It's 7:30 in the evening, and everything is ready to go at the performance hall on the second floor of the Town Hall in Changpin Rural Township in Taitung County. But out in the rows of steel chairs set up for the audience, there are but a few folks meandering about. It seems that tonight's performance is no match for the appearance of TV personality Mother Ah Pi to help sell medicines in the next town over.

You act very well! Still, the performance starts on time. A Miss Wang, secretary at a Taipei construction company, was ordered to come to Taitung and extol the beauties of the vacation bungalows; an avaricious and ambitious landlord named Mr. Chen finally sees his long lost daughter doing the striptease at a show held by a building company....

It's not certain when the seats began to fill up, but now those coming late have standing room only. Children speak to each other in stage whispers and weave among the chairs, but the adults are fixated by the facetiously amusing performance. Everything happens right before their eyes, and the actors are so close the audience can reach out and touch them. Whenever called for by the script, the audience members unwittingly become bystanders or members of the audience at the building company's show, rippling applause....

After the audience scatters for the night, the cast and workers from the Cultural Center quickly pack up the props and clean the hall; later they gather under quiet and starry skies to do a rehash of the night's performance. In three days they have to go to Chengkung Township to perform, and the day after must head back to Taitung city to go to work.

A member of the audience passes by, and the one line "you act very well" boosts everyone's morale.

It's hard for "arts in the countryside" to set down roots: "We are the only performing troupe in eastern Taiwan, and people are really surprised when they hear that Taitung has a drama troupe after all," says Liu Mei-ying, executive director of the Taitung Civil Service Drama Company, without hiding her satisfaction.

Altogether, there are probably no more than ten similar local drama troupes. Participants mostly have a sense that cultural development between the cities and the rural areas is too imbalanced: In Taipei arts groups are concentrated together and there are abundant performing arts. But elsewhere, after the powerful assault of the mass media, now everyone is bolted in front of the TV watching the same old TV personalities and plots that have nothing to do with their daily lives. Where have those dramas that reflect local life gone to?

"If you just have artists going down to the countryside, with performing troupes making tours of south and central Taiwan, in the end it's just a flash in the pan, which leaves no permanent results behind," says Lang Ya-ling, founder of the Taichung Viewpoint Drama Workshop.

Thus people at the local level who are interested in performing arts get together and stage shows for the local people. This makes them happy, and gives the local people a bit of entertainment and some reflection on life outside of TV, movies and roving stripper acts.

Is not this the same as the outdoor stage performances in front of temples in days past which consoled the old, delighted the young, and were accompanied by the happy sounds of gongs and drums? "They gave all the people of the village an opportunity to get together and do something they really wanted to do," says drama scholar Wang Chi-mei. The old society in Taiwan believed that "a young person who studies drama will not go bad." The elders would bring a teacher to the village to instruct the young men in the dramatic arts, learning music, speech, history and proper social mores in the process.

But with the passage of time, TV and film have replaced drama for young people, and have overwhelmed outdoor performances at festive occasions. Is it possible today to revive the popular arts activities and their intimate connection with daily life? Yu Yuan-keng, executive director of the Ilan Little Theater Workshop, has been mulling over this problem for a long time.

Famous name imports aimed at the countryside: In August of last year, the Council for Cultural Planning and Development of the Executive Yuan set in motion a three-year "Community Theater Activities Promotional Plan" to guide localities in establishing theater companies to tour the rural communities and small towns. The goals are to increase cultural leisure activities, to discover and develop specialized theater talent, and to narrow the cultural gap between city and country. After sign-ups and competitions though the cultural centers in each city and county, four troupes were selected. Most have been established for several years, with the "senior" being the Heritage Drama Company from Kaohsiung, set up in 1983. The others--the Taitung Civil Service Drama Company, the Taichung Viewpoint Drama Workshop, and the Tainan Chinese Lantern Theater--all have four or five years under their belts. In addition, the Cornfield Experimental Theater from Hsinchu, which has been around for about a year, has also applied to the CCPD for subsidization.

Under a separate "Plan for the Amalgamation of Resources for Drama and Folk Arts," the Ilan Little Theater Workshop is today being helped to become the first county-supported drama troupe, aiming to revitalize the long tradition of community theater in Taiwan. And back in the capital city Taipei, the Minhsin Theater, from the Minsheng district, also intends to develop in the direction of community theater, to open up a training center, to provide drama classes and to enter a dynamic relationship with the people of the neighborhood.

This collection of troupes are all grouped together under the "community theater" label. But what is community theater?

Katie Su, a theater administrator at the CCPD who is handling this plan, explains that the name is borrowed from abroad, from the English. Originally it means that both personnel and funding come from the local area, and what is performed also has the objective of serving the local community.

In fact, Taiwan has no administrative jurisdiction "community" (she-chu). The two main definitions implied in this term are, first, that the drama group arise outside of Taipei, and second, that it takes service to the local area as its objective. In this case wouldn't using "local" (ti-fang) theater be more suitable? But scholars who participated in the plan were concerned that using "local" would lead to confusion with existing local drama like Taiwanese opera or puppet shows. Owing to bureaucratic divisions of responsibility, the targets of this plan are mainly groups which perform stage plays, and a separate unit is responsible for planning for "local" (ti-fang) drama.

Each has his or her own reason for going into drama: These companies are mostly composed of an accumulation of interested students who have come out of various years of the drama training camps annually sponsored by the CCPD. An example is the Taitung Civil Service Drama Company. The name "civil service" comes from the fact that in the beginning the local Department of Education would always send letters down to each agency and school telling them to "assign" staff or teachers to participate in the study camp. Today they are already "privatized," and the participants come from private business, the military and students.

The Cornfield Experimental Theater of Hsinchu, on the other hand, was founded by local youth who returned home. Director Chiu Chuan-chuan graduated from the Theater Department of the National Institute of the Arts, served as assistant director of the Mokit Taiwan Children's Theater, and has done a great deal of artistic directing for stage and film. She set up the troupe when she returned to Hsinchu, hoping to let those neighbors who said to her mother, "Your daughter is going to become a star" when hearing the news that she had tested into the theater department know that the definition of theater is not nearly so limited, and can be linked closely to daily life.

The Chinese Lantern Theater of Tainan has its roots in the local Catholic Chinese Lantern Arts Center, as Father Chi, the prime mover, got the idea to set up a drama company and recruited interested local young people from the community to put it together. Director Tsai Ming-yi left home at a young age to go north, and only returned to his home to work after completing military service. Because of his experience performing in the Lan Ling Theater, he was "drafted" to be director, though he says of himself that it was only because "there are no tigers in the mountains" (there was no one more qualified in this remote place).

Further, some founders are "outsiders," who have come to a locality through their jobs or marriage, and begin to promote drama activities. Lang Ya-ling of the Taichung Viewpoint Drama Workshop is originally a Taipei native. After finishing graduate school in Chinese literature at Tunghai Univerity in Taichung, she remained to teach, directed drama at several tertiary institutions there, and then founded what remains the only drama company in central Taiwan. Chao Yu-chen of the Kaohsiung Heritage Drama Company, from Taipei, married into a Kaohsiung family. She has been promoting school drama for 27 years. She has now returned to her alma mater, the National Taiwan Academy of Arts, to teach, and travels back and forth between Taipei and Kaohsiung.

In the remote countryside, you work with what you've got: There are similarities in the development process of all of these companies active in their own back yards. They started from "prepared scripts"--by adapting famous European or American plays or by taking the best scripts from the CCPD--though naturally not without the group's collective creative input and improvisations. They mostly have recruited members through holding drama training camps, they refine their skills by participating in the annual drama competition held by the Ministry of Education, or they offer children's theater performances and training. It's just as Wang Chi-mei says, "No one ever pays attention to these outlying companies, and no one nourishes them. The only thing to do is to digest everything they can from junk to nutritious food. You are what you eat, but if you want to grow upthen you still have to eat anything you can get your hands on."

In its early days, the Tainan Chinese Lantern Theater performed in the tiny film screening room of the Chinese Lantern Arts Center. There were no restrictions on performance form, and people could do anything they liked including mime or improvisation. For the 30 or 40 audience members scattered about on all sides, these forms were extremely novel and refreshing, and after the show they would ask the actors to explain this or that.

Last March, the Taiwanese comic dialogue "Ordinary People, Ordinary Life," written and directed by Tsai Ming-yi, made its way to the Experimental Theater of the National Theater, getting quite a response. The next Taiwanese language drama "Take Me to See the Fish" was also selected, establishing a trend of that company choosing materials with a local flavor to perform.

On the other hand, the Taichung Viewpoint Drama Workshop does mainly experimental drama. Two years ago a kind-hearted friend put up NT$2 million, so they have their own theater, sound system, lighting and props, and can show arts films and hold drama training camps. They have also been invited up north, to give Taipei residents the "viewpoint" of another theater.

To be a community theater, besides bringing together the local people and providing a location for exchanging feelings and ideas, is it essential that a community theater also reflect local culture and customs, or use traditional local resources?

Choosing materials with a local touch: The answer is not inevitable, and these troupes have all gone through trial and error. Still, choosing themes with a local flavor is a viable way for these companies to mature and to make a deep impression on local sensibilities.

In April and May of this year, several companies toured the cities and counties to which they belong with support from the CCPD. Besides the Heritage troupe, which did not have time to write new scripts and thus performed existing materials, the other groups, given substantial human and financial support, either brought in outside teachers to do instruction and scripting or did field surveys to reflect local sentiments and social problems in their performances.

The Taitung Civil Service Drama Company, for its Blossoming Flower of Taitung, invited Lan Ling founding member Chuo Ming to do training in gestures, and Culture University drama department graduate Ho Chien-wei to do scripting and directing. The script reflects the trend in recent years for people from Taipei to go to Taitung and drive up land prices by building vacation bungalows without regard for protecting the local soil or water--simultaneously bringing in the habit of "construction site shows" (stripper shows at construction sites to attract potential buyers). During rehearsals, one actor's brother, who is in real estate, couldn't help but ask himself, "Does our Taitung really need vacation bungalows?"

Doing "field research": The Taichung Viewpoint Drama Workshop put on "Fly, Train, Fly." It discussed how people lose simple dreams under the competition for material goods, and made a special point of Taichung's sex industry. The prostitutes, pimps and the beauties selling aphrodisiacs in the night market all were products of their "field research"--their little theater is located on Hupei Street, right in the heart of the red light district of days gone by. In the post-performance discussion, an actor who played the role of a pimp, when asked by an audience member how he figured out how to play the part, answered, "If you have the honor to be a Taichung City resident then you won't have any problem." After the whole place filled with laughter, he added: "I hope the drama will give us a chance to rethink."

The play "End of an Era" put on by the Tainan Chinese Lantern Theater talked about the life of an old puppeteer, closing the play by putting all the props and costumes in a box and sealing it to bring out the traditional, inevitable fate of withering away. Their concept for the play came from assisting the CCPD to do a Taiwan-wide survey of drama troupes. They discovered that the past flourishing of puppetry in Tainan had by the time of the survey become desolate, with some companies existing only in name and others being "one man shows." Yet in order to rehearse this play they held a puppetry training camp, and though the performance has had its run, the students have requested an advanced level class purely out of interest.

Playing on open air stages is lots of fun: The current tours and public performances are perhaps the first chance for many troupes to "go down to the countryside" outside of the county cultural centers, thus getting a taste of old-time open-air theater. There are many variables in open-air theater, you can't predict either the audience or the situation, and if you hit stormy weather then you had best listen to the commands of heaven. But on the other hand the audience response is direct and up-front, and the enthusiasm and moral support can bring even more out of the performers.

Viewpoint artistic director Lang Ya-ling says that she really only came to feel the "flavor of people" in the performance at the Kuan Yin Temple. For example, during the scene with the seductively clad woman selling love potions, the audience watched with great interest, and even asked her why she wasn't giving a bit more of a show.

"There are so many, many variables in an open air performance, but isn't that just like the dangers of life itself? This is probably the key to the vitality of community theater." She plans to produce plays which are even closer to the lives of the ordinary people, and to put them on in even more remote places.

Which is more important, art or social education? In order to really get down to the local level, and become accessible to young and old alike, is it necessary that the subject matter and performance of community theater be commonplace and simple to understand? How should one assess the proper balance between the function of social education and artistic creativity?

The creators mostly believe that the materials should come from daily life, but that the performance methods may be highly artistic, and there is no inevitable conflict between the two. Of course, an over-experimental style which is impossible for people to understand might frighten away the audience.

In the ideal world of Cornfield Experimental Theater director Chiu Chuan-chuan, community theater should not just be composed of drama lovers. She plans to establish a children's theater, and has gone recruiting at the Chang Ching institute and the women's commercial association to set up a mothers' theater to perform periodically in schools. "Drama can be brought together directly with life, and need not be a refined artistic product," she concludes.

Her troupe not only hopes to get close to the people, it is even more actively going on the offensive to get away from traditional theater and perform in any location. For example, their first play "Solo Identity" was rehearsed and performed in the family garage, done over into a small theater, while neighbors watched from the street. Their second play, an environmental piece entitled "Which River is More Beautiful?," went even further, being performed in community square on the temple stage, so that the women selling vegetables in the market below could just turn around and watch. They even sought permission and support from a construction company to stage a different sort of "construction site show" on work premises. The large production now in preparation, "A Conversation with the East Gate Wall," will adopt the environmental theater technique, following a path past many of Hsinchu's historic sites, such as the East Gate Wall, walking and performing at the same time.

It's hard to get financing, and harder to retain talent: Looking generally at the just-completed "tours of the countryside," several troupes were able to get even closer to local life, and displayed a more mature posture than in the past. Nevertheless, if there is to be an even better showing in the future, there are several difficulties which need to be overcome. The most important are the lack of skilled personnel and the dearth of funding sources.

In the schools in the cities and counties where these troupes reside, there are usually no theater courses, and group members get together purely out of interest, and are purely amateur. They must find time outside of normal work schedules to rehearse, and struggle to get a grip on the play, and it is often impossible to manage to break through. Also, because of an absence of rehearsal sites, it is difficult to train lighting and sound specialists.

"Our weakest link is that we have no one who serves full-time as director," says Taitung Civil Service Drama Company leader Hsieh Pi-hung. This time, being able to hire specialists to lead, everything was fascinating and novel, rehearsing became terrific fun, and they really had their eyes opened. Chinese Lantern Theater also states that it could achieve professional range only after bringing in Liu Ke-hua from the Drama Department at the National Institute of the Arts for a year of training and getting professional direction from talents like Chuo Ming, Li Kuo-hsiu and Liu Shao-lu.

"It's a good thing that people are able to move from place to place, so that Taipei artists can go to the countryside to teach others," says Wang Chimei. But it's less certain that there is a good enough environment there to retain them.

The CCPD's annual NT$2 million budget is a great encouragement to these troupes, who ordinarily raise funds as they go along and whose cast members often have to pay expenses out of their own pockets. "But our ultimate objective is that we hope they can become self-sufficient, or at least that the expenses can be split three ways between the troupe, the CCPD, and the local government. After all, local theater has its own development, and it's not good to have too much central intervention, "says the CCPD's Katie Su.

It's hard to get as famous as in Taipei: In order to get funding, some troupes have tried to seek support from businesses. However, without a high degree of name recognition, it is hard for local drama companies to catch the eye of entrepreneurs. Cornfield once sought support from a certain makeup manufacturer, but as soon as the latter heard that the tour would be entirely in the countryside, they promptly turned the request down.

The lack of fame is a product of the gap between city and country. Information about local drama performances almost never makes it onto the cultural pages of the Taipei-centric media. The Viewpoint and Chinese Lantern groups only got some local support because they brought with them reputations that had been earned in Taipei when they "returned home." "Even still, we might still be a little better known in Taipei than in Tainan," says Tsai Ming-yi. "If you ask local Tainan residents if they've heard of Chinese Lantern Theater, 95% won't know. But if you ask about Cloud Gate or the Performance Workshop [both located in Taipei] then they'll nod their heads and say they know, "he says, shaking his head.

Because of the prevailing standards of the urban culture, which derives mainly from Taipei, it's impact sweeps across the entire island. The phenomenon of lack of personnel to look after local culture, the need to cultivate a trend of cultural education, and the inadequate attention given to local cultural workers are all obstacles and handicaps they need to find ways of overcoming.

Display local vitality, and the renewal of life: "Affairs are in the hands of men." Ho Chien-wei learned from this set of performances that drama companies can compromise with and come together with local cultural centers: "The local administrative system is the greatest source of energy. If you just give them a chance, they can escape from the traditional recalcitrant attitude of 'having one more thing to do is not as good as having one less thing to do.'"

The Taitung Civil Service Drama Company next year plans to perform with the local special Lantern Festival custom of the story of Han Dan Yeh. In the year after next they will begin field research focussing on the Five Year Festival of the Taiwan aboriginal people. They are excited and vigorous, and want to continue on; several other troupes will take a breather after this tour is over before they want to set off again.

This vitality which arises from local areas can only flourish and grow with the support of the local people. When the neighbors come to understand that studying in the department of drama doesn't mean you want to become a star, and when the people of Taitung ask themselves if it is really necessary to build small apartments, then drama--as an art form that grows out of life--is exerting its influence. Can other cities and counties which do not yet have community theater move quickly to give the local residents another choice besides TV and movies?

[Picture Caption]

With the idea of "performing for one's own people," community theater has arisen outside of Taipei. (The poster is for a performance by the Taitung Civil Service troupe)

The Ilan Little Theater Workshop is striving to work with local arts resources, by visiting temples and making suggestions about how to hold festivals, for instance.

This isn't a "construction site show," but a Taitung Civil Service Drama Company car, touring to attract an audience. (photo courtesy of the Taitung Civil Service Drama Company)

The play "The Blossoming Flower of Taitung" reflects the recent social phenomena of skyrocketing real estate prices and "construction site shows" in Taitung County.

(Above) The Cornfield Experimental Theater of Hsinchu is actively penetrating society and sowing the seeds of dramatic arts among children. (photo courtesy of the Cornfield Experimental Theater)

(Below) The community theater that Chiu Chuan-chuan has in mind is one that can touch daily life, not just one for drama-lovers. (photo courtesy of the Cornfield Experimental Theater)

The Taiwanese language comic dialogue "Ordinary People, Ordinary Life "was selected for performance in the Experimental Theater in the National Theater--and wasa big hit. (The photo shows the troupe performing at the National Taiwan University Arts Week)

In order to put on "Fly, Train, Fly," the Taichung Viewpoint Workshop went to red light districts and night markets to do "field research."

The Ilan Little Theater Workshop is striving to work with local arts resources, by visiting temples and making suggestions about how to hold festivals, for instance.

This isn't a "construction site show," but a Taitung Civil Service Drama Company car, touring to attract an audience. （photo courtesy of the Taitung Civil Service Drama Company）

The play "The Blossoming Flower of Taitung" reflects the recent social phenomena of skyrocketing real estate prices and "construction site shows" in Taitung County.

（Above） The Cornfield Experimental Theater of Hsinchu is actively penetrating society and sowing the seeds of dramatic arts among children. （photo courtesy of the Cornfield Experimental Theater）

（Below） The community theater that Chiu Chuan-chuan has in mind is one that can touch daily life, not just one for drama-lovers. （photo courtesy of the Cornfield Experimental Theater）

The Taiwanese language comic dialogue "Ordinary People, Ordinary Life "was selected for performance in the Experimental Theater in the National Theater--and wasa big hit. （The photo shows the troupe performing at the National Taiwan University Arts Week）

In order to put on "Fly, Train, Fly," the Taichung Viewpoint Workshop went to red light districts and night markets to do "field research.".