The Taichung Jazz Festival is the latest casualty of COVID-19.
City officials announced the cancelation of this year’s festival, which typically attracts upwards of 1 million spectators over a 10-day period each October.
“It’s impossible this year,” said Hsiao Jing-ping (蕭靜萍), head of performing arts for the city’s Cultural Affairs Bureau. “We just didn’t have a choice.”
Photo courtesy of Taichung City Government
Difficulty getting overseas jazz musicians into the country coupled with concerns over large crowd size, forced organizers to cancel the festival, Hsiao said. The decision was made earlier this summer, she added.
The festival, which would have celebrated its 18th year, has grown into one of Asia’s largest. Last year’s event brought together more than 50 jazz groups performing throughout Taichung.
Hordes of spectators typically pack Civic Square (市民廣場主舞臺) to see local and international jazz groups, including Grammy and Golden Melody Award winning artists.
With the festival’s cancelation, organizers said they hoped others would help give local jazz musicians a venue to perform.
In order to further help promote jazz in the city, the city’s Cultural Affairs Bureau is cooperating with Compass Magazine, which hosts an annual weekend music festival.
This year’s Compass festival is set to take place in mid October. While jazz fans might be disappointed, Hsiao said she was optimistic that the Taichung Jazz Festival would return for 2021.
Most heroes are remembered for the battles they fought. Taiwan’s Black Bat Squadron is remembered for flying into Chinese airspace 838 times between 1953 and 1967, and for the 148 men whose sacrifice bought the intelligence that kept Taiwan secure. Two-thirds of the squadron died carrying out missions most people wouldn’t learn about for another 40 years. The squadron lost 15 aircraft and 148 crew members over those 14 years, making it the deadliest unit in Taiwan’s military history by casualty rate. They flew at night, often at low altitudes, straight into some of the most heavily defended airspace in Asia.
This month the government ordered a one-year block of Xiaohongshu (小紅書) or Rednote, a Chinese social media platform with more than 3 million users in Taiwan. The government pointed to widespread fraud activity on the platform, along with cybersecurity failures. Officials said that they had reached out to the company and asked it to change. However, they received no response. The pro-China parties, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), immediately swung into action, denouncing the ban as an attack on free speech. This “free speech” claim was then echoed by the People’s Republic of China (PRC),
Many people in Taiwan first learned about universal basic income (UBI) — the idea that the government should provide regular, no-strings-attached payments to each citizen — in 2019. While seeking the Democratic nomination for the 2020 US presidential election, Andrew Yang, a politician of Taiwanese descent, said that, if elected, he’d institute a UBI of US$1,000 per month to “get the economic boot off of people’s throats, allowing them to lift their heads up, breathe, and get excited for the future.” His campaign petered out, but the concept of UBI hasn’t gone away. Throughout the industrialized world, there are fears that
Like much in the world today, theater has experienced major disruptions over the six years since COVID-19. The pandemic, the war in Ukraine and social media have created a new normal of geopolitical and information uncertainty, and the performing arts are not immune to these effects. “Ten years ago people wanted to come to the theater to engage with important issues, but now the Internet allows them to engage with those issues powerfully and immediately,” said Faith Tan, programming director of the Esplanade in Singapore, speaking last week in Japan. “One reaction to unpredictability has been a renewed emphasis on
RSS