A Theatre of Taiwaneseness: Politics, Ideologies, and Gezaixi

In September 1990o, for the first time after four decades, the Taiwanese government decided to send a performance group to participate in a state-sponsored cultural event in Beijing-the Art Festival of the Asian Games. The decision was significant not only because the KMT (Kuomintang) government has been on bad terms with China's government since it lost the mainland to the Chinese Communist Party and retreated to Taiwan in 1949. It was also because the theatre group chosen as the representative of Taiwan was Minghuayuan, a newly emerged model troupe of gezaixi (Taiwanese opera). Gezaixi, in contrast to the widely studied jingju (Beijing opera), is little known in the West. Yet, in today's Taiwan, gezaixi is getting particular attention from intellectuals, politicians, the media, and the theatre world. This attention is generated mainly because gezaixi is widely recognized as "a theatre of Taiwaneseness." Generally speaking, "Taiwaneseness" refers to the nature of Taiwanese culture and its presumed attributes. It is largely connected with the culture and history of southeastern Chinese immigrants who first arrived in numbers during the 17th century and continued pouring in through the Qing dynasty. It not only excludes the culture of the aborigines (mountain people),' who were the first settlers of the island, but also draws a line against the latest immigrants from all over mainland China in the 1940s. The "Taiwaneseness" designation is given partly because gezaixi is performed in Taiwanese, the "mother tongue" of the majority of Taiwan's population. Though not the only "human theatre" (as opposed to puppetry) performed in Taiwanese, it is the most popular, even if in decline. Chinese theatre genres that had existed on the island for a long time-such as budaixi, a type of Chinese hand puppetry, and liyuanxi, a theatre form popular in Taiwan since the I7th century-lost their popularity to gezaixi. Qiou Kunliang, in his pioneering research on the performing arts during the Japanese colonization (I895-I945), concludes that by I925 gezaixi had become the most popular theatre genre in Taiwan (1992:I86).