Taipei Times: What are your priorities as artistic director of I-Wan-Jan?
Huang Chiao-wei: To put it bluntly, it is to learn as much as I can while the older generation is still around to teach me. You must fill yourself up if you are going to have stuff to take out and show people in future ... There is no point doing lots of performances before the fundamentals are established. Ours is a long-term strategy, so that while people haven’t noticed us much recently, they will eventually.
TT: What is the greatest challenge facing puppet theater today?
HC: The ability to promote ourselves and our art. One of Master Li Tien-lu’s great strengths was that he encouraged us to innovate and use what we learned as part of the puppeteering tradition in new ways ... exploring every possibility. People don’t necessarily understand traditional puppet theater, so we must find ways of drawing them in. We have collaborated with Western classical musicians and experimental artists ... But our emphasis is still on tradition — 90 percent tradition, 10 percent innovation.
TT: Language is an integral part of Taiwanese puppet theater. How does that affect performances in the modern era?
HC: Glove puppet theater is performed in Taiwanese, an older style of Taiwanese that is not used so much today. We do not use subtitles in glove puppet performances. The audiences’ focus should be on the puppets, and they are too small for audiences to move from subtitles to the action and still get the full impact of the performance. Also, puppet theater has always had a strong improvisational aspect, so subtitles don’t work well for that reason. We have experimented with using other characters to explain difficult language and with providing abstracts for each scene.
TT: Li Tien-lu had a strong commitment to education. Does this continue today?
HC: We do a lot of teaching, especially of children. But Taiwan has no system for ongoing training in traditional arts. It’s not like studying the violin or the piano, where you can study it at university and beyond. So as a teacher, I used to find this very frustrating. You’d teach kids for three years, then they would move on to other things. It was a terrible drain on time and other resources ... A few years ago, I had become very depressed about teaching puppetry, but two years ago I came to a realization: Even if many of the students would never go on to study puppetry in later life, it would leave an impression ... it’s like planting a seed in society.
Behind a car repair business on a nondescript Thai street are the cherished pets of a rising TikTok animal influencer: two lions and a 200-kilogram lion-tiger hybrid called “Big George.” Lion ownership is legal in Thailand, and Tharnuwarht Plengkemratch is an enthusiastic advocate, posting updates on his feline companions to nearly three million followers. “They’re playful and affectionate, just like dogs or cats,” he said from inside their cage complex at his home in the northern city of Chiang Mai. Thailand’s captive lion population has exploded in recent years, with nearly 500 registered in zoos, breeding farms, petting cafes and homes. Experts warn the
The unexpected collapse of the recall campaigns is being viewed through many lenses, most of them skewed and self-absorbed. The international media unsurprisingly focuses on what they perceive as the message that Taiwanese voters were sending in the failure of the mass recall, especially to China, the US and to friendly Western nations. This made some sense prior to early last month. One of the main arguments used by recall campaigners for recalling Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers was that they were too pro-China, and by extension not to be trusted with defending the nation. Also by extension, that argument could be
Aug. 4 to Aug. 10 When Coca-Cola finally pushed its way into Taiwan’s market in 1968, it allegedly vowed to wipe out its major domestic rival Hey Song within five years. But Hey Song, which began as a manual operation in a family cow shed in 1925, had proven its resilience, surviving numerous setbacks — including the loss of autonomy and nearly all its assets due to the Japanese colonial government’s wartime economic policy. By the 1960s, Hey Song had risen to the top of Taiwan’s beverage industry. This success was driven not only by president Chang Wen-chi’s
Last week, on the heels of the recall election that turned out so badly for Taiwan, came the news that US President Donald Trump had blocked the transit of President William Lai (賴清德) through the US on his way to Latin America. A few days later the international media reported that in June a scheduled visit by Minister of National Defense Wellington Koo (顧立雄) for high level meetings was canceled by the US after China’s President Xi Jinping (習近平) asked Trump to curb US engagement with Taiwan during a June phone call. The cancellation of Lai’s transit was a gaudy
RSS