Director and actor Hsu Yen-ling (徐堰鈴) feels torn as Shakespeare’s Wild Sisters Group’s (莎士比亞的妹妹們的劇團) new production The Tracks on the Beach (沙灘上的腳印), which was inspired by the work of Marguerite Duras, hits the stage.
She had hoped the production would evolve organically as an abstract work in progress. Yet for all her experimental aspirations, she returned to a concrete, easy-to-grasp story.
Above all, though, Hsu strove to reproduce Duras’ sentiments.
The director’s bold exploration begins with Duras’ Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein (The Ravishing of Lol Stein). Stein, a married woman, returns to her hometown, where the disloyalty of her fiance tormented her when she was young, which led to an obsession with her childhood friend’s paramour Jacques Hold.
Duras’ tale serves only as a backdrop in Hsu’s production, the first of a yearlong series of performances to celebrate the Sisters’ 15th anniversary. The narrative of the play’s first half deals with love, desire and a constantly frustrated, elusive relationship between a deranged woman (Wei Chin-ju, 魏沁如) and a man (Shih Ming-shuai, 施名帥).
In the second half, the two characters become dancers and emulate each other’s movements, improvising and creating moves that resemble those of a tango or a pas de deux, though they rarely touch.
Meanwhile, a prerecorded voice-over reads lines from Duras’ novel, but deliberately out of sync with what’s going on on the stage.
The director says the piece is about the process of creating.
“I want to grasp why people want to create art and seek a way of creating that I feel most at ease with,” Hsu said. This play “is the beginning of a period of heavy learning. It is a tremendous task, but I may end up writing everything, hence nothing.”
Hsu said during an interview on Sunday that as director, she is constantly engaged in negotiations and discussions with the play’s actors and production team. As a result, the play is in flux.
All this weekend’s performances of The Tracks on the Beach at Guling Street Avant-Garde Theatre (牯嶺街小劇場) have long since sold out. Next in line in the series is Jumel, which takes place in June and was tailor-made by French theater director Franck Dimech for the company’s two veteran performers, Juan Wen-ping (阮文萍) and Chou Jung-shih (周蓉詩). Following Jumel are new renderings of the company’s 2005 box-office success Michael Jackson in August and Quartett von Heiner Muller in October.
For more information, visit the group’s bilingual Web site at www.swsg95.com.tw.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist