Liang Yue 良约(AGood Promise)
Photo credit:安頭
Creative team in Search
At a family gathering, three families that have taken different paths in their lives try to retell a story from the past up to their grandchildren’s lives. Details of the story become fuzzy and what seems to be one story becomes more…
Liang Yue良约 (a singer and performer for the army) and Xian Ming献明(a soldier with musical talent) fall in a forbidden love close to the end of the Chinese civil war. Due to the pressures from the government post-civil war, Xian was asked to leave for Taiwan with the Republican Party. Without bearing the separation, Liang cross-dresses as a soldier to sneak on a boat to Taiwan. With that, the couple embarks on a journey with no return...
To further the writing processes and connect to the time period this piece is set in, I aim to use this play as an opportunity to examine Yang Ban Xi (Model Opera) a convention that was created during the Chinese Cultural Revolution’s impact on the limited narrative that was told during such time.
A series of other theatrical practices were combined in an effort to reimagine Yang Ban Xi as a convention for a modern-day audience to document and create healing for historical trauma. The following two sample scenes are written to demonstrate such differences.
Both scenes are original and taken from the story of Liang Yue. The script on the left is written in a style that mimics the character design and dialogue from Yang Ban Xi while the one on the right applies the reimagined version of the convention.
