This year's biannual International Theatre Festival will once again be bringing some of the best in global theater to the CKS Cultural Center from March 25 through May 9, with troupes from five countries performing in five languages over a six-week period,
In contrast to 2002's inaugural event, which saw theater groups from France, Denmark, Lithuania, Norway and Taiwan focusing their talents on body language, this year's festival is a more verbal affair. Troupes from Japan, Poland, Canada, UK and Taiwan will be treating audiences to productions that, along with being both visual and emotionally powerful are centered around the spoken word rather than body movement.
Poland's Teatr Peisn Kozla will be beginning the festival in late March with a Polish-language performance of the ancient Sumerian epic, Chronicles. The festival's English language shows will see the UK's Theatre Babel performing Ibsen's A Doll's House and Canada's UbU Theatre Troupe performing its multi-media production of The Blind.
Taiwan's two main languages are represented by the Jen Theatre, which will perform a Taiwanese language version of Samuel Beckett's Endgame and the avant-garde Rive-Gauche Theatre Group, which will treating audiences to a Mandarin language version of Abe Kodo's off-beat detective story, The Ruined Map.
The festival's biggest show is Japan's Ku Na'uka Group. It will be putting on a lavish performance of Tenshu Monogatari, a show that combines elements of traditional Japanese performance arts such as Bunraku and Kabuki with modern theatrical techniques in order to create a vivid and stylistic form of theater that represents today's Japan. This Japanese language production will be performed at the National Theatre.
Although the festival is nearly a month away tickets are expected to sell out well in advance of the opening show. The 2002 International Theatre Festival proved so popular with local audiences that tickets had completely sold out within two weeks of going on sale. Needless to say, organizers advise anyone wishing to attend this year's festival to purchase tickets well in advance.
Tickets for the 2004 International Theatre Festival are now available direct from the CKS Cultural Center's booking office or via Acer Ticketing Outlets nationwide. Tickets for performances at the Experimental Theatre cost NT$600. Tickets for the performance at the National Theatre cost from NT$400 to NT$1,500. For further information and a full performance schedule visit the festival's Web site at www.ntch.edu.tw. March 25 through May 9.
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
April 15 to April 21 Yang Kui (楊逵) was horrified as he drove past trucks, oxcarts and trolleys loaded with coffins on his way to Tuntzechiao (屯子腳), which he heard had been completely destroyed. The friend he came to check on was safe, but most residents were suffering in the town hit the hardest by the 7.1-magnitude Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake on April 21, 1935. It remains the deadliest in Taiwan’s recorded history, claiming around 3,300 lives and injuring nearly 12,000. The disaster completely flattened roughly 18,000 houses and damaged countless more. The social activist and
Over the course of former President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) 11-day trip to China that included a meeting with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping (習近平) a surprising number of people commented that the former president was now “irrelevant.” Upon reflection, it became apparent that these comments were coming from pro-Taiwan, pan-green supporters and they were expressing what they hoped was the case, rather than the reality. Ma’s ideology is so pro-China (read: deep blue) and controversial that many in his own Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) hope he retires quickly, or at least refrains from speaking on some subjects. Regardless
Approaching her mid-30s, Xiong Yidan reckons that most of her friends are on to their second or even third babies. But Xiong has more than a dozen. There is Lucky, the street dog from Bangkok who jumped into a taxi with her and never left. There is Sophie and Ben, sibling geese, who honk from morning to night. Boop and Pan, both goats, are romantically involved. Dumpling the hedgehog enjoys a belly rub from time to time. The list goes on. Xiong nurtures her brood from her 8,000 square meter farm in Chiang Dao, a mountainous district in northern Thailand’s