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Opera Portent─Interview with librettist and director Hung Hung
by CHEN Wei-jen
"A totally ordinary tenant leaves, but a truck remains parked there for a year. How did simply wanting to clean out the house end up involving the police, the whole judicial system, and unwritten cultural laws that can’t be disregarded?"
Weiwuying and the Taipei Performing Arts Center have teamed up in producing this contemporary jazz fusion opera Portent. Weiwuying Artistic Director CHIEN Wen-pin and director Hung Hung are working with composer LI Yuan-chen and jazz musician HSIEH Min-yen in bringing together jazz fusion and vocals on a framework of poetic symphony music to create a contemporary opera with the feeling of a concerto that does not hold to traditional rules.
Portent is an adaptation of a novel by the same name. Hung Hung says, "I first read the novel, by HUANG Ling-zhi, a Taiwanese author who began writing in Japanese after WWII, in the bimonthly The Saline Land, and it took my breath away. I was also surprised at how little he was known in the history of Taiwanese literature." Hung Hung wants this operatic adaptation to inspire interest in HUANG's work among the public and to expand the possibilities for contemporary opera in Taiwan.
It is not uncommon for a novel to be made into an opera—VERDI's La Traviata is one such example. However, simply making an opera based on a novel would not satisfy the director's thirst for breakthrough and innovation. Thus, other things were added: LI excels at transforming the timbre of traditional Taiwanese music into chamber instrument music, and HSIEH, with jazz, fuses different cultural aspects. This bold attempt at bringing together Chinese and Western music styles will create lots of surprises and ruggedness for the audience. The resulting sense of instability and uncertainty is precisely the atmosphere portrayed in the novel.
The Taiwanese author wrote the novel, which is set in post-WWII Taiwan, in Japanese. The Chinese version Hung Hung read is a translation by RUAN Wen-ya, in which dialogue takes place in both Mandarin and Hoklo (Taiwanese). This intersection of three languages had a major influence on Hung Hung's direction for the script. He says, "I'm pretty sure that nowhere else in the world has seen Mandarin, Hoklo, and Japanese fused into the libretto of an opera." Admitting his lack of fluency in Hoklo, he invited LU Chi-chieh to write the Hoklo libretto, enhancing the true Taiwanese flavor of the piece.
The Chinese and Japanese name of the novel is a phrase used in fortune-telling. Hung Hung states that even though the phrase is originally Japanese, it is readily understood in Chinese as well, causing one to immediately think of the sky and slaughter, an environment and an action, from which emanate a sense of threat. At first, he wanted to have a truck fall from the sky and crash to the ground during the piece. Of course, that could not happen in real life, but it just goes to show how much he looks to achieve on stage.
In recent years, Weiwuying has been working to root the performing arts into people's hearts, growing its audience. With regard to people who like the performing arts but have never seen an opera, Hung Hung says that HUANG may turn into a subject of study in Taiwanese literature and that various kinds of music may start to exert a greater influence on contemporary opera, much like with this one, so he thinks such people will be interested in how different this piece is. For those who have just recently come to like opera or are interested in seeing one for the first time, this is a good chance. Hopefully, the piece will ignite a spark of imagination and curiosity in people about HUANG's novel, contemporary opera, and jazz fusion.
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2023/03/17 (Fri) 19:30
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