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Designed by award-winning costume and makeup designer Tim Yip, "The Lady of Loulan" tells the legendary tragedy of a beautiful woman.
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Chinese theater continues to be more and more adventurous, but a Peking Opera version of a Greek tragedy in which a spurned beauty goes on a killing spree really pushes the boundaries.
Taiwanese artist Wu Hsing-kuo and his co-workers from the Contemporary Legend Theater are set to "China-ize" the classic fable "Medea" from Greek mythology through the language and style of traditional Peking Opera.
Opening tonight at the Shanghai Oriental Art Center, the adapted version with a more Chinese name - "The Lady of Loulan" - tells the legendary tragedy of a beautiful woman.
Loulan is known as an ancient kingdom along the Silk Road in today's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.
The play features Peking Opera and Xinjiang folk song-inspired music by renowned Taiwanese composer Hsu Po-yun and glamorous costumes by Oscar-winning costume and makeup designer Tim Yip.
"'The Lady of Loulan' was created almost 14 years ago, but it is still considered the biggest breakthrough of CLT," says Wu, who founded CLT in 1986 with a group of enthusiastic young Peking Opera performers in Taiwan.
Their aim was to look for new paths, to revive the ancient Chinese art form, which was in an embarrassing state, loosing popularity with audiences, especially young people.
Together they adapt Western classics from Greek mythology to William Shakespeare's works, for Peking Opera, or relate the idiom of contemporary Western drama to East Asia's opulent heritage, giving a new life to legacies such as "King Lear," "The Tempest" and "Waiting for Godot."
According to Wu, the play was originally inspired by "The Loulan Beauty," a 3,800-year-old mummy discovered in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region in the 1980s.
"I was so curious about the mysterious lady," he says. "There must have been a lot of stories behind her, just like Medea in the Greek mythology."
