The Art of Chinese Theatre: When Tradition Meets Evolution

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Ms. Kuang-Yu Fong will share her story of why she chose to perform Chinese theater in the United States. The mission of her company, Chinese Theatre Works, is to “preserve and promote classic Chinese theater through performance, research and teaching; and to create new works that fuse Chinese theatrical aesthetics with contemporary western performance methods and social concerns.”

This statement indicates Ms. Fong’s two major artistic concerns, which are to hold onto and nurture tradition while allowing for its growth and evolution in the new social environment of the United States. Ms. Fong will illustrate this with examples from some of Chinese Theatre Works’ projects from the last decade, and will also talk some about the process and difficulties of creating this kind of theatre with a small, non-profit company.

URL: www.chinesetheatreworks.org

Author Bio

Kuang-Yu Fong majored in Chinese Opera at the Chinese Cultural University in Taiwan. In 1983 she moved to the United States, where she received her MA in Educational Theater at New York University. She travelled all over the United States and to Belgium, Germany, Greece, Holland, Taiwan, Korea, Hong Kong and China. In 1990 Ms. Fong founded Chinese Theatre Workshop (CTW). She has also been the artistic director of the Gold Mountain Institute for Traditional Shadow Theatre (GMI) since 1998. In 2001, the two companies, GMI and CTW merged to form a new organization, Chinese Theatre Works, Inc. which Ms. Fong is executive director and co-artistic director.

Some of the original works produced by CTW, which Ms. Fong conceived, wrote, directed and often performed in as well include: A Day at the Office, Zhang Boils the Ocean, Climbing Gold Mountain, Kasper as a Banana, Toy Theatre Peony Pavilion (winner of a 2000 UNIMA Citation of Excellence in Puppetry), Little Red Riding Hood: the Chinese Opera , Kun/Shadow Whitesnake, Border of Womanhood, Tiger Tales, (awarded “best short play” and “best vocal performance” at the First International Shadow Play Festival, Tangshan, China,) Birth of the Monkey King, Monkey in America: Day Jobs, Opera Dreams, Three Women: Many Plays (awarded “best directing and playwrighting” at the First International Shadow Play Festival, Tangshan, China) and Book of Songs.

She has been a guest professor at the Chinese Opera Academy in Beijing. She has taught in the Language and Culture Department of Pace University since 1990. She is currently serving as a member of the board of directors of UNIMA/USA, in charge of the “Hands Across the Sea” foreign puppetry cultural exchange program. Ms. Fong has written many articles for Chinese magazines, newspapers, conferences and for the journal “Puppetry International.” She translated into Mandarin Nellie McCaslin’s book, “Shows on a Shoestring”, which is a standard text for educational theater. With Stephen Kaplin, she co-wrote “Theatre on a Tabletop: Puppetry for Small Space.”