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Breathing life into the West Wing

English pop music in a Chinese opera? Actually, you can expect hip hop and jazz as well. To top it all, the opera in question, Xi Xiang Ji (which means "the west wing" in English) is one of the most controversial operas in Chinese history. It was banned during the period of three dynasties, Yuan, Ming and Qing, for its risqué and liberal political and sexual content. Now, given a modern twist, the opera is brought back by the National University of Singapore (4-8 April 2008) at the University Cultural Centre.

MODERN TWIST: Assoc Prof Grant Shen is known for directing his students in “laboratory-like” settings. He investigates the acting traditions, audience response, and social milieus of the golden age of theatre in India, China and Japan.

Its creator, Assoc Prof Grant Shen, Department of English Language and Literature, said he wanted to provide the "authenticity of experience" to the audience of today. Operas are to be enjoyed, he said, and not meant to be a "museum piece" or a "dead body". In the opera's golden days, the audience looked forward to an opera with great anticipation — the music was always contemporary — in-synch with the era it was performed. The opera was very much like what a rock concert is, to many today. With the passage of time, however, opera has become a tradition, an art enjoyed only by limited groups of people.

Many today would not experience what the audience experienced when watching an opera in the olden days, said Assoc Prof Shen. "The opera for many today is just a lot of screaming and noise. Many would be overwhelmed by the singing voice," he said.

The Chinese opera was initially performed throughout the different dynasties — using librettos (text in an extended musical work) re-cast to contemporary music. In other words, the music has always moved with time. The music died when other forms of entertainment overtook the opera, alienating the audience and the art. Hoping to change this, Assoc Prof Shen intends to bring back the "authentic experience" of operas — the sheer enjoyment as they were meant to be.

Breathing life back into Asian theatre is not as easy as it seems — not just creating a potpourri of modern dance, songs and music — and hoping that it all gels with an ancient storyline. The authenticity of the experience has to be brought back with much credibility — with complete mastery of the Chinese traditional theatre.

For Assoc Prof Shen — it has taken almost 30 years of research. He first began his journey as a classical scholar with the Shanghai Normal University and later, the University of Hawaii. "I am one of the very few living today who can write in classical Chinese," he said with a laugh.

The production of Xi Xiang Ji or Meeting the Fox Fairy is an effort true to his reputation. Assoc Prof Shen is known for his impressive productions in Asia — Freed by a Flirt (1995), Sukeroku: Flower of Edo (1998) and his most recent Shakuntala of the Mahabharata (2005) where cultural boundaries were crossed and the discourse of interpretive theatre elevated among global audiences.

When directing Freed by a Flirt, he preserved as many stylistic features of zaju as possible. This ancient genre has no known stage production in the past 500 years. His Sukeroku: Flower of Edo was the first kabuki play to be performed in English in Asia. They were reported in TDR, a top theatre journal. The authentic Sanskrit dance-drama, Shakuntala of the Mahabharata received much attention from the media.

Assoc Prof Shen expects Xi Xiang Ji to be well received as well. The production's librettos in English took about six months to complete with the task undertaken by one of Singapore's foremost poets, Leong Liew Geok. They were written in a rhythm that would go with contemporary music. It is not easy to translate opera librettos into English, said Assoc Prof Shen, the rhythm scheme as well as the language parallelism have to be retained. It took almost another four months for the librettos to be re-arranged to the music selected. Hundreds of popular and classical tunes were thrown open for voting by the entire team involved in the production — and eventually shortlisted for the production.

Assoc Prof Shen is known for directing his students in "laboratory-like" settings in which experiments were conducted under controlled conditions, before the actual delivery on stage. For Xi Xiang Ji, he has observed in his "lab" that his student actors have related very well to the characters they are portraying.

"They seem more relax, and their portrayals come across as more sincere. There is certainly chemistry between themselves and the roles they are playing," he said. This "chemistry", he said, is quite rare in opera productions he said, when many times, the actors were just delivering their lines and action.

"But in this production, I can see that they are living the life of the characters they portray," said Assoc Prof Shen.

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