When Slow Island Theater Group’s (慢島劇團) popular musical, Moon Girl (月孃), premiered in 2010, their choice of venue seemed unconventional at first. For two weeks, the troupe performed a story about the lives of three women growing up together in a karaoke parlor in front of a live audience at Ke Lai (閣徠演歌坊), a karaoke parlor in Taipei’s Ningxia Night Market (寧夏夜市).
“Every performance, there would be two, three people in the audience who hadn’t seen any theatrical production before. They came to sing karaoke, but found us instead,” troupe founder Wang Ke-yao (王珂瑤) says.
It’s precisely these types of audiences that the theater troupe wants to reach out to — people who don’t normally go to the theater.
Photo Courtesy of Slow Island Theater Group
For its 2013 production, Factory (鐵工廠), Slow Island teamed up with organizations such as the Taiwan International Workers Association (台灣國際勞工協會) to invite factory employees, migrant workers and immigrants from Southeast Asian countries to see a lively musical centering on a group of Thai, Indonesian and Taiwanese workers at a small factory in Greater Taoyuan. It used dance, singing and comedy to address social issues surrounding labor and immigrant workers.
BRINGING THEATER TO THE MASSES
To Wang, the aim is to create everyday art for everyday folk. “My performances used to be poetic and abstruse. Every time my mom came to my show, she would be like, ‘I don’t understand a thing,’” she says.
In 2008, Wang returned to her hometown in Taoyuan and established Slow Island. Often assuming the roles of both producer and performer, Wang collaborates with different artists, which explains the troupe’s diverse oeuvre. Factory was directed by Lin Hsin-i (林欣怡) from the more politically-oriented Taiwan Haibizi (台灣海筆子). Meanwhile, Mint, Rosemary and the Flower with no Name (薄荷、迷迭香和不知名的花) in 2008 and Awakening of Love (夢醒時分) in 2012 are romantic comedies led by Wu Shih-wei (吳世偉).
Moon Girl, on the other hand, is a collaboration between Taiwan’s theatrical talents, including Betsy Lan (藍貝芝) and Hung Pei-ching (洪珮菁) and American director Dan Chumley, with whom Wang had worked on a Taiwanese production of The Vagina Monologues (陰道獨白) in 2007.
Featuring many old Mandarin and Hoklo-langague ballads as well as original songs by Cheng Chieh-jen (鄭捷任), the music director of Tiehua Music Village (鐵花村) in Taitung County, the production tells a bittersweet story about the decline of a karaoke parlor called Moon Girl. It revolves around three orphaned girls who were raised by the parlor owner who go their separate ways after growing up and return bearing the scars of life.
Since its successful premiere, Moon Girl has returned to few karaoke parlors and other venues in Taitung County, Greater Tainan and Greater Taoyuan’s Jhongli District (中壢) in 2012. It even traveled to Brazil last year. A new tour began in Greater Kaohsiung last month and will end this week with six shows in Yilan City.
“It is a melodrama. It is about humanity. Everybody can understand it,” Wang adds.
When asked about what she wants to do next, Wang says she has planned to bring an audience-friendly production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream to local parks and community centers across the country.
“I think stage performances are good to see. People just don’t know how and where to see them. Hopefully, I can offer more access,” Wang says.
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