The Taipei International Jazz Festival launched its weekend finale on Friday evening at the 228 Peace Park amphitheater with top-notch performances by musicians visiting from the US, Belgium, and the Netherlands, who taught last week at the Taipei International Jazz Academy, an annual one-week summer camp dedicated to cultivating up-and-coming talent in Taiwan. The finale also featured student performances throughout the evening.
The 2,000 or so audience members didn’t seem to mind the typically stuffy summer evening in Taipei as they listened to Dutch vocalist Denise Jannah, who charmed attendees with personable stage banter and her clear, exquisite voice. She sang a variety of styles, ranging from jazz standards to numbers tinged with Caribbean rhythms. The Suriname-born singer’s smooth delivery was enhanced by rousing improvisations, in particular from violinist and festival founder Hsieh Chi-pin (謝啟彬) and guitarist Fabien Degryse.
Thousands attended the Formoz Rock Festival, which took place at the soon-to-be-closed Taipei Children’s Recreation Center (台北市兒童育樂中心) over the weekend.
On Saturday, a large crowd of 400 or so people jostled in front of the Rock stage to watch festival founder Freddy Lim’s (林昶佐) band, Chthonic (閃靈), whose members donned their usual black leather costumes and face makeup. Lim screeched, yelled, and growled as his band played frantic speed metal riffs, which had the audience headbanging and moshing.
In fine Formoz tradition, there was something for every rock fan: on the Fire stage, garage rock band Rabbit Is Rich (兔子很有錢) held a rousing show. The band members got lost in their songs, which started at a mid-tempo hypnotic beat and ascended into a punk frenzy. Meanwhile, a large crowd gathered at the Wind stage, to see popular alt-rock singer Deserts Chang (張懸) and her band.
One of the evening’s highlights was the Canadian band Caribou, which played a set of atmospheric but driving indie rock instrumentals, accompanied by a light show. The band’s leader and drummer, Daniel Snaith, is a spectacle by himself, perhaps a modern day Keith Moon gone avant-garde. With his drum kit placed at the front of the stage, Snaith’s arms swung wildly as he pounded out the beat.
The festival organizers revised the lineup yesterday as typhoon Fung-wong approached the country.
Shots rang out inside Taipei’s National Theater on Friday night as balaclava-clad extremists stormed the stage and down the aisle, taking the three-quarters full theater hostage. One burly terrorist planted a bomb two seats over from where I was sitting and then sat down with the trigger device in his hand.
Such was the tense spectacle that La Fura dels Baus confronted its audience throughout Boris Godunov, a play by the Spanish theatrical group that fuses the original work by Alexander Pushkin with the story of the Moscow theater hostage crisis when roughly 50 Chechen rebels seized a crowded Moscow theater in October of 2002.
La Fura’s meditation on using violence as a means of grabbing power succeeded in revealing the individual motivations behind the terrorists — though without justifying extremism — and in the process humanized them in a way that the media often fails to portray.
Large projection screens were used to great effect and served as both a background set to the actors on stage as well as to show the action outside the theater — such as government officials trying to decide how to proceed with negotiations or police surrounding the building (presumably filmed earlier in the week).
La Fura’s greatest success, however, was how it made use of the entire theater. Not content to relegate its actors to the stage, the characters were brought out into — and at several points became part of — the audience watching the show. Doing so helped to create a masterpiece of verisimilitude rarely seen at theaters in Taiwan.
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