The 23rd Taiwan-France Cultural Awards were on Monday presented in Paris to an academic, a director and a radio presenter who have enhanced cultural exchanges between the two nations.
The three winners this year were French anthropologist Josiane Cauquelin, Taiwanese radio presenter Miao Yung-hua (繆詠華), who hosts a French program at Radio Taiwan International, and German director of plays and operas Lukas Hemleb.
The awards were set up in 1996 by the then-Council for Cultural Affairs and Institut de France’s Academy of Moral and Political Sciences.
They are awarded to institutions and individuals who have contributed to the research and promotion of Taiwanese culture.
Cauquelin, a researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research, said at the awards ceremony that she would like to share the award with her long-term research interest: the Puyuma Aborigines.
She also thanked Taiwan for “accepting her and allowing her to freely conduct research.”
Cauquelin, who calls Taiwan “her second home,” has been studying Puyuma language, rites and society since 1983. She is the author of numerous Puyuma-themed articles and books, including the first Puyuma-language study and Puyuma-French dictionary.
Through close contact with the Puyuma, Cauquelin was granted access to observe the community’s annual sacrifice and great hunting festival, which was previously forbidden to women.
Miao, the presenter of Radio Taiwan International’s French program L’Heure des Musees, has been promoting cultural exchanges between Taiwan and France for more than a decade.
She said at the ceremony that she would continue to translate French contemporary novels and classics into Chinese, and help French-speaking listeners better understand and thereby appreciate the beauty of Chinese art.
Hemleb, who has adapted French playwright Pierre de Marivaux’s The Game of Love and Chance and blended it with Taiwanese opera, said that he would like to pay tribute to the late Taiwanese dancer Hsiao Ho-wen (蕭賀文), a former member of Cloud Gate Dance Theatre.
Hemleb said that Hsiao was one of the few people who made him realize that adhering to tradition does not necessarily conflict with pursuing innovation.
He added that Taiwanese novelist Wu Ming-yi (吳明益) has agreed to let him adapt his novel The Man with the Compound Eyes (複眼人) into a play, which is expected to debut in Taichung in March 2021 and in France in fall that year.
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