When one door closes, another one opens is an old adage the National Theater Concert Hall (NTCH) has embraced with the eight-month closing of the National and Experimental theaters in downtown Taipei for renovation.
Now the NTCH is hoping that the audiences for its annual or biennial festival programming will be willing to enter new doors — or open spaces as the case might be.
“We started the renovation plans 10 years ago, but then we did not plan on outreach projects. About two or three years ago, we realized we had to reach out, we cannot just close,” NTCH artistic director Lee Huey-mei (李惠美) said in a telephone interview earlier this month.
Photo courtesy of National Theater Concert Hall
“We have to reach out, not just to audiences but to see if we can cooperate with others [theaters] — with Yilan and Taichung — but travel costs a lot, so we found theaters that are nearby, not so far, in Banqiao (板橋) and Taipei ... We wanted to cooperate with Shilin [the new arts center under construction], but they cannot provide a date,” she said.
One of the first tests of this new outreach endeavor is the biennial International Theater Festival, which opens on Oct. 7 with a production from the Chekhov International Theatre Festival in Russia, The War (戰火浮生), a coproduction of the Chekhov festival and the Edinburgh International Festival that was created to commemorate the 100th anniversary of World War I.
“It’s been a nightmare,” Lee said. “Locations, the size of the theaters, the marketing — we don’t have the experience of marketing in other areas.”
Photo courtesy of National Theater Concert Hall
The NTCH programmers had to match venues with the productions that they wanted to bring for the festival, so that ended up affecting the selection of programs.
“The company from [South] Korea, it’s a traditional performing arts group, so it is good for the Xiqu Center’s [臺灣戲曲中心] opening. For the local companies, we gave them an assignment to do site specific works, such as the Golden Bough [Theatre (金枝演社)],” she said.
Lee sees the festival as a chance for the NTCH to reach out to people who would not usually think of attending performances in its theaters. She said she hopes the variety of alternative venues will show people that they can participate in theatrical events.
Photo courtesy of Vladimir Vyatkin
“I think it is a great moment... I hope they will open their hearts, follow our footsteps and take an adventure, because it’s not conventional theater. That’s our ambition,” she said.
The theme of this year’s festival is “Soaring with the classics,” so the line-up includes troupes that specialize in traditional arts, such as Pansori Project ZA, a South Korea collective that specializes in new works based on the traditional Korean performing art of pansori and Theodoros Terzopoulos’s Attis Theater from Greece, which will perform The Bacchae, while the Golden Bough Theatre will perform Oidipous Tyrannos (伊底帕斯王) and Indian actor Atul Kumar’s The Company Theater will present a Hindi musical version of William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night — Piya Behrupiya (第十二夜).
The international range of the festival is highlighted in the number of languages that will be heard, including Mandarin Chinese, Russian, Korean, Hindi and Greek.
Photo courtesy of National Theater Concert Hall
There will be shows in conventional theaters outside of Taipei, such as the Performing Hall at the National Taiwan University of the Arts in Banquio, in unconventional spaces such as the Taipei Expo Park Greeting Plaza and the parking garages under the National Theater Concert Hall, and two at new venues — the National Theater Taichung and the Xiqu Center of Taiwan in Shilin District (士林).
Some of the shows are free, others will require tickets and for others, audiences will also have to factor in travel time and costs.
In addition to the programs mentioned above, also on offer are Mobius Strip Theatre’s (莫比斯圓環創作公社) Somewhere out there (夢外之境) and the Dark Eyes Performance Project (黑眼睛跨劇團) will give two free performances of Les fourberies de Myriam (蜜莉安的詭計).
The NTCH’s Web page (ift.npac-ntch.org/2016/) has information on the festival shows, in Chinese and English, as well as the ticket discount and early bird package deals available, although the early bird offer expires on Wednesday next week.
Unfortunately, the Web site of the National Taichung Theater, which you have to navigate if you are interested in Shakespeare in Hindi, is only in Chinese.
All Lee and her team can do now is wait to see who follows them through the doors.
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
Japan is celebrated for its exceptional levels of customer service. But the behavior of a growing number of customers and clients leaves a lot to be desired. The rise of the abusive consumer has prompted authorities in Tokyo to introduce the country’s first ordinance — a locally approved regulation — to protect service industry staff from kasuhara — the Japanese abbreviated form of “customer harassment.” While the Tokyo ordinance, which will go into effect in April, does not carry penalties, experts hope the move will highlight a growing social problem and, perhaps, encourage people to think twice before taking out their frustrations
RSS