One of the flagship productions of the 2013 Kaohsiung Spring Arts Festival (高雄春天藝術節), Forever Dialogue (愛。時尚), premiered in Kaohsiung last week, and will now tour Taiwan. The show, which mixes an exuberant celebration of consumer culture and an intimate portrait of three Chinese women, has brought together a number of big names that guarantee appeal across the Strait.
Forever Dialogue stars Vega Tsai (蔡燦得), a popular presence on Taiwan’s stage and screen; Hong Kong’s Perry Chiu (焦媛), a veteran stage actress; and Chinese screen actress Cheryl Hsieh (謝承穎). At the center of the story is a pair of embroidered silk slippers, which link up a deconstructed tale that starts in 1940s Shanghai and extends to the modern day, following its main characters from the Republican era through to contemporary China, a period in which both the appearance of Chinese women, and the social milieu in which they exist, has changed out of all recognition.
Directed by Li Zongxi (李宗熹), who picked up the Kaohsiung Culture and Arts Award (高雄文藝獎) in 2012 and is a bright new star on the Chinese-language theater scene, Forever Dialogue is a big-budget production showcasing not just its three leading ladies, but also the talents of a top-notch behind-the-scenes team. Given that the show not only focuses on the emotions of three women, but also their material accoutrements, it is fitting that another star of the show is fashion designer Goji Lin (林國基).
Photo courtesy of Taiwan Drama Performance
“It is much more than just a piece of theater,” Lin said. “It is also more than a fashion show. I have designed over 10 sets of costumes specifically for this production, which are presented in a number of catwalk displays. There are fashion shows within the play, and the emotions of the play pervade the fashion show. It’s really an amazing experience, and the first time I have done anything like this in all my years as a designer. The performance, the language and the emotions in the play make the fashion items even more expressive.”
Set design is by Max Li (黎仕祺), who regularly manages the design for mega concerts by stars such as Judy Chiang (江蕙) and Jeff Chang (張信哲), and music is by the multi-award winning Cello Fan (范宗沛), who composed and won a Golden Melody Award for the Original Soundtrack of the hit TV series The Crystal Boys (孽子).
The fact that this show about women, which is supposedly targeted at women, has an almost exclusively male production team might give rise to snide suggestions that not much has really changed in the position of women in Chinese society, but the appeal of the three female stars and the general bling of the production is likely to drown out negative commentary.
By all accounts, the premiere last week in Kaohsiung was a great success, and will now be followed by this weekend’s show in Hsinchu, followed by Tainan, Taipei and Taichung. The show will then tour the region with bookings in Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore and Beijing. More information regarding the show and performance schedule can be found at www.performer.org.tw.
June 2 to June 8 Taiwan’s woodcutters believe that if they see even one speck of red in their cooked rice, no matter how small, an accident is going to happen. Peng Chin-tian (彭錦田) swears that this has proven to be true at every stop during his decades-long career in the logging industry. Along with mining, timber harvesting was once considered the most dangerous profession in Taiwan. Not only were mishaps common during all stages of processing, it was difficult to transport the injured to get medical treatment. Many died during the arduous journey. Peng recounts some of his accidents in
“Why does Taiwan identity decline?”a group of researchers lead by University of Nevada political scientist Austin Wang (王宏恩) asked in a recent paper. After all, it is not difficult to explain the rise in Taiwanese identity after the early 1990s. But no model predicted its decline during the 2016-2018 period, they say. After testing various alternative explanations, Wang et al argue that the fall-off in Taiwanese identity during that period is related to voter hedging based on the performance of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Since the DPP is perceived as the guardian of Taiwan identity, when it performs well,
A short walk beneath the dense Amazon canopy, the forest abruptly opens up. Fallen logs are rotting, the trees grow sparser and the temperature rises in places sunlight hits the ground. This is what 24 years of severe drought looks like in the world’s largest rainforest. But this patch of degraded forest, about the size of a soccer field, is a scientific experiment. Launched in 2000 by Brazilian and British scientists, Esecaflor — short for “Forest Drought Study Project” in Portuguese — set out to simulate a future in which the changing climate could deplete the Amazon of rainfall. It is
The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) on May 18 held a rally in Taichung to mark the anniversary of President William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20. The title of the rally could be loosely translated to “May 18 recall fraudulent goods” (518退貨ㄌㄨㄚˋ！). Unlike in English, where the terms are the same, “recall” (退貨) in this context refers to product recalls due to damaged, defective or fraudulent merchandise, not the political recalls (罷免) currently dominating the headlines. I attended the rally to determine if the impression was correct that the TPP under party Chairman Huang Kuo-Chang (黃國昌) had little of a
RSS