On the afternoon of June 4, 2003, as tens of thousands filled Hong Kong's Victoria Square to commemorate the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, Lenny Guo (郭達年) snuck into Guangzhou with a bottle of rice wine and 128 photocopies of Chinese characters. The front man for Hong Kong agit-rock group Blackbird (黑鳥) has staged memorial concerts for Tiananmen each year in Hong Kong since the territory reverted to Chinese control. But he had something special in mind for the 14th anniversary.
“The whole point [was] to plant a piece of performance art on a territory where the commemoration of the June 4 massacre is forbidden,” Guo explained Tuesday in an e-mail exchange. At 6pm he and artist Xi Xin began pasting the characters in front of Guangzhou's Museum of Fine Arts. Xi placed flowers on the ground as Guo circled the installation. Then, as a small crowd of mostly art students gathered to watch, Xi took a swig of wine, poured the rest on the flowers, and with a shout of “For the dead!” lit them, as Guo broke into song.
Guo will perform the anthem, Shengdaruan (上大人), and explain the theories behind his blending of art with activism at the fifth annual Migration Music Festival (流浪之歌音樂節), which starts tonight and runs through Tuesday in Taipei, before heading to Chiayi for a final concert Wednesday. The festival is organized by Trees Music & Art (大大樹音樂圖像) and features local artists affiliated with that label as well as innovative folk and World Music artists from around the world. Some 5,000 people attended last year's festival, organizers said.
PHOTO COURTESY OF TREES MUSIC & ART
As in previous years, the core of the Migration festival is a series of free concerts in Taipei's Da-An Forest Park (大安森林公園). Tonight, tomorrow and Sunday's concerts start at 7:30pm. This year's theme is “crossings” (無國界), and the concerts will feature artists from different countries performing each other's music together on stage, in addition to solo performances.
Highlights of this segment include tonight's set by Golden Melody Award-winning Labor Exchange Band (交工樂隊) front man Lin Shen-xiang (林生祥), who teams up with Okinawa's Takashi Hirayusu and Ken Ohtake of Japan in a performance that the trio have been preparing since last year. Lin is tuning his guitar to “open D” for what he calls “a more tropical, ocean music sound” and the set will feature elements of Takashi's sangen, an Okinawan banjo. Songs will relate to “rice culture” and “farmer's issues,” Lin said, including Yang Ju-men (楊儒門), the so-called “rice bomber” who staged a bombing campaign to protest rice imports.
Hirayusu, who will perform solo after the set, has a powerful stage presence and is adept at mixing traditional Okinawan music with American influences.
“When you use traditional instruments in pop something is often lost,” Ohtake said. “But we have created a very unique and meaningful mix of Japanese, Taiwanese and Okinawan styles that I have not heard before in Japan.”
Leading the final free concert on Sunday is US folk singer Jim Page, who will be followed by Amis Golden Melody nominees the Betel Nuts Brothers with Taipei-based US musician David Chen playing backup.
Page, who during his 20-year career has shared the stage with artists like Bonnie Raiit, Emmylou Harris and Michelle Shocked, describes his sound as “acoustic folk with some rock sensibilities. Strongly melodic, often political.”
His latest album, Head Full of Pictures, deals with the US' current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The title song refers to post traumatic stress disorder and is told in the voice of a returning soldier. “At the end he says that he knows who put him in this position, who it was who made the war and used him as a tool,” Page wrote Monday in an e-mail. “And he says that he might get smart and do something about it.”
Also free is a series of documentaries and lectures, as well as workshops led by several of the artists who will be performing at the festival. These will take place in Huashan Culture Park (華山文化園區) tomorrow and Sunday, and run from 11am to 5pm. For English speakers, on Sunday at 11am, there is the sequel to acclaimed filmmaker Dick Fontaine's Bombin' (Hip-Hop History II). Following that are two Chinese-language documentaries involving Lenny Guo and the Blackbirds.
Huashan will also host a flea market on Saturday and Sunday, and a singing competition starting at 3pm on Sunday for Taiwan's Southeast Asian migrant workers.
The above describes only a small sampling of events scheduled for this week, some of which are only tangentially related to the theme of “crossings” and can be better understood as falling under the theme of human rights. It is highly recommended that those interested in attending visit the Web site www.treesmusic.com, which contains directions, summaries and artists' bios in clearly written English and Chinese.
The theme of human rights comes to the fore at Migration Plus, a series of paid events that starts Monday night at Underworld (地下社會), on Shida Road, with a DJ party led by Serbian director Boris Mitic. (Mitic's documentary Pretty Dyana — A Gypsy Recycling Saga will be shown at 11am Saturday at Huashan). NT$200 tickets for the party can be purchased at the door.
Tuesday afternoon at 3pm, Cheung Chui-yung (張翠容), a freelance journalist from Hong Kong who worked for the BBC and has also covered the Middle East and Latin America, will host a panel discussion on human rights and reporting from war zones. The other speakers will be Takashi Morizumi, the first Japanese reporter to write about the use of depleted uranium during the first Gulf War, and Nahoko Takato, a humanitarian worker who made headlines when she was kidnapped by militants in Iraq. There will also be documentary screenings and a photo exhibition.
Tuesday night, Lenny Guo and the Blackbirds, who released their final album in 2000, will reunite for a concert at Huashan that starts at 7pm. Joining them will be Page, avant-garde Belgian rockers DAAU and Chung Yong-feng (種永豐), a poet known for his activism and collaboration with the Labor Exchange Band.
Tuesday's Migration Plus events at Huashan cost NT$500. Tickets are available at www.artstickets.com.tw.
Page, DAAU, Chung and the Blackbirds will also play Wednesday night at the Experimental Theatre of the Chiayi Performance Arts Center (嘉義縣表演藝術中心實驗劇場). NT$250 tickets for this concert are available at www.artsticket.com.tw.
For more information, visit www.treesmusic.com/festival/2006mmf/index.htm.
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