Taipei enjoyed a delightful treat this past weekend with the first five of the original 10 plays that make up Taipei Shorts II. And if viewers liked those, the coming five plays promise an even more provocative and enticing evening.
In the upcoming works, the five new playwrights transverse time and space with challenging existentialist, absurd and inquisitive themes.
In A Gift from the Heavens, Mark Caltonhill revisits the death of Tang Dynasty poet, Li Bai (李白) but frames his verses with 1930 Taiwanese folk songs set in the politically repressive 1970s. The protagonist sings these folk songs to literary, political and comical effect.
Photos courtesy of Alicia Haddad
A T Beaune takes viewers into a different dimension mixing the modern with the past in Flight 109. In this play, Aqua on her round the world flight faces the existentialist conflict of being true to oneself as well as to one’s lover who remains at home.
In preparation, theatregoers are advised to read Shakespeare’s Sonnet 109 and be aware of Sandra Tavoli’s musical rendition of it, to get the full complexity of all expressed.
Shashwati Talukdar veers into the absurd with a mind-bending challenge of a different sort in Memory Stratagem. Here a memory expert in a remote monastery is trying to sort out the true story of a hero from a distant time, while being hassled by a monk to move quickly and just get it done.
Culture Bleep by Esther Wainwright also takes viewers into the absurd in the year 2040. There a desperate Mr Vain finds that, having lost his mobile phone, he is unable to link with his social media and therefore starts losing his viewers.
Finally, after all the heavy stuff, Emily Haver brings delight with Little Moons. Here two people wearing hydrated facemasks and listening to Debussy’s Clare de Lune come together to witness an eclipse.
On one level, it is simply a “sweet and silly love story” the dream-like type that everyone longs to experience. Yet at another level, it reminds us that love and magic are real and that we should always be open to their possibility.
All in all, the coming weekend promises to be a wild ride for viewers, and certainly one well worth the experience.
Gaotai Mountain (高台山) and the three Daotian Peaks (小中大島田山回來) afford visitors a truly rewarding hike in Hsinchu County (新竹). Located in the foothills just beyond the charming Neiwan Old Street (內灣老街), the hike is well suited for hikers in a fair to good physical condition. It’s also a good introduction to the foothills of northwest Taiwan, along with some more adventurous — but still not terribly dangerous — rope and scrambling sections. As a bonus, there are Japanese ruins, hot springs and river tracing destinations such as Meihua Waterfall (梅花瀑布) and Bilin Waterfall (比麟瀑布) all located nearby. WHISPERING PINES The first section of
Like many young Taiwanese men who recently graduated from university, George Lee (李芳成) isn’t quite sure what he’ll do next. But some of his peers surely envy what he’s already achieved. During the pandemic, while staying with his brother in California, Lee started an online food page, Chez Jorge. At first, it was a straightforward record of what he cooked each day, with many of the dishes containing meat. Lee soon began to experiment with plant-based dishes, specifically vegan versions of Taiwanese dishes he was already familiar with. “Very often, I found myself awed by not only how delicious they were,
With the inauguration of the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) William Lai (賴清德) today, the DPP has already announced plans for increased social spending. Meanwhile the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is pushing east coast infrastructure spending bills through the legislature, in part to feed and water its local patronage networks. The KMT plan is old: the first planning studies for it were done in 2012 under the Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) administration. Even then the head of the highway administration, Wu Meng-feng (吳盟分), pointed out that on a typical weekday only 20 percent of the capacity of the east coast highways 9
Tiffany Chang (張芳瑜) is a force to be reckoned with. Crowned Miss Taiwanese American in 2022, she made history last year as the first Taiwanese winner of Miss Asia USA. She’s also a STEM student at Stanford and an aspiring philanthropist — the kind of impressive accolades that has earned her the moniker “light of Taiwan.” At the end of March, Chang returned to Taipei, to “see the people that support me because ultimately that’s what made me win.” She says her Taiwanese supporters shower her with praise: “you inspire us, and you make us feel proud of our Taiwanese heritage,”