Theater troupes from Germany, France, Israel and South Korea, as well as two from Taiwan, have drawn inspiration from Athol Fugard, Bernard-Marie Koltes, Sophocles, and Ingmar Bergman and others for this year's International Theater Festival.
Ticket sales have been brisk for the event, which will be held at the National Experimental Theater (國家實驗劇場) from Monday through April 13: Gutes Tun and Sizwe Banzi Is Dead (directed by world-famous theater innovator Peter Brook) have already sold out.
Sizwe Banzi Is Dead, a play written by Athol Fugard, is a morality tale about apartheid in South Africa's townships that focuses on identity, survival and race.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF NTCH
In the production, Siswe Banzi adopts the identity of a dead man so he can find a job and escape the grinding poverty of the slums. One day he enters a photography studio where he is forced to confront the deeper meaning of his actions. The performance focuses on the cost of freedom and the power of art to transcend oppression.
Roberto Zucco, written by Bernard-Marie Koltes and adapted from the original by Taiwan-based theater group Creative Society (創作社), was inspired by a real-life killer.
Directed by Wang Jia-ming (王嘉明), the plot of the 15-scene play follows the last years of serial killer Roberto Zucco's life and the motives behind his killing spree.
Three actors play 20 nameless characters and pull the audience along in an avant-garde plot that follows Zucco's prison break and subsequent crime rampage. No specific protagonist is ever seen or heard in the play, which incorporates several viewpoints and uses constantly changing scenes strewn with monologues. Performances begin on March 13.
In Gutes Tin, two women intend to do good by providing people with what they desire most. Those who want buns shall have them. Stewed apples, no problem. However, these two are not very serious and spend most of their time in front of a cabin singing, joking and brawling. Though the characters might not bring happiness to the world, Tismer's snappy dialogue in this mad comedy is sure to keep audiences crying with laughter.
Comedy is not on Hana Snir's radar. The Israeli director working in with Habimah National Theater and Cameri Theater is staging an updated version of Sophocles' tragedy Antigone.
The story revolves around Antigone, who defies human laws in order to follow a higher one. She chooses to bury her fallen brother, though he has been declared an enemy of the state by her uncle and is ineligible for any funeral rites.
Snir's adaptation from a translation by Shimon Bouzaglo is interesting because it sound like breaking news.
In Woyzeck, a shattered wooden chair represents a soldier's life. Written by Georg Buchner just before his death at the age of 23, the play is a tragedy about love, betrayal, jealousy and murder.
In the hands of South Korea's Sadari Movement Laboratory, however, chairs take on an added dimension conjuring up physical contexts and revealing the inner states of the characters. A riveting musical score by Astor Piazzolla accompanies the production, which begins on April 4.
Off Performance Workshop's (外表坊) adaptation of Ingmar Bergman's Scener Ur Ett Aktenskap (Scenes From a Marriage), which begins on April 10, makes up the final performance of the festival. The Taiwan-based theater group uses a somber interpretation of Bergman's tale of the vicissitudes of marriage and its eventual breakdown.
Tickets for the International Theater Festival are NT$500 to NT$1,000. All performances will be held at the National Experimental Theater, Taipei. Tickets can be bought at www.artsticket.com.tw.
A few weeks ago I found myself at a Family Mart talking with the morning shift worker there, who has become my coffee guy. Both of us were in a funk over the “unseasonable” warm weather, a state of mind known as “solastalgia” — distress produced by environmental change. In fact, the weather was not that out of the ordinary in boiling Central Taiwan, and likely cooler than the temperatures we will experience in the near-future. According to the Taiwan Adaptation Platform, between 1957 and 2006, summer lengthened by 27.8 days, while winter shrunk by 29.7 days. Winter is not
Taiwan’s post-World War II architecture, “practical, cheap and temporary,” not to mention “rather forgettable.” This was a characterization recently given by Taiwan-based historian John Ross on his Formosa Files podcast. Yet the 1960s and 1970s were, in fact, the period of Taiwan’s foundational building boom, which, to a great extent, defined the look of Taiwan’s cities, determining the way denizens live today. During this period, functionalist concrete blocks and Chinese nostalgia gave way to new interpretations of modernism, large planned communities and high-rise skyscrapers. It is currently the subject of a new exhibition at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Modern
March 25 to March 31 A 56-year-old Wu Li Yu-ke (吳李玉哥) was straightening out her artist son’s piles of drawings when she inadvertently flipped one over, revealing the blank backside of the paper. Absent-mindedly, she picked up a pencil and recalled how she used to sketch embroidery designs for her clothing business. Without clients and budget or labor constraints to worry about, Wu Li drew freely whatever image came to her mind. With much more free time now that her son had found a job, she found herself missing her home village in China, where she
In recent years, Slovakia has been seen as a highly democratic and Western-oriented Central European country. This image was reinforced by the election of the country’s first female president in 2019, efforts to provide extensive assistance to Ukraine and the strengthening of relations with Taiwan, all of which strengthened Slovakia’s position within the European Union. However, the latest developments in the country suggest that the situation is changing rapidly. As such, the presidential elections to be held on March 23 will be an indicator of whether Slovakia remains in the Western sphere of influence or moves eastward, notably towards Russia and