It would make the perfect headline: Lady Gaga in an S&M tussle with Andy Warhol. The story would go on to describe, in intimate detail, the dripping of candle wax on Warhol’s naked torso, a whip to keep him in line and plenty of rope to ensure no escape.
Though implausible (Warhol’s been dead for 23 years), the above scene kicks off American Dream Factory (美國夢工廠), the latest play of social criticism by Against Again Troupe (再拒劇團), which begins tonight at Guling Street Avant-Garde Theatre (牯嶺街小劇場).
“It’s the play’s only S&M scene,” said Sammie Liu (劉柏珊), the production’s producer, an hour into a technical rehearsal on Wednesday night.
Pity, that, because Against Again Troupe does such a bang-up job of it — a cross between the gothic atmosphere of Warhol’s Flesh for Frankenstein and the false sexuality of a Gaga video (didn’t she used to be a blow-up doll?).
Directed by Huang Si-nung (黃思農), who co-wrote and workshopped the script with his four actors, American Dream Factory is a mise-en-scene that examines the export of the American dream. Here, however, democratic principles don’t lead to prosperity — the ad nauseum mantra mouthed by a string of recent US presidents.
Today’s American dream export, American Dream Factory suggests, is unfettered capitalism, consumerism and materialism, a dehumanizing product that perpetuates vast inequalities and turns people into automatons. Along with Gaga and Warhol — the latter played by Jack Yao (姚淳耀) of Au Revoir Taipei (一頁台北) fame — the play uses Ronald McDonald, Michael Jackson and Madonna as symbols of the American dream gone wrong.
American Dream Factory began as an art installation for the 2008 Singapore Fringe Festival. The installation comprises the set for the play and requires considerable visual multi-tasking to keep up with. Three televisions showing, for example, footage of Kurt Cobain smashing his guitar and Warhol eating a hamburger, add to the overall theme but also serve as a distraction to the human action. But that’s probably the point.
Though not a particularly original concept (it seems that every month sees a new play in Taiwan attempting to tackle consumerism and materialism as a subject), the fantastical staging of the production makes it an enjoyable ride.
Growing up in a rural, religious community in western Canada, Kyle McCarthy loved hockey, but once he came out at 19, he quit, convinced being openly gay and an active player was untenable. So the 32-year-old says he is “very surprised” by the runaway success of Heated Rivalry, a Canadian-made series about the romance between two closeted gay players in a sport that has historically made gay men feel unwelcome. Ben Baby, the 43-year-old commissioner of the Toronto Gay Hockey Association (TGHA), calls the success of the show — which has catapulted its young lead actors to stardom -- “shocking,” and says
Inside an ordinary-looking townhouse on a narrow road in central Kaohsiung, Tsai A-li (蔡阿李) raised her three children alone for 15 years. As far as the children knew, their father was away working in the US. They were kept in the dark for as long as possible by their mother, for the truth was perhaps too sad and unjust for their young minds to bear. The family home of White Terror victim Ko Chi-hua (柯旗化) is now open to the public. Admission is free and it is just a short walk from the Kaohsiung train station. Walk two blocks south along Jhongshan
The People’s Republic of China (PRC) invaded Vietnam in 1979, following a year of increasingly tense relations between the two states. Beijing viewed Vietnam’s close relations with Soviet Russia as a threat. One of the pretexts it used was the alleged mistreatment of the ethnic Chinese in Vietnam. Tension between the ethnic Chinese and governments in Vietnam had been ongoing for decades. The French used to play off the Vietnamese against the Chinese as a divide-and-rule strategy. The Saigon government in 1956 compelled all Vietnam-born Chinese to adopt Vietnamese citizenship. It also banned them from 11 trades they had previously
The 2018 nine-in-one local elections were a wild ride that no one saw coming. Entering that year, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) was demoralized and in disarray — and fearing an existential crisis. By the end of the year, the party was riding high and swept most of the country in a landslide, including toppling the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in their Kaohsiung stronghold. Could something like that happen again on the DPP side in this year’s nine-in-one elections? The short answer is not exactly; the conditions were very specific. However, it does illustrate how swiftly every assumption early in an
RSS