Documentary film revives a lost stage

By June Tsai

“We feel appalled by the cultural amnesia of our society,” said filmmaker Waro Hsueh. Her documentary “E. Sha Age,” exploring the history of the influential E. Sha Singing and Dancing Group, sets out to make amends by rejuvenating old memories among middle-aged Taiwanese and creating new ones among the younger generation.

E. Sha was an all-female musical theater group modeled after Japan’s Takarazuka Revue. Founded in 1959, it soon became a box office smash and dominated the local entertainment industry for 25 years before it was disbanded in 1985. Its disappearance was so sudden and complete that Hsueh, who was trained in anthropology and whose films focus on history and the humanities, had never heard of it.

“I felt like a blind person stumbling across a national treasure,” she said in reference to learning about arguably the most popular show group of her parents’ generation. She first learned about E. Sha from a friend and researcher familiar with the history of theater in Taiwan.

Hsueh was intrigued by what she heard. “I wanted to know why they succeeded so well in their time, and why Japan’s Takarazuka Revue is still popular today, while in Taiwan no one seems to remember E. Sha.”

She discovered E. Sha’s all-embracing style and free use of a multitude of cultural components made it highly relevant to the study of changes in popular culture in conjunction with Taiwan’s political, social and economic history.

The documentary, which premiered Oct. 23, reconstructs E. Sha’s story in the context of this history, including censorship during the martial law era, the patriotic fervor following the break in diplomatic relations with the United States, Taiwan’s most important ally, the craze for baseball beginning in the late 1960s and the large infrastructure projects in the 1970s.

During the 1950s, the political atmosphere did not foster popular entertainment, while native forms such as Taiwanese opera and puppet shows were not encouraged. At the same time, strip shows were stigmatizing stage performance. In an attempt to initiate entertainment of a higher standard, Japanese-educated Wang Zhen-yu and his art-loving family invested their wealth in starting up the all-woman group.

The company recruited unmarried women, provided board and lodging, and trained them in a manner comparable to military discipline. The young women sang, danced, acted, made their own costumes and recorded their singing with big bands for use on stage. Former members of the troupe, some of them now over 60, still recall the hardships as well as the solidarity forged among them through living, learning and performing together.

“Surprisingly, no contracts were ever signed between the company and the performers,” Hsueh said. Yet those who could bear the rigors of training and the performing life received pensions when they retired.

E. Sha performances in their heyday boasted lavish costumes and makeup, elaborate set designs and sound and light effects produced by advanced equipment rarely seen locally at the time. A standard two-hour show would encompass large-group dance numbers, chorus lines, skits and melodrama.

In an age before the concept of intellectual property rights, E. Sha drew generously on ready-made stories and melodies, combining them with creative choreography mixing elements from folk and modern art. Genres ranging from Taiwanese opera to popular film, Latin dances to show tunes, and world literature to comic stories were all fair game. The group developed an eclectic repertoire appealing to a wide cross-section of audiences around the island.

E. Sha’s creativity could be seen in its response to censorship. “It happened that a song we were using one day would be banned the next, and we had to quickly change its lyrics for the next show,” recalled the group’s director, Tsai Pau-yu, now over 80 years old.

The troupe’s popularity soared in the early 1970s when Taiwan’s economy began to take off. Ticket prices could be 100 times the cost of a bowl of beef noodles, of 5 percent of a public servant’s monthly income. At its peak, E. Sha sold out 250 performing days a year. It delivered spectacular shows in Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia. In Hong Kong, a scheduled one-month sojourn was extended to six months.

E. Sha’s flexibility in accommodating contemporary feel and emotional need seemed to guarantee its continuing success. However, as the economy continued to grow, large movie theaters, which often provided venues for E. Sha, were either sold to capitalize on skyrocketing real-estate prices, or divided into many small theaters in order to accommodate the burgeoning number of movie-goers. This was the beginning of the end for the song and dance revue.

The biggest and deciding blow came with the death in 1984 of both the founder and E. Sha’s choreographer of over 20 years, Wang Yue-xia. After a performance in Taipei in June 1984, E. Sha decided to rest for two months, but those two months became forever.

In making the documentary, Hsueh sought out and interviewed many former members of the group, and ended up bringing them back together for the production of the film. These artists, in turn, volunteered to pass their skills down to an interested group of students from Kaohsiung City-based Chung Hwa School of Arts. The result is a film depicting E. Sha’s history and reproducing a typical E. Sha performance for today’s audiences.

Hsueh and her team not only made a documentary. They also helped to preserve historic materials relating to E. Sha. They drew on period films from the nation’s film archive to provide the social and political backdrop, and sought help from the public and private sectors in digitally saving photographs, posters and video footage from the 1960s to 1980s. They even hope to use proceeds from commercial screenings of the documentary to help revive E. Sha shows in the future.

“These performers and their professional spirit are part of our cultural treasure,” Hsueh said. Some of them, such as Chen Feng-gui, are still active in dance and other arts. Chen, better known as Xiao-mi, was a major star for E. Sha, admired for her ability to perform different roles, male and female, young and old, serious and clownish. Today she is an established Taiwanese opera actress and was recently awarded the Global Chinese Culture and Arts Award in the category of traditional theater.

“E. Sha Age,” linking this legendary group of the past to Taiwan’s present, opens up room for the revival of musical theater and new memories of the island’s vibrant artistic spirit.

This article is published at online Taiwan Today Nov. 6, 2009.