Bonding with Chio-Tian
At a loss, he took his wife and kids on a vacation to Disneyland in Tokyo, and he suddenly saw the two Chinese characters for dintao. “Previously, my impression of dintao performance arts came from the glimpses I had of them at temple fairs, but immediately I had an intuition that there would surely be a good story to tell in material so close to the common people’s beliefs and lives.”
When he returned to Taiwan, he threw himself into fieldwork, which brought him into contact with the Chio-Tian Folk Drum & Arts Troupe in Taichung. He hit it off with troupe leader Hsu Chen-jung, a man who had pulled himself up from humble beginnings.
Twenty years ago, at the Immortal Maiden of the Ninth Heaven Temple in Taichung’s Mt. Dadu, Hsu brought together some young dropouts to form the Chio-Tian troupe. At first the group was looked upon warily by outsiders, who regarded them as a bunch of hooligans. But Hsu insisted that members would have to enroll in school before they could train on the drums. Moreover, he punished anyone who cut classes, swore or fought. In the process, he provided a way for a lot of boisterous young men who weren’t academically oriented to turn over new leaves. After many years of hard work and praise from all quarters, the group gradually turned into a professional performing arts troupe that nowadays frequently performs at celebrations both in Taiwan and abroad.
As it provides a sense of substance and essence of the troupe, the film explains how this offbeat group persevered through adversity for over a decade.
Every year, in the seventh lunar month, members of the troupe shoulder the Prince Nezha deity and embark on a pilgrimage that circles the island. Last year, during the period documented by the film, the troupe took an unprecedented seven-day, 250-kilometer walk through the Sahara Desert.
“I asked Hsu, ‘Why do you have to make it so hard for yourselves?’ And he responded: ‘I want to have a troupe like no other. What’s more, dintao has always been about pushing boundaries.’ I took this spirit and inserted it into the film. Just they as put themselves on the line with hard physical training, I wanted to push myself to capture their real essence, not mouth cheesy slogans.”
The most serious line in the film—“We want to create a dintao troupe that gets people’s respect and that doesn’t require us to shave, put on makeup and dress up as deities”—is a line that gets to the heart of Fung’s thoughts about the true essence of Chio-Tian.
Playing troupe members who were very close, the actors themselves grew to be much like a family during the shooting. The cast included consummate professionals such as Chen Bozheng, Ke Shuqin, Zheng Zhiwei (right photo, first to third from left), and Liao Jun (facing page bottom photo, first right in front row).