Danny Yung interview
Posted:
31 Mar 2010
With Flee by Night, experimental theatre veteran Danny Yung deconstructs traditional kunqu opera down to its very core. By Edmund Lee
In the work of theatre pioneer Danny Yung, it’s sometimes hard to determine where fiction ends and life begins. Flee by Night, which was previously staged by Yung with the same performer (kun opera maestro Ke Jun, current director of Jiangsu Kunqu Opera Troupe) in Norway several years ago, is another production of the classic kunqu solo act by the director with that befuddling characteristic. Ostensibly an investigation into the notion of political correctness and a nostalgic revamp of a tradition assailed by time, Yung’s latest also represents the final piece in his Experimental Traditional Opera Trilogy, which includes the previously staged The Outcast General and Tears of Barren Hill.
As one of the two surviving acts from The Legend of the Precious Sword, written by mid-Ming playwright Li Kaixian, the politically allegorical Flee by Night tells the story of Lin Chong – a fictional hero character in Water Margin, one of the great classical Chinese novels. Initially the martial arts instructor of the 800,000-strong Imperial Guards in the Song Dynasty, Lin was subsequently framed, exiled, and forced by corrupt officials to retreat as an outlaw to the legendary mountain Liangshan (Mount Liang in Shandong, China), the stronghold of the 108 heroes of the novel. The act focuses on the character’s psychological journey as he, in the heat of the night, hurries alone towards Liangshan.
“I’ve always been curious about the capacity of art works to stand the trials of time,” says Yung, founder of internationally recognised experimental theatre group Zuni Icosahedron, which is presenting the current show together with the Hong Kong Arts Festival. “Flee by Night was originally written into a kunqu opera piece 600 years ago, but its charisma has hardly faded. I think the original work is filled with suppressed fury towards the establishment. While it touches on a very sensitive topic for politicians, the work has nonetheless stayed popular under the rules of several [different] dynasties; and this, in a certain aspect, proves the power of art over that of politics. As politicians come and go, artists stand immortally on the stage with their creations.”
At last year’s Arts Festival, Yung’s experimental stage piece Book of Ghosts mesmerised with its combination of Chinese (kunqu opera, Peking opera) and Southeast Asian traditional arts (Thai dance and classical Javanese dance), while interestingly taking ghosts as a metaphor for artists under oppression. As viewers familiar with his work can attest, however, it is the metafictional flourishes in Yung’s productions that are the most entrancing: one such moment came when regular collaborator Ke partially removed his makeup during his kunqu act and became half man, half woman; or half character, half performer.
In Flee by Night, Yung’s protagonist is a stagehand working in traditional Chinese theatre who has lived and observed its evolution from stage side for 600 years. The distinguishing lines between the Lin Chong character, the stagehand role, the performers in characters, and the performers as themselves are set to be blurred, once again. Yung says of the role in his new work: “During these times – from the Ming Dynasty to Qing Dynasty, from Republic of China to the new China, from the Cultural Revolution to its economic revolution – he witnessed how Flee by Night has reinvented itself and fended off challenges from offstage.”
Apart from bringing in Ke Jun and his 25-year-old student, Yang Yang, to embody respectively the middle-aged and teenaged versions of Lin Chong, Yung has also enlisted kunqu opera percussionist Li Lite to take part in the performance. “A percussion performer is usually a canny observer, so he’s also in a position to offer imperative critique,” explains Yung. “In the creative process, I had some open, unbounded dialogue with my several collaborators, and [the ideas generated from] this have also gone into the script. The greatest pleasure in creating this work stems from the honesty and boldness that all our collaborators have put into the investigation and experimentation.”
He continues: “Apart from exploring the issues of identities and political correctness among artists and intellectuals, the subject of our experiment this time is also to inspect [those issues] in the relationships between subjects and objects, between the audience and the performer, and between the individual and the pre-existing system. Through kunqu opera, I learned about the culture of the Ming Dynasty, about what [kunqu opera as] ‘alternative history’ means, and how it’s been passed on and become the heritage of our times.”
Flee by Night is performed at Cultural Centre’s Studio Theatre from Thu 25 to Sat 27, with Chinese and English Text.Tickets: 2734 9009; www.urbtix.hk.
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