The fire that destroyed Cloud Gate Dance Theatre’s (雲門舞集) rehearsal studio and warehouse complex earlier this year was a tragedy for Taiwan’s dance scene. Fortunately, however, the Taipei City Government stepped in and offered the dance troupe one of its many vacant properties throughout Taipei City until the group got back on its feet.
This left many smaller theater and dance companies wondering — sometimes out loud — why they weren’t offered the same deal. The existence of these properties is the inspiration for iHome (仲介愛情), a largely humorous play by Black Gate Mountaintop Theater (黑門山上的劇團) that starts tonight and runs this weekend at Novel Hall.
Instead of directly criticizing the government’s perceived favoritism, however, iHome ponders the tactics real estate agents use to sell homes.
PHOTO COURTESY OF BLACK GATE MOUNTAINTOP THEATER
The play’s main character is experiencing a mid-life crisis when a friend approaches him with a plan to sell a number of houses, recently acquired from the government.
Although each property is flawed in some way, the two men come up with a plan to convince potential customers to buy them. Rather than lower the price of the houses, the salesmen use themes from classical plays as a means of turning the shortcomings into selling points.
For example, a young couple refuses to buy a house, the main room of which has been torn in half by an earthquake — that is until the agent points out that Romeo and Juliet were separated by a larger chasm. By moving into the house the young lovers are told they could relive daily the romance of Shakespeare’s most famous lovers. Sold!
iHome will be performed at Novel Hall (新舞臺), 3-1 Songshou S Rd, Taipei City
(台北市松壽路3-1號), today, tomorrow and Sunday at 7:30pm and tomorrow and Sunday at 2:30pm. NT$400 to NT$1,200
tickets are available through ERA ticketing.
Earlier this month Economic Affairs Minister Kuo Jyh-huei (郭智輝) proposed buying green power from the Philippines and shipping it to Taiwan, in remarks made during a legislative hearing. Because this is an eminently reasonable and useful proposal, it was immediately criticized by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP). KMT Legislator Chang Chia-chun (張嘉郡) said that Taiwan pays NT$40 billion annually to fix cables, while TPP heavyweight Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) complained that Kuo wanted to draw public attention away from Taiwan’s renewable energy ratio. Considering the legal troubles currently inundating the TPP, one would think Huang would
Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an (將萬安) last week told residents to avoid wearing scary Halloween costumes on the MRT so as not to alarm other passengers. Well, I thought, so much for my plan to visit Taipei dressed as the National Development Council’s (NDC) biennial population report “Population Projections for the Republic of China (Taiwan): 2024-2070,” which came out last week. Terms like “low birth rate” and “demographic decline” do not cut it — the report is nothing short of a demographic disaster. Yet, in Taiwan, as in other countries, it is solvable. It simply requires a change in mindset. As it
Chiayi County is blessed with several worthwhile upland trails, not all of which I’ve hiked. A few weeks ago, I finally got around to tackling Tanghu Historic Trail (塘湖古道), a short but unusually steep route in Jhuci Township (竹崎). According to the Web site of the Alishan National Scenic Area (阿里山國家風景區), the path climbs from 308m above sea level to an elevation of 770m in just 1.58km, an average gradient of 29 percent. And unless you arrange for someone to bring you to the starting point and collect you at the other end, there’s no way to avoid a significant amount
For three films now, Tom Hardy has smushed Jekyll and Hyde into one strange and slimy double act. In a Marvel universe filled with alter egos that cloak stealthy superpowers, his investigative reporter Eddie Brock doesn’t transform. He shares his body with an ink-black alien symbiote (voiced with a baritone growl by Hardy), who sometimes swallows him whole, sometimes shoots a tentacle or two out and always chipperly punctuates Eddie’s inner monologue. These have been consistently messy, almost willfully bad movies, but Hardy’s performance has been a strangely compelling one-body buddy comedy. It’s one thing to throw a cape on and