If your Mandarin-speaking children were awed by Narnia -- or just like puppet shows -- Eyuan Puppet Theater (一元布偶劇團) has a treat for them: a lively 70-minute rendition of The Magician's Nephew (魔法師的外甥), the prequel to C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia.
The story, to be performed by a young cast which uses a combination of full-body suits and puppets, follows a boy whose magician uncle accidentally sends him to a parallel universe. The boy then witnesses the creation of Narnia and searches for a magical apple in a walled-off garden.
If a few of those elements sound familiar, they're supposed to. The troupe's leader, Nigel Hsieh (
PHOTO COURTESY OF EYUAN PUPPET THEATER
At the same time, he insists the production is about building a wider cultural vocabulary, not pushing religion. The main point of the show is to entertain and educate children.
"There's no turning water into wine or anything like that," he said.
This is in line with C.S. Lewis' own thinking. While he was known as a Christian author, he objected to the idea that The Chronicles of Narnia were about Christianity.
"It all began with images; a faun carrying an umbrella, a queen on a sledge, a magnificent lion," Lewis wrote in Of Other Worlds. "At first there wasn't anything Christian about [the Narnia books]; that element pushed itself in of its own accord."
Performances at the National Taiwan Arts Education Center (
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