The National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts — Weiwuying is staging its biennial Circus Platform tomorrow and Sunday afternoons with a series of free performances in the Banyan Plaza and one absolutely not-to-be missed ticketed show in the Playhouse: Formosa Circus Art’s (FOCA, 福爾摩沙馬戲團) Moss (苔痕).
The free “Circus Wonderland” performances, which start at 3:30pm and run until a little after 6pm, feature seven mini shows: Spinning Macarons (旋轉馬卡龍) by On. P. Young (紅鼻子馬戲團); Baby in Cart (新手爸爸) by Hsu Kai-hsuan (徐開炫), Master M and Boy Z by WHO Theatre (虎劇團); HEY NOW by 0471 Acro Physical Theatre (0471特技肢體劇場); Fall in love with you (與你相愛) by Hu Chia-hao (胡嘉豪); Step by Wu Haw-jong (吳顥中); and Ba~HaGa! (巴哈嘎不可不可) by Dai Yu-ren (戴郁仁) and Wu Zheng-ying (吳政穎)
A run-down of the shows and their start times can be found on Weiwuying’s Web site (www.npac-weiwuying.org).
Photo courtesy of Ken Wang, Formosa Circus Arts
FOCA’s Moss was not originally scheduled to be part of the platform, as it had been planned for earlier in the year, but was moved back due to COVID-19 restrictions. It should prove a fitting coda to Saturday’s activities.
I saw Moss at the Cloud Gate Theater in New Taipei City’s Tamsui District (淡水) last month and was just blown away. The production is the final part of FOCA’s crossover trilogy, and was created in collaboration with the Germany-based Peculiar Man, founded by Tien Tsai-wei (田采薇), a dancer with Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, and Jan Mollmer.
Tien and Mollmer’s dance theater expertise gives the show its narrative structure — and its poignancy.
The five FOCA members perform in front of an apparently abandoned construction site in alley, a setting familiar around Taiwan. A three-level metal scaffold stands in for the concrete house that inspired the work and serves as a launch pad for a series of drops, falls and swings.
Moss at its heart is a tale about enduring friendships. The story does not really move in a linear fashion, but each segment segues seamlessly into the next and several funny bits of business cycle back through the tale as it unfolds
The FOCA members’ physically — and several of their stunts — are awe inspiring, and they had the Cloud Gate audience demanding repeated curtain calls.
■ Formosa Circus Art, “Moss,” tomorrow at 7:30pm
■ The Playhouse at the National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts—Weiwuying (衛武營國家藝術文化中心戲劇院), 1, Sanduo 1st Rd, Kaohsiung City (高雄市三多一路1號)
■ Tickets are NT$300 to NT$1,000, available at Weiwuying box offices, online at www.artsticket.com.tw and at convenience store ticket kiosks
May 28 to June 3 Taiwan provincial governor Chen Cheng (陳誠) was adamantly opposed to the state-run Central Daily News (中央日報) moving from Nanjing to Taipei in 1949. The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) already had a mouthpiece in Taiwan, the China Daily News (中華日報), and he argued that the relocation of the Central Daily News “would have absolutely no function besides affecting the morale of the people,” according to the book 1949: An Earth-Shattering Year (1949: 石破天驚的一年) by Lin Po-wen (林博文). Chen likely had a grudge against the paper too. Despite editor-in-chief Tao Hsi-sheng’s (陶希聖) “central first, then daily” policy prioritizing the
A fine-grained opinion piece in United Daily News (UDN) in December was packed with data that tells the story of the coming voter shifts in this election. The piece cited another UDN poll from early last year that surveyed residents of the six municipalities. The overall data identified four areas of major concern: housing prices (named by 50.6 percent), low salaries and insufficient career opportunities (32.2 percent), transportation problems (26.5 percent) and air pollution (25.1 percent). The next more important issue was public order at 10.1 percent. None of these issues have become a signature issue for any of the presidential
Buffeted by earthquakes and the potential of conflict with China, Taiwan’s leaders want to accelerate plans to make the island more resilient to communications breakdowns and direct attacks on its digital infrastructure. It could be an impossible task. Audrey Tang (唐鳳), the head of the Ministry of Digital Affairs, says she wants the country’s US$740 billion economy to be able to handle the possible collapse of all its communications in the event of an emergency by the end of next year. The threat isn’t theoretical: the Matsu Islands found themselves digitally adrift after two of their submarine internet cables were severed by boats
When Theresa MacPhail was four, her brother was killed in an accident. When she was 14, her mother died in a car crash. And when she was 24, her father died from anaphylactic shock after a bee flew in through the open window of his truck and stung him in the neck. For anyone else, these devastating experiences would almost certainly have been psychologically catastrophic. “I have several friends who are psychology professors, and they’re always saying, ‘No offense but, by rights, you should be a drug addict, or have severe emotional issues,’” she says, smiling, over Zoom from her
RSS