As part of the 14th Taipei Arts Festival, Play Bauhaus, an exhibition on the theater of the Bauhaus, opened yesterday at Songshan Cultural and Creative Park (松山文創園區) and runs through Sept. 9. All activities are free and open to the public.
Commissioned by the arts festival and curated by Torsten Blume from the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation in Germany, the exhibition consists of performances, interactive installation works and video projections that aim to shed light on the Bauhaus ideas about performance space and theatrical performance.
Bauhaus theater was founded in 1921. Under a theater workshop headed by Oskar Schlemmer from 1923, it evolved from the idea that theater should be stripped of narration and experiment with basic stage elements such as abstract movement, line, form, color and light, the festival’s artistic director Ti I-wei (耿一偉) said.
To Blume, the important question was how to rejuvenate old Bauhaus notions and make them relevant to today’s increasingly complex and diverse society.
“The Bauhaus movement is well-known for its influence on architecture and design, but people in Taiwan may not be familiar with Bauhaus as study of theater,” Blume said. “The world in the 1920s was completely different from the world where we live today. Yet we can make further exploration of existing Bauhaus techniques and ideas and investigate humans’ relationship with objects, space and environment in new, different ways.”
At the heart of the exhibition is Play Bauhaus — Jam Out, a dance performance Blume and his team co-developed with Taiwanese dancer and choreographer Chen Yun-ju (陳韻如). The piece involves performers playing in several specially designed stage spaces-cum-installations, and through the dancers’ interaction with the spaces, the ingredients of the play such as gestures, movements and objects are revealed and enhanced, Blume said.
Over the following two weeks, Chen Yun-ju and dancers Chiu Yu-wen (邱鈺雯) and Chen Po-ting (陳柏廷) will perform the piece every Friday and Sunday at 2:30pm and every Saturday at 2:30pm and 4:30pm.
Visitors are also welcome to experiment with the stage spaces as interactive installation works to create their own dances and movements.
The choreographic installation entitled Space Game, for example, invites participants to play amid a web of rubble cables.
“The concept of Bauhaus theater is not easy to grasp. At the festival, we encourage visitors to experience it with their bodies through games and playful interaction,” Ti said.
Meanwhile, history is revisited through several video installations that show important reconstruction and reinterpretation projects inspired by Schlemmer’s dance pieces.
Apart from Play Bauhaus, the annual festival features 12 theatrical performances, many of which are collaborations between local groups and artists from abroad.
Admission and venue vary for each theatrical performance. More information can be founded on the festival’s bilingual site at www.taipeifestival.org.
Taiwan yesterday condemned the recent increase in Chinese coast guard-escorted fishing vessels operating illegally in waters around the Pratas Islands (Dongsha Islands, 東沙群島) in the South China Sea. Unusually large groupings of Chinese fishing vessels began to appear around the islands on Feb. 15, when at least six motherships and 29 smaller boats were sighted, the Coast Guard Administration (CGA) said in a news release. While CGA vessels were dispatched to expel the Chinese boats, Chinese coast guard ships trespassed into Taiwan’s restricted waters and unsuccessfully attempted to interfere, the CGA said. Due to the provocation, the CGA initiated an operation to increase
A crowd of over 200 people gathered outside the Taipei District Court as two sisters indicted for abusing a 1-year-old boy to death attended a preliminary hearing in the case yesterday afternoon. The crowd held up signs and chanted slogans calling for aggravated penalties in child abuse cases and asking for no bail and “capital punishment.” They also held white flowers in memory of the boy, nicknamed Kai Kai (剴剴), who was allegedly tortured to death by the sisters in December 2023. The boy died four months after being placed in full-time foster care with the
The Shanlan Express (山嵐號), or “Mountain Mist Express,” is scheduled to launch on April 19 as part of the centennial celebration of the inauguration of the Taitung Line. The tourism express train was renovated from the Taiwan Railway Corp’s EMU500 commuter trains. It has four carriages and a seating capacity of 60 passengers. Lion Travel is arranging railway tours for the express service. Several news outlets were invited to experience the pilot tour on the new express train service, which is to operate between Hualien Railway Station and Chihshang (池上) Railway Station in Taitung County. It would also be the first tourism service
The Chinese military has boosted its capability to fight at a high tempo using the element of surprise and new technology, the Ministry of National Defense said in the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) published on Monday last week. The ministry highlighted Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) developments showing significant changes in Beijing’s strategy for war on Taiwan. The PLA has made significant headway in building capabilities for all-weather, multi-domain intelligence, surveillance, operational control and a joint air-sea blockade against Taiwan’s lines of communication, it said. The PLA has also improved its capabilities in direct amphibious assault operations aimed at seizing strategically important beaches,
RSS