Looking at some of the works that the Holyground Renaissance Association has put on over the last five years, it is hard to get away from the feeling that you have been put back in Sunday school. With titles such as Bible Stories and Vow in Action, you quickly get the idea. The twist comes when you realize that this isn't some fringe Christian group singing about the Lord to guitar accompaniment, but an ecumenical Buddhist foundation that simply wants to tell a good story, and if you happen to find some deeper meaning in it all, so much the better.
Vow in Action is actually the story of the monk Master Hsuen Tsang, who traveled to India and brought back many Buddhist scriptures that proved invaluable in the development of that religion during the Tang dynasty. To hear Yang Ching-liang (
"You see, the texts he [Hsuen Tsang] brought back, nobody can read them. They are in Sanskrit. Of course they were translated. But even these Chinese texts are only accessible to various experts and scholars. His work of bringing back the texts is relatively unimportant. What is important is that his journey, traveling on foot over thousands of kilometers was a model for others. This act of will and dedication is what can really move a modern audience," Yang said.
PHOTO COURTESY OF HOLYGROUND
Yang, a former doctoral student in philosophy, is an avid storyteller, and while the group's Chinese name is instantly recognizable as Buddhist, he claims that his work is about the religious impulse rather than any particular religion. For this reason, he finds nothing unusual about drawing material from the Christian Bible, or indeed from China's political and martial classic The Romance of the Three Kingdoms (三國演義).
The Romance of the Three Kingdoms is Yang's most recent project, and his most ambitious, insofar as he is billing it as a trilogy. Two more shows will follow over the next two years. Even on this large scale, it seems a near impossible task to put such a book, with its cast of thousands, onto the stage.
In re-creating the story of The Three Kingdoms, Yang said he has focused on the theme of fate and the manner in which it acts on the three main characters of the story: Liu Bei (劉備), Kuan Yu (關羽) and Chuke Liang (諸葛亮). The novel, in all its vast complexity, is open to many interpretations, but Yang's to some extent rather goes against the chivalric grain of the novel, finding in the actions of the three great heroes something sad and even tragic as they become pawns to the workings of fate.
PHOTO COURTESY OF HOLYGROUND
"Everyone sees Kuan Yu as the embodiment of loyalty, but this loyalty to Liu Bei costs the lives of many other characters. They die simply because Kuan is caught in a moral dilemma," Yang said. "I have built the story up around this idea." Heroism plays second fiddle to the metaphysical subtext, an avenue that has rarely been explored in the vast corpus of Three Kingdoms literature.
"This is not like a Beijing opera performance which focuses on one or two incidents in the story. What I have done is a kind of hermeneutics of the novel, not necessarily overturning the original interpretation, but adding a more complex layer," Yang said. "In Chinese chivalric literature, the good guys and the bad guys are divided very clearly. But life is not as simple as that, and while an action might be seen as good from one perspective, it could be bad from another perspective."
To tell his story, Yang combines the arts of storytelling, dance and music. "It all came out of finding a way to tell stories to children," he said. Being able to resort to music and song allows Yang to create atmosphere, bringing out the internal world of characters through sound and images rather than words.
PHOTOS COURTESY OF HOLYGROUND
The style of modern dance and the indeterminate orchestral music that he uses has echoes of the inspirational operas put on by the communist Chinese regime, can be rather disconcerting, but this is largely the result of a datedness of presentation that might have seemed more at home in the 1950s. The style of singing is that of western opera and there is an earnestness that also has a little too much of the schoolhouse about it. But for all that, Yang insists that it is about getting the story across, rather than any formally didactic intention.
But even though make use of some less than cutting-edge forms, the shows have proved very popular with audiences. "In the past, all our performances were free," Yang said. "Now that our performance style has become more mature, we have decided to go commercial." This will be the first performance by the group for which tickets will be sold, rather than distributed free through associated organizations. "I hope that this will bring our shows to the attention of mainstream theater goers," Yang said.
June 9 to June 15 A photo of two men riding trendy high-wheel Penny-Farthing bicycles past a Qing Dynasty gate aptly captures the essence of Taipei in 1897 — a newly colonized city on the cusp of great change. The Japanese began making significant modifications to the cityscape in 1899, tearing down Qing-era structures, widening boulevards and installing Western-style infrastructure and buildings. The photographer, Minosuke Imamura, only spent a year in Taiwan as a cartographer for the governor-general’s office, but he left behind a treasure trove of 130 images showing life at the onset of Japanese rule, spanning July 1897 to
One of the most important gripes that Taiwanese have about the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) is that it has failed to deliver concretely on higher wages, housing prices and other bread-and-butter issues. The parallel complaint is that the DPP cares only about glamor issues, such as removing markers of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) colonialism by renaming them, or what the KMT codes as “de-Sinification.” Once again, as a critical election looms, the DPP is presenting evidence for that charge. The KMT was quick to jump on the recent proposal of the Ministry of the Interior (MOI) to rename roads that symbolize
On the evening of June 1, Control Yuan Secretary-General Lee Chun-yi (李俊俋) apologized and resigned in disgrace. His crime was instructing his driver to use a Control Yuan vehicle to transport his dog to a pet grooming salon. The Control Yuan is the government branch that investigates, audits and impeaches government officials for, among other things, misuse of government funds, so his misuse of a government vehicle was highly inappropriate. If this story were told to anyone living in the golden era of swaggering gangsters, flashy nouveau riche businessmen, and corrupt “black gold” politics of the 1980s and 1990s, they would have laughed.
In an interview posted online by United Daily News (UDN) on May 26, current Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) was asked about Taichung Mayor Lu Shiow-yen (盧秀燕) replacing him as party chair. Though not yet officially running, by the customs of Taiwan politics, Lu has been signalling she is both running for party chair and to be the party’s 2028 presidential candidate. She told an international media outlet that she was considering a run. She also gave a speech in Keelung on national priorities and foreign affairs. For details, see the May 23 edition of this column,