Having grown up in a rural village in Ilan County, dancer/choreographer You Shao-ching
Last year, she realized her dream by setting up the White Dance Temple (
In the first dance performance combining puppet theater and contemporary dance, four performers will dance in sync with puppets on their hands in a Taiwanese interpretation of Franz Schubert's Winterreise. This is meant literally because the only language to be heard during the performance will be Taiwanese. Wilhelm Muller's poetry, for which Schubert composed the music, has been rewritten to accompany the performance.
You was inspired by a dream she had. In an all-white colored dream, the traveller in the poem meanders in a snowstorm shedding white tears. "He keeps looking at me over his shoulders and tells me again and again to look for love in the world," You said.
Trained in and still a member of the yoga-and-tai chi influenced Taipei Dance Circle, You created the piece with a flow of imageries, which are carried out smoothly by the energetic and expressive body movements of the performers. Although dancing with puppets in hand is not easy, the performers, including Huang Wu-shan (黃武山), a puppet performer with the renowned I Wan Jan Puppet Theater (亦宛然掌中劇團), performed the delicate movements with reasonable ease.
"If you see puppeteers backstage, they are actually moving like dancers. Dancing and puppet-performing have much in common. You have to transmit the feelings from every part of your body onto the puppet to bring it to life, to give it emotion. Therefore, puppeteering employs more than hands," You said.
White Roars will be performed at 7:30 tonight and 2:30 and 7:30 tomorrow at the Forum Auditorium, 4, Lane 187, Minzu W. Rd. (
In 1990, Amy Chen (陳怡美) was beginning third grade in Calhoun County, Texas, as the youngest of six and the only one in her family of Taiwanese immigrants to be born in the US. She recalls, “my father gave me a stack of typed manuscript pages and a pen and asked me to find typos, missing punctuation, and extra spaces.” The manuscript was for an English-learning book to be sold in Taiwan. “I was copy editing as a child,” she says. Now a 42-year-old freelance writer in Santa Barbara, California, Amy Chen has only recently realized that her father, Chen Po-jung (陳伯榕), who
When nature calls, Masana Izawa has followed the same routine for more than 50 years: heading out to the woods in Japan, dropping his pants and doing as bears do. “We survive by eating other living things. But you can give faeces back to nature so that organisms in the soil can decompose them,” the 74-year-old said. “This means you are giving life back. What could be a more sublime act?” “Fundo-shi” (“poop-soil master”) Izawa is something of a celebrity in Japan, publishing books, delivering lectures and appearing in a documentary. People flock to his “Poopland” and centuries-old wooden “Fundo-an” (“poop-soil house”) in
For anyone on board the train looking out the window, it must have been a strange sight. The same foreigner stood outside waving at them four different times within ten minutes, three times on the left and once on the right, his face getting redder and sweatier each time. At this unique location, it’s actually possible to beat the train up the mountain on foot, though only with extreme effort. For the average hiker, the Dulishan Trail is still a great place to get some exercise and see the train — at least once — as it makes its way
Jan 13 to Jan 19 Yang Jen-huang (楊仁煌) recalls being slapped by his father when he asked about their Sakizaya heritage, telling him to never mention it otherwise they’ll be killed. “Only then did I start learning about the Karewan Incident,” he tells Mayaw Kilang in “The social culture and ethnic identification of the Sakizaya” (撒奇萊雅族的社會文化與民族認定). “Many of our elders are reluctant to call themselves Sakizaya, and are accustomed to living in Amis (Pangcah) society. Therefore, it’s up to the younger generation to push for official recognition, because there’s still a taboo with the older people.” Although the Sakizaya became Taiwan’s 13th
RSS