The Chai Found Music Workshop (采風樂坊) has spent years pushing the boundaries of traditional Chinese music. It is not alone in this, but it is unusual among local groups in emphasizing the academic rather than folk music aspects of this endeavor. Its most recent work, The Journey of the Monkey King (西遊記), combines an original new score by composer Huang Cheng-ming (黃正銘) with drama and action created by director Li Shao-ping (李小平) to tell the classic Chinese story of the monkey king’s journey with Tripitaka to India to obtain sacred Buddhist texts.
Huang, who is also the artistic director of Chai Found Music Workshop, has been actively seeking new ways to create opportunities for the presentation of contemporary Chinese music compositions. In 2005, the group achieved considerable acclaim for its production of Ambush! — An Instrumental Musical (十面埋伏), which presented stories from the Romance of the Three Kingdoms (三國演義) using a traditional string and woodwind ensemble, augmented by drums, dance and multimedia.
The Journey of the Monkey King takes this a step further, striving to a higher degree of integration between the music and action. This is achieved by having musicians suddenly standing forward to represent characters in the story, and by the use of unconventional instruments such as bamboo starves used for percussion. The staff is the monkey king’s signature weapon, and while it was necessary to have it feature as a prop, Li said he didn’t want to have performers simply swirling a staff as part of a dance sequence. “In traditional Chinese opera performances, such staff twirling is an acrobatic feat in itself. We would simply not be up to scratch,” Li said. The performers on stage are primarily musicians, not trained dancers, and Li acknowledged that in choreographing the movements on stage, he had to take account of this. “The performers may not be as agile as trained opera performers, but they have an intimate understanding of the music, and as long as they can feel the movement of the music as they move, they will not be any less graceful,” Li said.
DANCING MUSICIANS
Most of the action on stage is not as physically demanding as one might expect from professional dancers, but the producers have achieved a remarkable job in creating seamless transitions between music and movement. Speaking about choreographing the work, Li, who has worked extensively in opera, said that it was simply a case of knowing what was possible.
The new production starts off with an interpretation of the main characters in the novel Journey to the West (西遊記), a development from the narrative presentation seen in Ambush. “This was part of the appeal of Journey to the West,” Huang said. “For Ambush, there was an historical element that restricted what we could do, but with Monkey King, which is basically a fantasy, the potential for innovation was greater.”
In an early movement in which the monkey king is introduced, a juggler working with a glass ball accompanies the music, presenting in a visual form the infinite mutations of the monkey king’s mind, following on from a movement in which performers move about the stage in monkey-like fashion, adding a sense of playfulness to the musical portrait of the monkey king.
The music itself, which is a contemporary take on traditional Chinese orchestral music, draws on the ensemble’s strong command of traditional instruments such as the guzheng (古箏), a kind of zither, the pipa (琵琶), a kind of lute, erhu (二胡), flute and yangqi (揚琴), a kind of dulcimer. Drums, cymbals and other traditional percussion instruments also play a part. Given that Chai Found Music Workshop is as much at home with contemporary music as with traditional music, having participated in events such as the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival and Berlin’s MaerzMusik Festival, the music is difficult to categorize, drifting from traditional folk melodies into complex atonal forms and at moments of high action, creating a wall of noise that any rock group would be proud of.
The Journey of the Monkey King looks set to repeat the success of Ambush and offers a original reworking of the material from a famous tale. It should appeal to a wide audience through its combination of the visual and musical, and will also show off the enormous potential of Chinese orchestral music.
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