The Sun Son Theatre’s (身聲劇場) Tribal Sound Music Room is a living museum. Hundreds of instruments from across the world hang on the walls, dangle from the ceiling, hide in corners and are even part of the furniture.
Tomorrow night visitors can hear some of the venue’s collection — African drums, a two-string lute from Albania, Malaysian gongs and Native American flutes — when Sun Son’s Wild Beat (狂打樂擊) percussion group launches a series of monthly shows.
Wild Beat is an offshoot of Sun Son Theatre, a performing troupe with a penchant for tribal music and dance.
“We combine many different kinds of music, from places like Taiwan, Africa, Indonesia and Southeast Asia,” said Sun Son Theatre’s artistic director Ng Leon-son (吳忠良) in an interview at the group’s studio workshop, which is located in a sleepy riverside neighborhood of Tamsui (淡水).
Wild Beat and Sun Son’s members see themselves as nomads in a world of percussion and dance. Since forming in 1999, they have performed in countries such as Senegal, Brazil and Indonesia, returning to Taiwan with new instruments, techniques and ideas, which they then incorporate into novel performances.
“It’s using all kinds of drums to create a new kind of expression,” said Ng of Wild Beat’s music. “So, it’s not about playing the drums of a particular country. It’s more of a new style in Asian percussion.”
Wild Beat’s six members also try to put a new spin on local instruments, such as Chinese drums and the gongs associated with traditional temple and funeral music.
Taiwanese audiences tend to dismiss these instruments as “noisy,” says Ng, so Wild Beat plays them using African beats.
“The effect is great,” he said. “People start to realize the sounds from [these drums] can be enjoyable.”
In addition to live shows, the Tribal Sound Music Room, which holds around 40 people, hosts educational workshops, where attendees can try out the instruments and build one of their own. Recently visitors have been building rainsticks, bean-filled tubes that imitate the sound of rain.
Many of the instruments at the Tribal Sound Music Room come from Ng’s personal collection, which he started with a simple bamboo tube drum from his native Malaysia. He decided to bring his instruments to Sun Son Theatre and create an interactive space after seeing how “excited” his friends became whenever they saw his collection.
Ng showed me one of the more unusual instruments from a trip abroad: a rattler made out of part of a horse’s skull, which he obtained from an Easter Island musician. The sound comes from slapping the skull, which shakes the teeth that are held loosely in place by wire.
It’s not as creepy as it sounds. The skull has been polished smooth and is painted with intricate patterns that resemble Aboriginal art, designs that look like the vibrant lines and colors which adorn the walls of the Tribal Music Sound Room.
“I hope this room can let people get closely acquainted with the instruments,” said Ng.
President William Lai (賴清德) yesterday delivered an address marking the first anniversary of his presidency. In the speech, Lai affirmed Taiwan’s global role in technology, trade and security. He announced economic and national security initiatives, and emphasized democratic values and cross-party cooperation. The following is the full text of his speech: Yesterday, outside of Beida Elementary School in New Taipei City’s Sanxia District (三峽), there was a major traffic accident that, sadly, claimed several lives and resulted in multiple injuries. The Executive Yuan immediately formed a task force, and last night I personally visited the victims in hospital. Central government agencies and the
Australia’s ABC last week published a piece on the recall campaign. The article emphasized the divisions in Taiwanese society and blamed the recall for worsening them. It quotes a supporter of the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) as saying “I’m 43 years old, born and raised here, and I’ve never seen the country this divided in my entire life.” Apparently, as an adult, she slept through the post-election violence in 2000 and 2004 by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), the veiled coup threats by the military when Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) became president, the 2006 Red Shirt protests against him ginned up by
As with most of northern Thailand’s Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) settlements, the village of Arunothai was only given a Thai name once the Thai government began in the 1970s to assert control over the border region and initiate a decades-long process of political integration. The village’s original name, bestowed by its Yunnanese founders when they first settled the valley in the late 1960s, was a Chinese name, Dagudi (大谷地), which literally translates as “a place for threshing rice.” At that time, these village founders did not know how permanent their settlement would be. Most of Arunothai’s first generation were soldiers
Among Thailand’s Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) villages, a certain rivalry exists between Arunothai, the largest of these villages, and Mae Salong, which is currently the most prosperous. Historically, the rivalry stems from a split in KMT military factions in the early 1960s, which divided command and opium territories after Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) cut off open support in 1961 due to international pressure (see part two, “The KMT opium lords of the Golden Triangle,” on May 20). But today this rivalry manifests as a different kind of split, with Arunothai leading a pro-China faction and Mae Salong staunchly aligned to Taiwan.
RSS