Taipei's popular Red House Theater (
One of the nation's leading exponents of Nankuan, or Southern Winds music -- a form of Chinese opera originating in Fujian Province over 2,000 years ago -- the HTYF was founded in 1983 by Nankuan aficionado, Chen Mei-o (
Since then the HTYF has received high praise and been the recipient of many musical and cultural awards, at home and abroad. The group picked up two Golden Cauldron (
PHOTO COURTESY OF HAN-TANG YUEFU ENSEMBLE
Along with performing Nankuan opera, the HTYF has successfully crossed the cultural divide of east and west and performed an adaptation of Jerome Bosch's Le Jardin des Delices at the prestigious Opera Comique Theatre in Paris in 2000.
While preserving the age-old Nankuan tradition, the HTYF has also breathed new life into Liyuan opera (
This more recent form of Nankuan blends southern-styled traditional operatic music and song with the delicate, hypnotic and at times slow-motion movements of the troupe's dancers.
PHOTO COURTESY OF HAN-TANG YUEFU ENSEMBLE
Wednesday's performance will comprise a mixed bag of Nankuan. The first half of the evening will see the troupe performing three scenes from the classic Nankuan opera The Time We Met (
The Han-Tang Yuefu (
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby