Cultural program offers an eye on Taiwan

Yesterday the Koo Foundation and the Council for Cultural Affairs announced a new cooperative venture that will couple tourism and culture and hopefully create a showcase for Taiwanese arts specifically aimed at business travelers and tour groups.

The venture, called Taipei Eye, is a fixed program of traditional arts performances to be held at the Concrete Hall (士敏廳) in the Taiwan Concrete Building (台泥大樓), one of Taipei's newest performance venues. Although the CKS Cultural Center provides a wide range of performances, it is both too formal and too scattered to provide short-term visitors the chance to see the best of Taiwanese performance culture, Tchen Yu-hsiu (陳郁秀), chief of the cultural bureau said.

Currently, the venture has brought together the Hsiao Hsi Yuan Puppet Theater, the Taipei Li-Yuan Chinese Opera Theater, the Hualien Aboriginal Dancers, the Miaoli Chen Family Peikuan Pa Yin Group, the National Kuokuang Chinese Opera Troupe and the Acrobatic Troupe of the National Taiwan Junior College of Performing Arts. Starting on Sept. 28, these groups will provide a weekly program of the arts at which they excel.

The program has drawn support from the Tourism Bureau, who hope that the existence of such a program will provide short-term visitors an opportunity to see some of the best Taiwan has to offer even if a performance is not scheduled for major venues.

"It is all about having it available at a fixed time and place," Chen said. Bookings from Japanese tourist agencies, one of the main groups through which the performances are being marketed, have already proved encouraging. "It's not the first season we are worried about," said Koo Huai-chun (辜懷群) of the Koo Foundation. "It's what happens after that that really matters." She admitted that this is not the first time that such efforts to provide a cultural showcase have been attempted, and hoped that on this occasion, because of the quality of the program offered, it would succeed where previous efforts had failed.

Tickets for these performances are also being sold through hotels and through Acer ticketing so that seats can be booked from overseas as well.

As these shows have been specifically designed for a foreign audience, Chinese, English and Japanese subtitles are provided, remedying one of the greatest impediments for non-Chinese speakers trying to get a taste of Taiwanese culture.