Taipei has arts festivals aplenty these days and for the arts savvy, you can put your money down for a big-ticket imported act or an off-the-wall experimental production pretty much any time of the year. But for those less familiar with the ins-and-outs of the arts scene, finding something to watch can be a bewildering exercise.
The Performing Arts Alliance (表演藝術聯盟), which is the organizer for this year’s Huashan Living Arts Festival (2012 華山藝術生活節), has fixed on this the disjunction between art and ordinary life as the concept for this year’s festival, and through the design of the month-long festival, it aims to sweep aside boundaries between the artistic and the recreational.
“People queue up for May Day concert tickets,” said to Lin Pei-rung (林佩蓉), a staffer with the alliance said. “The audiences are definitely out there.” The challenge is to bring them in, and to this end the talents of two well-known designers have been sought to create the best possible environment to encourage engagement with the artistic life.
Photo courtesy of PAA, photographer Wang Bi-zheng
Boundaries swept aside
Photo courtesy of PAA, photographer Wang Bi-zheng
The logo for the festival this year is a huge windmill, which designer Akibo (李明道) told the Taipei Times represents the churning together not just of all kinds of arts, but also of all kinds of people. Akibo, who has created the visual design for the festival since its inception in 2010 said: “As this is the third year of the festival, and people are familiar with the festival, I felt we could focus on the conceptual element. A fan represents a drawing together of arts and people.”
The main festival street in Huashan was designed by architect Kung Shu-chang (龔書章), who has created a central avenue of kiosks that look outward to the warehouse buildings on either side. As a result, the information and ticketing booth are both turned away from the main entrance, a result that, according to Lin, is fundamental to the desire of the festival organizers not to reinforce artificial boundaries.
“In most theaters and the like, the box office faces the main entrance. It can be quite intimidating,” Lin said, suggesting that this kind of set up almost seemed to demand to know what your business before letting you through. “With this design, you are inside the environment already,” she said.
The box office does not bar your entrance, and in fact is as much an information kiosk as a sales counter, with videos of upcoming performances on the wall, folders with information about shows and artists, as well as a list of discounts for people buying tickets directly at the Huashan venue. Offering discounts at the venue, as opposed to online, goes directly against the current trend, but again is aimed at drawing people into the Huashan environment and its many other artistic temptations.
Take a punt on a show
“Being in this environment, with so much information available, people might be a bit more willing to take a punt on a show,” Lin said.
In addition to a wide range of shows for which tickets must be purchased in the conventional manner, there is also a huge range of free activities at Huashan to warm people up to the joys of art.
Walking on past the box office, there is a theatrical souvenir shop that contains books, videos, CDs and memorabilia from over 200 of Taiwan’s theatrical groups. It is also the venue for a variety of games that PAA is experimenting with. Public participation in these activities is encouraged through the offer of various free gifts.
Visitors can choose to select various potential activities that they might wish to participate in with artists, ranging from joining the artists for a beer to joining a expressionist workshop. “We will tally the results after the festival,” Lin said “and will present the results to the performance groups for them to consider.” According to Lin, this might open new avenues for artist/audience interaction rather than just the formal one that takes place in a theater.
Something for the kids
The installation created by Kung also has a mini maze created like a series of tunnels that children can clamber through. The surface of the maze is textured like rock, and the twists and turns make children move in ways that are not so different from dance. There is also a light and sound game box in which children are directed to make movements to touch points surround them, creating dance-like movements. This only operates on the weekends, when teachers from the Cloud Gate Dance School (雲門舞集舞蹈教室) are available to provide some direction.
Then there is the graffiti wall, a Perspex wall on which children can draw. Being transparent, this “wall” allows interaction between children on both sides, and Lin said was one of the most popular items in the set up.
Static displays in the Silian Building (四連棟) are also worth checking out, as it provides a tasting menu of the diverse arts that are now being created in Taiwan. There are listening stations which provide a huge range of audio content from contemporary local groups, and video stations that offer archive material of performances by Taiwan’s top artists. Videos are also projected onto screens in another area, and on weekends, mini theatrical events are performed, with time left over after each performance for the public to ask questions.
Outside performances
Best of all, every weekend there are lots of outdoor performances in which people can sit on the lawn, children and dogs can wander about, while anything from traditional puppet theater to acrobatics and contemporary dance are performed on stage. The evenings usually wrap up with a film screening: also usually something to do with the theater. Tonight there is Mao’s Last Dancer, with Hairspray tomorrow. On Oct. 27, check out the screening of Pink Floyds’ The Wall.
The festival runs through to Nov. 4, with three more weekends worth of activities. Detailed English program information about the festival is available at www.hlaf.com.tw.
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
Approaching her mid-30s, Xiong Yidan reckons that most of her friends are on to their second or even third babies. But Xiong has more than a dozen. There is Lucky, the street dog from Bangkok who jumped into a taxi with her and never left. There is Sophie and Ben, sibling geese, who honk from morning to night. Boop and Pan, both goats, are romantically involved. Dumpling the hedgehog enjoys a belly rub from time to time. The list goes on. Xiong nurtures her brood from her 8,000 square meter farm in Chiang Dao, a mountainous district in northern Thailand’s
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
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist