Abstract
This journal papers employs popular theatre as the research site to investigate the Taiwanese’s experience of modernization in the sphere of theatre during the fifty-one year period of Japanese colonial ruling over Taiwan. In the beginning of the Twentieth Century, along with the widespread establishments of colonial town-based theatre, the history of Taiwan theatre stepped into the modern. Thereafter and till the end of colonial period, colonist, theatre manager, and colonized intellectual respectively entertained different purposes, struggling for dominating the development of the Taiwan theatrical activities. In the first place, theatre was built for the need of the Japanese populace and soldiers for entertainment. Up to the late 1900s, Takamatsu Toyojiro（高松豐次郎）, who was identified as the representative of colonist, regarded theatre as an institutional mechanism of colonial indoctrination and thus popularized it, with not only the import and projection of films, but also the innovation of the theatre of Taiwan Seigeki (臺灣正劇) which targeted Taiwanese as the audience in order to domesticate Taiwanese into the subjects of the Imperial Japan, and to help consolidate the ruling authority. When other institutions of social indoctrination were well prepared by the colonist, and when the competition among theatres returned to market mechanism, the rising of Chinese opera alternated with the ebbing of Seigeki. In the circumstances of theatre of 1920s, Old Koa-a-hi,（老歌仔戲）intermingled with other genres of popular theatre, including Taiwan Seigeki, Wenmingxi（文明戲）, Beijing Opera（京劇）, Fuzhouxi（福州戲）etc., and evolved into Koa-a-hi（歌仔戲）, or Taiwanese Opera. When theatre, coupled with the popularity of Koa-a-hi that swept over the entire island, catalyzed the flowering of epicureanism, the colonized intellectuals came to realize that the social reality of colony was thus buried, and even the oppression of nation/ class was reinforced through the reproduction of ideology proposed by the popular dramas. Therefore, they took ‘New Drama’（新劇）as the important means of enlightenment; meanwhile, they also consciously began their pursuit of the modernization of drama. In the mid-1930s, the Office of the Governor-General（台灣總督府）practiced the radical assimilation policy, and consequently the principles of ‘rewarding new drama’ and ‘gradual prohibition of old drama’ took shape. Encouraged by the trend of ‘Kōminka (formation of imperial subjects) movement’（皇民化運動）, the local police, who then were in charge of the drama affairs, actively intervened in the development of drama. Despite the agile responses of theatre groups to this intervention, however, the audience of colony demonstrated their initiatives which turned out to be the setbacks to the official policies and forced them to be made some adjustments. It follows that the colonized intellectuals took this historical opportunity of the surging discourses on the revitalization of local culture（地方文化振興論）shortly before and after the outbreak of the Pacific War, continued the ‘New Drama’ movement and redefined the concept of ‘native land’（鄉土）in order to call forth the Taiwanese national spirit. The chaos in the sphere of theatre lasted for seven or eight years and the violence of the official unification imposed upon drama brought down curtain on it. To sum up, the colonial rule left Taiwan society a theatre of interpretative community which, linguistically speaking, was clearly bordered by the mixture of Taiwanese and Japanese; and, aesthetically speaking, was characterized by a kind of high hybrid. It is the ‘Colonial New Drama’. Throughout the Japanese colonial period, the Taiwanese’s experience of the modernization of drama differed from that of other normal countries. The colonist produced the ruler’s interest–oriented ‘modern drama’ more than once with view to not only taming and subjecting Taiwanese but also reshaping their national identity. For the temporal anxiety-loaded intellectuals, the limited sources and experiences made their road towards the popularization of dramatic creations tortuous. Thus, the ‘Colonial New Drama’ can be regarded as the final result of the long lasting confrontation between the Taiwanese populace and the Japanese colonial violence.