In the production A Fool’s Life (傻子的一生), audiences won’t remain seated during the performance.
“The audience will fill out a questionnaire before the show begins,” says the plays Chiang Yuan-hsiang (江源祥) told the Taipei Times on Tuesday. “We’ll then read out the responses during the performance.”
A founding member of the The Post-Theater (破空間) group, formed mostly by National Taiwan University of Arts (國立台灣藝術大學) theater students, Chiang writes and directs A Fool’s Life, which draws inspiration from Ryunosuke Akutagawa, known as the father of the Japanese short story.
Photo Courtesy of The Post-Theater
A Fool’s Life is the theater group’s interpretation of several of the author’s works, the performance built largely around structured improvisation.
Chiang calls the show a “live art” performance, where each actor has an action to perform.
“For example, one strips naked and eats paper. Another recites an incantation and paints a stroke onto the wall every 10 recitations until the painting is finished,” said Chiang.
Photo Courtesy of The Post-Theater
The performance in New Taipei City will take place at the group’s 66-square meter theater, where they exchange ideas and rehearse. They will accept six audience members per show. The Greater Tainan and Greater Kaohsiung performances will see space for 40 audience members for each performance.
BREAKING RULES
Experimentation is how The Post-Theater likes to create. Its previous work, Fucking Brain with Murmur (他媽的大腦雜音), saw the group blindfolding the audience, forcing them to rely on their other senses to experience the show.
With A Fool’s Life, the group’s eighth work in three year, audiences will be invited to complete a lotus painting.
“All the interactions are to prompt the audience to give their own interpretation,” Chiang said.
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
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
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