THEATER: Upping the ante

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The 12th Taipei Arts Festival (第十二屆台北藝術節) began yesterday with Hey Girl!, a visually stunning performance by Romeo Castellucci. The avant-garde play and its celebrated Italian director embody the direction in which the festival has been headed since the Taipei Culture Foundation (台北市文化基金會) took control of it three years ago.

“We want people to see that [the Taipei Arts Festival] is doing some serious art instead of community art,” said Victoria Wang (王文儀), executive director of the Taipei Culture Foundation. “This [means] giving audiences a new format, new techniques and new styles to show where contemporary theater is going.”

In 2008, the first year of the festival’s reorganization, the Taipei Culture Foundation spent a wad of cash on bringing Robert Wilson to Taiwan, which significantly increased the festival’s profile, said Wang. Last year’s theme, Shakespeare, relied on the Bard’s good name to present a number of avant-garde pieces. It proved a successful pairing with many shows selling out soon after tickets went on sale.

This year’s festival features unconventional theater by some of the world’s top practitioners and more mainstream theatrical performances and musicals by local troupes.

But are Taipei audiences ready to pay big bucks for what is generally considered experimental theater? As of Wednesday, only Waiting for What? (等待窩窩頭之團團圓圓越獄風雲), a play by Four Chairs Theater (四把椅子劇團) about pandas Yuan Yuan (圓圓) and Tuan Tuan (團團) plotting to escape from the Taipei Zoo, had sold out.

Wang lamented the difficulty the festival had in promoting some of the more demanding of its top-billed performances. “In Taiwan, audiences tend to want all the answers ... They want to know exactly what [an artist] is trying to [say],” she said. “So it’s more like an educational kind of experience for them — not an artistic or relaxing or even entertaining kind of experience.” This is unfortunate, because this year’s lineup features the work of directors who rarely, if ever, come to Taiwan.

But perhaps it’s understandable, as many of the performances require the viewer’s complete attention. Hey Girl!, with its sparse dialogue and emphasis on multimedia visuals, is a difficult work to penetrate. One must get inside the body and mind of the play’s protagonist, a young woman coming to terms with her own life experiences, to fully appreciate its themes of violence and the oppression of women. Yet if reviews are anything to go by, it is more than worth the effort. The Guardian called Castellucci “a towering visual genius” who created a “mesmerizing show.”

Even more unconventional, perhaps, is Stifters Dinge, a genre-bending piece that opens on Wednesday by internationally celebrated German director and composer Heiner Goebbels. Equal parts music, theater and art installation, it is described in the festival catalogue as “a composition for five pianos with no pianists, a play with no actors, a performance without performers — one might say a no-man show.” Wang said it was chosen because it illustrates the endless possibilities that contemporary theater professionals are bringing to the stage.

While some plays might stretch the limits of the viewer’s understanding, others may test their ability to concentrate. Lipsynch by Robert Lepage, the French-Canadian pioneer of mixed-media theater, is an almost nine-hour “marathon” performance (including four short intermissions and a 45-minute dinner break). It begins on Aug. 21 and tells the story of an orphaned boy who is adopted by an opera singer, and playfully touches on the heavy themes of family, language and identity.