While Tibetan culture is celebrated across the capital, the plight of people living on the streets is being put under the spotlight by Homeless in Taipei (流浪讀劇計畫), an ongoing project initiated by the Wanhua Theater (萬華劇團).
Homeless in Taipei began with two men and one woman from the theater group spending several nights sleeping on the streets earlier this month. They were not allowed to take any money with them, but were free to use other resources to find food and a place to get some shut-eye. Another team of three will undertake the same mission on Feb. 24.
“We want to gain a better understanding of what it’s like to be homeless,” the troupe’s artistic director Chung Te-fan (鍾得凡) told the Taipei Times.
Photo Courtesy of Wanhua Theater
The idea of living a homeless life came from The Eleventh Planet, a play by noted Slovene writer, poet and playwright Evald Flisar. It tells a story of three vagrants, Peter, Paul and Magdalene, who cannot resist the temptations of the world of the “bonkers” (hard-working citizens) they claim to despise. The three believe they have been chosen to go to the solar system’s 11th planet where they will find a utopian living environment.
The Eleventh Planet’s script was translated to Chinese by Ting Fan (丁凡), a member of Wanhua Theater, and recently went on sale in Taiwan.
To Chung, Flisar uses the play’s characters as metaphors to describe the nature of existence in a capitalist society. In order to draw attention to the beautifully written script, the troupe has organized 11 play-reading sessions by actors and nonprofessionals who will join the troupe’s members living on the streets.
The play-reading sessions will be held in different locations across the capital, mostly in old parts of town, including Wanhua (萬華) and Datong (大同) districts.
Though he spent a few days living on the streets earlier this month, Chung says he had not really “put himself out there.” Because the weather was cold and the participants didn’t have enough clothes to wear and food to eat, they spent most of the time cuddling each other to keep warm.
May 11 to May 17 Traversing the southern slopes of the Yushan Range in 1931, Japanese naturalist Tadao Kano knew he was approaching the last swath of Taiwan still beyond colonial control. The “vast, unknown territory,” protected by the “fierce” Bunun headman Dahu Ali, was “filled with an utterly endless jungle that choked the mountains and valleys,” Kano wrote. He noted how the group had “refused to submit to the measures of our authorities and entrenched themselves deep in these mountains … living a free existence spent chasing deer in the morning and seeking serow in the evening,” even describing them as
As a different column was being written, the big news dropped that Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅?萁) announced that negotiations within his caucus, with legislative speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) of the KMT, party Chair Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文), Taichung Mayor Lu Shiow-yen (盧秀燕) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) Chair Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) had produced a compromise special military budget proposal. On Thursday morning, prior to meeting with Cheng over a lunch of beef noodles, Lu reiterated her support for a budget of NT$800 or NT$900 billion — but refused to comment after the meeting. Right after Fu’s
Yesterday, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) nominated legislator Puma Shen (沈伯洋) as their Taipei mayoral candidate, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) put their stamp of approval on Wei Ping-cheng (魏平政) as their candidate for Changhua County commissioner and former legislator Tsai Pi-ru (蔡壁如) of the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) has begun the process to also run in Changhua, though she has not yet been formally nominated. All three news items are bizarre. The DPP has struggled with settling on a Taipei nominee. The only candidate who declared interest was Enoch Wu (吳怡農), but the party seemed determined to nominate anyone
What government project has expropriated the most land in Taiwan? According to local media reports, it is the Taoyuan Aerotropolis, eating 2,500 hectares of land in its first phase, with more to come. Forty thousand people are expected to be displaced by the project. Naturally that enormous land grab is generating powerful pushback. Last week Chen Chien-ho (陳健和), a local resident of Jhuwei Borough (竹圍) in Taoyuan City’s Dayuan District (大園) filed a petition for constitutional review of the project after losing his case at the Taipei Administrative Court. The Administrative Court found in favor of nine other local landowners, but
RSS