Two productions created for this year’s Taipei Arts Festival have used the past, or cultural traditions, to inspire creations for the modern day, one in theater and the other in dance.
Dark Eyes Performance Lab (黑眼睛跨劇團) is promising that its latest production, Bananaiana (我是東西南北香蕉人), which opens tomorrow night at Taipei’s Metropolitan Hall, will be a “dimension-jumping show that will change Hakka musical theater.”
Meanwhile, Pingtung County-based Tjimur Dance Theatre (蒂摩爾古薪舞集) is busy polishing its collaborative effort with dancers from New Zealand’s Black Grace troupe for their show at the Wellspring Theater that opens on Friday next week, 2 Gather (在一起).
Credit: Courtesy of Dark Eyes Performance Lab
While Dark Eyes’ promise is a pretty heady one — the track record for “Hakka musicals" is not a good one — but judging by the last show I saw the company perform, 2014’s Die Walkure (The Valkyrie,女武神) as part of “A Revolution Unarmed” at Huashan 1914 Creative Park, the troupe can deliver on its vows.
Bananaiana was written and directed by Dark Eyes founder Hung Hung (鴻鴻), with music by Hakka folk musician Ayugo Huang (黃連煜), who won Best Hakka Album at last year’s Golden Melody Awards (金曲獎) for his solo album Shan Ge Yi Tiao Lu (山歌一條路).
Ayugo Huang also stars in the show as Huang Zunxian (黃遵憲), the Hakka intellectual, poet, revolutionary, diplomat and the man who inspired Hu Shih (胡適), a Chinese literary reformer and academic who championed the use of written vernacular Chinese and later became president of Academia Sinica in Taipei.
Credit: Courtesy of Sandy Ouyang
The play begins in the “Banana Republic,” where an opening ceremony is being held for a Hakka Cultural Center. A time machine transports Huang Zunxian to modern-day Taipei, where a television reporter guides him through the city and he meets young democracy activists and is reinspired.
The multi-media show features puppets and animation. The other cast members are Peter Lin (林文尹), Jen Jen (廖原慶), Jasper Hsu (徐浩忠), Xi Hao-chen (奚昊晨) and Anlin Huang (黃勤芳).
The show, which runs 100 minutes without an intermission, will be performed in Mandarin, with English surtitles at all shows. There will be post-show discussions after the Saturday and Sunday performances.
Down in Pingtung, at their studio in Sandimen Township (三地門), Tjimur artistic director Ljuzem Madiljin and her brother, choreographer Baru Madiljin, have been hosting dancers Sean MacDonald, Tupua Tigafua, Callum Sefo and Demi-Jo Manalo from one of New Zealand’s leading modern dance troupes, the 21-year-old Black Grace.
2 Gather is definitely a collaborative undertaking, with Baru and Black Grace artistic director Neil Ieremia each contributing a 20-minute segment for their own dancers and jointly choreography the beginning and end of the hour-long work.
The idea is to use their similar indigenous backgrounds to explore body movements from the Austronesian origin the groups’ two cultures share, while highlighting the strengths of the respective companies.
The 10-year-old Tjimur was the first contemporary dance company dedicated to the Paiwan community in the nation. It might be one of Taiwan’s smallest dance troupes, but the Madiljin siblings have built a reputation for strong, physically and emotionally challenging works based on contemporary interpretations of Paiwan traditional dances and melodies that belie the troupe’s size.’
Ieremia similarly draws from his Samoan and New Zealand background and the story-telling traditions of the South Pacific to create works that transcend social and cultural barriers.
Tickets for 2 Gather have sold fast and as of press time, there were less than 40 tickets left for the matinee on Sunday, Sept. 25. The other two shows are sold out.
The festival program notes that latecomers will not be admitted and there will be post-performance discussions after the shows on Sept. 23 and Sept. 25.
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