It is a rare thing for an executive producer to receive a standing ovation in a theater, but Kenneth Pai’s production of the classic kun opera (崑劇) The Jade Hairpin (玉簪記) was, above all else, about his passion and new vision for this ancient operatic form.
On Friday, he brought an audience at the National Theater that ranged from high school kids to elderly opera aficionados to its feet when he appeared at the end of the curtain call. During the interval, Pai had been virtually mobbed by girls wearing the distinctive green-and-black uniforms of the Taipei Municipal First Girls’ Senior High School (北一女中), who were there in force.
Pai had set out to make kun opera chic and cool and just good plain fun: The Jade Hairpin achieved all of these. Pai’s new aesthetic for kun is difficult to pin down. There are no startling departures from convention. It is more about overall quality, a look, a knowing sophistication that immediately announced itself as something new and stylish.
From the opening sequence, the production values were evident in the sophisticated lighting, the simple, elegant set, the magnificently understated costumes and the discipline of the chorus line. Considerable attention to technical details, from the sound quality to the use of the follow spot, contributed to the overall effect, and this care is something that other local productions could learn from.
The two young stars, Shen Fengying (沈豐英) and Yu Jiulin (�?L), were in fine form, and despite the archaic manners of an opera style that dates back almost five centuries, they managed to prove that young love is a constant, however it is expressed.
In a scene in which the two young characters get to know one another other while playing the zither, their elaborate courtesies are a source of humor, but this never undermined the beauty of the music — provided by a Tang Dynasty zheng (箏) performed by Li Xiangting (李祥霆) — or the poetry of the lyrics. This balancing act was maintained throughout the nearly three-hour performance.
The show finished with a scene that combined complex choreographed movements to imitate, on an empty stage, a dangerous meeting on a turbulent river, and some passionate arias in which the love birds pledge their eternal love to each other.
One very small fly in the ointment was the quality of the English surtitles. Although superior to what is generally seen in the few traditional productions that sport English surtitles, the quality was uneven and certainly could have done with thorough editing.
Upstairs in the Experimental Theater, Lin Wen-chung’s (林文中) latest work, Small Songs, kept dancers rooted to a confined space, much like his WCdance troupe’s premiere piece, Small.
Instead of a Plexiglas cube, however, his design team came up with a rectangular platform.
Lin has made a virtue out of minimalism. He has a real flair for reducing the space and time needed to convey his ideas while giving you richly layered, finely nuanced works. His works bring to mind Persian miniatures, those small worlds that mix reality and dreams and become more complex the longer you look at them.
While Lin is capable of filling an entire stage, the score for Small Songs was an intriguing mix of songs by the Mexican-American singer Lhasa de Sela, P.S. I Love You from the film of the same name, Love You to Death from Cape No. 7 (海角七號), a nanguan (南管) piece, excerpts from Handel and Mozart and Song to the Moon from the Czech opera Ruslaka.
The latter was used in the segment titled “A song of Wenchung and Ruping” danced by Chiu Yu-wen (邱鈺閔) and Chang Chih-chieh (張智傑) that segued from a lovely pas de deux to a friendly but exhilarating competition. It was a beautiful and moving tribute by Lin to his wife, Wang Ru-ping (王如萍), a dancer with the Jose Limon Company.
Lin himself appeared just briefly, leaving most of the work to his five dancers, especially the exceptional Chiu and Lin Hsiao-yuan (林筱圓).
While “minimalism” was the word that sprang to mind with Lin Wen-chung, “articulated” seemed to be the word to define Wayne McGregor and his Random Dance company’s production Entity at Novel Hall on Friday night.
In McGregor’s choreography, the joints of the body — from the neck to the shoulders, elbows, hips, knees and ankles— are twisted and cocked to allow the body to turn in unexpected directions.
Like Lin, McGregor strips away all the excess, a minimalism reflected in the set by Patrick Burnier (who also designed the black briefs/white T-shirt costumes) — three screens held up (or down) by structures that look like catapult rigs.
Entity began and ended with a stop-motion short video projection made from photographs of a racing greyhound taken by 19th-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge. Just as Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion works allowed viewers to clearly delineate the movements of running animals, McGregor’s choreography takes apart his 10 dancers’ bodies and puts them back together in unexpected ways.
Friday’s show at Novel Hall was a fascinating introduction to one of the most innovative choreographers working today.
What was the population of Taiwan when the first Negritos arrived? In 500BC? The 1st century? The 18th? These questions are important, because they can contextualize the number of babies born last month, 6,523, to all the people on Taiwan, indigenous and colonial alike. That figure represents a year on year drop of 3,884 babies, prefiguring total births under 90,000 for the year. It also represents the 26th straight month of deaths exceeding births. Why isn’t this a bigger crisis? Because we don’t experience it. Instead, what we experience is a growing and more diverse population. POPULATION What is Taiwan’s actual population?
For the past five years, Sammy Jou (周祥敏) has climbed Kinmen’s highest peak, Taiwu Mountain (太武山) at 6am before heading to work. In the winter, it’s dark when he sets out but even at this hour, other climbers are already coming down the mountain. All of this is a big change from Jou’s childhood during the Martial Law period, when the military requisitioned the mountain for strategic purposes and most of it was off-limits. Back then, only two mountain trails were open, and they were open only during special occasions, such as for prayers to one’s ancestors during Lunar New Year.
You would never believe Yancheng District (鹽埕) used to be a salt field. Today, it is a bustling, artsy, Kowloon-ish “old town” of Kaohsiung — full of neon lights, small shops, scooters and street food. Two hundred years ago, before Japanese occupiers developed a shipping powerhouse around it, Yancheng was a flat triangle where seawater was captured and dried to collect salt. This is what local art galleries are revealing during the first edition of the Yancheng Arts Festival. Shen Yu-rung (沈裕融), the main curator, says: “We chose the connection with salt as a theme. The ocean is still very near, just a
A key feature of Taiwan’s environmental impact assessments (EIA) is that they seldom stop projects, especially once the project has passed its second stage EIA review (the original Suhua Highway proposal, killed after passing the second stage review, seems to be the lone exception). Mingjian Township (名間鄉) in Nantou County has been the site of rising public anger over the proposed construction of a waste incinerator in an important agricultural area. The township is a key producer of tea (over 40 percent of the island’s production), ginger and turmeric. The incinerator project is currently in its second stage EIA. The incinerator
RSS