Draft:Tang Mei Yun Taiwanese Opera Company

Tang Mei Yun Taiwanese Opera Company is a private Taiwanese opera troupe that specially focuses on producing large-scale stage Taiwanese opera productions. The troupe was founded in 1998 by Tang Mei-yun, who is also the artistic director, leader, and producer of the troupe. The troupe has been awarded the Best Group Performance at the Golden Melody Awards for Traditional Arts and Music for five times.

History
The founder Tang Mei-yun was born into a family of Taiwanese opera performers. Her father Chiang Wu-tung, whose original name was Ichiro Morita, and her mother Tang Ping-sen, whose stage name was Tang Yen-chiu were both Taiwanese opera performers. Tang Mei-yun started performing Taiwanese opera when she was in junior high school, and has experienced various developmental stages of Taiwanese opera, including indoor performances, outdoor performances, and TV Taiwanese operas. In the 1990, she was recruited by the Holo Taiwanese Opera Troupe as the lead of the “sheng” (male) role, which established her status in the field of Taiwanese opera. In 1998, Tang founded Tang Mei Yun Taiwanese Opera Company with the aim of “inheriting the tradition and making innovation.”

The troupe collaborates with several important performers, including national treasure Wang Chin-ying, Chen Feng-kuei (stage name Hsiao Mi), and “The Lady Forever” Hsu Hsiu-nien. In the early period, the troupe worked with playwrights Ke Tsung-ming and Shih Ru-fang, creating several new adaptions and original productions, e.g., “Somewhere for True Love, Crooks of World”, and “Love on Pregnancy”. Works written solely by Shih Ru-fang include “The Immortal Lover, Who Is My Bride?”, “Seal of 1895”, and “Yen Ko Hsing”. Shih Ru-fang introduced young playwright Chen Chien-hsing, who is now the troupe’s resident playwright, to the troupe in 2011, and Chen has thus explored new topics for Taiwanese opera, writing works such as “The Maze of Memories”, “The Double Life of Princess Wencheng”, “Song of the Fireflies”, “Legend of the White Snake”, “The Storyteller and Her Dream”, “Royal Feast of the Underworld”, and TV Taiwanese opera “Tavern by the Lethe”.

Performance
The main focus of the troupe is “creating.” Apart from exploring and trying out new stories, it also seeks breakthroughs and interdisciplinary cooperation in music. The compositions for the early productions were done by Liu Wen-liang, who composed brand-new tunes and melodies for the plays. In works such as “Who Is My Bride?”, “Lost Butterfly”, and “Romancing in the Moonlight”, Taiwanese opera melodies and symphony were combined by the collective music design by composers including Chung Yiu-kwong, Ji Yu-chen, and Lee Che-yi. Ji Jun-da, Ji Jun-ting, and Chen Hsin-han are the composers that the troupe currently collaborates with.

Incubators
To develop young talent, Tang Mei Yun Taiwanese Opera Company established a youth sub-troupe as the base to hone the young members’ skills by arranging varying number of shows for them every year.