About Contemporary Legend Theater

In 1986, a group of Peking Opera players, being keenly aware of the decline of traditional Chinese Opera, began thinking seriously about how to integrate traditional Chinese Opera with modern theater. Thanks to the efforts of WU Hsing-kuo, WEI Hai-ming and other equally enthusiastic young Peking Opera players, Contemporary Legend Theater (CLT) was founded. Adapted from Shakespeare's tragedy Macbeth, The Kingdom of Desire—CLT's first play—sought to fuse the singing, acting, reciting, and acrobatic fighting of traditional Chinese Opera with Western canons, and presented the performance in theater forms. The performance successfully subverted the playgoers' recognition of Peking Opera and created a totally new aesthetic in Eastern theater.

Ever since its founding, CLT has been invited to perform abroad many times, and in such venues as Royal National Theater, UK; Festival d'Avignon, France; Asian Performing Arts Festival, Japan; 40th Anniversary of Odin Theater, Denmark; and Spoleto Festival, USA.

To Fuse Eastern and Western Theater Arts

For years, audiences in Taiwan and overseas have applauded CLT's repertoires. They include adaptations of Shakespeare, such as The Kingdom of Desire, War and Eternity, King Lear, and The Tempest; adaptations of Greek tragedies such as Medea, Oresteia; traditional repertoire Yin Yang River; new repertoires, such as The Last Days of Emperor Lee Yu, The Hidden Concubine; and an innovative Hip Opera, A Play of Brother and Sister. In 2005, CLT took up the challenge of adapting Waiting for Godot, a play of the theater of the absurd by Nobel Prize Winner for literature, Samuel Beckett.

Founding Members

Art Director / Wu Hsing-Kuo

Artist / Wei Hai-Ming

Producer / Lin Hsiu-Wei

Wu Hsing-Kuo

Wu Hsing-Kuo is currently the Artistic Director of Contemporary Legend Theater. From age 11, he studied at the Fu-Hsing Chinese Opera School for eight years, specializing in wu sheng (male martial roles). He was admitted with honor into the Theater Department of Chinese Culture University and became the leading dancer of the Cloud Gate Dance Theater. Later he studied with Master Zhou Zheng-Rong, broadening his field to include civil and martial lao sheng (middle-aged or old male roles). He played a wide variety of roles and won the Military Golden Award for best actor three times.

Wei Hai-Ming

Wei Hai-ming is a brilliant star nurtured by Taiwan's Haiguang Chinese Opera Troupe. A "natural talent", she possesses all the essential qualities of the diva—a graceful figure, a noble face, an excellent voice, acuity of mind, and innate charisma. The roles she has played, each a genuinely unique figure, transcend the rigid boundaries between performance schools and historical periods, winning her the fame of "a woman with a thousand faces." Her performance was highly acclaimed by the general audience, but she was not complacent.

Lin Hsiu-Wei

Lin Hsiu-wei, the producer, is the choreographer, artistic director of Tai-Gu Tale Dance Theatre. She graduated from the Chinese Cultural College in Taipei, Taiwan, with a degree in Dance Performance. She was a principal dancer in the Cloud Gate Dance Theatre from 1975 to 1985, where she received different professional dance trainings, such as ballet training of Martha Graham and Limon’s dance style, as well as Chinese opera movements and gestures.