The first installment of the International Theater Festival opens this week
with performances by Voix Polyphoniques from France and Birgitte Grimstad,
who will perform in a double bill with Taiwan's U Theater(憂劇團), a
veritable feast of non-mainstream theater. Voix Polyphoniques, which opens
the festival, uses a capella and ritual movements to create a kind of
vocalized tableau vivant that asks more questions than it answers. While its
physicality is subordinated to voice, making it stand out from the majority
of performances that make up the festival, its use of voice (as opposed to
speech) to tell a story is in line with the festival's move away from
conventional dialogue-oriented drama. The Empress?Roast and Nakasone both
deal with questions of food, passion and song. Voix draws on a rich
tradition of European folk with Gypsy, Jewish and Magyar roots to create a
rich tapestry of human life.
Birgitte Gramstad continues the musical motif with her Mass for the Mother.
An important folk artist working out of Norway, Grimstad began adding
costume and props to her musical performances and in 1991 started her
one-woman Little Windharp Theatre. The show she brings to Taipei explores
the roles that the mother has played in the mythology of many cultures using
voice, gesture and dance.
Gramstad will perform a double bill with Taiwan's outstanding U Theater, who
will perform Flower with Smile(捻花), which follows the same new-agey
themes, but in this case drawing on the rich tradition of Chinese tai chi
(太極) to create a world in which humans can put themselves in tune with the
universe.
Voix Polyphoniques will perform The Empress' Roast at 7:30pm today and
tomorrow and at 2:30pm tomorrow. Nakasone will be performed at 2:30pm and
7:30pm on Sunday. Birgitte Gramstad and U Theater will perform 7:30pm on
April 5 and 6. All performances are at the Experimental Theater.
In the March 9 edition of the Taipei Times a piece by Ninon Godefroy ran with the headine “The quiet, gentle rhythm of Taiwan.” It started with the line “Taiwan is a small, humble place. There is no Eiffel Tower, no pyramids — no singular attraction that draws the world’s attention.” I laughed out loud at that. This was out of no disrespect for the author or the piece, which made some interesting analogies and good points about how both Din Tai Fung’s and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) meticulous attention to detail and quality are not quite up to
April 21 to April 27 Hsieh Er’s (謝娥) political fortunes were rising fast after she got out of jail and joined the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) in December 1945. Not only did she hold key positions in various committees, she was elected the only woman on the Taipei City Council and headed to Nanjing in 1946 as the sole Taiwanese female representative to the National Constituent Assembly. With the support of first lady Soong May-ling (宋美齡), she started the Taipei Women’s Association and Taiwan Provincial Women’s Association, where she
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) hatched a bold plan to charge forward and seize the initiative when he held a protest in front of the Taipei City Prosecutors’ Office. Though risky, because illegal, its success would help tackle at least six problems facing both himself and the KMT. What he did not see coming was Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an (將萬安) tripping him up out of the gate. In spite of Chu being the most consequential and successful KMT chairman since the early 2010s — arguably saving the party from financial ruin and restoring its electoral viability —
It is one of the more remarkable facts of Taiwan history that it was never occupied or claimed by any of the numerous kingdoms of southern China — Han or otherwise — that lay just across the water from it. None of their brilliant ministers ever discovered that Taiwan was a “core interest” of the state whose annexation was “inevitable.” As Paul Kua notes in an excellent monograph laying out how the Portuguese gave Taiwan the name “Formosa,” the first Europeans to express an interest in occupying Taiwan were the Spanish. Tonio Andrade in his seminal work, How Taiwan Became Chinese,
RSS