On Sept. 26, Hugh Lee (
In the week before Lee made his announcement, the Taipei Arts International Association (TAIA, 台北藝術推廣協會), in coordination with the British Council, had brought over eight theater professionals from the UK for the 21st Century Creative Industries Showcase (二十一世紀創意工業研討會). This activity included seminars on ways of stimulating the performing arts industry, during which many local theater professionals voiced their dissatisfaction with the environment in which they are forced to contend.
The cancelation of the Ping-fong production lent poignancy to the discussions of the previous week. "I was shocked," said Fu Yu-hway (
In his open letter announcing the cancelation, Lee said that in the two months during which tickets had been available, sales had failed to reach 20 percent of capacity. Ping-fong is known for its strongly "Taiwanese" repertoire -- dealing with the social and political concerns of modern day Taiwanese people -- and its insistence on longer runs and wide touring schedule. To put on the play as had been intended, Lee said the company would incur losses of up to NT$9 million, which the company was unable to shoulder.
For all the gloom and doom, other theater groups have managed to keep going, but even Stan Lai (
Lai said that popular shows have been hit hardest, and was pleased that people were still coming to see such a cerebral work as Waiting for Godot. "I am encouraged that people are still coming to a show like this," he said. "If they stopped, it would mean the economic situation had managed to hit a blow against culture." While suggesting that creativity is still very much alive and well in Taiwan, Lai suggested that current government policies hamper higher achievements.
PHOTO COURTESY OF TADS
Funding culture
That culture must be paid for is one of the uncomfortable truths of the theater world, and was one the focal points of the recent seminars. The Council of Cultural Affairs, the National Culture and Arts Foundation (
Of Taiwan's budget earmarked for culture last year, Wen Hui-wen (
PHOTO COURTESY OF CKS CULTURAL CENTER
In the eyes of Serina Chen, who lectures in the Arts Management Program at the Taipei National Arts University, part of the problem is that there has never been any recognition of the need for professionally trained arts administrators. This is the case both within individual groups and within the government, hampering the ability of different groups to work together, making the best use of money available. Speaking in a wider context, this was all part of a widely supported contention that the performance arts are an industry, and like any other industry must be managed by specialists. "We must think much more entrepreneurly," said Theresa Beattie, director of The Place Dance Services, one of the UK's foremost dance centers, which is a pioneer in using community access programs to procure funding to dance.
In the division of limited cultural funding currently available, there is considerable dissatisfaction with its distribution. "The pie [government funding for the arts] is divided equally among all eligible parties, without any consideration of different needs," said Lai of Performance Workshop. Fu agreed, pointing out that superficial equality in the division of funding, largely due to a lack of expert assessment, was little help in cultivating creative talent. "If you follow the correct procedure, you'll probably receive your share, but this kills real creativity," she said.
Searching for Another way
"Ideally we could find a way to bypass government subsidies," Fu said.
For Fu, social values that emphasize the importance of material wealth has held people back from dedicating themselves to the arts, or confining themselves to work for which government funding is available.
The other side of the coin was in finding new ways of marketing the arts. "Cultural funding is always limited," Beattie, pointed out, but The Place has successfully bid for money from community redevelopment projects. "The money available for such projects is vastly in excess of anything made available to the arts." The Place provides a number of highly successful community-access projects in the formerly run-down area around Kingscross in London.
PHOTOS: CHEN CHENG-CHANG, TAIPEI TIMES
Taiwan may be some distance from this yet. "At the moment, it is still a period of guerilla warfare," Fu said. The lack of established centers such as The Place means that performers in Taiwan are still very much on their own, drawing on limited resources which jobs or connections would ordinarily provide. "The government could really help by creating service organizations for artists," Chen said. "What is needed is ways for artists to be able to live within the theater industry, building up skills and bringing those skills into other sectors of industry."
In the case of Stan Lai, who is on the faculty of the National Institute of the Arts and chaired its theater department for five years, he has the substantial support of this academic institution behind him. Unlike Lai, who was among the first wave of theater professionals to return from overseas filled with the ambition to create a Western-style theater in Taiwan, academic positions are now much more scarce, and alternatives are not readily available for aspiring theater professionals.
Finding commercial sponsors -- which in the West has become an increasingly popular way of financing the arts -- is still done on only a relatively small scale in Taiwan. Part of the problem, according to Fu, is that art education is much neglected in Taiwan. "In England, Shakespeare is part of everyone's heritage, but if you ask someone about liyuan opera or nan guan music, they probably will know nothing about it." In this environment, there is little to attract corporate sponsors to the arts. "Corporate sponsors also tend to be very demanding as to their quid pro quo, affecting the quality of the show," said Melissa Chiao, PR manager at Paris International, an arts organizer.
PHOTO COURTESY OF PING-FONG ACTING TROUPE
Finding a stage
The limited functions of Taiwan's performance venues, and their relative hands-off approach to cooperating with performers, can also be seen as a weak link in the further development of Taiwanese theater.
Taipei's three main government-owned venues, the National Theater and Concert Hall, the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall and the Municipal Social Education Hall provide little more than space, obliging performers to provide their own technical staff, a considerable burden on already stretched finances.The only high-quality private venue is the Novel Hall, which has only been open four years, but the support it is able to provide is also limited by its own budget.
According to Liu Chia-yu (
According to Liu Mei-tse (劉美子), a program planner at the Whashang Art District (華山藝文特區), Taipei's alternative arts space, the venue provides space and some equipment, and for technical support will provide some recommendations. "We see ourselves mainly as a facilitator," she said.
New crisis
Faced with increased belt tightening all round, and a further blow from the economic recession and international political events, the National Theater and Concert Hall have reduced all ticket prices by 30 percent. "Where people might have gone to see five shows in a month before, they may now only pick two," Chiao of Paris International said. "It has made the environment much more competitive."
Imported shows such as the Australian Chamber Orchestra and the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, which had been expected to draw crowds, didn't perform as expected. "In the future, we will have to be far more selective," Chiao said. This means more shows such as the recent highly successful Matthew Lien concert, which proved very popular with its nature themes and New Age ambiance.
The same move towards selecting works of popular appeal has motivated Ping-fong's Hugh Li, who says that next year the troupe will revive some of its most popular comedies as a final testing of the theatrical waters, before making a possible permanent withdrawal from the theater.
"The next couple of years look pretty bad," Chen said, adding that Ping-fong has moved to limit its losses given the current environment. "Only in this way will they be able to keep going. But I fear that many theater companies will fall victim to financial pressure."
Chen said that unless theater companies are able to survive this downturn, the effects on Taiwan's nascent theater culture could cut deeply. "When a company closes, the pool of talent disperses. People find jobs in other areas. If this happens, when the economic environment improves, the collected talent is no longer there."
April 14 to April 20 In March 1947, Sising Katadrepan urged the government to drop the “high mountain people” (高山族) designation for Indigenous Taiwanese and refer to them as “Taiwan people” (台灣族). He considered the term derogatory, arguing that it made them sound like animals. The Taiwan Provincial Government agreed to stop using the term, stating that Indigenous Taiwanese suffered all sorts of discrimination and oppression under the Japanese and were forced to live in the mountains as outsiders to society. Now, under the new regime, they would be seen as equals, thus they should be henceforth
Last week, the the National Immigration Agency (NIA) told the legislature that more than 10,000 naturalized Taiwanese citizens from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) risked having their citizenship revoked if they failed to provide proof that they had renounced their Chinese household registration within the next three months. Renunciation is required under the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), as amended in 2004, though it was only a legal requirement after 2000. Prior to that, it had been only an administrative requirement since the Nationality Act (國籍法) was established in
Three big changes have transformed the landscape of Taiwan’s local patronage factions: Increasing Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) involvement, rising new factions and the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) significantly weakened control. GREEN FACTIONS It is said that “south of the Zhuoshui River (濁水溪), there is no blue-green divide,” meaning that from Yunlin County south there is no difference between KMT and DPP politicians. This is not always true, but there is more than a grain of truth to it. Traditionally, DPP factions are viewed as national entities, with their primary function to secure plum positions in the party and government. This is not unusual
US President Donald Trump’s bid to take back control of the Panama Canal has put his counterpart Jose Raul Mulino in a difficult position and revived fears in the Central American country that US military bases will return. After Trump vowed to reclaim the interoceanic waterway from Chinese influence, US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth signed an agreement with the Mulino administration last week for the US to deploy troops in areas adjacent to the canal. For more than two decades, after handing over control of the strategically vital waterway to Panama in 1999 and dismantling the bases that protected it, Washington has
RSS