Taiyuan Puppet Theatre Company’s (台原偶戲團) Pilgrimage, which opens on Wednesday, is a very different puppetry experience, even by the group’s own unconventional standards.
Most of the action takes place in a wading pool on the floor of the Nadou Theater (納豆劇場) to the accompanied of a live accordion, guitar and erhu (二胡) combo, and the puppeteers wear black neoprene bodysuits.
Taking inspiration from two great ocean travelers, Pilgrimage does not so much tell a story as create an abstract work of images and sounds that explores the worlds of the Ming Dynasty general Koxinga (國姓爺) (also known as Zheng Chenggong (鄭成功)), who built a short-lived fiefdom based on Taiwan in the 17th century, and the Portuguese soldier-poet Luis Vaz de Camoes, who explored Asia in the 16th century and whose Chinese lover died in a shipwreck. And added to that highly eclectic mix of characters are a Brazilian leprechaun called Saci, the African deity Yemanja and the ocean goddess Matsu (媽祖).
Photo courtesy of the Taiyuan Puppet Theatre Company
Boundaries of time and place are transcended in Pilgrimage’s tale of love, birth, death, the transitory nature of existence and, above all, the ocean’s ability to bring people together and to tear them apart again.
Staging the production presented Taiyuan Puppet Theatre Company with many technical problems, not least because the puppeteers must spend much of the performance partly submerged.
During a rehearsal earlier this week, the puppeteers huddled next to a fan heater to regain some body warmth after more than an hour splashing about, and occasionally floundering, in the pool.
Photo courtesy of the Taiyuan Puppet Theatre Company
“The theater represents reality, and as these stories take place on the ocean, the most direct way to represent them is with water,” director Wu Shan-shan (伍姍姍) said during a rehearsal break. “I have taken the simplest and the most difficult route. It is also the most direct route.”
But the water is much more than a production gimmick. In addition to the not-so-metaphorical reference to the ocean, through which all the characters and locations are linked, the water also alters the small theater’s visual and audio dynamics.
Taiyuan’s Pilgrimage uses images and music rather than dialogue or narration to tell its story.
“The stories of puppet theater where generally told through words,” Wu said, adding that Taiyuan, in its experimental productions at least, aimed “to show rather than to tell.”
This approach has given birth to innovative theatrical devices that increase the puppets’ expressiveness.
In Pilgrimage, not only do the puppets interact with human actors, the puppeteers themselves take part in the action. Their hands often serve as the puppet’s hands, providing the puppets with a whole new expressive dimension.
It is techniques like this, and the need for audience members to put aside representational expectations, that make new Taiyuan shows so exciting.
It is also worth pointing out that while Pilgrimage is staged by a puppet theater company and makes extensive use of puppets, the cast includes two highly accomplished contemporary dancers who play an integral part in generating the production’s on-stage dynamism.
While there is some dialogue in the show, the words form part of a soundscape created by Huang Si-nung (黃思農), the founder of the experimental theater group Against Again Troupe (再拒劇團), who has created a musical fabric woven from European folk melodies, Chinese operatic tunes, electronic sound manipulation and poetry read in Chinese
and Portuguese.
Pilgrimage shares many similarities with earlier Taiyuan productions, but its format, with widely diverse, even incongruous elements, linked together by their common association with the sea, is much more flexible.
Once the technical challenges are overcome, said Wu, the structural framework developed for Pilgrimage will be used to bring more stories to the stage.
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
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby