Concert of Chen Chien-chi: Love Scenes of Flowers and Farewell (陳建騏:花與告別的愛情場景) brings the enormously successful Taipei Arts Festival (台北藝術節) to a close with three sold-out shows this weekend. Chen is a figure normally seen in the credits rather than on the stage, and the concerts give prominence to a man whose work has played a major part in Taiwan’s efforts at cultural globalization.
Chen is an enormously prolific composer of music for the cinema and theater and is adept at creating a sense of mood with his scores. Among other high-profile projects are his scores for the musical Sound of Colors (地下鐵) and films A Fish With a Smile (微笑的魚) and Splendid Float (艷光四射歌舞劇), and musical arrangements for Fish Leong’s (梁靜茹) most recent album Worship (崇拜). He also composed the score for the new Wu Nien-chen (吳念真) production Somewhere I Have Never Traveled (帶我去遠方), which opens next week.
For tonight and tomorrow’s concerts, Chen will be working together with singer Waa Wei (魏如萱) and other performers to create a kind of musical theater. The shows will also feature the work of installation designer Huang I-ju (黃怡儒) and multimedia designer Logico (郎機工).
In an interview with the Taipei Times, Chen said this was the first time he had presented a show in this fashion, focusing on music but including stage settings and speech.
While the songs have a Shakes-pearean connection, Chen said the tracks do not necessarily reflect any particular scene or character.
“It is a dialogue between Shakespeare and me,” he said. “Prior to each number, there will be a brief introduction relating how the track was inspired. This will be quite brief, because I don’t want the audience to have a one-to-one association with anything specific in Shakespeare.”
Chen said he had chosen to use a largely acoustic setup, in keeping with the smaller space of the Guangfu Auditorium (光復廳) of the Zhongshan Hall (中山堂). “The space is really quite intimate. This makes it ideal for an acoustic lineup, because you can feel the breathing, the rhythms of the performance.”
While this style of presentation is new to Chen, his association with the Bard goes back to some of his theater music collected in the album Mad Scenes (瘋狂場景), released last year,
in which, as the title suggests, he created music for the performance of various scenes of madness from Shakespeare’s plays.
“As in the case of Ophelia. Her obsessive nature prevented her from accepting what was going on around her. This is a kind of madness. This has a close affinity to music, because it’s a mood rather than a narrative,” he said.
June 2 to June 8 Taiwan’s woodcutters believe that if they see even one speck of red in their cooked rice, no matter how small, an accident is going to happen. Peng Chin-tian (彭錦田) swears that this has proven to be true at every stop during his decades-long career in the logging industry. Along with mining, timber harvesting was once considered the most dangerous profession in Taiwan. Not only were mishaps common during all stages of processing, it was difficult to transport the injured to get medical treatment. Many died during the arduous journey. Peng recounts some of his accidents in
“Why does Taiwan identity decline?”a group of researchers lead by University of Nevada political scientist Austin Wang (王宏恩) asked in a recent paper. After all, it is not difficult to explain the rise in Taiwanese identity after the early 1990s. But no model predicted its decline during the 2016-2018 period, they say. After testing various alternative explanations, Wang et al argue that the fall-off in Taiwanese identity during that period is related to voter hedging based on the performance of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Since the DPP is perceived as the guardian of Taiwan identity, when it performs well,
A short walk beneath the dense Amazon canopy, the forest abruptly opens up. Fallen logs are rotting, the trees grow sparser and the temperature rises in places sunlight hits the ground. This is what 24 years of severe drought looks like in the world’s largest rainforest. But this patch of degraded forest, about the size of a soccer field, is a scientific experiment. Launched in 2000 by Brazilian and British scientists, Esecaflor — short for “Forest Drought Study Project” in Portuguese — set out to simulate a future in which the changing climate could deplete the Amazon of rainfall. It is
The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) on May 18 held a rally in Taichung to mark the anniversary of President William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20. The title of the rally could be loosely translated to “May 18 recall fraudulent goods” (518退貨ㄌㄨㄚˋ!). Unlike in English, where the terms are the same, “recall” (退貨) in this context refers to product recalls due to damaged, defective or fraudulent merchandise, not the political recalls (罷免) currently dominating the headlines. I attended the rally to determine if the impression was correct that the TPP under party Chairman Huang Kuo-Chang (黃國昌) had little of a