The National Theater Concert Hall opens this year’s International Theater Festival in satirical style with Dulcinea’s Lament, a multimedia performance by Montreal-based theater group Dulcinea Langfelder & Co. It begins Thursday at 7:30pm.
Dulcinea Langfelder, the show’s principle actor and writer, said in an e-mail exchange that the work is based on the female character who is referred to but never appears in Cervantes’ novel Don Quixote.
“I haven’t come across many Dulcineas in my life, and most of them have been pet dogs,” wrote Langfelder, whose last Taipei performance, the 1996 Portrait of a Woman with Suitcase, received rave reviews. She added that the name Dulcinea is “charged with romantic and grandiose connotations” — nuances that she examines through wordplay, much like Cervantes’ novel.
“The show is based on associations one can make with this famous (and famously misunderstood) name,” she said. Dulcinea is often portrayed as a prostitute.
And the lament?
“Since Dulcinea del Toboso never speaks in Cervantes’ novel, I wanted to give her a voice. And since she is Don Quixote’s ‘raison d’etre’ — his reason for attempting to save the world — she laments his failure to do so. Today’s ‘Post 9-11’ world is woefully reminiscent of the time of the crusades. The discovery of a ‘New World,’ with all its hope for something better, has led to yet another superpower ... yet more war, after war, after war,” she said.
Audiences shouldn’t be put off by the seriousness of the themes — which she uses to examine the roles of men and women throughout history — as Langfelder handles them with considerable doses of satire.
Mythology, philosophy and literature are all touched upon through music, dance, monologue and video images projected on to several moveable screens. The action never wavers thanks to the snappy rhythm of the movement and the spoken lines, which one reviewer said, “border on stand-up comedy.”
But much of the narrative explores feminism and the feminine.
“I believe that Cervantes imagined Dulcinea to represent the feminine side of human spirituality,” she said. “The word, ‘devil,’ comes from ‘devi’: the Sanskrit word for ‘Goddess.’ Dulcinea is the Feminine: a damsel in distress worth fighting for.”
Langfelder also examines another timeless theme in the performance: physical intimacy and its taboos.
“How did sex become such a ‘bad’, forbidden thing? Why do we have pornography? Why did we pervert sex from an essential, natural thing to something so threatening? Dulcinea represents (among other things) ‘good’ sex!,’” she said.
By global standards, the traffic congestion that afflicts Taiwan’s urban areas isn’t horrific. But nor is it something the country can be proud of. According to TomTom, a Dutch developer of location and navigation technologies, last year Taiwan was the sixth most congested country in Asia. Of the 492 towns and cities included in its rankings last year, Taipei was the 74th most congested. Taoyuan ranked 105th, while Hsinchu County (121st), Taichung (142nd), Tainan (173rd), New Taipei City (227th), Kaohsiung (241st) and Keelung (302nd) also featured on the list. Four Japanese cities have slower traffic than Taipei. (Seoul, which has some
Michael slides a sequin glove over the pop star’s tarnished legacy, shrouding Michael Jackson’s complications with a conventional biopic that, if you cover your ears, sounds great. Antoine Fuqua’s movie is sanctioned by Jackson’s estate and its producers include the estate’s executors. So it is, by its nature, a narrow, authorized perspective on Jackson. The film ends before the flood of allegations of sexual abuse of children, or Jackson’s own acknowledgment of sleeping alongside kids. Jackson and his estate have long maintained his innocence. In his only criminal trial, in 2005, Jackson was acquitted. Michael doesn’t even subtly nod to these facts.
Writing of the finds at the ancient iron-working site of Shihsanhang (十 三行) in New Taipei City’s Bali District (八里), archaeologist Tsang Cheng-hwa (臧振華) of the Academia Sinica’s Institute of History and Philology observes: “One bronze bowl gilded with gold, together with copper coins and fragments of Tang and Song ceramics, were also found. These provide evidence for early contact between Taiwan aborigines and Chinese.” The Shihsanhang Web site from the Ministry of Culture says of the finds: “They were evidence that the residents of the area had a close trading relation with Chinese civilians, as the coins can be
The March/April volume of Foreign Affairs, long a purveyor of pro-China pablum, offered up another irksome Beijing-speak on the issues and solutions for the problems vexing the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the US: “America and China at the Edge of Ruin: A Last Chance to Step Back From the Brink” rang the provocative title, by David M. Lampton and Wang Jisi (王緝思). If one ever wants to describe what went wrong with US-PRC relations, the career of Wang Jisi is a good place to start. Wang has extensive experience in the US and the West. He was a visiting
RSS