An interview with Lu Po-Shen.

Lu Po-Shen (???) is a founding member of the Department of Theatre Arts at Dr. Sun Yat-Sen University in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, where he teaches directing and acting. He received his M.A. in Drama and Theatre Studies from Royal Holloway, University of London, and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. there. Since 2003, he has been Artistic Director of Tainaner Ensemble (?????) in Tainan, Taiwan.

Over the last fifteen years, Tainaner Ensemble, founded in 1987 under the name Hwa Deng Theatre Troupe (????), has hosted many theatre-related workshops and festivals. Devoted to exploring the possibilities of community-related theatre, Tainaner Ensemble has transformed itself, gradually, into a professional theatre company that has attracted a following across Taiwan and built relationships with theatre companies abroad.

Lu Po-Shen's association with Tainaner Ensemble has been instrumental to this development. Over the years, Lu and his Tainaner actors have developed a method called "the performance score of voice and body" (???) in order to realize the "musicality" of the works they stage. They have also opened an intercultural dialog between Western classics and contemporary Taiwanese theatre. As faithful min-nan-hua (Taiwanese language) adaptations of Western dramas, Lu's productions of Antigone (2001), Sonata of the Witches-The Macbeth Verses (an adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth, 2003), and Endgame (2004), have been acclaimed by many critics and scholars as Taiwan's most successful intercultural experiment in recent years. His Mandarin-language Shakespeare Unplugged series--Romeo and Juliet (2004) and Hamlet (2005)--has sought to reclaim, particularly for younger generations, the vitality of Renaissance theatre through innovative stage and video techniques. Lu's other directing credits with the Tainaner Ensemble include Footfalls (2006), Come and Go (2006) and Auntie Liu (a Yuju production, 2006). He is currently working on two productions--Lysistrata and The White Snake--which will open in October and December 2006, respectively.

On July 29, 2005, Lu Po-Shen visited Fu Jen University to discuss his work with Cecilia Hsueh-Chen Liu, Associate Professor of English and Director of the Multimedia Center; Llyn Scott, Associate Professor of English and Coordinator of the College of Foreign Languages Theatre; and Joseph C. Murphy, Assistant Professor of English and Editor of Fu Jen Studies.

JOSEPH C. MURPHY: What is the significance of your theatre company being based in Tainan, when most of the theatre-going audience is in Taipei?

LU PO-SHEN: The theatre company was founded in 1987, and I joined the company in 2001. So before I joined it, most of the work was of local interest. But since then, because of my educational background, we started to make these Western plays, and suddenly the company is not that local. We receive a lot of attention in the Taipei theatre circle. But in Tainan we have done more than a theatre company usually does. For example, for the last three years we have organized different festivals and invited theatre companies from Taipei to come to perform. We try to give the Tainan audience more choices.

MURPHY: Why do you perform Western plays in Taiwanese?

LU: In 1999 in England I was working with the Polish theatre company The Song of the Goat (Teatr Piesn Kozla), and we used Antigone as a text for practice. So in 2001 when I was first invited to direct a play for Tainaner Ensemble, I decided to try it here. Initially I didn't intend to stage Antigone in Taiwanese, but Hsu Rey Fang, our former artistic director, told me the actors could speak Taiwanese more fluently than Mandarin Chinese, so I said, OK, let's use Taiwanese, if we can find someone to translate the text. Just by chance we met a Taiwanese poet, Mr. Chou Ding-Bang (???), and he did the translation of most of the choral odes. That was the first time I found that the Taiwanese language has a lot of potential as a stage language. Since then, I had the idea to stage Western plays in Taiwanese. It's just by chance. I thought that if every year we stage a Western play in Taiwanese, then after ten years we have ten translated texts. We seldom find Taiwanese translations in bookshops--always in Mandarin.

CECILIA HSUEH-CHEN LIU: Does that mean that all your actors are trained in the Taiwanese language?

LU: Yes. Most of the actors I am working with now are young actors, and most of them are the second generation of mainland Chinese, so they have to learn how to speak Taiwanese, and Mr. Chou Ding-Bang is their coach. So whenever we have a new production, he will give them Taiwanese lessons and record the text for them to catch the tones.

LLYN SCOTT: Is there a particular emotion or inflection in the Taiwanese language that communicates in an interesting way?

LU: In Taiwanese, what we call min-nan-hua, the sound, the intonation, has more variety than in Mandarin. It has eight tones. I find Taiwanese language can do better than Mandarin with poetry. Every time when I pick up a Mandarin translated text I can't imagine how it can be spoken on stage, but I find Taiwanese more suitable. The first time the audience saw our Taiwanese production, they wondered why this familiar language sounded unusual to them. One of my tasks is to explore the possibilities of using Taiwanese language on stage. Normally the Taiwanese language is stereotyped as low class; Mandarin is the high class language. I wanted, to some extent, to change this stereotype. And we did. Some audiences really find that the Taiwanese language sounds different to them. But we also get some audience members who think I have destroyed the language, because I didn't use it like we speak it in daily life. Sometimes I play with the sound, and make it more dramatic. The Taiwanese language experts--they can't stand for that.

MURPHY: Is there a tradition for the way that you're using Taiwanese, for example, in Taiwanese opera, or are you doing something totally new?

LU: I was influenced by traditional Chinese/Taiwanese operas; I'm not doing something totally new. But I want to create a new way of speaking Taiwanese on stage. Still, when audiences told me that they felt frustrated because they couldn't understand the language, I wanted to do something different. That's why I staged Endgame. The language of Endgame is more like daily life, although it still has a kind of musical score beneath the text, and this time the audience said, OK, we understand now. But when I did Sonata of the Witches-The Macbeth Verses, I asked my translator of Macbeth to keep that old language--I didn't want to make it too direct, too popular. So even for audiences who know Taiwanese, they could only understand maybe fifty percent. I thought, why can't you just appreciate it as something different, regard it as a foreign Shakespeare production? When I was in England, whenever I saw a Shakespeare production in Polish or Romanian, that was no problem for me to understand. Why not just appreciate the visual aspects? They say they can't. But later I understand that if my audience knows Taiwanese, and my actors make mistakes with the language, that will detach them from my plays.

MURPHY: Is the intonation of Taiwanese that you try to bring out influenced by the English original?

LU: No. It's impossible to do that. Shakespeare wrote in pentameter, but we couldn't find an equivalent in Taiwanese or Mandarin.

LIU: I noticed in the theatre, when the audience heard very famous lines from Shakespeare, their response was different from what you might expect--they laughed.

LU: Most young audience members are not familiar with Taiwanese, they only pick up some. If they hear something familiar they laugh, to show they understand. But I did not intend to make them laugh.

LIU: In your Hamlet Unplugged, which was performed in Mandarin, I thought it was a very intelligent decision to do the play within the play in Taiwanese. What was your reasoning?

LU: It's all because of my actors. The actor who played Gertrude and the Actor could speak Taiwanese better than Mandarin. In Hamlet, it was the first time for her to speak Mandarin on stage, and she was very scared. So I let her play the Actor in Taiwanese, and in the end the audience said she played the Actor better than Gertrude.

MURPHY: Regardless of how you came to that decision, did it have any impact, to portray that other level of reality--the play within the play--in a different language?

LU: With Hamlet, the main questions I wanted to ask were about performance. Through Hamlet Shakespeare tells us what good performance is. For the play within the play, I asked those actors to be like Taiwanese opera actors. I used two women to play Actors, so one had to dress like a man. In Taiwanese opera, always the main male part was played by a woman. When Hamlet asks Polonius about his acting in the university, I asked Polonius to play death in a very exaggerated way. In reality, we have a group of Taiwanese actors doing Hamlet, and the way they act is more realistic. So I tried to put three different performance styles on stage, to ask the audience, which is truest to you?

LIU: In your Taiwanese production of Macbeth, you seem to focus on the witches. Any special reason?

LU: It's also because of my actors. Originally my plan was to ask one actress to play both Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, but then that actress left us. And I wanted to cast the dancer, who ultimately played Macbeth, to play one of the witches because of his trained body. Macbeth was his first major role. I totally changed my production to focus on the three witches because my actors playing the witches are more experienced. So when people say this is not Macbeth I say no, this is the Sonata of the Witches. But it's because of my actors.

MURPHY: Why present these witches as attractive, rather than "witch-like"?

LU: I always want my actors, my students, and my audience to reexamine their stereotypes. Why are the witches always like old women or ugly? Why can't they be attractive? But still when Macbeth encounters the three witches he asks them who they are and why they look like women and yet have beards. My device is to have the witches wear masks of old men with beards. So they have several faces.

LIU: The use of masks is of course a device in Greek tragedy; I'm reminded of your production of Antigone.

LU: I did Sonata of the Witches immediately after Antigone. In Antigone I used masks for the chorus, and we spent a lot of time working on that. I found some interesting techniques, like putting the masks on the back of their heads. We tried that in part of Antigone, and I wanted to explore that technique further in Sonata of the Witches.

LIU: I noticed that the set of Sonata was very dramatic but simple, like the red sofa in your Hamlet.

LU: I find that in good tragedy, especially Shakespeare, the form of the written play was very much influenced by the architecture of the playhouse, the performance space. When I was staging Shakespeare I thought about the Elizabethan playhouse and I used a bare stage. There are so many changes of location. I find that nowadays some companies are very much influenced by realism, so they always black out, and we see the crew changing the set, then lights on, but I ask why? In the traditional theatre they will even draw a second curtain. And still the play is going on in front of the curtain and someone behind is changing the set. In Shakespeare's day they didn't do that, because all the changes of location were indicated by the actors. When the actors say, this is a forest, then the audience will believe this is a forest if the actor is good enough, and that's why in almost all my productions the set is simple. Still, I want to create a very powerful visual impact. That's why I use, for example, red sand in Macbeth. In Hamlet it's just an iron floor with a sofa.

In Lu's Hamlet, the play within the play featured shadow effects and min-nan dialect.

SCOTT: In your Hamlet the actors sit on the side of the stage, this thrust stage, and wait for their turn, and there is a unique acting device: when the actor's foot touches the stage floor then he becomes the character.

LU: It's the first time I did that. In Hamlet I really wanted to question why we perform, how we perform; more than try to show a story, I ask questions. And when I first tried this method in Hamlet it was just in the early rehearsals. Whenever we were rehearsing, those actors who were not in the scene were just sitting on both sides, and when I looked at them I thought, interesting, why don't we put that on stage. In traditional theatre, actors wait in the wings, and when they return to the wings they become who they are--they are actors, not characters. I just wanted to remove the wings to show that to the audience, that the actors were not performing--they went to the toilet, they were drinking water, they were just sitting there, ready to come onstage. One critic asked, "Why do this--why do you always want to detach the audience from the play, always ask us to think? I just want to enjoy watching a play." And I say, good, but this time that is the question I want to ask, and I want the audience to think about that.

SCOTT: I enjoyed that part of the production so much. It activated their characters immediately, so you really began to feel that they were entering a powerful environment.

LU: Yes, but audience members said that for them it was more difficult to believe what the actors were doing on the stage. They see the transition from actor to character, and that would make them feel really detached. I said to my actors, some audience will come to the theatre expecting to be really emotionally involved and that is not what we intend to do this time.

SCOTT: Did your audience also have critical comments about using the monitor for the ghost in Hamlet, or the use of cameras and video? Did they think that was distracting?

LU: No, a few audience members found the ghost funny-because the monitor showed only the ghost's head, no body, only a head moving in mid-air, and they found that funny. But only very few.

MURPHY: Did you intend that comic effect?

LU: No. Originally I wanted the ghost to appear on the stage, I didn't want to use monitors. But the actor who played the dead King is old and Shakespearean language for him is difficult. He spent one month working with us and he couldn't memorize the lines and then he decided to give up, so I had to find another way.

SCOTT: Did you use a cue card for him?

LU: Yes. When we were doing the filming we had to write down the lines and show him.

SCOTT: In the Ophelia death scene, that was a bathtub, right?

LU: Yes.

SCOTT: Did you mean for the audience to recognize that?

LU: Yes, I wanted the audience to recognize that's a bathtub, but if we had the chance to do it again, I would say that's wrong.

MURPHY: Because?

LU: Because it's not consistent with the other images on the monitor. Actually all the images that appear on the monitor should be what Hamlet sees through his camera. But Hamlet didn't see Ophelia's death, he didn't film it. I show Ophelia's death when Gertrude is reporting her death, just because as a director I find Gertrude's speech beautiful, and I didn't want Ophelia to die tragically, I wanted her to die romantically, so I filmed that part to show it. But in the end I found that's not appropriate because it's not consistent.

MURPHY: Are you influenced by any contemporary directors or productions of Shakespeare?

LU: Peter Brook influenced my theatricalism: always use the bare stage, and depend on the actors to tell the audience to believe what they say and do on stage. Brook directed Hamlet in 2000, and he only used a few chairs of different colors on stage. So I decided to use just one sofa. Brook's stage is always bare, but with a very powerful visual spectacle. I was influenced by him. But I never saw anyone do something like what I did in my Hamlet. I have seen performances by Shakespeare companies and national theatres, and they were very traditional.

SCOTT: I saw the Peter Brook Hamlet in Paris, and the setting for that was completely russet color, like the russet-color dawn mentioned in the play. It had that rusty red color saturating the walls of this old theatre. Is there sometimes a cue, an image, you might pick up from Shakespeare's English that would lead you to, for example, the "unplugged" metaphor that you use for your Hamlet--anything in the text that gave you that distant eye, the method of self-examination through a camera?

LU: In Shakespeare's original, Hamlet always has a notebook to record what he sees, what he thinks, so I thought, in the twenty-first century, I'll use a digital camera. I wanted to give a contemporary image of Hamlet.

SCOTT: In your Hamlet, when characters die in the last scene, the actor "vanishes"--slips away from his position--but of course the one remaining on stage keeps the eye contact in that space. Did you develop that technique together with your actors?

LU: Sometimes I make fun of Shakespeare--I tell myself, he is not a good writer. From my experience of directing three of his plays, he always gives me big trouble in the last act, especially the last scene. Always a lot of people die in that scene. It's difficult for me. Personally, I really hate to see people die on stage, because no one, here, has had the experience of dying, so how can we act dying? Normally people expect characters to just--die--but how? Is it real? Of course, it's not real. I think it takes some time to die. When we perform dying on stage, how can we make the audience believe? That is my question. So in the end, I am quite happy to find this way to sort out the problem.

SCOTT: I was also curious about your using the Japanese martial art, with the bokko, in the death scene. How, logically, could you kill people with this non-lethal weapon?

LU: I want the audience to think. The Japanese bamboo sword is not dangerous, but if you see my Hamlet production from beginning to end, that is the question that I always ask: what is real, what is artificial, what kinds of things do you believe or not believe? So in the end when I use the bokko, why can't you believe that it is dangerous? That's the question I want to ask. If at that time I use a real sword the audience will think, "oh no, that's real, oh no, don't, don't." The people in the front row will feel endangered there. I don't want to make the audience feel like that. I want them to imagine. Also, in that scene, the fencing is not important-the important thing is how to end the play. Gertrude was poisoned, and Hamlet killed Claudius-not intentionally, but by chance. That's why I didn't focus on the fencing so much, and used the Japanese sword. I expected the audience to ask themselves, if everything on stage is hand-made-artificial-then what makes you believe in what you see on stage?

SCOTT: Is that why at the end Hamlet comes back and sings like a cabaret singer, "to be or not to be"?

LU: Let me ask you, how did you respond to that?

SCOTT: To me it was like avoiding the death issue, in a sense. And the reprise of "to be or not to be" means that the question was not answered in the play. Why not?

LU: Shakespeare didn't answer the question for me. I think he just questions. I put that song in the end because it's the most famous Shakespearean soliloquy. Many people in Taiwan know "To be or not to be," but they don't know what comes after that opening question. In my Hamlet production, I ask Hamlet to speak that monologue three times: in the scene before he saw Ophelia as in the original, then he sings the song at the end; finally, there's a monitor showing Hamlet saying it again. I just want to remind the audience to really, really listen to that monologue, and to think about what Shakespeare has written.

SCOTT: What are Hamlet's options--to be or not to be what? What are his choices?

LU: To live or to die.

SCOTT: Nothing else?

LU: I think Hamlet's father's murder makes him question many aspects of life, including his relationships with women--his mother, Ophelia--and also with death, life. We always say that in Act V when Hamlet comes back from England, he seems to realize a lot of things, but I don't think so. Because when he speaks to his friend saying how he tricked Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, I feel that is very cruel of Hamlet. And he seems proud to say that. If at that time he is really more comfortable with life, then personally I ask, why does he show off? That is why I still think that "To be or not to be" is the question, it is not the answer.

LIU: You use "unplugged" in the title of a series of plays. Does that suggest that you want to use different theatrical devices to break away from traditional techniques, or are there some messages you want to convey?

LU: My manager always says I should change the title to "Shakespeare Using a Lot of Electricity." It's very expensive--the monitors, the lighting design. I use "unplugged" because I try to discard modern theatrical devices like lighting and sound. I remember seeing the Royal Shakespeare Company's King Lear in London, and in the tempest scene it was raining on stage. But I think that's stupid. Because in that scene we need to listen to King Lear cursing heaven. That is a very important monologue there. But there are sound effects of rain and thunder. In my productions I try to use theatricalism. For example, in my Romeo and Juliet set I use a lantern and the lit lantern looks like a moon. When Romeo is swearing his love to Juliet he holds the lantern and gives it to Juliet. Juliet tells him not to do that because the moon is inconstant--and she gives it back. At that moment the audience believes that the lantern is no longer the lantern, it's the moon. So "unplugged" means I want to open the audience's imaginations. Their brains are always working: "Why this?" "Why that?" And "I believe."

MURPHY: By making your audience work more you hope that they will believe more, imagine more?

LU: Yes.

MURPHY: Before your audience makes a connection with your theatrical devices--with the stilts in Macbeth, or the lantern in Romeo and Juliet--do you accept that their initial reaction might be to laugh?

LU: If they laugh because they think it's clever, that's fine; if they laugh because they think it's stupid, that's bad, for me--then my device is not clever enough. For example, in Romeo and Juliet, when Romeo gives Juliet the lantern, I asked the stage crew to hold the lantern on a long bamboo, and lower it down. The audience laughs, and that's good, because they think it is the moon. For this young couple, their love is like that, so romantic, so pure, so innocent--maybe stupid, and the audience laughs. That's OK for me.

SCOTT: Tell us about your next production.

LU: Next year I'll work on Lysistrata. For the past three years all my productions were done with a small group of actors, just five or six. Lysistrata will be more like Antigone. I'll use maybe sixteen, because I'll need two groups of choruses--men and women. I want to continue experimenting with masks. But I will use masks to make the actors become bigger because, as with Antigone, we will perform outdoors. Also, the mask will be like a headdress for the actors, because so far I haven't been able to overcome the problem of voice. Actors wearing masks can't project their voices effectively. The production will be in Taiwanese, and will be like a musical. We will borrow music from Taiwanese strip tease shows, to portray the Greek women as sexy models.

MURPHY: Lysistrata is a political play. How do you see its politics of war and gender playing in present-day Taiwan?

LU: That is not the main part I want to emphasize. Whenever I stage a production, I never have a political message. I don't believe that when an audience walks out of a theatre, that they will start doing something to change the society, or to better society. I never thought that happened in Taiwan. Personally, I find that the Taiwanese audience is crazy about politics already. You can see so many talk shows. I didn't want to educate my audience. What I try to introduce to them is a different kind of theatrical performance. I believe that my productions are quite different from most Taiwanese productions nowadays, because I always ask questions related to the essence of theatre.

SCOTT: Does your particular career aim to change the audience's sensitivity and responsiveness to art, rather than what they might be doing in society?

LU: Nowadays the audience is too much influenced by television or film. For them, theatre or drama means movies and television. Even students when they first learn drama, if you ask them to write a play, they will always come up with something like a sitcom. But if we look back to the roots of Western drama, in Greek tragedy, it's not like that. When an audience came to the theatre, they opened their imaginations in that large amphitheatre. Even with the actors wearing masks, the audience still believed in what the actors said or did. On Shakespeare's stage as well. But nowadays, with the sets I find in many Taiwanese productions, their purpose is to decorate, to tell me, for example, this is a restaurant. That is TV for me. Why are we so influenced by the realist theatre of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? In Taiwan maybe eighty percent of productions are like that.

MURPHY: Some English-language promotions of Tainaner Ensemble suggest that its productions have relevance to contemporary Taiwanese society and politics. Your own vision of it is somewhat different, then?

LU: Yes. My dramaturge, Mr. Lan Chien-Hung (???), always asks me, what do you want to say to the Taiwanese audience when you stage Shakespeare or Greek tragedy or Samuel Beckett? I say I don't know. When I choose to stage a play, the main question I ask myself is what kind of challenge I want to give my actors. I don't choose a play to say something politically or culturally. What concerns me most is the performance, the questions I want to ask: what acting is, why we do theatre, those kinds of questions. My dramaturge is more concerned with the social message because he's very influenced by Brecht. And it's good to work with someone who is so different from you. When he came to see my Hamlet production, he said, "Why did you make Hamlet so funny? Hamlet should be heavy." But for me it's very light.

SCOTT: Your idea of "unplugged" reminds me of Jerzy Grotowski's "Poor Theatre." Has he influenced your work?

LU: Yes, greatly. I regard Grotowski as my spiritual master. I admire that he could leave the theatre in 1968 and say to the whole world that he wouldn't make any more productions for the public. I hope that one day I can be like him because now when I make a production I always need to be concerned about whether the audience will buy tickets.

SCOTT: But Grotowski continued to teach.

LU: To a certain extent I am following what he was doing. In Taiwan, as far I as I know only U Theatre has a group of fulltime actors, and every day they are practicing drumming or meditation; but apart from U Theatre there is no company in Taiwan that has fulltime actors. Actors are always case by case. Normally theatre companies don't give the actors training; they just take what the actors have, what they can give. But my near future plan is to have a small group of fulltime actors, maybe six or seven, just like what Eugenio Barba and Grotowski did. And we could work together and do training everyday. That is my dream, although so far I only have two actresses. I'm waiting for some of my students to grow up.

SCOTT: With your student actors do you do physical training as well as language training?

LU: Yes. I've invited a choreographer to train them once or twice every week, and in Tainan we have a traditional Indian dancer from India, so every week she comes to teach my actors traditional Indian dance. I won't say we're the only one, but my company really demands that the actors do lots of physical training. I always said to my students that many Taiwanese actors perform with their heads only, not with the whole body. They only know how to speak or make facial expressions, but they don't know how to act with their bodies. And that is something I always ask my actors to do.

SCOTT: The Polish group The Song of the Goat, that's working with you this summer, do they help with physical training?

LU: Yes, they always use acrobatics. Their artistic director Grzegorz Bral used to work with the famous Polish company Gardzienice Theatre, and that company's artistic director worked with Grotowski for more than ten years. After he left Gardzienice he developed a kind of acting training called "the singing body," focused on coordination. He considers that individually you need to coordinate your body and your voice, and as a group you need to coordinate with the other members. That's why in their training, they always do a lot of singing together, and a lot of stomping and dancing together. In September they are coming again. In 2001, when I was directing Antigone, I invited them to come and to train my actors for two weeks. We have been talking about the possibility of sending my actors to Poland to work with them.

MURPHY: You observed that actors in Taiwan don't know how to act with their bodies. Is this a problem that actors in general face, or is it something specific to Taiwan, and if so, what?

LU: I did my undergraduate and postgraduate studies in England, and I find there's a trend in the development of Western theatre called physical theatre. It really breaks down the boundaries between theatre, dance, and music. Physical theatre demands actors to be total actors, good at singing and dancing. But in Taiwan I still find that most of the actors, especially graduates of university theatre programs, are mostly trained to speak the texts. I can say, eighty percent of the mainstream theatres in Taiwan are still doing spoken drama, and that's a pity. Thus, I would like my actors to be total actors able to use the body, the voice, to perform, rather than just being good at speaking.

MURPHY: This observation about Taiwan's theatres is perplexing to me because the culture in fact seems so sophisticated in terms of physical motion--martial arts, Chinese opera, Cloud Gate, a tradition of incorporating physical motion into performance.

LU: But it doesn't happen in modern theatre.

LIU: Do you mean here the training is divided into those actors for the Peking Opera, and others for spoken modern plays?

LU: Yes. But also the problem is our society's thinking about theatre. For example, in the Theatre Arts Department at National Sun Yat-Sen University, where I am teaching, we invited one of the most famous traditional theatre actors, Wang Hi-Ling, to teach. I remember the first few weeks there were about fifteen students, but now there are seven. She asked the students to do a lot of stretching and exercise. Young students find this boring. They ask why do I have to learn this, what is this for? But that is the way traditional actors were trained.

LIU: Usually traditional training takes many years. Practice at the Peking Opera School, for instance, was very strict. The students had been signed into contracts that would allow the instructors to punish them even to death. Training would take place eighteen hours a day and included stretching, weapons training, acrobatics, martial arts and acting. Most of the actors began this training when they were seven or eight.

LU: Yes, from the age of eight. But we still can do something. I know that at National Taipei University of the Arts, the first year theatre students have to do Tai Chi. I asked the Dean of Faculty there if it helps. His response was very funny. He said, "Now they become quiet. Before whenever they were in the department building, they were often running. Especially when climbing the steps, they always made a lot of noise. I could hear their footsteps. But now they are quiet." The question is how to apply that kind of training to performance. I think it depends on the actors' sensitivity, their ability, and also a good director who can help them to transform that training into performance. When I teach my students at the university I emphasize physical training first, not acting emotionally, but physically first. That is the more traditional way of training actors.

MURPHY: Do you mean traditional in Western theatre?

LU: No, in Oriental theatre. For example, now they are doing acrobatics.

SCOTT: They don't complain?

LU: They do complain, all the time. In May we did our first departmental production, Beauty and the Beast. In that production we have a lot of dancing, and also actors need to play the parts of candles and of different non-human beings. Therefore, every morning, 8:00, I asked them to come to the rehearsal room to train, five days a week. In the beginning they complained, but I was very harsh and said to them if you fail to show up on time, then I will fail you. And after two weeks, it became natural for them. If they don't come, they will feel uneasy. So it really depends on what we demand of our actors.

MURPHY: What made you become a director?

LU: When I became very lazy training myself to be an actor, I decided to be a director. I had a class called Twentieth Century Directors, and I read a lot of materials about those great directors--what they have achieved, and what their visions of theatre were. These touched me greatly. They were geniuses, they were like pioneers. Before that I was acting all the time, and I attended workshops in England. I remember once in a Suzuki workshop, I could not concentrate at all, because I was always thinking about the principles behind this training. I started to analyze, and I could not concentrate. And I said to myself, now I want to be a director like Grotowski or Eugenio Barba. And then suddenly I realized I have that kind of ability: to help actors be good performers.