Though drama experience camps are profoundly influential, they can only be held under the right conditions, and are not regular activities. Workshops, on the other hand, are small in scale and flexible as to location and are more suitable for promoting Chinese Opera in a fast-paced modern society. The workshops held by Guoguang consist of two kinds. One is a promotional workshop held before stage performances, at which playwrights, actors, or other significant personages in the cultural field are invited to give talks and/or demonstrations. They share their creative knowledge and experience in accordance with the themes of the workshops which have more in common with informal cultural gatherings and informational activities rather than dramatic education per se.
Another kind of workshop is that held on campuses, aiming to attract students of different ages and different schools. The company arranges and designs the content of each workshop in accordance with the specific requests of individual schools. These workshops are usually hosted by scholars, actors, or directors of the company, and they explain the development of Chinese Opera clearly, but thoroughly in simple and straightforward language. If the audience is made up of students of grade schools, junior high schools, or high schools, they take up the unit, “Descriptions of Chinese Opera off Stage” to talk about the beauty of the art of Chinese Opera by explaining its elements, such as martial arts, vocal quality, costumes, and make-up; this makes it easy for the participants to understand the difficult training process Chinese Opera actors undergo. If the audience consists mainly of college students, such a workshop includes the production of literary Chinese operas of the kind that the company has been working hard to produce in recent years. The content is a fusion of traditional and modern stage design of diversified presentations to arouse the students’ interest in Chinese Opera. If the location is suitable, sometimes the workshop presents scenes from such interesting operas as The Fork in a Road or Hiding in a Wardrobe; in this way the students get to watch the opera up close and experience the rich beauty of traditional art.
In the past few years, the Guoguang Opera Company has given workshops on many campuses of different levels all over Taiwan, and the workshops have won the acclaim of students and teachers alike. When the time for a workshop performance arrives, the workshop becomes so popular it is nearly impossible to get a seat. This is a sure sign of the company’s successful marketing strategy and its promotion of art education.
