The Dream Community Culture and Education Development Foundation's (夢想社區) annual carnival (夢想嘉年華) starts tomorrow at 3pm. The parade, which is usually held on the streets of Sijhih (汐止), has moved to Taipei City, and will set off from Xingan Elementary School (幸安國小) on Renai Road, finishing with performances and a pageant at the Presidential Office on Chongqing South Road at 6:30pm.
In preparation for the event, 20 international artists from nine countries were invited to hold a series of workshops for the anticipated 10,000 participants, which would be triple last year's.
Organized by the Dream Center, a community-based arts organization located in Sijhih and funded partly by the local government and businesses, the theme for this year's parade is hope.
PHOTOS: COURTESY OF DREAM COMMUNITY
"Hope for a better future and hope for the environment," said Ann Ho (何英琪), the artistic director of this year's carnival.
Ho said moving the parade to downtown Taipei will enable more people to view and participate in the carnival and increase cultural awareness. "People in Taiwan [have little] awareness of art and culture and the ability [to be] creative," she said.
In Aboriginal communities, Ho said, creativity is more prevalent yet indigenous peoples haven't been adequately represented in previous parades.
Ho and her team have worked with different tribes throughout the island since the beginning of the year to increase their presence at the parade. Ho said this year 1,500 Aboriginal students plan to participate in the parade where "they will combine artistic styles drawn from their traditional cultures with some of the artistic skills they learned in workshops."
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
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby