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.
In the March 9 edition of the Taipei Times a piece by Ninon Godefroy ran with the headine “The quiet, gentle rhythm of Taiwan.” It started with the line “Taiwan is a small, humble place. There is no Eiffel Tower, no pyramids — no singular attraction that draws the world’s attention.” I laughed out loud at that. This was out of no disrespect for the author or the piece, which made some interesting analogies and good points about how both Din Tai Fung’s and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) meticulous attention to detail and quality are not quite up to
April 21 to April 27 Hsieh Er’s (謝娥) political fortunes were rising fast after she got out of jail and joined the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) in December 1945. Not only did she hold key positions in various committees, she was elected the only woman on the Taipei City Council and headed to Nanjing in 1946 as the sole Taiwanese female representative to the National Constituent Assembly. With the support of first lady Soong May-ling (宋美齡), she started the Taipei Women’s Association and Taiwan Provincial Women’s Association, where she
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) hatched a bold plan to charge forward and seize the initiative when he held a protest in front of the Taipei City Prosecutors’ Office. Though risky, because illegal, its success would help tackle at least six problems facing both himself and the KMT. What he did not see coming was Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an (將萬安) tripping him up out of the gate. In spite of Chu being the most consequential and successful KMT chairman since the early 2010s — arguably saving the party from financial ruin and restoring its electoral viability —
It is one of the more remarkable facts of Taiwan history that it was never occupied or claimed by any of the numerous kingdoms of southern China — Han or otherwise — that lay just across the water from it. None of their brilliant ministers ever discovered that Taiwan was a “core interest” of the state whose annexation was “inevitable.” As Paul Kua notes in an excellent monograph laying out how the Portuguese gave Taiwan the name “Formosa,” the first Europeans to express an interest in occupying Taiwan were the Spanish. Tonio Andrade in his seminal work, How Taiwan Became Chinese,
RSS