Theater
Aurora (北極光) with Yang Kuei-juan (楊桂娟), David Grenke and the Assembly Dance Company (組合語言舞團). The program includes American Pop a new work by choreographer Grenke which incorporates elements from drama and multimedia. At the National Experi-mental Theater, Taipei.
● Tickets are NT$450 and are available through NTCH ticketing.
● Tonight and tomorrow at 7:30pm and tomorrow and Sunday at 2:30pm.
Goldburg Variations by the Compagnie Marie Chouinard. The program includes the respected Canadian dance company's new work, originally created for the Venice Biennale's International Festival of International Dance. The dance explores variations on the theme of freedom through the use of props such as crutches and rope that alternately bind and support the dancers. At the National Theater.
● Tickets are NT$500 to NT$2,000 and are available through NTCH ticketing.
● June 9 and June 10 at 7:30pm and June 11 at 2:30pm
Misty Ocean of Love (情海煙雲), by the Ming-Ju Taiwanese Opera Troupe (明珠女子歌劇團), an original ge-zi opera by a traditional troupe based in Nantou county, the penultimate offering of the 2006 Taipei Traditional Arts Festival. At Zhongshan Hall, (台北市中山堂), 98 Yenping S Rd, Taipei (台北市延平南路98號).
● Tickets are NT$200 to NT$800 and are available through NTCH ticketing.
● Sunday 7:30pm
Classical Music
Rudolf Barshai and the National Symphony Orchestra (俄國絃樂巨擘巴夏與國家交響樂團), will see Barshai, one of the 20th century's great conductors and viola players, direct Taiwan's own NSO. The program includes Beethoven's Grosse Fugue, Borodin's Chamber Symphony, and Tchaikovsky's String Symphony. At the National Concert Hall tonight and at National Tainan University Recital Hall (台南大學雅音樓), 33, Shulin St Sec 2, Tainan City (台南市樹林街二段33號), tomorrow.
● Tickets are NT$300 to NT$1,500 in Taipei and NT$100 and NT$200 in Tainan and are available through NTCH ticketing.
● Tonight and tomorrow at 7:30pm
Liu Meng-jie Piano Recital -- "Heart" Sonata (劉孟捷鋼琴獨奏會 -- "心"奏鳴曲), features the US-based pianist who suffered from a rare and debilitating illness in 1997, but who made an "absolutely impossible" recovery to embark again on his concert career. His current concert tour presents the sonatas of Schubert. At the National Concert Hall.
● Tickets are NT$200 to NT$1,200 and are available through ERA ticketing.
● Saturday at 2:30pm and 7:30pm
Mezzo-Soprano Fan Ting-yu Recital (次女高音范婷玉獨唱會) will present opera fans with a special vocal treat from Fan, a young star of the NTCH and outstanding mezzo-soprano, at National Rectial Hall. Accompanied by Pianist Hsieh Hsin-jung (謝欣容), Fan will present Wagner's Wesendonk Lieder, Falla's Seven Spanish folksongs, Bach and R. Strauss's lieders, and arias from Les Huguenots, Samson et Dalila, Mignon and la Cenerentola, which are her speciality.
● As of press time, NT$300 tickets are sold out, but seats are available from NT$400 to NT$500 through NTCH ticketing.
● Sunday at 7:30pm
The Maestro Series: Pinchas Zukerman Violin Recital (小提琴巨擘祖克曼獨奏會). Joined by cellist Amanda Forsyth and Pianist Tatiana Goncharova, Zukerman, is recognized as one of the best violinists of the last 40 years, and has a prolific record of 100 albums, 21 of which have been nominated for Grammy Awards. The program will include Schubert's Sonatina, Franck's Sonata, Kodaly's violin and cello duo, Faure's Berceuse, and Kreisler's Liebesfreud. At the National Concert Hall.
● Tickets are NT$500 to NT$2,500 and are available through NTCH ticketing.
● Monday at 7:30pm
A Concert for Clarinet, Piano, and Harp (琴逢笛手 -- 豎笛鋼琴與豎琴的對話) featuring clarinetist Chad Burrow, pianist Amy Cheng (鄭以琳), and Linda Sung (宋秀娟) at National Recital Hall. Burrow, the youngest principal at the Oklahoma City Philharmonic, performs with his wife Cheng, winner of the Helda Hermanns International Piano Competition. The Taiwan debut pieces include Bochsa's Sonatine and Nocturne for clarinet, harp and piano and Edward Knight's Romance for Clarinet and Piano, in addition to works by Brahms, Ravel, Salzedo, Schumann, Liu Wen-hsiang (劉文祥), and Chen Ling-chao (陳玲昭). The performance will incorporate ballroom dancing, mime performance, and multimedia arts to create an innovative show.
● Tickets are NT$250 to NT$500 and are available through ERA ticketing.
● Thursday 7:30pm
Contemporary
Luxy Dance music in Taiwan can no longer be viewed as a nascent genre, but it is certainly far from mature. Home-grown talent is thin on the ground and notoriously publicity shy. International acts visit Taiwan with increasing frequency, but leave little in the way of creative input. The Loop and Luxy are opening a new chapter tonight with their weekly Sabbatical, which will bring an international producer and/or DJ to Taiwan for a month at a time. The aim is to nurture up and coming spinmeisters and knob twiddlers by collaborations with world-class movers and shakers in the dance music arena. First up in the studio and to the decks in the Onyx room, the former Lotus room given a makeover, is Johnny Fiasco.
● Tickets are NT$800 in advance and NT$1,000 on the door
● Tonight at 10pm
Global Underground (GU) is coming to town to record Dubfire's (aka Ali Shriazinia) set at Luxy and put out a CD under that label. Along with Sharam Tayebi, Dubfire formed Deep Dish Records in 1992 and just two years later the pair had risen to the top of the District of Colombia's house scene. The Iranian-born pair's Hideaway in 1995 climbed well up the charts and threw the lads into the mainstream spotlight. Despite the hyperbole written about the UK label GU as it celebrates 10 years in the business, it is immensely influential and has pioneered dance music, publishing cutting-edge tunes and mixes at some of the world's most spectacular venues (www.global-underground.co.uk).
● Tickets are NT$600 before 11pm and NT$800 after
● Tomorrow at 10pm
● Location: Luxy, 5F, 201, Zhongxiao E Rd Sec 4, Taipei (台北市忠孝東路四段201號5樓). Call (02) 2772-1000, or visit www.luxy-taipei.com.
Kunlun Herb Gardens Rock, dance, eat and make merry for a cause at the Hoping for Hoping peace festival next weekend. The lineup: Milk, David Chen & the Muddy Basin Ramblers, Boogie Chillin', Neon, Fireflower, The Sound Clashes, BoPoMoFo, The Anglers, Fluent, Fat Club, Consider the Meek, Long Gone Sound, Militant Hippi, Minstral, Public Radio, Native Space, Hulihutu, Silent Toads, The Scooters, `Round Midnight, Va Ai, To a God Unknown, Brian Funshine, Mister Green, and more.
● Weekend passes, which include camping, are NT$500, family passes are also NT$500, which entitles children to free entry. For tickets visit www.hopingforhoping.com.
● June 9 through June 1
● Location: Kunlun Heb Gardens, Longtan, Taoyuan County (桃園龍潭崑崙藥用植物園)
The Wall (這牆) The three-piece Big Brass Balls Band is teaming up with Fluent, a live hip-hop crew, for a night of rock and rap. The Balls have honed a repertoire of cover songs and original crowd pleasers with a humorous slant and are steadily gaining a loyal fan base.
● Tickets are NT$400 on the door, or buy four in advance and get one free Call (02) 8787-4154 or visit www.livingroomtaipei.com
● Tonight at 8pm
Four Tet, aka Kieran Hebden, has built up an impressive remixology having reworked tracks by diverse artists such as Radiohead, Bloc Party, Beth Orton and Black Sabbath. Four Tet's sound is a mish-mash of samples taken from across the musical spectrum, mixed with his prowess on the guitar. For more information visit www.fourtet.net, www.silentagreement.com, or call (02) 8935-1454.
● Advance tickets are NT$600
● Thursday at 9pm
● Location: B1, 200, Roosevelt Rd Sec 4, Taipei (台北市羅斯福路4段200號B1)
Exhibition
Chen Houei-kuen: A Centennial Exhibition (百慧藏坤:陳慧坤教授百年誕辰特展), featuring 25 ink and oil paintings by one of Taiwan's foremost artists, the exhibition chronicles the development of the arts. Chen's paintings reflect a range of influences from Japan to the West. National Museum of History (國立歷史博物館), 49 Nanhai Rd, Taipei (台北市南海路49號).
● Open Tuesday to Sunday from 10am to 6pm. Call (02) 2361-0270.
● Until July 2
A Solo Exhibition by Cheang Shu-lea (鄭淑麗個展堲). Made up of pieces from a Web project entitled Milk, which includes seven 5th generation iPods and four MP3 players as art, exhibition is based on the concept of memory as a storage measurement for computer data. The artist explores the transformation of human behavior and existence by which memory becomes rewritable and reloadable. IT Park Gallery (伊通公園), 2-3F, 41, Yitong St, Taipei (台北市伊通街41號2/3樓).
● Open Tuesday to Saturday from 1pm to 10pm. Call (02) 2507-7243.
● Until June 24
Untitled -- A Solo Exhibition by Chen Luoke (無題捖紐鳩 J 個展). Drawing inspiration from the artist's travels in Europe, the exhibition features abstract paintings by the acclaimed German-based, Taiwanese painter, who says his creations are human landscapes that manifest the similarities between the human world and nature. German Cultural Center Taipei (德國文化中心), 12F, 20, Hoping W Rd Sec 1, Taipei (台北市和平西路一段20號12樓).
● Open Monday to Friday from 9:30am to 8pm. Call (02) 2365-7294
● Until June 16
Green Field: Ecological Practice of Contemporary Art (綠色奇蹟:藝術與環境生態的對話), examines the coexistence of human beings and nature through the work of local and foreign artists. Art workshops are also included on the program. Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts (高雄市立美術館), 20 Meishuguan Rd, Gushan District, Kaohsiung. (高雄市鼓山區美術館路20號).
● Open Tuesday to Sunday from 9am to 5pm. Call (07) 555-0331.
● Until June 18
New Media Collection 1965-2005 Centre Pompidou (龐畢度中心新媒體藝術展). Curated by Christine Van Assche, the director of New Media Art of France's Pompidou Center, the must-see exhibition brings to local museum-goers more than 30 classical video art works from the center's collection including those of pioneering masters such as Nam June Paik, Bill Viola, Gary Hill and Tony Oursler. Taipei Fine Arts Museum (台北市立美術館), 181 Zhongshan N Rd Sec 3, Taipei (台北市中山北路三段181號).
● Open Tuesday to Sunday from 9:30am to 5:30pm. Call (02) 2595-7656.
● Until July 23
Last week, Viola Zhou published a marvelous deep dive into the culture clash between Taiwanese boss mentality and American labor practices at the Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC) plant in Arizona in Rest of World. “The American engineers complained of rigid, counterproductive hierarchies at the company,” while the Taiwanese said American workers aren’t dedicated. The article is a delight, but what it is depicting is the clash between a work culture that offers employee autonomy and at least nods at work-life balance, and one that runs on hierarchical discipline enforced by chickenshit. And it runs on chickenshit because chickenshit is a cultural
My previous column Donovan’s Deep Dives: The powerful political force that vanished from the English press on April 23 began with three paragraphs of what would be to most English-language readers today incomprehensible gibberish, but are very typical descriptions of Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) internal politics in the local Chinese-language press. After a quiet period in the early 2010s, the English press stopped writing about the DPP factions, the factions changed and eventually local English-language journalists could not reintroduce the subject without a long explanation on the context that would not fit easily in a typical news article. That previous
April 29 to May 5 One month before the Taipei-Keelung New Road (北基新路) was set to open, the news that US general Douglas MacArthur had died, reached Taiwan. The military leader saw Taiwan as an “unsinkable aircraft carrier” that was of huge strategic value to the US. He’d been a proponent of keeping it out of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) hands. Coupled with the fact that the US had funded more than 50 percent of the road’s construction costs, the authorities at the last minute renamed it the MacArthur Thruway (麥帥公路) for his “great contributions to the free world and deep
Years ago, I was thrilled when I came across a map online showing a fun weekend excursion: a long motorcycle ride into the mountains of Pingtung County (屏東) going almost up to the border with Taitung County (台東), followed by a short hike up to a mountain lake with the mysterious name of “Small Ghost Lake” (小鬼湖). I shared it with a more experienced hiking friend who then proceeded to laugh. Apparently, this road had been taken out by landslides long before and was never going to be fixed. Reaching the lake this way — or any way that would