This year, the CKS Cultural Center has added a new event to the cultural calendar with its World View Series, which aims to bring the best of international theater to Taipei. Getting the series off to a splendid start will be a showcase of British theater -- which hardly comes as a surprise given Taiwan's current infatuation with Britain's creative industries concept and energetic promotion by the British Council.
The British Theater World View Series actually only incorporates three shows, all in the tradition of the much admired fringe theater mold. The opening act is the highly acclaimed Bobby Baker with Box Story, originally designed for performance at St. Luke's Church in North London in 2001.
Taiwan has become familiar with many British performers who have brought skills to the stage from outside the traditional drama establishment, most notably from the circus and street performances.
Bobby Baker trained as a painter, but later turned to more physically expressive media, and while she now performs regularly in theaters, much of her work up to now has been designed for specific venues, most famously in Kitchen Show, in which she opened her own kitchen to serve as a performance venue.
Indeed, much of Baker's work is intimately connected with her life and the daily round of British domestic life. That she is able to see the profound issues that lie beneath the most mundane of existences has brought her rave reviews such as Time Out's "touching, deliciously batty and seriously revealing."
"Most of my work has been based on my own experience or observations," Baker said in an interview with Taipei Times. "I am not really acting the show, I am just being me, only slightly exaggerated."
But at the same time, Baker denies that her work is autobiographical, for she creates strange, funny and surreal situations with the aim of making people reflect on their own lives rather than simply taking in her experience.
This attitude is part of a breaking down of traditional ideas of drama, part of Baker's own rebellion against the traditions that still bound mainstream theater in the 1960s and 1970s. Talking about why British drama has proved so popular, she pointed to the incredible openness to other styles and approaches that performance art has shown over the last couple of decades. "We have been so enriched by this, and it shows in the work."
This richness is the icing on the cake of a long and established theatrical tradition -- but this tradition, for Baker, is something, which she has accepted in her own way.
"The fact that I trained as a painter meant I lacked awareness of this tradition and later [after becoming a performer], I had to discover it for myself. My training as an artist also gives me a more visual orientation, which probably puts a different spin on my shows," she said.
Probably the most unusual aspect of the show is its emphasis on food, which is part and parcel of the dramatic performance. Food is made into art, and also provides the materials from which Baker makes a complete mess of herself in her show.
Box Story is in fact the last in a quintet of performances titled Daily Life, a project first commissioned by the London International Festival of Theater, an organization that Baker credits for much of the vitality of contemporary English theater. Her next work, How To Live, will be the first work designed for a formal theater setting but will remain a one-woman show ... with a large cast of peas.
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