own cultural subjectivity. This is a kind
of ‘critical hybridity’ rather than the ‘happy hybridity’ that Jacquelin Lo describes.4
Peng’s creative and critical synchronisation of artistic styles from different theatrical
traditions creates a new artistic style of her own. This is a distinctive example of the
hybridity of Taiwanese culture.
In her mise en scene, Peng Ya-Ling employs circular rather than linear blocking
which resonates with Chinese traditional theatre aesthetics.5 An example could be
drawn from ‘the lantern parade’ scene in which Taiwanese and Japanese children
circle the stage to parade their lanterns on the occasion of the Lantern Festival in
Figure 1. Echoes of Taiwan III*/The Story of Taiwanese Men in 1999, the scene demonstrates that
Tsai Yi-Shan recalls how he watched the sheep when he was a child as well as how his mother
wrapped up the wounds for his father, who is beaten by KMT nationalists at the far back of this
picture, as his life-long haunting image. Courtesy of the Uhan Shii Theatre Group
Echoes of Taiwan III . In her choice of narrative strategy, she combines storytelling
directly addressed to the audience and lyrical singing that expresses the inner feelings
of a character. This is typical of the Chinese opera style, and is well-illustrated in the
soliloquies and Japanese singing in Echoes of Taiwan III . In the tender singing of
Japanese songs, the elderly man and woman express their ambivalent and suppressed
feelings towards Japanese colonial rule combined with love and hate, adoration and a
sense of inferiority. In the same production, the symbolic use of props such as stools
to represent sheep recalls the property usage in Chinese theatre. In a game-playing
scene, for example, Wu Wuen-Cheng and Tsai Yi-Shan play a game of throwing
cards while they talk about the restriction of Chinese education under Japanese
colonial rule. They pause at the point when they begin to throw their cards as they
are fixed by their time; they freeze the moment of play as a perpetual moment of their
childhood to highlight this memory. This tableau-like effect resonates with Chinese
opera’s ‘Liang Xiang’, which is a highly stylised movement in Peking Opera; when a
character first appears on stage, he or she will hold their characteristic posture and
gesture with a certain special tempo of music for a moment on stage in order to stress
their distinguishing characteristic.
The trademark of the Uhan Shii Theatre Group is the transformation of the
movements of daily life into stylised movements, thereby turning the ordinary into
the extraordinary. This derives from Chinese theatre aesthetics, in which daily
movements are deliberately stylised. The emphasis on physicalisation to reveal the
inner feelings comes from Ya-Ling’s meticulous training in the school of Etienne
Decroux in London. The best example of how this Western training has become
assimilated into her work is the scene of ‘pulling the white hair’ in Echoes of Taiwan
IV*/If You Had Called Me. The elders repeatedly pulling their white hair as a group
in slow motion symbolises the past that they wish to forget.
Peng Ya-Ling employs modern Western theatre aesthetics such as lighting, sound
effects and slide projection to create a ‘total’ theatre effect and to reinforce the
dramatic atmosphere. In the process of training the elders in acting, she has applied
Feldenkrais’ method to liberate the elders’ bodies from conditioned social bounds
and incorporated training in ‘psychodrama’ and ‘contact improvisation’ to unfix both
their physical and psychological blocks. In this collaborative process, Ya-Ling draws
upon improvisation techniques to develop scripts with the elders in the rehearsal.
The ritualistic slow motion movement, shown in the scene of ‘wrapping the wounded
father’ in Echoes of Taiwan III , derives from the non-realism style that Ya-Ling was
exposed to in the 1980s’ experimental theatre movement adapted from the West in
Taiwan.
Based upon the above examples, Uhan Shii’s aesthetics of production demonstrate
the cultural inter-inscription of roots and routes in Taiwan and reflect the on-going
process of Taiwanese identity formation. The performances also offer the opportunity
for a triple reflexivity upon histories from the performer, the director and the
audience. Their dialogues with their complex personal and cultural histories
continue to shape the new and ever-changing identity of Taiwan.
Reminiscence theatre in Taiwan 81
Taiwanese female experience presents and subverts the symbolic power
and space
Reminiscence theatre in Taiwan not only represents the practice of cultural
conventions, but the fixity of habitus is also subverted in performance. In this
section, I shall examine representations of female experience in Taiwan as one aspect
of post-colonial feminist discourse. In the terms of Bourdieu’s analysis of the
symbolic power of language and Henri Lefebvre’s concept of space as social
production, the Uhan Shii Theatre Group employs the symbolic power of theatrical
languages and space to subvert social hierarchies experienced in Taiwan (Bourdieu,
1991, pp. 163170; Lefebvre, 1991, pp. 3844). The company’s resistance to
patriarchy is demonstrated through their awareness of the symbolic power of local
languages and by reclaiming a space for women’s voices and performances in their
theatre.
The Uhan Shii Theatre Group is led by a female director and 80% of its
performers are community-based female elders. This means that female experience
has become one of the major subjects of their plays. Female elders not only express
their complex feelings and stories in drama, they also use theatre to demonstrate how
they survived different colonial and nationalist regimes and the patriarchy associated
with them by adopting strategies of both compliance and resistance. These female
performers seek to restore and disseminate Taiwanese female elders’ oral histories
through performance. This process uncovers stories previously hidden from view,
and thus inserts multiple ‘Her Stories’ into the previously unitary, masculine and
official ‘His story’. By disentangling the complex relations among colonialism,
nationalism, post-colonialism and feminism, their personal and collective stories
represent a significant aspect of post-colonial feminist discourse.
The representation of women’s experience of being silenced in the past to finding a
voice in the present subverts patriarchal traditions. In Echoes of Taiwan III the change
in women’ status is reflected in the transformation of the gestures and language of the
main female character, Li-Xiou. In the beginning, she is silent, submissive and
humiliated. With limited movement, she is cornered and confined in domestic chores
and space. She tolerates colonialism and complies with patriarchy in order to survive.
But after she has secured her economic independence in the 1980s, she begins
to defy patriarchal confinement. She becomes outspoken and even talks back to
her husband. Her gestures become expressive, and she moves actively to reclaim her
domestic space. In the end, she puts on make up and her best dress and leaves her
home to pursue her own enjoyment. The reversal of her physical and verbal language
signifies the possibility of the reversal of symbolic power between women and men in
Taiwan.
Henri Lefebvre has argued that representational spaces possess the power to
subvert and reshape the spatial structures of everyday life. Taiwanese women have
reshaped the fixed spatial power structures of gender relations in their performances.
In Echoes of Taiwan III , Li-Xiou makes her suppressed domestic experience public.
The dramatic representation of Li-Xiou’s change of gender politics offers a possible
model through which women might reclaim spaces previously denied to them.
Walking out of the home, Li-Xiou demonstrates that women can not only win an
equal place at home but they also can leave their confined domestic spaces and enter
the public space. Through performance, fixed divisions between gender relations are
dismantled and patriarchal power is redistributed into multiple agents and spaces.
Avoiding direct confrontation, Li-Xiou uses humorous remarks to satirise and
counter-act her husband’s rigidity and inability to adapt to the rapid changes evident
in Taiwanese society. By these actions, she demonstrates that Taiwanese women seek
equality and balance with men rather than dominating them or creating another
social hierarchy.
In Echoes of Taiwan VI*/We Are Here, premiered in 2000, a migration epic story of
Hakka (the second largest ethnic group in Taiwan) was delivered for the first time on
the Taiwanese stage in the Hakka language. The story spans the past to the present,
from the countryside to the metropolis, and the experience of Hakka women is the
main focus. These women use their Hakka dialect to tell their life stories and project
themselves into a public space, thereby countering their previous absence in public
and creating a new spatial reproduction. They employ the Hakka language and
singing to reclaim a space for Hakka women whose experiences and voices had been
previously marginalised by the double oppressions of KMT’s nationalism and
patriarchy. They share their personal stories of migration, showing how they make a
living in the metropolis and how they have moved from the confines of the domestic
place to the public space. Furthermore, their numerous tours (the production has
toured to remote Hakka villages for more than 50 performances and has travelled as
far as Wupertale, Germany in 2001) has meant that their stories have been seen on
various public platforms both in and out of Taiwan.
Echoes of Taiwan VI*/We Are Here reveals the hidden tradition of adopted
daughters in Hakka history for the first time on a Taiwanese stage. Some of the
female cast are ‘adopted daughters’ themselves, some of their mothers and sisters
were ‘adopted daughters’ who were given to another family in exchange for their
labour.6 Sharing collective memories of this exploitative system of adoption helps
them to come to terms with their suffering. In turn, the performance enables them
to show the inner feelings of these exploited daughters through dramatic narratives
and singing. In the scene of ‘Wrapping the Wound for the Little Girl’, enacted by
an all-female cast, they pass a long white strip of cloth towards each other slowly
(see Figure 2). It occupies and involves the whole stage and symbolises a cleansing
meandering river. It represents a healing ritual to comfort their traumas. The healing
space sometimes extends beyond the stage and reaches the audience who may have
endured similar afflictions.7
The production also portrays how Hakka women break free from their domestic
constraints and economic dependency. Women start to make a living to support their
families by tailoring or selling merchandise, and this is shown theatrically in Jyu-Ing’s
and Yu-Ching’s stories, both of whom are self-reliant Hakka mothers and career
women in real life. They either walk out of their domestic space and create their own
Reminiscence theatre in Taiwan 83
career in the public domain or transform their domestic space into their workplace.
In contrast with the confinement, financial worries, suppression and anger that Jyu-
Ing had to put up with at home, she dances with her customers, using her tapemeasure
and mannequin to celebrate the economic independence she has gained by
transforming her home into a tailor’s studio.
In the last scene, the circling parade ‘Opening up the Bundle of Memory’, projects
the Hakka women’s memories into the auditorium (see Figure 3). Each woman
opens a blue bundle, which traditional Hakka people wrap up and carry around their
shoulders when they embark upon a faraway journey, and she shares her most
treasured memory with the audience. Xiou-Ching’s memory is a family photograph
in which her mother holds her tight and loves her dearly; Jyu-Ing’s blue bundle
contains her diary which accompanies her migration journey from village to city.
One after another, they circle around the auditorium and pass on the blue bundles
to children as passing on their Hakka heritage. The procession encompasses the
space with their memories of migration and projects them into their prospective
futures. This play has toured around the metropolis and remote Hakka towns
twice in the past five years with the intention of re-inscribing Taiwanese history
with Hakka women’s oral histories and re-affirming their identities through theatre
practice.
Figure 2. Echoes of Taiwan VI*/We Are Here (2000). This photograph captures the moment when
all the female cast work together to pass on the long white strip to wrap up the symbolic wounds
which scared the young adopted daughter as a healing ritual on stage. They are all dressed in the
renovated form of traditional Hakka female costumes, noted for their floral patterns. Courtesy of
the Uhan Shii Theatre Group
These examples illustrate how the Uhan Shii Theatre Group not only presents the
traditions of Taiwanese culture, but also subverts them by new representations of
contemporary female experience. The company presents how Taiwanese women
have dismantled fixed gender relations and destabilised patriarchy in ways that are
different from their feminist counterparts in Western cultures. The presentation of
the Taiwanese stories performed by the women themselves also subverts the
‘orientalist’ imagination about Asian women and challenges passive stereotypes
with which they are sometimes associated. Although the director Peng Ya-Ling,
never stresses their political aim as a ‘feminist group’ (Wang, 2004), the process of
women acting their own stories is part of a continual process of striving towards
social justice and gender equality. Through these cultural and theatrical strategies the
company intends to transcend binarism and open multiple choices and spaces for
different voices in Taiwan.
Notes
1. KMT is the leading nationalist party, led by Chang Kai-Shek, lost the civil war with
Communist China in 1947 and retreated to Taiwan. It built a settler-state in Taiwan
immediately after the Japanese returned Taiwan to Chang-Kai-Shek’s nationalist regime
and became the sole authoritarian and autocratic political party in Taiwan until 2000
Figure 3. Echoes of Taiwan VI*/We Are Here (2000). This photo juxtaposes several scenes when the
elder female characters open up their blue bundles accordingly, share their most treasured memories
in migration, and pass them on to the younger Hakka generation. Courtesy of the Uhan Shii
Theatre Group
when the opposition party, Democratic Progress Party, won the presidential election for
the first time.
2. After the Democratic Progressive Party, which is mainly constituted of Holo people in
Taiwan, won the presidential election in 2000, the Holo, the largest ethnic group in Taiwan,
has become the dominant ethnic group. They tend to promote the formerly suppressed Holo
culture as the representative and leading Taiwanese culture and consequently marginalise
the previously privileged ‘mainlander group’ in nationalist rule as a cultural counterreaction.
3. The actor, Tsai Yi-Shan, was a retired film projector in real life and has now passed away.
4. Jacqueline Lo criticises in her poignant essay, ‘Beyond happy hybirdity: performing
AsianAustralian identity’: ‘Hybridity is not therefore perceived as a natural outcome but
rather as a form of political intervention . . .’. She also points to ‘happy hybridity’ as ‘the most
pernicious form of hybridity . . . found in eclectic postmodernism which the term is emptied
of all its specific histories and politics to denote instead of a concept of unbound culture’
(Lo, 2005, pp. 12).
5. Circular blocking is a typical, customary and stylised movement pattern in Chinese Opera.
Whenever a new character appears or exits the stage, he or she will make a circular
movement to give a clear demonstration of his or her distinctive character with stylised
postures and gestures. The circular movement also creates a constantly unbroken line
between movements on stage and secures a harmonious and smooth aesthetic quality in
Chinese traditional theatre. The circular movement is often used in dance and singing
sequences to deliver a continuous and flowing sense of beauty and momentum in traditional
Chinese Opera.
6. ‘Adopted daughters’ is one of the pervasive and common folk customs in Taiwan before
1970s. The main purpose of this custom was to lessen the financial burden of the traditional
Chinese big families, who consider daughters inferior to sons and thus they are considered to
be extraneous and to belong to their husbands’ families after they are married. It is
considered common to give away one’s daughters as other families’ ‘adopted daughters’ in
exchange for money and to help with the heavy labours of the adopted family if the original
family has too many daughters and is in severe poverty. Some of the daughters are bought in
order to become the future wives of their adopted family’s young sons. Often they are
physically and emotionally exploited when they were bereft from their kinship and used
extensively as child labour in the domestic setting.
7. According to my observations and interviews of the audience when I followed their tour
around some remote Hakka villages, I witnessed many female audience members shedding
tears when they saw the healing scene on stage happen for adopted daughters. In Guan-Xi,
the remote northern Hakka village in Taiwan, there were three female audience members
interviewed by me evidencing that they were comforted by the performance in different
degrees. They said that they felt they were more or less relieved by the secrets they buried
deep in their hearts as adopted daughters when they saw that their experience was shared by
so many other women and they seem to have mourned together in the performance for
themselves as well as for those sitting in the auditorium.
Notes on contributor
Wan-Jung Wang, born in Taiwan, is a theatre director, teacher and scholar. Having
published three books about theatre in Chinese: Peter Brook, With wings I fly
across dark nights and Stage vision, she is currently researching Reminiscence
Theatre at Royal Holloway, University of London as a PhD student.
References
Agnew, J., Mitchell, K. & Toal, G. (Eds) (2003) A companion to political geography (Malden, MA
and Oxford, Blackwell Publishers).
Bourdieu, P. (1977) Outline of a theory of practice (R. Nice, Trans.) (Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press).
Bourdieu, P. (1991) Language & symbolic power (G. Matthew & R. Adamson, Trans.) (Cambridge,
Polity Press).
Connerton, P. (1989) How societies remember (Cambridge and New York, Cambridge University
Press).
Halbwachs, M. (1950) The collective memory (F. J. & V. Y. Ditter, Trans.) (London, Harper
Colophone Books).
Lefebvre, H. (1991) The production of space (D. Nicholson-Smith, Trans.) (Oxford, Blackwell).
Lo, J. (2005) Beyond happy hybridity: performing AsianAustralian identities . Available online at:
http://dlibrary.acu.edu.au/research/adsa/Lo.htm (accessed 5 August 2005), pp. 120.
Peng, Y.-L. (1995) DVDs of Echoes of Taiwan IIIXX of Uhan Shii Theatre Group in Taiwan (Taipei,
Uhan Shii Theatre Group).
Wang, W.-J. (2004) 12 interviews with the Director Peng Ya-Ling about Uhan Shii Theatre
Group’s methods and process in rehearsal, September 2003January 2004, Taipei.
(Wan-Jung Wang,〈The subversive practices of reminiscence theatre in Taiwan〉。《Research in Drama Education》Vol.11,No.1,February 2006,pp.77-87)
The subversive practices of reminiscence
theatre in Taiwan
Wan-Jung Wang*
Royal Holloway, University of London, UK
Founded in 1995, the Taiwanese Uhan Shii Theatre Group has created 12 distinctive reminiscence theatre productions and has performed locally in Taiwan as well as globally around the world. The company has developed its own theatrical aesthetics of memory, and their work not only represents the traditions of Taiwanese culture and habitus, but it also subverts its conventions. In this paper I will examine how the aesthetics of production represents Taiwanese cultural habitus and how their representation of female experience subverts orthodox cultural expectations and traditional gender roles associated with them.
The background and context of the Uhan Shii Theatre Group
Taiwan has been ruled by different political regimes, undergoing colonisation by Japan and ‘re-colonisation’ by the Kuomingtang nationalists (shortened to KMT)1 immediately after the Japanese occupation in the twentieth century. Culturally and historically, Taiwan has been influenced by Chinese and Japanese imperialism as well as ‘modernised’ by Western neo-colonialism, and the hybrid culture of Taiwan indicates this post-coloniality. It was only after the lifting of Martial Law in 1987 that the Taiwanese began to reconstruct their own multiple histories and, as part of the process of decolonisation, started to renegotiate a more secure sense of their own identities. The Uhan Shii Theatre Group was founded in this emerging movement of cultural decolonisation in the 1990s.
The director of the Uhan Shii Theatre Group, Peng Ya-Ling, was an active theatre practitioner in the experimental theatre movement in Taiwan in the 1980s, where she adapted Western avant-garde theatre forms developed during the 1960s. Later, she went to London to attend the London School of Movement and Mime, and received rigorous training in Etienne Decroux’s form of corporeal mime. Although her performance was often praised by her British teacher as ‘uniquely Taiwanese’, she was unaware of this quality in her work at the time. When she returned to Taiwan in 1990s, she embarked upon a personal journey to seek her ‘uniquely Taiwanese’
*Department of Drama and Theatre, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, Surrey
TW20 0EX, UK. Email: w.c.wang@rhul.ac.uk
ISSN 1356-9783 (print)/ISSN 1470-112X (online)/06/010077-11
# 2006 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/13569780500437754
qualities. Her personal journey collided with a collective quest for cultural identity on
the island. By interviewing traditional performing artists and community-based
elders, she started to re-learn her own culture and traditions. These interviews
motivated the foundation of the Uhan Shii Theatre Group.
The Uhan Shii Theatre Group is the first Taiwanese theatre company exclusively
dedicated to the performance of the oral histories of community-based elders. By
recovering and performing their buried memories, the company reconstructs
Taiwanese historicised identity and, in the process, reaffirms it. The elder
performers, who had never before undergone any professional theatre training,
perform their life stories in collaboration with Peng Ya-Ling, the director. Reclaiming
a sense of their own post-colonial subjectivity is a shared goal for Uhan Shii’s director
and its elderly performers, who are differently marginalised according to gender,
ethnicity, and class groupings. In the following section, I will demonstrate how the
aesthetics of production presents and reclaims a specifically Taiwanese cultural
identity.
Aesthetics of production
Places are often inscribed by people’s memories and interpretations. Conversely,
people are also inscribed by the places in which they have dwelt. The interrelationship
between people and places is a process of inter-inscription and is constantly
changing according to people’s different needs at different times (Agnew et al. , 2003,
pp. 290297). Places are inscribed upon the elders’ bodies with cultural meanings
which derive from their social experiences. Pierre Bourdieu described the significance
of such physical imprints as ‘social habitus’, and sociologists Halbwachs and
Connerton have stressed the importance of the body in producing and reproducing
cultural remembrances (Halbwachs, 1950, pp. 7884; Bourdieu, 1977, pp. 7887;
Connerton, 1989, pp. 58, 88). This combination of the social and cultural practices
inscribed on the bodies might be described as a ‘cultural habitus’, a term I am using
to suggest the ways in which Taiwanese elders in the Uhan Shii Theatre Group
demonstrated their neglected and colonised cultures in performance.
On stage, the elders’ physical presence is visible to the audience as they tell their
stories and means that reminiscence theatre exhibits the historical sedimentation of
places upon bodies. In the Uhan Shii Theatre Group, Taiwanese cultural habitus is
presented by performative elements such as the elders’ dialect, singing, gestures,
postures and movement as well as the director’s mise en scene. The social habitus of
Taiwan is presented by the individual elders’ habitual gestures and postures which
derive from their social encounters in Taiwan.
The aesthetics of production evident in the company’s work reflects the influences
of the cultural habitus of Taiwan in two ways. One is concerned with looking for its
‘roots’ and the other is related to the ‘routes’ Taiwanese people have travelled and
their encounters with other cultures. Firstly, ‘looking for roots’ suggests the quest to
re-establish the subjectivity of the previously disfranchised and oppressed Taiwanese
people. The company deliberately recovers histories and languages of ethnic minority
groups such as Hakka and Holo who have been suppressed in the past, and those
from the currently marginalised ‘mainlander group’ in Taiwan.2 By performing
stories in their own dialects, these performers are offered the chance to restore
subjectivities that have been exploited by different dominating political regimes.
In 1995, the Uhan Shii Theatre Group started to devise a series of productions
called Echoes of Taiwan based upon the oral history accounts of Taiwanese
community-based elders. These productions established critical acclaim for their
theatrical reflection of Taiwanese cultural identities. In the production Echoes of
Taiwan III*/The Story of Taiwanese Men premiered in 1998, the Uhan Shii Theatre
Group demonstrates the cultural hybridity of Taiwanese men and women under
Japanese colonialism and KMT’s nationalism. The production also reflects the
influences of both Western and Chinese theatre cultures on the director Peng
Ya-Ling. This mirrors the two directions of Taiwanese cultural habitus: the roots, by
recovering histories hidden during the colonial and nationalist periods; and the
routes, by renovatingWestern and Chinese theatre cultures with a renewed vision. By
synchronising the influences of routes and roots, the Uhan Shii Theatre Group
reflects the complexity of contemporary Taiwanese culture.
In the first scene of Echoes III , the ritual of a Taiwanese man taking a bath
demonstrates the imprint of Japanese imperialism through a series of movements.
Portrayed by a retired merchant, Wu Wuen-Cheng, the man sits upright and
motionless with one arm straight up whilst his wife rubs his back silently. The
commanding and unyielding posture of the patriarchal man and the submissive
posture of a subservient and obedient wife reflect the imprint of Japanese colonialism
on Taiwanese culture. In contrast to the dominating position in his domestic life, in
public the Taiwanese man kneels down and bows in front of a Japanese soldier to ask
forgiveness for smuggling pork for his family. These two images mirror the complex
imprint of Japanese colonialism on elderly Taiwanese men. He both enacts Japanese
patriarchal postures at home and succumbs to an inferior position as the colonised in
public. By contrast, Taiwanese women are doubly oppressed by complying with both
colonialism and patriarchy and diminished into the role of silent submission. The
humiliation inscribed upon the wife is shown vividly in another scene when she serves
the tea respectfully for her husband and persistently extends her hand to ask money
from him, but in vain.
After Japanese colonialism, the KMT nationalists also left a legacy of suffering and
restraint on the Taiwanese people. That means that when the KMT nationalists
practised stringent political and military rule in Taiwan, they left physical imprints of
suppression on Taiwanese people. This point is demonstrated in the second part of
the Uhan Shii Theatre Group’s production of Echoes of Taiwan III . The character,
Tsai Yi-Shan’s father, was almost beaten to death in the period of ‘White Terror’
when the KMT crushed opposition to its police state. His crime was to ask KMT
soldiers to return his sheep which had been taken by force.3 Seeing his badly
wounded father, his mother’s creaking scream and cry resonates on stage. The image
of his mother wrapping his father haunted him for years and was made into an
Reminiscence theatre in Taiwan 79
unforgettable stage picture (see Figure 1). Consecutively, the hushed gestures
exchanged between the two men crouching with their backs on small stools and their
image bound by the long white strips of cloth hanging from the ceiling, reflect the
physical and psychological restraints experienced under nationalist rule.
An alternative direction of Taiwanese cultural habitus is manifested in the
director’s travelling ‘routes’ from the West back to Taiwan. Through exploring
indigenous cultures, Peng Ya-Ling counter-balances the Westernisation and neocolonialism
that permeated the cultural scene of Taiwan in the 1980s. Furthermore,
her ‘unique Taiwanese’ quality is especially reflected in the hybridity of her acting
training and directing style. It is fused with indigenous Taiwanese theatre aesthetics,
Chinese traditional theatre concepts and Western experimental theatre forms.
Nevertheless, this hybridity reflected in her theatre works also contains a strong
awareness of the need to seek and sustain her own cultural subjectivity. This is a kind
of ‘critical hybridity’ rather than the ‘happy hybridity’ that Jacquelin Lo describes.4
Peng’s creative and critical synchronisation of artistic styles from different theatrical
traditions creates a new artistic style of her own. This is a distinctive example of the
hybridity of Taiwanese culture.
In her mise en scene, Peng Ya-Ling employs circular rather than linear blocking
which resonates with Chinese traditional theatre aesthetics.5 An example could be
drawn from ‘the lantern parade’ scene in which Taiwanese and Japanese children
circle the stage to parade their lanterns on the occasion of the Lantern Festival in
Figure 1. Echoes of Taiwan III*/The Story of Taiwanese Men in 1999, the scene demonstrates that
Tsai Yi-Shan recalls how he watched the sheep when he was a child as well as how his mother
wrapped up the wounds for his father, who is beaten by KMT nationalists at the far back of this
picture, as his life-long haunting image. Courtesy of the Uhan Shii Theatre Group
Echoes of Taiwan III . In her choice of narrative strategy, she combines storytelling
directly addressed to the audience and lyrical singing that expresses the inner feelings
of a character. This is typical of the Chinese opera style, and is well-illustrated in the
soliloquies and Japanese singing in Echoes of Taiwan III . In the tender singing of
Japanese songs, the elderly man and woman express their ambivalent and suppressed
feelings towards Japanese colonial rule combined with love and hate, adoration and a
sense of inferiority. In the same production, the symbolic use of props such as stools
to represent sheep recalls the property usage in Chinese theatre. In a game-playing
scene, for example, Wu Wuen-Cheng and Tsai Yi-Shan play a game of throwing
cards while they talk about the restriction of Chinese education under Japanese
colonial rule. They pause at the point when they begin to throw their cards as they
are fixed by their time; they freeze the moment of play as a perpetual moment of their
childhood to highlight this memory. This tableau-like effect resonates with Chinese
opera’s ‘Liang Xiang’, which is a highly stylised movement in Peking Opera; when a
character first appears on stage, he or she will hold their characteristic posture and
gesture with a certain special tempo of music for a moment on stage in order to stress
their distinguishing characteristic.
The trademark of the Uhan Shii Theatre Group is the transformation of the
movements of daily life into stylised movements, thereby turning the ordinary into
the extraordinary. This derives from Chinese theatre aesthetics, in which daily
movements are deliberately stylised. The emphasis on physicalisation to reveal the
inner feelings comes from Ya-Ling’s meticulous training in the school of Etienne
Decroux in London. The best example of how this Western training has become
assimilated into her work is the scene of ‘pulling the white hair’ in Echoes of Taiwan
IV*/If You Had Called Me. The elders repeatedly pulling their white hair as a group
in slow motion symbolises the past that they wish to forget.
Peng Ya-Ling employs modern Western theatre aesthetics such as lighting, sound
effects and slide projection to create a ‘total’ theatre effect and to reinforce the
dramatic atmosphere. In the process of training the elders in acting, she has applied
Feldenkrais’ method to liberate the elders’ bodies from conditioned social bounds
and incorporated training in ‘psychodrama’ and ‘contact improvisation’ to unfix both
their physical and psychological blocks. In this collaborative process, Ya-Ling draws
upon improvisation techniques to develop scripts with the elders in the rehearsal.
The ritualistic slow motion movement, shown in the scene of ‘wrapping the wounded
father’ in Echoes of Taiwan III , derives from the non-realism style that Ya-Ling was
exposed to in the 1980s’ experimental theatre movement adapted from the West in
Taiwan.
Based upon the above examples, Uhan Shii’s aesthetics of production demonstrate
the cultural inter-inscription of roots and routes in Taiwan and reflect the on-going
process of Taiwanese identity formation. The performances also offer the opportunity
for a triple reflexivity upon histories from the performer, the director and the
audience. Their dialogues with their complex personal and cultural histories
continue to shape the new and ever-changing identity of Taiwan.
Reminiscence theatre in Taiwan 81
Taiwanese female experience presents and subverts the symbolic power
and space
Reminiscence theatre in Taiwan not only represents the practice of cultural
conventions, but the fixity of habitus is also subverted in performance. In this
section, I shall examine representations of female experience in Taiwan as one aspect
of post-colonial feminist discourse. In the terms of Bourdieu’s analysis of the
symbolic power of language and Henri Lefebvre’s concept of space as social
production, the Uhan Shii Theatre Group employs the symbolic power of theatrical
languages and space to subvert social hierarchies experienced in Taiwan (Bourdieu,
1991, pp. 163170; Lefebvre, 1991, pp. 3844). The company’s resistance to
patriarchy is demonstrated through their awareness of the symbolic power of local
languages and by reclaiming a space for women’s voices and performances in their
theatre.
The Uhan Shii Theatre Group is led by a female director and 80% of its
performers are community-based female elders. This means that female experience
has become one of the major subjects of their plays. Female elders not only express
their complex feelings and stories in drama, they also use theatre to demonstrate how
they survived different colonial and nationalist regimes and the patriarchy associated
with them by adopting strategies of both compliance and resistance. These female
performers seek to restore and disseminate Taiwanese female elders’ oral histories
through performance. This process uncovers stories previously hidden from view,
and thus inserts multiple ‘Her Stories’ into the previously unitary, masculine and
official ‘His story’. By disentangling the complex relations among colonialism,
nationalism, post-colonialism and feminism, their personal and collective stories
represent a significant aspect of post-colonial feminist discourse.
The representation of women’s experience of being silenced in the past to finding a
voice in the present subverts patriarchal traditions. In Echoes of Taiwan III the change
in women’ status is reflected in the transformation of the gestures and language of the
main female character, Li-Xiou. In the beginning, she is silent, submissive and
humiliated. With limited movement, she is cornered and confined in domestic chores
and space. She tolerates colonialism and complies with patriarchy in order to survive.
But after she has secured her economic independence in the 1980s, she begins
to defy patriarchal confinement. She becomes outspoken and even talks back to
her husband. Her gestures become expressive, and she moves actively to reclaim her
domestic space. In the end, she puts on make up and her best dress and leaves her
home to pursue her own enjoyment. The reversal of her physical and verbal language
signifies the possibility of the reversal of symbolic power between women and men in
Taiwan.
Henri Lefebvre has argued that representational spaces possess the power to
subvert and reshape the spatial structures of everyday life. Taiwanese women have
reshaped the fixed spatial power structures of gender relations in their performances.
In Echoes of Taiwan III , Li-Xiou makes her suppressed domestic experience public.
The dramatic representation of Li-Xiou’s change of gender politics offers a possible
model through which women might reclaim spaces previously denied to them.
Walking out of the home, Li-Xiou demonstrates that women can not only win an
equal place at home but they also can leave their confined domestic spaces and enter
the public space. Through performance, fixed divisions between gender relations are
dismantled and patriarchal power is redistributed into multiple agents and spaces.
Avoiding direct confrontation, Li-Xiou uses humorous remarks to satirise and
counter-act her husband’s rigidity and inability to adapt to the rapid changes evident
in Taiwanese society. By these actions, she demonstrates that Taiwanese women seek
equality and balance with men rather than dominating them or creating another
social hierarchy.
In Echoes of Taiwan VI*/We Are Here, premiered in 2000, a migration epic story of
Hakka (the second largest ethnic group in Taiwan) was delivered for the first time on
the Taiwanese stage in the Hakka language. The story spans the past to the present,
from the countryside to the metropolis, and the experience of Hakka women is the
main focus. These women use their Hakka dialect to tell their life stories and project
themselves into a public space, thereby countering their previous absence in public
and creating a new spatial reproduction. They employ the Hakka language and
singing to reclaim a space for Hakka women whose experiences and voices had been
previously marginalised by the double oppressions of KMT’s nationalism and
patriarchy. They share their personal stories of migration, showing how they make a
living in the metropolis and how they have moved from the confines of the domestic
place to the public space. Furthermore, their numerous tours (the production has
toured to remote Hakka villages for more than 50 performances and has travelled as
far as Wupertale, Germany in 2001) has meant that their stories have been seen on
various public platforms both in and out of Taiwan.
Echoes of Taiwan VI*/We Are Here reveals the hidden tradition of adopted
daughters in Hakka history for the first time on a Taiwanese stage. Some of the
female cast are ‘adopted daughters’ themselves, some of their mothers and sisters
were ‘adopted daughters’ who were given to another family in exchange for their
labour.6 Sharing collective memories of this exploitative system of adoption helps
them to come to terms with their suffering. In turn, the performance enables them
to show the inner feelings of these exploited daughters through dramatic narratives
and singing. In the scene of ‘Wrapping the Wound for the Little Girl’, enacted by
an all-female cast, they pass a long white strip of cloth towards each other slowly
(see Figure 2). It occupies and involves the whole stage and symbolises a cleansing
meandering river. It represents a healing ritual to comfort their traumas. The healing
space sometimes extends beyond the stage and reaches the audience who may have
endured similar afflictions.7
The production also portrays how Hakka women break free from their domestic
constraints and economic dependency. Women start to make a living to support their
families by tailoring or selling merchandise, and this is shown theatrically in Jyu-Ing’s
and Yu-Ching’s stories, both of whom are self-reliant Hakka mothers and career
women in real life. They either walk out of their domestic space and create their own
Reminiscence theatre in Taiwan 83
career in the public domain or transform their domestic space into their workplace.
In contrast with the confinement, financial worries, suppression and anger that Jyu-
Ing had to put up with at home, she dances with her customers, using her tapemeasure
and mannequin to celebrate the economic independence she has gained by
transforming her home into a tailor’s studio.
In the last scene, the circling parade ‘Opening up the Bundle of Memory’, projects
the Hakka women’s memories into the auditorium (see Figure 3). Each woman
opens a blue bundle, which traditional Hakka people wrap up and carry around their
shoulders when they embark upon a faraway journey, and she shares her most
treasured memory with the audience. Xiou-Ching’s memory is a family photograph
in which her mother holds her tight and loves her dearly; Jyu-Ing’s blue bundle
contains her diary which accompanies her migration journey from village to city.
One after another, they circle around the auditorium and pass on the blue bundles
to children as passing on their Hakka heritage. The procession encompasses the
space with their memories of migration and projects them into their prospective
futures. This play has toured around the metropolis and remote Hakka towns
twice in the past five years with the intention of re-inscribing Taiwanese history
with Hakka women’s oral histories and re-affirming their identities through theatre
practice.
Figure 2. Echoes of Taiwan VI*/We Are Here (2000). This photograph captures the moment when
all the female cast work together to pass on the long white strip to wrap up the symbolic wounds
which scared the young adopted daughter as a healing ritual on stage. They are all dressed in the
renovated form of traditional Hakka female costumes, noted for their floral patterns. Courtesy of
the Uhan Shii Theatre Group
These examples illustrate how the Uhan Shii Theatre Group not only presents the
traditions of Taiwanese culture, but also subverts them by new representations of
contemporary female experience. The company presents how Taiwanese women
have dismantled fixed gender relations and destabilised patriarchy in ways that are
different from their feminist counterparts in Western cultures. The presentation of
the Taiwanese stories performed by the women themselves also subverts the
‘orientalist’ imagination about Asian women and challenges passive stereotypes
with which they are sometimes associated. Although the director Peng Ya-Ling,
never stresses their political aim as a ‘feminist group’ (Wang, 2004), the process of
women acting their own stories is part of a continual process of striving towards
social justice and gender equality. Through these cultural and theatrical strategies the
company intends to transcend binarism and open multiple choices and spaces for
different voices in Taiwan.
Notes
1. KMT is the leading nationalist party, led by Chang Kai-Shek, lost the civil war with
Communist China in 1947 and retreated to Taiwan. It built a settler-state in Taiwan
immediately after the Japanese returned Taiwan to Chang-Kai-Shek’s nationalist regime
and became the sole authoritarian and autocratic political party in Taiwan until 2000
Figure 3. Echoes of Taiwan VI*/We Are Here (2000). This photo juxtaposes several scenes when the
elder female characters open up their blue bundles accordingly, share their most treasured memories
in migration, and pass them on to the younger Hakka generation. Courtesy of the Uhan Shii
Theatre Group
when the opposition party, Democratic Progress Party, won the presidential election for
the first time.
2. After the Democratic Progressive Party, which is mainly constituted of Holo people in
Taiwan, won the presidential election in 2000, the Holo, the largest ethnic group in Taiwan,
has become the dominant ethnic group. They tend to promote the formerly suppressed Holo
culture as the representative and leading Taiwanese culture and consequently marginalise
the previously privileged ‘mainlander group’ in nationalist rule as a cultural counterreaction.
3. The actor, Tsai Yi-Shan, was a retired film projector in real life and has now passed away.
4. Jacqueline Lo criticises in her poignant essay, ‘Beyond happy hybirdity: performing
AsianAustralian identity’: ‘Hybridity is not therefore perceived as a natural outcome but
rather as a form of political intervention . . .’. She also points to ‘happy hybridity’ as ‘the most
pernicious form of hybridity . . . found in eclectic postmodernism which the term is emptied
of all its specific histories and politics to denote instead of a concept of unbound culture’
(Lo, 2005, pp. 12).
5. Circular blocking is a typical, customary and stylised movement pattern in Chinese Opera.
Whenever a new character appears or exits the stage, he or she will make a circular
movement to give a clear demonstration of his or her distinctive character with stylised
postures and gestures. The circular movement also creates a constantly unbroken line
between movements on stage and secures a harmonious and smooth aesthetic quality in
Chinese traditional theatre. The circular movement is often used in dance and singing
sequences to deliver a continuous and flowing sense of beauty and momentum in traditional
Chinese Opera.
6. ‘Adopted daughters’ is one of the pervasive and common folk customs in Taiwan before
1970s. The main purpose of this custom was to lessen the financial burden of the traditional
Chinese big families, who consider daughters inferior to sons and thus they are considered to
be extraneous and to belong to their husbands’ families after they are married. It is
considered common to give away one’s daughters as other families’ ‘adopted daughters’ in
exchange for money and to help with the heavy labours of the adopted family if the original
family has too many daughters and is in severe poverty. Some of the daughters are bought in
order to become the future wives of their adopted family’s young sons. Often they are
physically and emotionally exploited when they were bereft from their kinship and used
extensively as child labour in the domestic setting.
7. According to my observations and interviews of the audience when I followed their tour
around some remote Hakka villages, I witnessed many female audience members shedding
tears when they saw the healing scene on stage happen for adopted daughters. In Guan-Xi,
the remote northern Hakka village in Taiwan, there were three female audience members
interviewed by me evidencing that they were comforted by the performance in different
degrees. They said that they felt they were more or less relieved by the secrets they buried
deep in their hearts as adopted daughters when they saw that their experience was shared by
so many other women and they seem to have mourned together in the performance for
themselves as well as for those sitting in the auditorium.
Notes on contributor
Wan-Jung Wang, born in Taiwan, is a theatre director, teacher and scholar. Having
published three books about theatre in Chinese: Peter Brook, With wings I fly
across dark nights and Stage vision, she is currently researching Reminiscence
Theatre at Royal Holloway, University of London as a PhD student.
References
Agnew, J., Mitchell, K. & Toal, G. (Eds) (2003) A companion to political geography (Malden, MA
and Oxford, Blackwell Publishers).
Bourdieu, P. (1977) Outline of a theory of practice (R. Nice, Trans.) (Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press).
Bourdieu, P. (1991) Language & symbolic power (G. Matthew & R. Adamson, Trans.) (Cambridge,
Polity Press).
Connerton, P. (1989) How societies remember (Cambridge and New York, Cambridge University
Press).
Halbwachs, M. (1950) The collective memory (F. J. & V. Y. Ditter, Trans.) (London, Harper
Colophone Books).
Lefebvre, H. (1991) The production of space (D. Nicholson-Smith, Trans.) (Oxford, Blackwell).
Lo, J. (2005) Beyond happy hybridity: performing AsianAustralian identities . Available online at:
http://dlibrary.acu.edu.au/research/adsa/Lo.htm (accessed 5 August 2005), pp. 120.
Peng, Y.-L. (1995) DVDs of Echoes of Taiwan IIIXX of Uhan Shii Theatre Group in Taiwan (Taipei,
Uhan Shii Theatre Group).
Wang, W.-J. (2004) 12 interviews with the Director Peng Ya-Ling about Uhan Shii Theatre
Group’s methods and process in rehearsal, September 2003January 2004, Taipei.
(Wan-Jung Wang,〈The subversive practices of reminiscence theatre in Taiwan〉。《Research in Drama Education》Vol.11,No.1,February 2006,pp.77-87)
全站熱搜
留言列表
