Sometimes the best birthday parties are the ones you throw yourself.
Taipei-based Riverbed Theatre (河床劇團) is celebrating its 20th anniversary, with a gallery exhibition at the Eslite Bookstore in Taipei’s Xinyi District (信義), which opened earlier this month, and three days of a new production, Dream Makers: Subconscious Theatre — Riverbed Theatre’s 20th Anniversary (造夢者:潛意識劇場—河床劇團20年), next weekend.
The company’s image-based, “Total Theater” productions, more than 40 in all, have blurred the boundaries between visual and performing arts, creating productions largely unhindered by text or even linear narrative.
Photo courtesy of Riverbed Theatre
Some shows have been inspired by the lives and/or works of famed artists from a variety of fields (Belgian surrealist Rene Magritte, US theater director Robert Wilson, US film director David Lynch, Albert Einstein, Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama) and events such as the Apollo 11 mission or Richard Wagner’s Das Rheingold. Others have sprung from the fertile, perhaps even fevered, dreams of artistic director Craig Quintero and his colleagues.
Riverbed’s painterly designs, sets featuring multiple hidden doors and exits, and its surreal imagery envelope audiences in dreamscapes that are filled with familiar objects yet often prove otherworldly, if not disturbing.
The troupe has developed a reputation for quality over quantity, preferring smaller venues such as the Taipei Artist Village and National Experimental Theater, or specially built environments for audiences ranging from two dozen to just one person, as with its “Just For You” productions set in hotel rooms and museums in Taipei and Tainan. It has also taken its shows on the road to festivals in Asia and Europe, such as the OFF d’Avignon.
Photo courtesy of Riverbed Theatre
The troupe staged its first show, Burnt Rice, at the Dunhua Eslite Art Space in 1998, so it is fitting it has returned to an Eslite outlet for its birthday celebration.
The “Dream Makers” exhibition is two-fold. While it features paintings, sculptures and video works by troupe members and collaborators, including Quinterro, Carl Johnson, Joyce Ho (何采柔), Su Hui-yu (蘇匯宇), Hsu Yin-ling (許尹齡), Hung Hung (鴻鴻) and Hsia Yu (夏宇), it is also a workshop where the set and props for next week’s shows are being built and painted.
The public is encouraged to participate in the set building process.
As for the show itself, the company says Dream Makers is “a performative meditation on the beauty and sorrow of living, on the fragile impermanence of life.”
“We are fascinated by our body, by the familiar yet strange vehicle that we inhabit. It is us, but at the same time it shifts and changes in ways beyond our control,” it says.
While that sounds maddeningly vague, it perfectly encapsulates Riverbed. The company’s shows have always been difficult to describe in advance, because they are made to be seen and experienced on an individual, not collective level.
While the shows can tap a shared subconsious in the form of cultural, social or visual references, each audience member sees and filters a Riverbed production through their own conciousness and imagination.
Twenty years is an admirable achievement, and Riverbed is a company certainly worth celebrating — whether by wielding a paintbrush or buying a ticket to next weekend’s shows.
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