This weekend, hopeless romantics can find a mini version of the poor-boy-meets-rich-girl at Crown Arts Theater Center, where The Happy Puppetry Company will put on the puppet version of a Taiwanese play whose name is now synonymous with marrying for love: Chen San Wu Niang.
Written in the early days of Taiwanese opera, Chen San Wu Niang tells the story of forbidden love. Chen San is a young man from a family of poor officials who falls in love with the fifth daughter of the wealthy Huang family, Wu Niang. To get closer to his beloved, Chen San enters the Huang court posing as a cleaner of mirrors. He intentionally breaks a mirror, and to compensate must become a slave of the Huang family. Unfortunately, he finds that Wu Niang is promised to the smarmy aristocrat Lin Dai (
PHOTO: MEREDITH DODGE, TAIPEI TIMES
According to director Ke Shi-hong (柯世宏), the theme of the triumph of love over tradition gives the story a modern edge. Perhaps Ke, whose grandmother founded the troupe, chose the play to fit his vision of a traditional puppet show -- with a up-to-date twist.
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE HAPPY PUPPETRY COMPANY
While the porcelain, cloth and wood puppets replace the flesh-and-blood humans that traditionally play the characters of Chen San Wu Niang, Ke has decided, in a few scenes, to replace the puppets with flesh-and-blood humans. The human actors do their part to mimic movements of their wooden counterparts as they sing, dance and spar with them. The result is endearing and comical.
"Hopefully, the modern style of this show will attract new audience members, especially the young folk," said Ke Jia-cai (
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE HAPPY PUPPETRY COMPANY
Another innovative aspect of the production is the musical accompaniment. It is not the fast-paced beiguan music traditional used in Taiwanese puppet theater, but rather the slower and more flowing nanguan music, provided by the SingSing Nanguan Company (
This, according to Ke, allows for more variety of movement with the puppets. And their movements are diverse indeed. As the puppets flow gracefully across the set, one can almost see the lightning-quick steps of their tiny, non existent feet. And while their porcelain lips do not move as they speak, the subtle cocking of the puppets chins can convey a surprising illusion of expression.
Both the songs and the dialogue are in Taiwanese, with Mandarin supertitles.
Performance notes:
What: Nanguan puppet theater: Chen San Wu Niang
(
Where: Crown Arts Theater Center, 50, Ln 120, Dunhua N Rd (皇冠藝文中心,敦化北路120巷50號).
When: Tonight at 7:30pm and tomorrow at 2:30pm and 7:30pm.
Tickets: NT$250
For more information, please go to www.artsticket.com, or call (02) 2993 1963.
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
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