Uhan Shii, an award-winning Taiwanese theater group, will visit the University Sept. 18-26 and offer a public performance of the narrative opera My Journey at 7 p.m. Sept. 23 at the Saint Louis Art Museum auditorium.
The visit, sponsored by the Visiting East Asian Professionals (VEAP) Program in Arts & Sciences, will also include a series of workshops for University students.
Uhan Shii performs traditional Taiwanese opera, much like the better-known Peking opera, except all roles are performed by women.
The plays are highly self-conscious works that address questions of masking, role-playing and identity, bringing 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, a famous Taiwanese opera actress who has performed Taiwanese opera since she was 5. 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 lifetime pursuit.
Uhan Shii, which in Chinese means “happy,” was founded in March 1995 by Ya-Ling Peng, who started her own theater 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 60 and young children.
The theater productions are based on oral history in a series called Echoes of Taiwan; My Journey is the eighth production in the series.
Tickets for the art museum performance are free to WUSTL students and $10 for the general public.
For more information on the art museum performance or the workshops, call Krystel Mowery at 935-8772 or go online to artsci.wustl.edu/~veap.