The biennial Pulima Art Festival (Pulima藝術節2016), a showcase for contemporary indigenous art and cultures, has moved south for its third installment after the first two were held in Taipei.
The festival, which opened on Saturday last week, runs through Feb. 5, with a multitude of dance, music and theater productions as well as art exhibitions and forums with contributions from Taiwan’s 14 Aboriginal communities, Austronesian-speaking areas and other indigenous peoples.
Organizers say the festival, the largest Aboriginal contemporary art event in the nation, is an important platform to showcase the power of Aboriginal cultural communication and to expose Aboriginal children to arts and cultural performances that are rooted in their own cultures.
Photo courtesy of Tjimur Dance Theatre
“Pulima” is a Paiwan word meaning creative or highly skilled people.
This year’s theme is “O loma no adingo,” which means “Home, where the spirit dwells.” The idea is to encourage young Aboriginals, especially artists, to have the courage to explore their own life experiences.
The festival, and the attendant Pulima Art Prize, is supported by the Indigenous Peoples Cultural Foundation, which took its initial inspiration for the event from the Edinburgh Art Festival and the Festival d’Avignon in France.
Groups that are members of the Taiwan Indigenous Performing Arts Connection, including the Pingtung County-based Tjimur Dance Theatre (蒂摩爾古薪舞集) and Taitung-based Bulareyaung Dance Company (布拉瑞揚舞團) are among those giving shows, along with the Atamira Dance Company and Black Grace from New Zealand and B2M (Bathurst to Melville), a seven-member band from the Tiwi Islands in Australia.
Tjimur and Black Grace will be performing their coproduction, 2_Gather (在一起), which premiered at the Taipei Arts Festival in September, this weekend.
The Hualien County-based Langasan Theatre (冉而山劇場), whose members are artists, farmers, blue-collar workers and academics from the Amis, Rukai and Sakizaya communities as well as Hakka and Hoklo, will present its new production, Mayaw Kakalawan (星星 — 颯旮啦旦老) for three shows at the Pier-2 Arts Center on Nov. 19 and Nov. 20
The festival events are being held around the city, at the Dadong Culture and Art Center, the Kaohsiung Experimental Theater, Pier-2 Arts Center and the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts.
More information is available at the festival’s Web site (www.pulima.com.tw), though it is predominately in Mandarin.
The problem with Marx’s famous remark that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, the second time as farce, is that the first time is usually farce as well. This week Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chair Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) made a pilgrimage to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) “to confer, converse and otherwise hob-nob” with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials. The visit was an instant international media hit, with major media reporting almost entirely shorn of context. “Taiwan’s main opposition leader landed in China Tuesday for a rare visit aimed at cross-strait ‘peace’”, crowed Agence-France Presse (AFP) from Shanghai. Rare!
What is the importance within the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) of the meeting between Xi Jinping (習近平), the leader Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文), the leader of the KMT? Local media is an excellent guide to determine how important — or unimportant — a news event is to the public. Taiwan has a vast online media ecosystem, and if a news item is gaining traction among readers, editors shift resources in near real time to boost coverage to meet the demand and drive up traffic. Cheng’s China trip is among the top headlines, but by no means
A recent report from the Environmental Management Administration of the Ministry of Environment highlights a perennial problem: illegal dumping of construction waste. In Taoyuan’s Yangmei District (楊梅) and Hsinchu’s Longtan District (龍潭) criminals leased 10,000 square meters of farmland, saying they were going to engage in horticulture. They then accepted between 40,000 and 50,000 cubic meters of construction waste from sites in northern Taiwan, charging less than the going rate for disposal, and dumped the waste concrete, tile, metal and glass onto the leased land. Taoyuan District prosecutors charged 33 individuals from seven companies with numerous violations of the law. This
Sunflower movement superstar Lin Fei-fan (林飛帆) once quipped that the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) could nominate a watermelon to run for Tainan mayor and win. Conversely, the DPP could run a living saint for mayor in Taipei and still lose. In 2022, the DPP ran with the closest thing to a living saint they could find: former Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中). During the pandemic, his polling was astronomically high, with the approval of his performance reaching as high as 91 percent in one TVBS poll. He was such a phenomenon that people printed out pop-up cartoon
RSS