Paying NT$600 to spend 45 minutes in a hotel room with one or more strangers could be the start of an erotic fantasy for some — or it could just be time for the Riverbed Theatre’s (河床劇團) second annual Just for You Festival.
Just 112 people will have a chance to get up close and personal with theater next month as the company performs four plays, seven times a day over four days, all for just one person at a time.
It’s an amazing undertaking and last year’s shows provoked an extraordinary outpouring from audience members, who found the one-on-one experience exhilarating, terrifyingly intimate and thought provoking — as did the actors and directors.
Photo courtesy of Riverbed Theatre
Craig Quintero, Riverbed’s artistic director, said last year that he couldn’t wait to do it again and he hoped to find a venue as good as Taipei’s Hotel Eight Zone (八方美學商旅). The hotel was apparently undeterred by last year’s festival and offered its second-floor rooms again for the sets.
This year Quintero has a new cast of collaborators for directors, whose varied backgrounds will make for widely disparate plays: dancer/choreographer Chou Shu-yi (周書毅), artist Yen Yi-tzu (顏亦慈) and actor/scenic designer Li Jain-lung (李建隆).
“I like their work, that they want to experiment, need to experiment,” he said at a press conference on Monday.
Photo courtesy of Riverbed Theatre
Twenty years ago Li was in Quintero’s first play in Taiwan, staged at the Chinese Culture University, for which Li won best actor. Quintero said it was great to be able to collaborate with him all these years later.
“That’s what’s great about the Taiwan art scene, people leave, people come back,” Quintero said.
Yen has also collaborated with Riverbed before, helping with the set for its 2006 production about Albert Einstein, while Quintero met Chou in Avignon, France, in 2010 during an annual arts festival there. The two hit it off: He said he called Chou about working on the Just For You Festival and Chou said, “Great, let’s do it,” even though it’s far from his normal metier.
Photo courtesy of Riverbed Theatre
For both Li and Yen, the time they spent away from Taiwan has influenced their plays.
Li spent six years in Japan studying scenic design and Japanese culture will be a major focus of his play, Geisha in the Room (梔子花與馬). Li said the play, which has three actors, will incorporate some traditional elements of a geisha’s life and performances — a tea ceremony, a flower arranging ceremony, a scent ceremony — as well as images from the Tang dynasty-era Dunhuang (敦煌) murals in China. The geisha will interact with the audience member through the ceremonies, including making an individual flower arrangement for each person.
While Li has incorporated the culture of his foreign stay into his play, Yen has focused on the sense of alienation she felt during the years she lived abroad as a student for her production, Witness (外人).
“I used to study in the Netherlands. I spent five years there, but I felt alone in public spaces … understanding situations in my own way. I lived in my own world. Dutch is very difficult, so even with my Dutch friends there was still a separateness sometimes,” she said.
That idea of a barrier to greater intimacy, of wanting to be involved, be inside, but blocked from doing so — whether by language or something else — will be a problem facing her audiences, because there will be a transparency separating them from the two performers.
She is also building a greenhouse in her hotel room for the set.
“I like to go to greenhouses when I travel. In a greenhouse everything is well protected, she said.
Chou’s play, The Last Day of Mr. Chou (周先生的最後一天), examines the day in a life of a dancer, the preparations a dancer makes before leaving home — or a hotel room when on the road. However, his inspiration came from the of question of how you would live your life on your last day on earth.
“I worry about this … if today was your last day, what would you do? It’s normal to eat breakfast, go running, since you don’t know it is the last day,” Chou said. “Don’t you wonder what you would do?”
“As a dancer, hotels are like home for me, they’re comfortable, they [hotels] do everything for you. A dancer’s life is in the room ... When I choreograph, I always dance in my room,” he said.
Chou said he was excited, but nervous about the play, in which he will be the sole performer.
“On stage you have a barrier, you don’t need to really care about the audience, you just need to concentrate on what you are doing. But one-on-one you really have to care about the audience, so how to share is very hard. It’s a challenge,” he said. “I hope I’m still alive at the end.”
Coming and going will be the theme of Quintero’s play, En-trance (入口), which has the biggest cast of the four plays, with five actors.
“The basic idea is that life is a series of entrances … entrances and departures. How do we bring audiences into the piece, onto the stage, into the play. How do you enter someone’s life?” he said. “You see 1,000 shows, but how to make one memorable?”
To reinforce the uniqueness of each performance, the starting times for the shows, which each run about 45 minutes, are staggered in 15-minute intervals, so an audience member coming or going from his or her play won’t see another audience member.
While the shows aren’t for another three weeks, the tickets go on sale this Sunday. Riverbed staff will be at the Taipeier Cafe on Anhe Road (安和路), behind the Eslite Bookstore’s Dunhua South Road branch (台北敦南誠品) to sell the tickets from noon to 3pm. Last year the shows sold out in under two hours. Be forewarned, ticket holders may be asked to provide an e-mail address and answer or ask some questions so a director can tailor the show more specifically for each person.
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