In every country that has ever had a puppetry tradition, puppeteers have carried their puppets around in a box. It is from this box, which holds the tools of their trade, the instruments of their art, their means of expression and their source of subsistence, that La Boite (The Box), a collaboration between Taiwan’s Taiyuan Puppet Theater Company (台原偶戲團) and the Compagnie des Zonzons, takes its name. Having premiered in Lyon, France, Zonzons’ hometown, in April, the show has its first Taiwan performance at Taipei’s Zhongshan Hall (台北市中山堂) this weekend.
“It is a much bigger performance than we’ve ever put on,” said Wu Shan-shan (伍姍姍), manager of the Taiyuan Puppet Theater Company, of a show that brings together both French and Taiwanese puppets and puppeteers. “Given that we are two troupes, we have double the resources of money and talent. It also required double the courage ... This production has taken Taiyuan to the next level.”
La Boite tells the story of two puppet troupes who mistakenly take the puppet box of the other troupe and then try to find ways of performing using the unfamiliar puppets. The puppets themselves are endowed with life and long to return to their rightful masters. Both the European and Taiwanese puppets used are very traditional, though the presentation is anything but. Wu emphasized that the troupes’ aim was to explore and give new dimensions to a shared aspiration to create a modern puppet theater grounded in tradition, one that is able to draw on a rich cultural heritage without being constrained by it.
The ability to perform at a venue the size of Taipei’s Zhongshan Hall is largely due to the highly innovative use of a multifunctional box designed by Robin Ruizendaal, director of the Lin Liu-hsin Puppet Theater Museum (林柳新紀念偶戲博物館) and artistic director of Taiyuan. The device, which stands more than 4m high and serves as a multilevel puppet stage, is also a prop for human actors and a screen against which images can be projected or through which shadow puppets can enter into the action. The contraption also rotates and can open to reveal its internal workings.
“Puppet theater in Taiwan tends to appeal only to the very old and the very young. It does not register with the general theater-going public. We were looking for ways so that actors, puppets and music can occupy the stage together,” said Wu, who has extensive experience pushing the boundaries of puppet theater with Taiyuan, most recently in the highly successful production of The Second Goodbye last November at the Experimental Theater in Taipei. Performing at the Zhongshan Hall, which has seating for 600, imposed significant challenges on Taiyuan and forced the company to develop new techniques to meet the demands of the larger space. Success will depend very much on what they can pull out of their bag, or box, of tricks.
“A production such as La Boite gives us a chance to show off some very traditional performances, both of European and Taiwanese puppetry, as part of a bigger and more diverse show. It is not like trying to watch the whole Three Kingdoms saga,” Wu said, referring to the interminable tale that forms part of the Taiwanese repertoire, “but you get to see some really outstanding segments.” This technique of repackaging material previously regarded as inaccessible or unpalatable has a proven track record, an early example being Milos Forman’s Amadeus (1984), which turned many people on to classical music who would never have thought of sitting through Mozart’s Requiem in its entirety.
Wu said some aspects of the production directly reflect the experience Zonzons and Taiyuan had during the many months of cooperation in design and rehearsal. The show is, after all, two puppet companies making a show about two puppet companies that meet through their puppets. “Two companies meet, they develop feelings for each other, and these feelings are reflected in their performance ... their individual traditions are given clearer expression through their relationship,” said Wu, talking both of the story of La Boite and her experience working with Zonzons.
With La Boite, Taiyuan hopes to pull a new lease of life for Taiwan puppetry out of the box, and much will depend on whether the cachet provided by the participation of Zonzons will draw Taiwanese audiences, who are notoriously shy of performances that smack too much of narrowly localized culture.
Most heroes are remembered for the battles they fought. Taiwan’s Black Bat Squadron is remembered for flying into Chinese airspace 838 times between 1953 and 1967, and for the 148 men whose sacrifice bought the intelligence that kept Taiwan secure. Two-thirds of the squadron died carrying out missions most people wouldn’t learn about for another 40 years. The squadron lost 15 aircraft and 148 crew members over those 14 years, making it the deadliest unit in Taiwan’s military history by casualty rate. They flew at night, often at low altitudes, straight into some of the most heavily defended airspace in Asia.
This month the government ordered a one-year block of Xiaohongshu (小紅書) or Rednote, a Chinese social media platform with more than 3 million users in Taiwan. The government pointed to widespread fraud activity on the platform, along with cybersecurity failures. Officials said that they had reached out to the company and asked it to change. However, they received no response. The pro-China parties, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), immediately swung into action, denouncing the ban as an attack on free speech. This “free speech” claim was then echoed by the People’s Republic of China (PRC),
Many people in Taiwan first learned about universal basic income (UBI) — the idea that the government should provide regular, no-strings-attached payments to each citizen — in 2019. While seeking the Democratic nomination for the 2020 US presidential election, Andrew Yang, a politician of Taiwanese descent, said that, if elected, he’d institute a UBI of US$1,000 per month to “get the economic boot off of people’s throats, allowing them to lift their heads up, breathe, and get excited for the future.” His campaign petered out, but the concept of UBI hasn’t gone away. Throughout the industrialized world, there are fears that
Like much in the world today, theater has experienced major disruptions over the six years since COVID-19. The pandemic, the war in Ukraine and social media have created a new normal of geopolitical and information uncertainty, and the performing arts are not immune to these effects. “Ten years ago people wanted to come to the theater to engage with important issues, but now the Internet allows them to engage with those issues powerfully and immediately,” said Faith Tan, programming director of the Esplanade in Singapore, speaking last week in Japan. “One reaction to unpredictability has been a renewed emphasis on
RSS