This weekend’s Taiwan International Festival of Arts production at the National Theater, War Sum Up (迷幻戰境), really puts the “international” into the National Theater Concert Hall’s programming for its six-week long festival.
The 2011 avant-garde opera — stress on avant-garde — was produced by the Denmark-based “laboratory” Hotel Pro Forma and the Latvian National Opera. It was conceived and directed by Hotel Pro Forma’s artistic director Kirsten Dehlholm, with a libretto taken from Japan’s classic Noh theater texts by her long-time collaborator Willy Flindt, and sung in Japanese by members of the Latvian Radio Choir, with a set and visuals inspired by the drawings of manga artist Hikaru Hayashi and a score that mixes classical, electronic and pop music. Chinese surtitles will be provided for the three Taipei shows.
The score’s composers came from across Europe: the English art-pop ensemble the Irrepressibles, Latvian composer Santa Ratniece and Frenchman Gilbert Nouno.
Photo courtesy of Gunars Janaitis
The idea of Danes creating a Noh-centric opera is not quite as strange as it sounds once you learn that the 73-year-old Flindt studied Japanese language and literature at the University of Copenhagen, studied Japanese language, theatrical history and music anthropology at Tokyo’s Waseda University and is a qualified Noh actor.
The 30-year-old Hotel Pro Forma, founded by Dehlhom and Flindt, bills itself as an international arts performance laboratory and producers of visual music performances and installations. It has created more than 50 works, many of them operas where the visuals often outweigh the texts, and that is certainly true of War Sum Up.
Critics in several countries have raved about War Sum Up, described as a “manga opera on the nature of war,” which focuses on both the glorification of war and its brutality and serves as a plea for peace. However, do not expect a linear story; it is a series of stories about the three main characters: a soldier suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, a warrior who died in battle and has become a ghost, and a female spy who is forced to turn into a superwoman to survive being captured.
Photo courtesy of Gunars Janaitis
The narrator, a mysterious woman in a yellow suit, also serves as the Gamemaster who starts wars.
Singers from the Latvian Radio Choir, dressed as futuristic warriors, frame the action.
Subtitled Music, Manga, Machine, the 80-minute War Sum Up comes with some caveats: latecomers will not be admitted, there is no intermission, and there is adult subject matter including nudity, smoke and bloody scenes, so only those over 12 years of age will be admitted.
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