The CyberFair Club did a presentation for the English teachers. At the end of each semester, our school usually holds an end-of-semester performance or display for clubs to show their learning outcome and for students to appreciate each other’s work. We took the opportunity and set up a station to display information about Taiwanese Opera and Sun Tsui-Feng. With the help of Canva, we organized the research and tried to make the display as clear and attractive as possible for our student audience. We also invited foreign English teachers to come to our station. We figured it was a great chance to let people from different cultures learn about Taiwanese Opera.

 

Besides introducing some fun facts about Taiwanese Opera, we also talked about the interview with Sun Tsui-Feng and our reflections. It was actually a short presentation. We didn’t have much time to prepare for it, so we were a bit nervous. We were glad that the teachers gave us compliments for the presentation. They even gave us a lot of ideas and suggestions about what else we could do to support and help gain popularity for Taiwanese Opera, such as using social media like instagram and creating a website to promote it, which was just the thing we were about to do next.

 

The presentation was quite successful. The foreign teachers asked several good questions about Taiwanese Opera, Sun Tsui Feng, and Ming Hwa Yuan. Some of the information wasn’t shown on the display board, so we needed to answer according to what we had learned during our research journey. We even showed them Ming Hwa Yuan’s official website and Youtube videos of their performances with our Chromebook on the spot. We hope we could make them interested in this traditional art form and successfully promote it to our generation.

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Taiwanese Opera is a beautiful traditional art form, but unfortunately, it wasn’t as popular as it was in the past. So we thought that giving a presentation to our third to sixth graders at the new semester opening ceremony was a good idea to let more people know about it.

Due to the time limit, we needed to challenge ourselves to introduce Taiwanese Opera within 15 minutes. Therefore, we started to plan our slides. After discussion, we decided to first let the audience know about Taiwanese Opera’s background and basic elements. Then we introduced Ms. Sun and her life stories. But what’s Taiwanese Opera without singing along with the traditional tunes and doing the moves? That was why in addition to the basic information, we wanted to teach the students how to do those dramatic gestures and moves in Taiwanese Opera and sing the most classic and well-known Chizi Tune-Riding the White Horse.

However, that wasn’t easy. Although we did a lot of research about Taiwanese Opera, we had never tried to sing Taiwanese Opera songs or walk and pose like a real Taiwanese Opera actor. One of our club members, Anna, was brave enough to do cross-casting acting as “xiao shan”, the male lead. And another member Zoey volunteered to act as “xiao dan”, the female lead. We believed these two most eye-catching and representative roles could definitely attract the attention of our audience.

They watched videos repeatedly to learn the gestures and the moves. They also practiced their singing in Taiwanese. They looked amazing after they put on the costumes. They took videos during numerous rehearsals so they could improve their performance. The speakers of the presentation also rehearsed at school and online, and they tried hard to think about hooks and arrange the content in order to keep the audience interested. We worked really hard to make this presentation work.

After a short winter break, the big day finally came. The speakers successfully grabbed the audience’s attention by asking which video showed the real Taiwanese Opera. Surprisingly, many students who claimed to know Taiwanese Opera chose the wrong answer. That gave us more reasons to introduce Taiwanese Opera to them. Then the demonstrators came out from behind the screen and did cool poses. They did a great job demonstrating the classic Taiwanese Opera song- Riding the White Horse. Some of the students even sang along. All of the teachers and students clapped and cheered for us. We were really glad that our hard work paid off. The presentation went as smoothly as we had hoped.

 

It was an honor for our CyberFair Club to present our work that we’ve been working on for almost half a year. Our school fan page on Facebook also reported about our presentation. We hoped that this could help promote Taiwanese Opera and let more and more people see how special it is.

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Following the Opening Ceremony presentation, we received significant feedback from our fellow students, highlighting how our presentation effectively captivated their attention and kindled an interest in Taiwanese Opera. Teachers also provided valuable suggestions on enhancing the content for better accessibility. Empowered by this feedback, we decided to create a brief video summarizing the essence of Taiwanese Opera. Our aim is to provide CyberFair website viewers with a concise and quick understanding. In the video, we delve into the elements of Taiwanese Opera and showcase the dedicated efforts of Sun Tsui Feng and Ming Hwa Yuan in preserving this invaluable Taiwanese art form. In addition to Legend of White Snake that we mentioned in the short clip, we also organized a few teasers of Sun Tsui Feng and her troupe Ming Hwa Yuan’s famous plays here. We hope you enjoy them.

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