Xiamen and Taiwan's Collaborative Gezi Opera "Love of the Butterflies"

This is a major news in the Hokkien (Gezi) opera scene, but apparently nobody has covered this before in English, and so I shall have the honour of doing it.

Taiwan's Tang Mei Yun Taiwanese Opera Troupe and Xiamen Municipality Gezi Opera Troupe has signed a contract last year to produce a collaborative performance titled "Love of the Butterflies", which would be staged as the finale for 2009 Cross-straits folk art festival held in Xiamen at the end of this month.



This excerpt here is performed by Xiamen's Zhuang Hairong and Taiwan's Lin Fangyi for CCTV's mid-autumn festival gala not long ago. For those who understand Mandarin or Hokkien, do not be mistaken that this production is a readaptation of "The Butterfly Lovers", although the lyrics did mention the names of Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai. From what I've researched upon, this production is about the half-century long love story of a pair of Gezi opera practitioners who were separated by the Taiwan straits. Whether or not this production has got any political undertones to it, I'm not sure, but nevertheless I feel this is a major breakthrough for the development of Hokkien opera. No doubt troupes from China had frequently performed in Taiwan and vice versa in recent years, but as far as I can remember, there has never been a case of total collaboration between troupes from both sides of the straits, other than once a few years back whereby Tang Meiyun performed a duet with Huang Juanjuan (also from Xiamen) for a TV concert.

Hopefully there'll be more of such collaborations following this, and who knows, many other new possibilities can spark out of such collaborations, pushing Hokkien opera to greater heights.