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THE
LAST FALSETTO
PREMIERE
DANCE THEATRE, TORONTO.
Lau submerges his face into a big puff of pink powder. A few dabs of
paint and an exaggerated pair of black brows later, he is transformed
into Lady Yang from the Ming Dynasty classic, “Drunken Beauty”.
THE
GRAND OPERA STAGE, BEIJING.
Close-up of painted face, pull out wide revealing ornately armored soldiers
prancing about in time to the beat of a wooden block, while haughty
general strides in on his mime horse. It is wartime during the Ming
dynasty. A colourful frenzy fills the dressing room on opening night
at The Grand Chang On Theatre in Beijing. Peering through the
curtains backstage, we catch a Felliniest pageantry of Beijing Opera
figures; despotic rulers, ill-fated lovers, clowns, refined ladies,
and most popularly, the painted-faces.
In
Canada, the name William Lau is synonymous with anything and everything
to do with “Nan Dan”, the disappearing art of males
performing female roles in Beijing Opera. Beijing Opera is the classical
theatre form that is the complete synthesis of all the cultural expressions:
song, dance, pantomime, martial arts & poetry. Lau aptly calls it
“one of the world’s theatrical treasures”. Standing
at the pivotal point of his illustrious career, William Lau, Diva Extraordinaire,
embarks on a journey through China’s ancient artistic capitals
to conclude this chapter of his artistic journey and training as Canada’s
premiere “Nan Dan” performer. Throughout
this journey, he reflects on his anxieties and challenges as the heir
to this quintessential cultural icon in a country that is undergoing
tremendous changes. At the end of this journey, Lau will be the only
performer in the world to have completed training in all four major
“Nan Dan” schools, making him a “theatrical
treasure” on both sides of the Pacific.
Set between East & West, China and Canada, the ancient and the contemporary,
Lau’s journey is filled with cultural and visual contrasts. The
Beijing Opera Costume shopping area is a filthy but beautiful place.
Bright lights perched on the sparse branches punctuate the darkness
like tiny pin pricks of neon. It is a diminishing ancient world of lost
craftsmanship locked inside a time capsule dwarf amidst newly constructed
skyscrapers and development projects. Parallel to the fate of “Nan
Dan’s ” fading demise, ancient city blocks are being
torn down at lightning speed paving way for the ’08 Olympics.
Along major throughways, giant computer-generated billboards selling
Western Capitalist consumer goods have replaced the peeling, hand painted
murals of party propagandas from a bygone Maoist era.
THE LAST FALSETTO is a 1 hour Arts Documentary
that traces Lau’s Beijing Opera journey over the span of his career,
shuttling between China and Canada. This artistic journey will be unveiled
through impressionistic location & performance footage, personal
interviews and narration. The film will reconstruct and reflect on Lau’s
journey through personal dialogues with on-camera personalities. Their
stories will complement, counterpoint, and propel one another creating
dramatic tension. His journey will unveil his philosophy that Beijing
Opera is not a dying art form. Just as Jazz, Rap or Hip-Hop have incorporated
other arts into their forms, it is an art with a long history of adaptation,
from Imperial Court Entertainment to Cultural Revolution Propaganda.
Lau’s mission is to take the audience on his quest to cultivate
a finer appreciation among the masses to embrace “tradition”
with the “contemporary” as he explores the languages of
border crossing, the similarities and differences in East and West concepts
of realism in pre-modern and post-modern times while weaving Beijing
Opera Styles with daily contemporary body languages and launch the next
phase of its evolution that awaits him in the diverse dance frontier
of his adopted country, Canada.
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Links
Production
Stills Gallery
Production
Journal
Banana Kowboy Anathema
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