Can Gabriel Garcia Marquez's bewitching novels be translated for the stage and still hold their charm? Taiwan's alternative theatrical troupe Shakespeare's Wild Sisters Group (
After receiving a full-house welcome in Tainan, the theater performance returns to the director's alma mater this weekend, in the seemingly desolate setting of the Huang Shan Theater, at the Taipei National University of the Arts.
The outdoor theater is surrounded by withered branches and trees, a group of readers recite passages from Marquez's writings. Poet Summer Lei (雷光夏) plays the off-stage narrator, delivering reflective commentaries.
To make full use of the peculiar theater setting and bring out the allure of the original text, the stage design is sparse and dismal. All the props and items are hung from trees, as if floating in the air.
"I have always found Marquez's way of storytelling captivating," Baboo said. So in this theatrical interpretation, director Baboo wants to conjure up the resplendent ghost of Marquez's words through the chan-ting of its characters. Characters from different times and space meet and depart, scraping together the fragments of their lives. It's a montage of time that echoes the form and structure of the novel.
Taking solitude as its main theme, director Baboo deconstructs the original text into three chapters: love, war and civilization. In each chapter, the language of solitude forms a conversation between love, war and civilization.
Director Baboo said his artistic interest in setting literature in theater lies in a personal craze for reading.
"Whatever you try to say is already well-expressed in literary works. To adapt the writings into another art form is to add up your own reflections. Further, our creative goal can also be achieved through dialogue with the author and by dissecting the structure of the original text," Baboo said.
Though young, Baboo already has a dozen theatrical works under his belt, including To Jorge Luis Borges (致波赫士, 2003), a tribute to the late writer who pioneered the magic realism genre, and A Memorandum of Disease (疾病備忘錄, 2004), which introduced the elusive inner landscape of Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa to local audiences.
To director Baboo's mind, a realistic performance is an anti-performance. The unique charm of theater is the overlapping transformation from the real to the illusory and vice versa.
The director's aesthetic inclinations leads him to the authors of magic realism, which he thinks can best represent and bring out the inherent aesthetics of the theatrical art form.
Baboo's theater is not always easy to digest and constantly posits challenges for the audience.
For those who would like to start an intellectual dialogue with the late master, go check out One Hundred Years of Solitude, in the woods at one of the most beautiful universities in Taiwan.
Performance notes:
What: One Hundred Years of Solitude
Where: Taipei National University of the Arts -- Huang Shan Theater (
When: from tonight to Sunday at 7:30pm
Tickets: NT$450, available through NTCH ticketing outlets or online at http://www.artsticket.com.tw
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