The NTCH’s Innovation Series continues this week with Mary Marlin Jony Jonathan (瑪莉瑪蓮 — 強尼強納森), and followed next week by No Comment! Nonstop! (無可奉告 — 13.0.0.0.0.全面啟動). Young directors appraise the achievements and longevity of classic texts from Taiwan’s experimental theater, providing a chance for audiences to look back and assess where this kind of theater has got to after decades of development.
Opening tonight is Chen Shi-ying’s (陳仕瑛) interpretation of Mary Marlin Jony Jonathan, a play by the influential director Tien Chi-yuan (田啟元) and performed originally by Critical Point Theater Phenomenon (臨界點劇象錄劇團). Both the play and the company were important in pushing forward experimental theater in the 1990s, a time of great political ferment.
SUPERFICIAL CHANGES
Photo courtesy of NTCH
It was a time when battle lines were drawn, with the established norms of political and sexual power coming under attack from a new generation of artists who had been exposed to Western literary and political theory. Twenty years on from works like Mary Marlin Jony Jonathan, and Taiwanese society has changed, at least superficially.
“Things seem to have changed, but have they really?,” Chen asked. “At that time, these artists were criticizing the government. Now you just turn on the TV, and its full of critical talk about the government. Are we any better off for this? Many of the issues dealt with in the play are still very much part of modern society, they are simply expressed in a different way.”
Mary Marlin Jony Jonathan was inspired by Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, and was performed through the 1990s in a number of productions, each reflecting the subtle shifts in counter-culture activism.
Photo courtesy of NTCH
“This play is about the relationship between lovers, including struggles and conflicts, and looks at how this influences how we act in society, or how we communicate with others. Everyone has some interest in how we respond to a lover, and this play expands this relationship to a wider social context,” Chen said.
The play explores the complex relationship between lovers that oscillate between various poles, from tenderness to revulsion, dependence to fury. The difficulty of expressing these emotions, which is central to the play, has acquired a new level as Mary Marlin Jony Jonathan enters the 21st century, an age characterized by communication technology. Chen said that this technology has not enhanced our ability to communicate.
NO COMMENT
Next week, the Innovation Series will draw to a close with a new production of No Comment! Nonstop! (無可奉告 — 13.0.0.0.0.全面啟動), a play by the doyen of Taiwan’s playwrights Chi Wei-ran (紀蔚然) that was first performed in 2001.
Chi is known for his acerbic humor and satirical take on society, and director Chen Chia-hsiang (陳家祥) opted to keep the original script of this decade-old play rather than updating it.
“In the original play, there are many references to current events, and I have retained these as stories that continue to exist. This turns it into an entirely new text. Using this device I can draw together past and present, the play from 2001 and the production in 2012, and we can observe what has changed and what has not. Often when we talk about things, we remain on the periphery of what we want to express and never get to the heart of the matter, which is about people and how we communicate. This is an issue that I think is very important.”
Chen said the importance of the original play for him was that it was a realization within a Taiwanese context of all the Western theory that the theatrical establishment in Taiwan has adopted.
“Chi was able to take all of this and use it in a play that had the experience of life in Taiwan as its point of departure,” Chen said.
A few weeks ago I found myself at a Family Mart talking with the morning shift worker there, who has become my coffee guy. Both of us were in a funk over the “unseasonable” warm weather, a state of mind known as “solastalgia” — distress produced by environmental change. In fact, the weather was not that out of the ordinary in boiling Central Taiwan, and likely cooler than the temperatures we will experience in the near-future. According to the Taiwan Adaptation Platform, between 1957 and 2006, summer lengthened by 27.8 days, while winter shrunk by 29.7 days. Winter is not
Taiwan’s post-World War II architecture, “practical, cheap and temporary,” not to mention “rather forgettable.” This was a characterization recently given by Taiwan-based historian John Ross on his Formosa Files podcast. Yet the 1960s and 1970s were, in fact, the period of Taiwan’s foundational building boom, which, to a great extent, defined the look of Taiwan’s cities, determining the way denizens live today. During this period, functionalist concrete blocks and Chinese nostalgia gave way to new interpretations of modernism, large planned communities and high-rise skyscrapers. It is currently the subject of a new exhibition at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Modern
March 25 to March 31 A 56-year-old Wu Li Yu-ke (吳李玉哥) was straightening out her artist son’s piles of drawings when she inadvertently flipped one over, revealing the blank backside of the paper. Absent-mindedly, she picked up a pencil and recalled how she used to sketch embroidery designs for her clothing business. Without clients and budget or labor constraints to worry about, Wu Li drew freely whatever image came to her mind. With much more free time now that her son had found a job, she found herself missing her home village in China, where she
In recent years, Slovakia has been seen as a highly democratic and Western-oriented Central European country. This image was reinforced by the election of the country’s first female president in 2019, efforts to provide extensive assistance to Ukraine and the strengthening of relations with Taiwan, all of which strengthened Slovakia’s position within the European Union. However, the latest developments in the country suggest that the situation is changing rapidly. As such, the presidential elections to be held on March 23 will be an indicator of whether Slovakia remains in the Western sphere of influence or moves eastward, notably towards Russia and