Performance Trip To Taiwan - Day 2

On the second day, all of us had to wake up very early, as we need to leave for Ilan at 8.30am, the place where we would be performing on that night. The trip to Ilan would take about 2 and 1/2 hours, and along the way were greeted by the gigantic waves of the Pacific Ocean splashing against the rocks near the shore. We were considered lucky to be able to see it, for the view would not have been so magnificant if the weather was good. Halfway through the journey, we were told to stop for a while, as we were supposed to depart together with the crew of a TV station from Xiamen. That's the style of my leader, always eager, sometimes over-eager, to carry out things!

We reached Taiwan Theatre Museum, an important cultural venue for the Ilan County Cultural Center, at around noon. This was also the place in which we were supposed to perform during the night. We were taken on a short tour around the meseum, and found that the contents of the exhibits in the museum had changed, no longer the same as what I had seen 2 years back. The themes of the various sections of the museum, however, were still the same. Anyway, something unpleasant happened while I was in the museum. The crew of the Xiamen TV station were supposed to do a TV shoot in the museum, and the rude videographer simply pushed me aside so that he could bypass me into the museum. What's the big deal about being a crew member of the TV station? That doesn't entitle you to be an arrogant punk!

Putting this unhappiness aside, I was looking forward to visit another place in Ilan: the National Center for Traditional Arts. This centre was very much like the old Tang Dynasty in Singapore, but with more life and appealing things to see and buy. I had visited this place 2 years back as well, and was amazed by what I saw. Inside this centre were shops selling various folk handicrafts, and various halls putting up regular exhibitions from time to time. There were also spots in the centre which were modelled after authentic traditional buildings, to show visitors how traditional houses, temples and opera stages used to look like some 100 years ago. This time round, as our schedule was tight, we were not brought around the centre by their crew, but were only briefly explained of what the centre offers, and then we proceed for a sumptuous lunch in their restaurant.

After our lunch comes the exciting part of the tour: shopping! No, I wasn't interested in buying those folk handicrafts or souveneirs, but was more interesting in buying opera VCDs and DVDs produced by the center itself. I had read from their website that the centre had produced many publications, and hence was actually more eager to visit this place than to perform! However, I was a bit disappointed by the variety of goods they had available on sale at that point of time. I didn't know if the rest of the stuffs listed in their websaite and not available for purchased had run out of stock, or they did not put them on display due to some reasons. I didn't ask them, for I was running short of time, so I just bought some Heluo opera DVDs and a DVD set comprising acts of Liyuan opera by budding actors from Quanzhou Liyuan Opera Company in 2002.

We left the centre at around 3pm, and by the time we returned to the Taiwan Theatre Museum, we found that there was a performance going on on the stage in which we were supposed to perform. It was some young children acting traditional Hokkien opera, and the orchestra accompanying the performance were young musicians too. Having said that, it didn't mean that they were inexperienced. They were in fact quite good in their act, and I was impressed. However, one thing I couldn't get used to was the accent they spoke in. It wasn't quite Hokkien to me, and I thought it sounded more like Hockchew or Heng-hua. Though it was still a few hours to go to our performance, we did not have much time to relax, as we need to unpack all our costumes from our luggages to be ironed, and we need to start doing our makeup. Anyway for that night's performance, the Taiwanese side and us would be presenting a few excerpts from our own individual repetiore, and Taiwanese opera artiste Lin Xianyuan would be performing alongside our troupe leader in te exerpt "Romance of the Red Mansion" too. This should be an interesting show to watch, as although our Xiangju and Taiwanese Gezi opera originates from the same source, the operatic style of both genres were not totally the same, and we were curious as to how was he going to interprete our Xiangju.

The rain was still pouring in the evening and we were worried. There was a bit of unsheltered area from the audience seat to the stage, and that means we would need to get drenched a little in order to go up the stage. Furthurmore, with such weather, we were uncertain of the turnout for the show. It would be utterly embaressing if there wasn't a single audience watching! Fortunately for us, there were still quite a number of people turning up to watch. In total, we staged 5 excerpts ("The Butterfly Lovers", "The Arrogant Princess", "Romance of the Red Mansion", "Romance of the Dragon Princess" and "Courtesan Yu Tang Chun"), while our Taiwanese counterpart staged 2 excerpts ("Yang Zongbao and Mu Guiying" and "Female Prime Minister Meng Lijun"). We may appear to have more stage appearance more for this performance, but actually our excerpts were very much shorter than our Taiwanese counterparts. I felt this was a bit inbalanced, as before the audience can really get into the mood to watch our excerpts, they were already over. The excerpts by our Taiwanese counterpart, however, were much longer, and you can tell that the audience was really into the show and they enjoyed these excerpts more. This is one thing we should take note of in future, but then again, it would take a lot of effort to really persuade my leader to do something about it!

We ended our show at around 10pm. It was considered early to us, but then if you were to take into consideration on the time taken to travel back to Taipei, it wasn't, and we didn't even have time to mingle around with the audience, because we were all in a rush. I think this was something we should look into, as more interaction with the natives there would better facilitate us in engaging more performance opportunities there in future. We arrived back at our hotel after midnight. It was a tiring and fulfilling night. Nevermind our overall standard may not be as good compared to our Taiwanese counterpart, I think it was still an eye-opening cultural interaction programme.