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.
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