An eight-year-old boy from Argentina wearing a traditional costume with black hat and boots performs with other young dancers with swift steps and strong rhythm. A few minutes later, a dance featuring South Pacific passion is presented by young performers from Fiji.
The young dancers are in Taiwan as cultural communicators, performing at the Yilan International Children's Folklore and Folkgame Festival that opened on Saturday. Most of them are visiting for the first time.
The dancers, mostly teenagers, are members of 18 different dance troupes from 17 countries.
“We expect the world will be able to see Taiwan and that Taiwan will be able to communicate with the world through this event,” Yilan County Commissioner Lin Tsung-hsien (林聰賢) said at the reopening of the event after a two-year hiatus.
Daniel Uribe, leader of the General Las Heras troupe from Argentina, said the group would give 20 performances this month.
The members of the Kabu Kei Vuda Cultural Group, meanwhile, are from Fiji's Vuda District School. Vuda means “root,” thus Kabu Kei Vuda represents the roots of Fiji, a troupe member said, because Fijians believe that vuda was the first habitation of their ancestors.
The performances by the primary school students recount myths about vuda that are central to Fijian culture, the organizers said.
In addition to performances from around the world, a local drama group will stage local children's stories.
Huang Chun-ming (黃春明), an influential Taiwanese literary figure, returned to his hometown of Yilan to promote local culture and set up a children's drama group to pass down the local tradition.
While the nation hosts all kinds of children's festivals, the festival in Yilan is unique because of its focus on culture, Huang said.
Yilan was formerly covered with rice fields, so Huang suggested an idea inspired by the local scenery — that is, erecting more than 500 scarecrows, which have become a special feature of the area.
Lin plans to place more than 6,000 scarecrows around the area next year and collect various kinds of scarecrows from all over the world for exhibition.
Lin said he planned to apply for certification of the festival from the International Council of Organizations of Folklore Festivals and Folk Arts at the end of this year to become the first festival in Asia to be certified.
The council is a nongovernmental organization in formal consultative relations with UNESCO.
“So far, not more than 10 festivals have been certified by the council worldwide,” an official said.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift