Does Taiwan need yet another arts festival? Well, the Bureau of Cultural Affairs seems to think so and this weekend will celebrate the official opening of the National Center of Traditional Arts with the inauguration of a new annual event -- the Asia-Pacific Traditional Arts Festival, which will take place in Ilan this weekend.
The event, which will focus on traditional wind and percussion music, brings together 10 local groups and five from overseas. The visitors, who are obviously the highlight of the event, include Abbos from Uzbekistan, the Iranian Folk Music Ensemble, Musafir from India, musicians from the Dharma Chakra Center in Tibet, the Chun Woong Korean Traditional Music Ensemble, and the Thai Classical Music Group of Srinakarinwirot University.
PHOTO: IAN BARTHOLOMEW, TAIPEI TIMES
The new festival is part of a larger Bureau of Cultural Affairs push to put Taiwan on the map in the arts world. It has received considerable impetus from culture having been made a major area in the Challenge 2008 National Development Program, which has made unprecedented funding available for cultural projects.
Tchen Yu-chiou (
It is rather disappointing, in the light of the laudable ambitions espoused by the Cultural Bureau, that the current event to be held in Ilan shows virtually no signs of innovation, doing little more than providing a forum for some rather arbitrarily selected shows and yet another opportunity to hawk local craft products.
Without diminishing the quality of the performances that visitors can expect to see -- and the visiting groups provide considerable interest for anyone who enjoys world music -- it is all rather disappointing. There will be seminars focusing on music, but with titles like "Double Reed Instruments of Thailand" and "The Concept of Dastgah in Persian Music," they will primarily be of interest to academics and professional musicians. Then there are the inevitable DIY craft workshops with classes in cloth dying, pottery, glasswork and calligraphy.
While it is all good and well that Ilan should promote itself as a fine place for domestic tourism ? the International Folk Lore and Folk Game Festival was successful -- the mish-mash of events seems to make the whole thing lose whatever cohesion it might have had.
Despite all this carping, devotees of world music could definitely find it worthwhile to visit Ilan and hear the sounds of the five foreign groups, that showcase musical styles, which, even among the plethora of musical styles that assault our ears daily, are, to say the least unusual. Abbos, a group from Uzbekistan, does wonderful things with huge horns that are likely to blow the audience away with their power. This is mixed in with the rapid maneuverings of the Surnay, a high-pitched central Asian flute.
In addition, to the big men and their big horns, there are also steppe-land beauties to provide visual appeal. While the Thai Classical Music Group is a little more sedate, they too provide new sound sensations, as do Musafir, which showcases the vibrant music of Rajasthan in northern India. Among the locals, there are distinguished musicians such as Chiu Huo-long (
At the other end of the spectrum there is the Ho-Hak Band (
The Asia-Pacific Traditional Arts Festival will take place in the grounds of the National Center for Traditional Art at 201 Wupin Rd, Sec 2, Jishin village, Wujie Township, Ilan. More information about the event can be found at the NCTA Web site at www.ncfta.gov.tw and at www.iov.org.tw. The event opens tomorrow and runs until next Sunday.
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
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
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist
A fossil jawbone found by a British girl and her father on a beach in Somerset, England belongs to a gigantic marine reptile dating to 202 million years ago that appears to have been among the largest animals ever on Earth. Researchers said on Wednesday the bone, called a surangular, was from a type of ocean-going reptile called an ichthyosaur. Based on its dimensions compared to the same bone in closely related ichthyosaurs, the researchers estimated that the Triassic Period creature, which they named Ichthyotitan severnensis, was between 22-26 meters long. That would make it perhaps the largest-known marine reptile and would