Politicians are always promising to turn Taiwan into a “Silicon Valley of the Pacific,” a regional transshipment hub, a regional financial center, an ornamental fish aquaculture center ... the list is endless.
The people at the National Chiang Kai-shek Cultural Center have an equally lofty ambition. They want to establish their National Theater and Concert Hall (NTCH) complex as one of the pre-eminent art centers in Asia, with an annual arts festival that will rival the more established ones in Hong Kong and Singapore.
Unlike the politicians, however, the staff at center appear to have a clear vision of the future and what it will take to achieve their goal. They began laying the groundwork for it with their festival last spring. Next year’s program is even more ambitious.
The 2010 International Festival was put together under the theme of “Diversity and Sustainability,” with the twin aims of promoting a variety of cultures and focusing on the environment. For five weeks, beginning on Feb. 19 and ending on March 28, the NTCH complex will be filled with performances most weekends in the main theater and concert hall, the smaller theaters and the outdoor plaza, by companies and artists from Spain, Colombia, Denmark and Germany, France and Taiwan. There will be six world premieres, including two flagship productions sponsored by TPAC, and six Asian premieres.
There is plenty to choose from, whether you enjoy music, dance or the theater. The fun starts with two free outdoor performances, the first by the Sol Pico Dance Company on Feb. 19 and the second, on the following day, by The Formosa Aboriginal Song and Dance Troupe. The Spaniards will perform their mermaid-on-a-mission tale, Sirena a la Plancha, which is a multimedia mixture of theater, dance and puppetry.
Famed American director Robert Wilson will be back in late February — a little over a year to the day that his Orlando with Wei Hai-min (魏海敏) opened at the National Theater — with a new production/collaboration with U-Theatre (優人神鼓) titled 1433 — The Grand Voyage. Lin Hwai-min (林懷民) has created a new work for his Cloud Gate Dance Theatre (雲門舞集) called Listening to the River.
Academy Award-winner Tan Dun (譚盾) will conduct the National Symphony Orchestra and the Taiwan National Chinese Orchestra in a performance of his score for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (臥虎藏龍). British composer George Fenton will conduct the National Symphony Orchestra on an exploration of the world with his score from The Blue Planet documentary series, for which he won an Emmy and a BAFTA.
The festival has a strong feminine streak, at least for its theater and dance productions. Ilan County-born dancer-choreographer Lin Mei-hong (林美虹) returns to Taiwan with the Tanztheater des Staatstheaters Darmstadt, at which she has been director since 2005. The company will perform Lin’s Violett, Lila, PurPur, which combines Taiwanese music and literature. Angelin Preljocaj is bringing his eponymous company, Ballet Preljocaj, and their production of Snow White. Several of the theater pieces are collaborations between the Magdalena Project — which was formed in 1986 by 38 artists from 15 countries to promote female artists and theater — and theater companies, including the Odin Teatret from Denmark, Germany’s Theater Unikate and Teatro la Candelaria from Colombia.
In addition to the performances, there will be pre-show talks in the National Theater lobby a half-hour before each performance of 1433 — The Grand Voyage, Hamlet, Snow White and Violett, Lila, PurPur, while over in the Concert Hall lobby there will be a talk half-hour before On the Road, Drum Beat, Heart Beat! and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
There will also be after-performance talks by Angelin Preljocaj, the choreographer of Snow White, on March 6, Patricia Ariza, the director of Emily Dickonson, on March 14, Roberta Carreri and Eugenio Barba, the performers in Salt, on March 21, Gilla Cremer, the actress in M.E.D.E.A., on March 28, and Thomas Ostermeier, director of Hamlet, on March 28.
Tickets for the festival went on sale last month and there are several discount and subscription offers available. Friends of the NTCH can get the usual 10 percent discount, while students are entitled to 20 percent off. When buying subscription tickets, you must purchase the same number of tickets for each of the shows you choose. However, if you buy tickets to more than five shows, there is a 25 percent discount, and for more than eight shows, the discount is 34 percent. There is a limited subscription offer (100) of a 50 percent discount if you buy tickets to more than 10 of the shows.
Tickets can be purchased at the NTCH box office, online at www.artstickets.com.tw, by phone at (02) 3393-9888, at 7-Eleven iBon kiosks or through Hi-Life’s (萊爾富) Life-ET ticketing service.
While the festival is still more two months away, and given that there will be just one performance of some of the music productions, while on some weekends, especially in March, there will be three productions, it’s worth planning ahead, whether you are interested in just one or two companies or want to see more.
Ajay Verma, a consultant gastroenterologist at Kettering general hospital in Northamptonshire, says our gut is a “complex machine.” “It is constantly providing us with the nutrition we need, initially to grow and develop, and then for us to survive, thrive and repair from injury and illness.” How can we keep it functioning well? Put simply: “Make sure what you put into it is balanced, and that you clear out its waste products adequately,” Verma says. “In a general gastroenterology clinic, the most common conditions we see are irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), gastroesophageal reflux disease, inflammatory bowel disease and constipation,” says Nisha
The arithmetic is straightforward and uncomfortable. By the end of 2025, Taiwan had committed itself to a 50-30-20 electricity mix — half natural gas, 30 per cent coal, 20 per cent renewables. The Ministry of Economic Affairs’s (MOEA) own monthly energy reports tell a different story. Natural gas reached 47.8 per cent of generation last year. Coal stood at 35.4 per cent, comfortably above its target ceiling. Renewables came in at 13.1 per cent, well short of the 20 per cent Taipei had pledged a decade earlier. Installed renewable capacity reached roughly half of the 12 gigawatts (GW) the government
Last week US President Donald Trump was asked by a reporter whether he would speak on the phone to the President of Taiwan. “l’ll speak to him. I speak to everybody. We have that situation very well in hand,” Trump said. This marked the second time in a couple of weeks he had said he would talk to the President of Taiwan. In 2016 he famously took a call from then-president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), when he was president-elect. Despite warnings that the apocalypse was nigh because of a phone call, the world quickly forgot about the conversation between two democratically-elected presidents.
May 25 to May 31 Few believed that apples could be cultivated on a commercial scale in Taiwan’s high mountains. When horticulturalist Cheng Chao-hsiung (程兆熊) first proposed the idea in 1955, both American and Taiwanese colleagues dismissed it as implausible, arguing that temperate fruit could not be reliably grown on a subtropical island, especially on rugged terrain. However, it was this terrain in the Central Mountain Range where many Chinese Civil War veterans were resettled in the late 1950s. With limited job prospects and no family in Taiwan, they were placed on cooperative farms aimed toward self-sufficiency. Some say the conditions
RSS