The long-anticipated Taichung Metropolitan Opera House is to begin trial operations today and is scheduled to officially open on Sept. 30, with the Taichung City Government yesterday donating the theater to the Ministry of Culture.
“The National Taichung Theater [Metropolitan Opera House] is not only a new Taichung landmark and beautiful soul of the city, [its inauguration] is also a milestone for Taiwan’s performing arts, which has entered a new stage of development,” Minister of Culture Cheng Li-chiun (鄭麗君) said.
The opera house will support the development of performing arts groups in central Taiwan, train local theater professionals, promote art education and become a networking platform for domestic and international performing arts groups, Cheng said.
Taichung Mayor Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) said construction took more than 10 years and cost NT$4.3 billion (US$135.76 million), but the result is an award-winning venue that he believes will play an important part in national arts and cultural development.
The eye-catching complex was designed by Pritzker Architecture Prize-winning Japanese architect Toyo Ito and boasts a 2,014-seat grand theater, an 800-seat theater and a 200-seat black-box theater.
Architecturally complex and highly challenging from an engineering perspective, the theater was built without beams or columns, relying instead on 58 curved wall units.
It is believed to be the first theater in the world to employ such techniques and is one of the most difficult to build.
The opera house has been touted as a leg of the “golden triangle” for the performing arts in Taiwan, alongside Taipei’s National Theater and Concert Hall and Kaohsiung’s Wei Wu Ying Center for the Arts, with the latter to be inaugurated in 2018.
National Taichung Theater artistic and executive director Victoria Wang (王文儀) said there is a vibrant traditional performing arts scene in central Taiwan and the opera house will work to bring these local groups to the international stage.
She said the opera house would feature a mix of 70 percent local programs and 30 percent international programs, and would cooperate with Taichung music groups and students to introduce at least one original or adapted opera piece each year.
A small number of Taiwanese this year lost their citizenship rights after traveling in China and obtaining a one-time Chinese passport to cross the border into Russia, a source said today. The people signed up through Chinese travel agencies for tours of neighboring Russia with companies claiming they could obtain Russian visas and fast-track border clearance, the source said on condition of anonymity. The travelers were actually issued one-time-use Chinese passports, they said. Taiwanese are prohibited from holding a Chinese passport or household registration. If found to have a Chinese ID, they may lose their resident status under Article 9-1
Taiwanese were praised for their composure after a video filmed by Taiwanese tourists capturing the moment a magnitude 7.5 earthquake struck Japan’s Aomori Prefecture went viral on social media. The video shows a hotel room shaking violently amid Monday’s quake, with objects falling to the ground. Two Taiwanese began filming with their mobile phones, while two others held the sides of a TV to prevent it from falling. When the shaking stopped, the pair calmly took down the TV and laid it flat on a tatami mat, the video shows. The video also captured the group talking about the safety of their companions bathing
PROBLEMATIC APP: Citing more than 1,000 fraud cases, the government is taking the app down for a year, but opposition voices are calling it censorship Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) yesterday decried a government plan to suspend access to Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu (小紅書) for one year as censorship, while the Presidential Office backed the plan. The Ministry of the Interior on Thursday cited security risks and accusations that the Instagram-like app, known as Rednote in English, had figured in more than 1,700 fraud cases since last year. The company, which has about 3 million users in Taiwan, has not yet responded to requests for comment. “Many people online are already asking ‘How to climb over the firewall to access Xiaohongshu,’” Cheng posted on
A classified Pentagon-produced, multiyear assessment — the Overmatch brief — highlighted unreported Chinese capabilities to destroy US military assets and identified US supply chain choke points, painting a disturbing picture of waning US military might, a New York Times editorial published on Monday said. US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s comments in November last year that “we lose every time” in Pentagon-conducted war games pitting the US against China further highlighted the uncertainty about the US’ capability to intervene in the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. “It shows the Pentagon’s overreliance on expensive, vulnerable weapons as adversaries field cheap, technologically
RSS