Young Paiwan Aborigines from Pingtung County will take center stage at the National Concert Hall in Taipei tonight and tomorrow to perform Story of the Daughter of the Sun (太陽的女兒), the second musical program in the this year’s Taiwan International Festival of Arts.
The performers are students from the Taiwu Elementary School in Pingtung County’s Taiwu Township (泰武) who belong to the Taiwu Children’s Ancient Ballads Troupe (泰武古謠傳唱), as well as elders of the Puljetji community.
The troupe, which was founded in 2004 by Camake Valaule, a teacher at the school, specializes in traditional Paiwan songs. It has toured internationally and won a few Golden Melody Awards for its albums.
Photo courtesy of Tang Chien-che
Paiwan mythology says that the Paiwan are descendants of the sun. Traditionally, the Puljetji community’s leadership has been passed down to the eldest child of the leader, be it a boy or a girl, who is then known as the “son of the sun” or “daughter of the sun.”
Camake teamed up with theater director Wei Ying-chuan (魏瑛娟), the founder of the Shakespeare’s Wild Sisters (莎的劇團) troupe; film director Chen Hung-i (陳宏一) and installation artist Wang Te-yu (王德瑜) to create a multi-media production that tells the life story of the “Daughter of the Sun” through a mix of songs, traditional rituals and modern imagery.
The show runs 85 minutes without intermission, and the Concert Hall has warned that latecomers will not be admitted. There will be Chinese subtitles for the songs.
■ Tonight and tomorrow at the National Concert Hall (國家音樂廳), 21-1 Zhongshan S Rd, Taipei City (台北市中山南路21-1號)
■ Tickets are NT$700 to NT$2,000; available through NTCH ticketing, online at www.artsticket.com.tw and convenience store ticketing kiosk. Tomorrow night’s show is sold out.
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