"Chin-pao [Chin Shih-chieh], don't forget your hat. Remember to put some water in every room," calls Chang Shu-chun, the first China-based chief representative of a Taiwanese performing group, the Performance Workshop (PW). Along with her other tasks, Chang was something of a nanny to the PW on their visit to Beijing, doing everything necessary to protect the performers' voices and keep them at their best in the city's cold, dry winter weather.

The volunteer corps

While in Beijing, the PW stayed in corporate apartment suites that combined all the amenities of a large hotel with a cozy, homey ambiance. While all the performers had private rooms, the apartments also featured communal living and dining rooms with large tables around which they could gather for piping-hot meals.

The PW's Beijing volunteers, most of whom were wives of successful Taiwanese businessmen operating in Beijing, were also remarkably effective. They hung posters and distributed tickets before the troupe's arrival. While the PW was in town, they helped out by delivering midnight snacks of bread, eggs and noodles, and by making sure that the performers always had fresh fruit and flowers in their rooms. Taiwanese businesspeople also contributed by providing the apartments in which the troupe stayed.

The PW received additional assistance from major Beijing media outlets including the Beijing Youth Daily and China Central Television, all of which assisted by publicizing the troupe's visit. Chang Shu-chun explains that the troupe's massive Beijing support network did not come into being overnight, but was something she had spent two years developing. Even the media appearances were orchestrated long before the performers actually arrived in Beijing.

Chang, who holds a degree in computer engineering, worked as an engineer with hi-tech firms such as Acer and Asustek before being sent to Beijing six years ago. She became the troupe's Beijing representative two years ago after meeting PW creative director Stan Lai and his wife at a Tibetan Buddhist function. On taking the job, she and assistant Yuan Hong, a famous young Beijing director, threw themselves into the planning of the PW's Beijing performances.

Packed houses

The PW earned excellent Beijing reviews, performing six shows in five days at the 900-seat Chang'an Grand Theater. In spite of relatively high ticket prices, which ranged from RMB150 to RMB250, seats were hard to come by and some scalping was seen.

Although the custom of buying tickets to performances is not very firmly established in China, Chang chose not to "do as the Romans" and insisted that no tickets be given away. She confidently asserted: "It's not difficult to fill a 900-seat venue, even if the tickets are a little expensive."

Chang feels that the PW's Beijing audience can be broken down into four major categories: Taiwanese businesspeople based in Beijing and Shanghai; reviewers, critics and young theater-goers; university students; and fans of traditional Chinese opera.

On this visit to Beijing, the Beijing-based Taiwanese businesspeople provided volunteers; the media provided publicity; and the students, who sometimes sell tickets for other Taiwanese performers, distributed PW tickets to other students.

The PW's relationship with mainland Chinese students goes back a number of years. In 1998, the troupe began working on a mainland Chinese production of Red Sky with A-list stars of the Chinese theater such as Lin Lianchang. In 1999, the PW established a Beijing office to work with mainland actors on productions of Man with Two Wives and the Taiwanese play The Taxi Driver, the Gangster, His Dog and His Wives. Last year, the PW and the Central Academy of Drama jointly produced Like a Dream of a Dream. But even before cross-strait artistic exchanges became common, bootleg videotapes of Performance Workshop pieces were creating waves among China's theater students. According to Wang Yi, who covers the arts beat at the Beijing Youth Daily, "Over the last two years, 14 or 15 student groups have performed Secret Love for the Peach Blossom Spring. And many students view having played a role in one of Mr. Lai's works as a seminal experience."

Fruits of a long labor

Already a major influence on Chinese theater, over the last two years Stan Lai has taught and lectured at Peking University and the Central Academy of Drama. Chang Shu-chun, meanwhile, regularly shows films and gives talks to drama clubs at mainland schools. She also arranges quarterly workshops featuring theater professionals from Taiwan, Japan and Korea. Chang explains, "To succeed in the China market, you must first have influence. Chinese people can see the effort that the Performance Workshop has put into developing a mainland audience."

Chang says, "I run the Performance Workshop like a business. Stan, the performers and the stage crew are all my products."

During the PW's run at Beijing's Chang An Grand Theater, theater workers caught at least four people per show trying to tape the performance without permission. Chang Shu-chun handles the more routine problems of people sneaking into performances and students performing PW works without permission with a light touch-she punishes the former by making them into PW "volunteers," and the latter by fining them a symbolic dollar. She says, "I've made my role that of a problem solver." Chang also says that once you understand them, many of the seemingly underhanded things that go on in China are really not so underhanded after all.

Chief representative

A city becomes a great international city by embracing cultural diversity. Businesses from all over the world are now setting up Beijing offices run by "chief representatives" to facilitate their efforts to win a piece of China's huge domestic market. The huge numbers of talented people in Beijing are Chang's favorite aspect of the city: "The world's best and brightest are all here. Being here, I can absorb the best that many countries have to offer."

Though she is single, Chang Shu-chun is anything but lonely; she attends twice weekly bookclub meetings with members of the international media and the international business community, and has converted these movers and shakers into loyal patrons of the PW.

A devout practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism, Chang wakes every morning at 4 a.m. and makes her way to a Lamaist temple near the Yonghe Temple for morning worship. Last year, while visiting Qinghai with a Swedish couple, she felt an incredibly strong attachment to a small Lamaist temple there. She explains, "I think I spent a past life there."

Chang has traveled from Taipei to Beijing, from a place among the hi-tech elite to a job as a theatrical producer. Fortune led her to Tibetan Buddhism, and fortune bound her to the Performance Workshop. Chang strongly believes that fortune means for her to be in Beijing.

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Chang Shu-chun, a devout Tibetan Buddhist, believes that her journey from the hi-tech industry to her current position as the Performance Workshop's chief representative in Beijing was fated.

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The deep humanism of the Performance Workshop's Look Who's Cross-talking Tonight won rueful laughs from audiences Beijing, the home of cross-talk.