Tainaner Ensemble—Building a Southern Taiwan Theater Scene

Founded by Father Donald Glover and a group of young Tai­nan residents with backgrounds in fields as diverse as Chinese literature, Western literature and metalworking, the Tainaner Ensemble has been winning over audiences in recent years.

The ensemble grew out of the Hua­den Art Center, an organization that Fr. Glover set up to host arts-oriented activities proselytizing Catholicism. The center also served as a base for the arts clubs that Fr. Glover formed every six months or so in areas ranging from photography and video to screenings of independent films.

Lee Wei-mu, the head of the Tainaner Ensemble, was an early participant in those clubs. A 20-something at the time, he was among the first generation of arts-oriented young people the center cultivated. Even though none of his generation took up Catholicism, the center was a “godsend” to young people starved for access to the arts.

The ensemble’s K24 ran for an uninterrupted six hours, and kept the show fresh for audiences by presenting a different ending for each of its seven performances.

By 1987, Taiwan’s experimental theaters were developing rapidly. Recognizing that most of the island’s theatrical resources were in the north, Fr. Glover decided to establish a theater company in Tai­nan at Hua­den. As it was first constituted, the troupe consisted of Lee and a dozen or so other individuals, none of whom had professional theatrical experience. In fact, all of them had day jobs and only rehearsed in the church in the evenings. The members of the company were also accustomed to using Taiwanese in everyday conversation, and felt uncomfortable performing interpretations of Western classics in Mandarin. With cross-talk shows like The Night We Became ­Hsiang-­Sheng Comedians gaining in popularity, the troupe decided to introduce its own cross-talk piece, a show on Tai­nan’s marital customs that it called Taiwanese Comic Dialogue: Ordinary Life.

The more the troupe performed, the more popular it became. When its performances began crowding out other events at the church, Fr. Glover “ordered” it to relocate to the old St. Boniface Church on You’ai Street. The new location provided the ensemble with a much-needed home of its own. Lee and the other members quickly converted the church into an 80-seat theater, and began using it to stage a variety of experimental pieces. They also invited troupes from Tai­pei to come and perform in their space.

In 1992, Hua­den won a grant from a small theater program administered by the Council for Cultural Affairs. Now possessed of a more formal membership, it began turning itself into a professional troupe. In 1997, it marked that transformation by changing its name to the Tai­naner Ensemble.

The Tainaner Ensemble stages everything from ghost stories to adaptations of Western classics performed in Taiwanese. The photo shows a scene from Re/turn.

The “rechristening” highlighted the company’s independence from Hua­den’s theater club, and represented an important step along the path to professionalism. After establishing its bona fides as a “Taiwanese-style” troupe with Ordinary Life, the ensemble introduced a series of pieces that drew on stories local to Tai­nan. By performing the pieces, which included The Phoenix Trees Are in Blossom, in Taiwanese, it brought something fresh to Taiwan’s Mandarin-oriented theatrical community.

In 2000, the ensemble took its performances to the next level, partnering with Lü Po-shen, a specialist in the Western classics.

At the recommendation of Taiwanese theater professor Wang Chi-mei, Lü and the ensemble decided to adapt Antigone, reading, rehearsing and performing the play entirely in Taiwanese.

Lee recalls that the eight tones of Taiwanese worked surprisingly well with the rhyme and tone of the Greek play, and created a wonderful effect on stage. In fact, the company’s Taiwanese interpretation of Antigone ended up being better received than that of a Japanese troupe that had been invited to Taiwan to perform the same play, and became a hot topic within Taiwan’s theatrical circles.

When the ensemble finished its tour of Taiwan, it named Lü its artistic director. Lü then embarked on a program of translating Western classics into Taiwanese, which led to Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Samuel Beckett’s End Game becoming popular elements of the company’s repertoire.

With Lü on board, the Tai­nan-based company launched a “Northern Expedition” aimed at gaining a foothold in the northern part of Taiwan. Around this time, its unique performances caught the eye of the National Theater, which subsequently commissioned a production of the Japanese-era classic Capon. “Our performance at the National Theater was a big step in our development,” says Lee.

Lee Wei-mu, the Tainaner Ensemble’s current head, was a member of the troupe’s first incarnation: the Huaden Art Center theater club. A theater lover for more than 30 years, Lee has cultivated the talents of many young theater professionals.

The company went on to add to its roster four new cutting-edge directors—Tsai Pao-­chang, Liao Zou-han, ­Huang ­Cheng-yu, and Chung Han—inspiring a fresh burst of creativity from the nearly 30-year-old ensemble.

A graduate of the Department of Drama and ­Theatre at National Taiwan University, Tsai is a writer, director and performer who has been described as Taiwan’s most interesting theatrical talent since Hugh Lee and Stan Lai. His recent works have included the six-hour-long K24, which adapts the episodic plot structure of American television, and Re/turn, a look back at the joys and sorrows of a love affair that has won fans among younger theatergoers. Lee Wei-mu has described Tsai’s writing and directing as being filled with “love and urban appeal.”

Lee’s take on Lü is that his diligence provides a model for theater’s younger generation, and that his adaptations of Western classics have grown out of the deep understanding of dramatic theory he acquired while studying in the UK. Lee describes Liao’s work as very experimental. She seeks to break the bonds of the “real” and the material, and therefore keeps her stages bare. Lee refers to ­Huang’s plays as the ensemble’s “supernatural series” because they always involve ghosts. ­Chung, meanwhile, is a former student of Lü’s who has a similar style but also “more of a sense of the vagabond.”

Having five directors with unique styles all under one roof makes the Tai­naner Ensemble’s collective style hard to pin down. “People identify Ping Fong with Hugh Lee and the Performance Workshop with Stan Lai,” says Lee. “The Tai­naner Ensemble is different. It’s a platform for a number of people.” Lee, at the ensemble’s helm since its Hua­den days, is more like a patriarch striving to cultivate and assist young talent than the typical director of a theatrical company.

Huang Cheng-yu, one of the Tainaner Ensemble’s directors, created a unique theatergoing experience for Tainan Snacks You’ve Never Heard Of by breaking free of the confines of the traditional stage and encouraging the audience to wander about.

In 2014, the high cost of moving company members back and forth between its Tai­nan base and its Tai­pei performances prompted the Tai­naner Ensemble to relocate its primary rehearsal and performance center to Tai­pei. Lee, however, chose to remain in Tai­nan, moving the Tai­nan-based portion of the ensemble into the 321 Alley Arts Village and building a new performance space there.

Lee says that the ensemble’s new location is an old army dormitory, one of eight remaining at what was a Japanese-era munitions factory. The Tai­­nan City Cultural Affairs Bureau administers the facility, which it received from the Ministry of Defense, but had left it derelict for years because it lacked the funds to renovate. That began to change when the CAB invited the ensemble to move in, after the lease on the troupe’s old offices expired last year.

While the dormitory retains its original Japanese structure, there’s now no space in the residence hall or rear courtyard that can’t be turned into a stage at any moment. Lee sees these open spaces, which lack permanent lighting and any distinction between stage and seating, as an inspiration and inducement to push beyond the traditional confines of the ­theater.

In July 2014, the ensemble launched a seven-day “Mini 321 Arts Festival” in conjunction with That Theater Troupe and the New Visions New Voices ­Theatre Company. The festival featured three 20-minute pieces while limiting the audience to just 99 people, who were also encouraged to explore the historic site.

In May 2015, the ensemble will present another mini-festival featuring even more troupes and events. The idea is to create a “theatrical night market” that “sells plays rather than snacks,” says Lee.

Over the years, the ensemble has nurtured a more vibrant theatrical environment in Tai­nan. Lee hopes that operating in this new space will serve to make the troupe stronger in much the same way.

Lee notes that the first-generation alumni who helped found Hua­den have since gone on to found companies including the Xi­ba­lian Children’s ­Theater, the experimental That Theater Troupe, and the 50-and-over Modern Form troupe, Taiwan’s first theater company exclusively for older performers. “Hua­den was Tai­nan’s equivalent of the Lan­lin ­Theater Troupe.”

Theatrical attendance in Tai­nan has grown greatly over the last 30 years, from just 20–30 theatergoers in the city in the old days to audiences of more than 1,200 per year today. While the gross numbers are far below Tai­pei’s 12,000-plus figure, Tai­nan has a much smaller population than Tai­pei and has managed to create a thriving theatrical “ecosystem” in a city with far less in the way of artistic resources.

As Ju ­Tzong-­ching, the former president of the National Tai­pei University of the Arts, has put it, the Tai­naner Ensemble has progressed from just fooling around to taking theater seriously. Now a mature 28 years old, the company continues to have fun while playing for keeps.