The Taipei Arts Festival (台北藝術節) has for the last two years, under the directorship of Keng Yi-wei (耿一偉), placed great emphasis on international collaboration. Of all the groups participating, none exemplifies the idea of such collaboration more than Ex-Asia Theater (EX-亞洲劇團), which will be presenting a new show, Red Demon (赤鬼), at Taipei’s Wellspring Theater (水源劇場) this weekend.
Ex-Asia Theater is the creation of Indian director Chongtham Jayanta Meetei and his Taiwanese partner Lin Pei-ann (林浿安). In the current production, the group will collaborate with Japanese performer Miyuki Kamimura. The play, based on a work by acclaimed Japanese playwright Hideki Noda, is about alienation and demonization of “otherness,” a theme that is close to Meetei’s heart.
The play is set in a small village. One day a stranger comes to the village. He speaks a strange language and comes from another culture. He is branded a demon by all except one woman from the village who tries to communicate with him. She is branded a traitor by her fellow villagers. Various revelations follow.
Photo courtesy of TAF
In a telephone interview with the Taipei Times, Meetei said that engaging with cultural diversity was central to his role as an artist.
“In this play there are three Taiwanese [including one of Aboriginal background] and one Japanese. So the Japanese plays the Red Demon, the outsider … This play is about how we confront another culture, how we create a fear in our own mind,” Meetai said.
Using a cast from different cultural backgrounds, and in dealing with the subject of xenophobia, Meetai is exploring cultural interaction both in the way the production is presented, as well as in the story it tells. His own experience of having to overcome barriers of culture and language significantly influenced his methods.
“In India, my hometown is in a very small state in India, and only a small population of people speak my language, so if you want to travel to any other part of India to perform, you must overcome this language barrier. So I became very influenced by physical expression theater that is not so dependent on language,” he said.
“We create a body language for the show. We don’t just use the dialogue, but we explore the movement with the dialogue together, working in the same way a choreographer of contemporary dance develops their movements. We try to bring in various traditional art forms, such as traditional Thai dance or Beijing opera for the development of the movement.”
Bridging different cultures is key to how Meetai works, aiming as he does to create forms of expression that can transcend cultural boundaries.
“In modern days, a culture cannot only be meant for one society — to say that this is my culture and that is your culture [is misguided] because communication has become very fluent. [It] is the job of artists to interact with different people and understand others, and as a result develop a new culture for a new world,” he said.
Meetai said that working in a multicultural production had been very important for developing his career as a director. “If I work only within my own culture, I can create something for a specific audience,” Meetai said. “But with actors from different cultures, they have different ways of expressing themselves. They start to open up your vision about how we all communicate.”
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
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
Peter Brighton was amazed when he found the giant jackfruit. He had been watching it grow on his farm in far north Queensland, and when it came time to pick it from the tree, it was so heavy it needed two people to do the job. “I was surprised when we cut it off and felt how heavy it was,” he says. “I grabbed it and my wife cut it — couldn’t do it by myself, it took two of us.” Weighing in at 45 kilograms, it is the heaviest jackfruit that Brighton has ever grown on his tropical fruit farm, located