Golden Twins were destined for tragedy if they remained together, or so an oracle predicted. To avoid a nasty end, they were separated at birth in the hope that the prophecy wouldn’t be fulfilled.
This story of forbidden love forms part of I La Galigo, a play adapted by acclaimed director Robert Wilson from an Indonesian creation myth. It is the first of six performances in the 10th Taipei Arts Festival (TAF), which also includes free lectures and workshops by some of the world’s top theater professionals.
Wilson’s I La Galigo adapts the story of the creation of the Earth as recorded in the Sureq Galigo, an epic poem written by the Bugis people of South Sulawesi that consists of 6,000 folio pages and dates back to Indonesia’s pre-Islamic history.
The play’s cosmological setting is the Upper World and Under World of the gods and the Middle World they create to house humans and the descendents of the gods. At the heart of the tale is the incestuous love of the hero Sawerigading for his twin sister, We Tenriabeng, and his attempt to avoid the passions that could destroy their kingdom.
The three-hour performance casts more than 50 actors and fuses the dance, storytelling and myths of the Bugis people and chronicles one cycle in the birth, aging and death of creation. Respected Indonesian composer Rahayu Supanggah compliments the dancing and acting with a hypnotic musical score.
Instead of gods creating humans, humans create puppets in La Boite, the result of a two-year collaboration between Taiwan’s Taiyuan Puppet Theater Company (台原偶戲團) and France’s Compagnie des Zonsons, which begins its run next week.
Using a blend of human actors, puppets and spherical installations, the two companies fuse their aesthetic ideals to create a love story between the puppets and humans that will be accompanied by live musicians using instruments from both Asia and the West.
Rather than using puppets to create a visual language on the stage, Chilean-based theater group Teatro Cinema blends the vocabulary of film with a traditional approach to the stage to mount a story of revenge called Sin Sangre (Without Blood), which begins its run on Aug. 22 at 7:30pm.
Based on the novel Senza Sangue by Italian novelist Alessandro Baricco, the play begins with the revenge killing of a man and his family. His youngest daughter survives after one of the murderers lets her go free, and decades later she exacts her own revenge on the killers. The denouement is a physical and psychological showdown between the woman and the man who set her free decades before.
On the same weekend, Performance Workshop Theater reprises its 2005 play Total Woman (這一夜,Women 說相聲). The work, written and directed by acclaimed Taiwanese theater maestro Stan Lai (賴聲川), employs the Chinese comedic genre called cross talk (相聲) — a form of witty dialogue usually played by male actors that employs complex wordplay to critique social conventions.
With Total Woman, Lai updates the tradition by using an all-female cast who discuss weighty issues such as women’s rights, work-related anxiety and love, as well as lighter fare such as why women wear makeup. The audience can expect to laugh while the women on stage shed tears.
It is doubtful that anyone will leave the theater crying after watching Mathias Woo’s esoteric Hua-yen Sutra — Mind as a Skillful Painter (華嚴經之心如工畫師). They might, however, feel spiritually uplifted. Woo, a director for Hong Kong-based theater company Zuni Icosahedron, hopes to return art to a time when it possessed sacred significance.
The performance is a mixture of chanting, music, dance and digital images that is meant to replicate the Buddha’s insight that the world is forged entirely by the mind.
The Life and Times of Louis I. Kahn is a kind of companion piece to Hua-yen Sutra in that Woo continues his investigation of the mind — though here through the work and life Louis I. Kahn, one of the 20th century’s most influential architects. Using the theories of minimalism propounded by Kahn, Woo investigates the relationship of light, space and materials through theater.
Hong Kong television celebrity Kam Kwok Leung (甘國亮), mentor to film director Wong Kar-wai (王家衛), will play the role of Louis I. Kahn.
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