Taiyuan Puppet Theatre Company’s (台原偶戲團) Pilgrimage, which opens on Wednesday, is a very different puppetry experience, even by the group’s own unconventional standards.
Most of the action takes place in a wading pool on the floor of the Nadou Theater (納豆劇場) to the accompanied of a live accordion, guitar and erhu (二胡) combo, and the puppeteers wear black neoprene bodysuits.
Taking inspiration from two great ocean travelers, Pilgrimage does not so much tell a story as create an abstract work of images and sounds that explores the worlds of the Ming Dynasty general Koxinga (國姓爺) (also known as Zheng Chenggong (鄭成功)), who built a short-lived fiefdom based on Taiwan in the 17th century, and the Portuguese soldier-poet Luis Vaz de Camoes, who explored Asia in the 16th century and whose Chinese lover died in a shipwreck. And added to that highly eclectic mix of characters are a Brazilian leprechaun called Saci, the African deity Yemanja and the ocean goddess Matsu (媽祖).
Photo courtesy of the Taiyuan Puppet Theatre Company
Boundaries of time and place are transcended in Pilgrimage’s tale of love, birth, death, the transitory nature of existence and, above all, the ocean’s ability to bring people together and to tear them apart again.
Staging the production presented Taiyuan Puppet Theatre Company with many technical problems, not least because the puppeteers must spend much of the performance partly submerged.
During a rehearsal earlier this week, the puppeteers huddled next to a fan heater to regain some body warmth after more than an hour splashing about, and occasionally floundering, in the pool.
Photo courtesy of the Taiyuan Puppet Theatre Company
“The theater represents reality, and as these stories take place on the ocean, the most direct way to represent them is with water,” director Wu Shan-shan (伍姍姍) said during a rehearsal break. “I have taken the simplest and the most difficult route. It is also the most direct route.”
But the water is much more than a production gimmick. In addition to the not-so-metaphorical reference to the ocean, through which all the characters and locations are linked, the water also alters the small theater’s visual and audio dynamics.
Taiyuan’s Pilgrimage uses images and music rather than dialogue or narration to tell its story.
“The stories of puppet theater where generally told through words,” Wu said, adding that Taiyuan, in its experimental productions at least, aimed “to show rather than to tell.”
This approach has given birth to innovative theatrical devices that increase the puppets’ expressiveness.
In Pilgrimage, not only do the puppets interact with human actors, the puppeteers themselves take part in the action. Their hands often serve as the puppet’s hands, providing the puppets with a whole new expressive dimension.
It is techniques like this, and the need for audience members to put aside representational expectations, that make new Taiyuan shows so exciting.
It is also worth pointing out that while Pilgrimage is staged by a puppet theater company and makes extensive use of puppets, the cast includes two highly accomplished contemporary dancers who play an integral part in generating the production’s on-stage dynamism.
While there is some dialogue in the show, the words form part of a soundscape created by Huang Si-nung (黃思農), the founder of the experimental theater group Against Again Troupe (再拒劇團), who has created a musical fabric woven from European folk melodies, Chinese operatic tunes, electronic sound manipulation and poetry read in Chinese
and Portuguese.
Pilgrimage shares many similarities with earlier Taiyuan productions, but its format, with widely diverse, even incongruous elements, linked together by their common association with the sea, is much more flexible.
Once the technical challenges are overcome, said Wu, the structural framework developed for Pilgrimage will be used to bring more stories to the stage.
Taiwan, once relegated to the backwaters of international news media and viewed as a subset topic of “greater China,” is now a hot topic. Words associated with Taiwan include “invasion,” “contingency” and, on the more cheerful side, “semiconductors” and “tourism.” It is worth noting that while Taiwanese companies play important roles in the semiconductor industry, there is no such thing as a “Taiwan semiconductor” or a “Taiwan chip.” If crucial suppliers are included, the supply chain is in the thousands and spans the globe. Both of the variants of the so-called “silicon shield” are pure fantasy. There are four primary drivers
The sprawling port city of Kaohsiung seldom wins plaudits for its beauty or architectural history. That said, like any other metropolis of its size, it does have a number of strange or striking buildings. This article describes a few such curiosities, all but one of which I stumbled across by accident. BOMBPROOF HANGARS Just north of Kaohsiung International Airport, hidden among houses and small apartment buildings that look as though they were built between 15 and 30 years ago, are two mysterious bunker-like structures that date from the airport’s establishment as a Japanese base during World War II. Each is just about
Two years ago my wife and I went to Orchid Island off Taitung for a few days vacation. We were shocked to realize that for what it cost us, we could have done a bike vacation in Borneo for a week or two, or taken another trip to the Philippines. Indeed, most of the places we could have gone for that vacation in neighboring countries offer a much better experience than Taiwan at a much lower price. Hence, the recent news showing that tourist visits to Pingtung County’s Kenting, long in decline, reached a 27 year low this summer came
The female body is a horror movie waiting to happen. From puberty and the grisly onset of menstruation, in pictures such as Brian De Palma’s Carrie and John Fawcett’s Ginger Snaps, to pregnancy and childbirth — Rosemary’s Baby is the obvious example — women have provided a rich seam of inspiration for genre film-makers over the past half century. But look a little closer and two trends become apparent: the vast majority of female body-based horror deals with various aspects of the reproductive system, and it has largely been made by men (Titane and The First Omen, two recent examples
RSS