The second Kaohsiung Spring Arts Festival opens this weekend, offering Greater Kaohsiung residents a wide variety of performances by Taiwanese and international troupes.
One of the headline acts is Tadashi Suzuki’s musical version of La Dame aux Camelias, featuring a cast of Taiwanese actors and singers. The show is a flagship production of the National Theater Concert Hall (NTCH) and had its world debut in Taipei on Feb. 10 as part of the NTCH’s Taiwan International Festival of Arts (TIFA), though it drew mixed reviews.
Another highlight of the Kaohsiung festival will be two outdoor performances of “Bugs Bunny at the Symphony,” featuring the Kaohsiung Symphony Orchestra against a backdrop of Warner Brothers cartoon characters projected onto a big screen.
George Daugherty, the show’s creator and conductor, will lead the orchestra in the two concerts, which will be held at the lakeside embankment of the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts next Friday and Saturday.
Another outdoor performance that is expected to draw large crowds is On the Road (很久沒有敬我了你), a collaboration between the National Symphony Orchestra and Taiwan Colors Music, and features some of Taiwan’s best-known Aboriginal singers.
The show, which combines live performances with a mock-documentary film, was one of the hits of last year’s TIFA. On the Road will be staged on March 5 and March 6.
The five-month long festival will be bigger this year because more international groups are participating, according to an official from Greater Kaohsiung’s Bureau of Cultural Affairs, which is hosting the event.
There is also greater involvement by NTCH, with several productions from this year’s and last year’s TIFA.
Spain’s TrukiTrek, whose performances of Hotel Crab at the Experimental Theater in Taipei this weekend sold out weeks ago, will perform on Wednesday and Thursday night at the Wei Wu Ying Center for the Arts.
Other visiting groups include the Salzburger Marionetten Theatre, a puppet company from Austria that will present its version of The Sound of Music on March 4 and March 5, and the Kronos Quartet from the US.
The string quartet will perform their multi-media production, Sun Rings on March 6, two days after their performace at the National Concert Hall in Taipei.
Eleven groups, which are based in Kaohsiung, will also be taking part in the spring festival between March 11 and June 18, with performances ranging from Taiwanese opera and puppetry to Chinese music and from modern dance to jazz.
About 40,000 people attended the first Kaohsiung Spring Arts Festival last year, the Bureau of Cultural Affairs said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching